Tired of Current Game Mechanics? What Would YOU Want? (Part 2 - Creature AI)

lifesbrink

In continuation from the previous post about itemization, here is another thread devoted to ideas about what would make the genre more interesting.  For this one, AI.  Right now, NPC AI is very poor.  Most of it is based around the traditional holy trinity, and even games that have no holy trinity have AI that feels more or less pointless.  Admittedly, having better AI is something that gets left by the wayside in favor of shiny graphics, but if devs wanted to make a game feel a bit more alive, perhaps they could try for higher standards in the behavior of their creatures and other NPC's.

 

For me, I like these ideas:

Forget the holy trinity of fake taunts and moves designed to gain aggro, creatures should attack who they want to attack

Forest animals should not wander about aimlessly, but should move in packs if they are pack animals, and have goals they are trying to accomplish, like surviving.

More cross-faction NPC's would make sense, seeing two orcs from different camps that hate each other run into each other and start fighting, for example.

Have bosses that have all kinds of tactics instead of needing to be chained to the tank.  Perhaps the creature randomly switches aggro a lot, but is a bit slower.  If you gain its wrath, you would need to run away, while others continue to hit it.

NPC's with schedules in cities.  Everyone talks about how this would be unfair to players who come on at night in-game and can't find their quest NPC's or vendors for whatever reason.  This is solvable.  Try to avoid quests that would have an NPC going to bed, allow some vendors who are night only or around at all hours, have certain quest NPC's who are always up, allow you to go through the process of waking an NPC and then turning in the quest, and so on.

Game mechanics could be vastly different based on a better system.  Dungeons wouldn't be running through and killing mobs one by one, but rather coming up with a game strategy to complete it.  Perhaps it is a camp of thieves deep in a cave, and you are there to get something without alerting the entire camp.  Sentries would need to be killed without them alerting the main force, and if you did alert them, it might mean death for your group.

For once, it would be nice if NPC's all had different movement speeds that make more sense.  I hate seeing everything run at one speed - fast, and every battle has to cooperate with this fact.  Make something run slow and give it abilities that make it more dangerous, so you need to be out of range of them.

AI should allow for more variety, so that fighting one giant, slavering waspbear is not the same as fighting every other giant, slavering waspbear!

 

 

Of course, if one is implementing higher AI, one needs to be reminded to have less NPC's overall, as the processing of more commands by each creature places higher demand on the server.  This, in turn, would mean classic whack 10 of these quests would be different as well, as in, none of that.  Quests would be  more about trying to catch a single mob and kill it, or bigger quests would actually have you need to spend some time planning to break that camp of raiders up to kiil them.

lifesbrink

I get the feeling that people would rather rage over 38studios closing.