Aside: Developers, Scruffy AI Won’t Cut It

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 9:50 am in Asides · Comments

The problem with Medal of Honor: Airborne, is that enemies are (seemingly) programmed to target you and you only. Your allies fail to attack enemies with even the slightest success rate, which means while all iron sights are on you, so is the onus of survival, creating a very frustrating experience. Not to mention your squad will often disappear at crucial moments (yet their vocal orders are still heard), respawning only when you’ve reached the next checkpoint. In fact, this game would have been considerably better if only a little more attention had been payed to AI.

Call of Duty 4, on the other hand, is a great team effort, with AI effectively clearing the surrounding area of enemies and allowing you to progress further (a godsend on Veteran). I don’t know what the CoD devs are doing, but they’re doing it right, and other studios need to take a leaf out of their book.

Tags: ,

One Response to “Aside: Developers, Scruffy AI Won’t Cut It”

Arnold Sideways

# July 29th, 2009 at 6:09 pm

Hmm, I totally agree with your point, but I actually found Call of Duty 4 to be one of the main offenders of your first point. When I was playing through on veteran, the most irritating thing I found about the game was the complete incompetence of the people on my side. I’d come up against, say, six enemies, kill five of them myself and get killed by the one remaining, while my team mates were presumably firing at butterflies and brick walls. Apparently it was too much to ask for my entire squad to be capable of taking down one man by themselves. Occasionally I’d sit in a safe place and watch their behaviour to see if I was just imagining it, and sure enough, there was Captain Price enjoying himself spraying bullets pretty much everywhere except for at enemies. Only once an enemy got right up close did any of the friendly AIs actually kill anyone. There were the occasional moments where they did suddenly become lethal, but I think these were mainly scripted special cases and in chaotic firefights, I pretty much resigned myself to thinking I was in it alone and my squadmates were just there to make the game sound noisier.

Medal Of Honour presumably just prioritises the human player as number one target, which is totally wrong, like you say. One of the things you’d expect to rely on in a game like that is when the enemies are distracted by your team mates, there’s a strategic opportunity to move to a better position or come out of cover and take some shots, but when they just drop all interest in your squad as soon as they spot you, it totally removes that depth of gameplay.

It is a balancing act though, which isn’t easy to get right. Take Rainbow Six: Vegas and its sequel, for instance. There were moments in that game where the exact opposite was true, I’d set things up tactically only to storm into a room to find a pile of corpses, my squad having completely annihilated all enemies and left me with nothing to do. Sometimes your friendly AI can be *too* efficient.

Leave a Reply