The greatest AI flaw of the EE games (and how to easily fix it)
Ygramul
Member Posts: 1,059
Noticed this while playing IWDEE (which has currently no AI mod) while doing the Vale of Shadows, but it remains true pretty much everywhere:
You dungeon-crawl your way into a hall of enemies; then, only the handful in the front who have seen your attack you. As long as you don't actually *rush* forward, their friends just behind won't lift a finger to help them.
They will attack. One. At. A Time.
Austin Powers style.
This is a terrible immersion breaker that makes the vanilla EE games just about unplayable for me.
(This doesn't happen in SCS because of the "Better Calls for Help" component.)
EASY FIX:
Line-of-sight alerting of enemies.
Simply put, if an enemy is agroed than it agroes all other enemies in its line-of-sight.
"Hey everyone, adventurers are beating up on Deekin. Let's get'em!"
Done. No more pulling enemies 1 or 2 at a time.
This would work better than merely a distance based alert, because in convoluted dungeons (Firewine!) distance is a misleading measure of proximity.
You can adjust the impact of this alert system by deciding whether it "chains" onward.
Example: at Core difficuluty, the alert applies to those in immediate line-of-sight (agro jumps forward only once), but at Insane, you can let this jump twice or maybe three times along line-of-sight. (Only relevant for a massive hall or a lengthy corridor full of enemies.)
Could @Dee or some other magician from Beamdog please comment on if this would be something they would consider? Vanilla game (without SCS) is unbearable without it.
You dungeon-crawl your way into a hall of enemies; then, only the handful in the front who have seen your attack you. As long as you don't actually *rush* forward, their friends just behind won't lift a finger to help them.
They will attack. One. At. A Time.
Austin Powers style.
This is a terrible immersion breaker that makes the vanilla EE games just about unplayable for me.
(This doesn't happen in SCS because of the "Better Calls for Help" component.)
EASY FIX:
Line-of-sight alerting of enemies.
Simply put, if an enemy is agroed than it agroes all other enemies in its line-of-sight.
"Hey everyone, adventurers are beating up on Deekin. Let's get'em!"
Done. No more pulling enemies 1 or 2 at a time.
This would work better than merely a distance based alert, because in convoluted dungeons (Firewine!) distance is a misleading measure of proximity.
You can adjust the impact of this alert system by deciding whether it "chains" onward.
Example: at Core difficuluty, the alert applies to those in immediate line-of-sight (agro jumps forward only once), but at Insane, you can let this jump twice or maybe three times along line-of-sight. (Only relevant for a massive hall or a lengthy corridor full of enemies.)
Could @Dee or some other magician from Beamdog please comment on if this would be something they would consider? Vanilla game (without SCS) is unbearable without it.
6
Comments
That being said, I don't think calls for help are the biggest issue, nor a simple fix. An improvement, sure, but a minor one. There's also the entire aggro situation to consider, for example, where mobs just keep on hitting whoever they saw first and only switch if they cannot reach them (and sometimes not even then); or the fact that so many enemies simply stand there and attack you and hardly use any abilities at all (save casters); etc.
Luckily we do have SCS, which probably does more than an "official" fix would be able to accomplish. If only we had the TTT variant for IWD...
But it's worth considering, certainly.
They certainly have justification to apply it in older games
I am actually playing through for the first time with SCS, fun yes, but for my RPG reqirements, it doesn't suit.
I like "sniping", I even play Halo the same way. Careful, careful creepy, creepy.
Probably age, my sons play all out "go in with their quick reactions and kill everything".
As long as there is a mod, why make the game almost unplayable for a lot of us?
OK, there is the option of using the difficulty slider, less damage, but that feels like cheating.
@Dee
There are lots of people who are playing BG inbetween working and living. You are quite right, they depend on it being slightly easier, to actually get somewhere in the game in the odd hour they get to play.
BG is massive, my daughter (20's) is finding it hard and phones up for tips now and again.
And she is the generation who are snatching a couple of hours play on the train ect. on her Ipad maybe once/twice a week at most.
And they have the money.
If she was confronted with a battle that needed reload after reload, she would just abandon the game eventually because it's days to acomplish any quest as it stands.
Look, fine, if people want to have an oldfashioned I-am-too-distracted-to-play-with-a-good-AI option based on the old broken AI, of course, they should have it. No need to deprive anyone of that.
But for the love of all that is holy, please give us an improved AI.
...and sell it as a DLC as necessary.
It surely won't be too hard to have a checkbox in the "Gameplay" options to have the smart AI on -- if smart AI could be done even moderately.
I would rather pay $40 or whatever for an AI improvement than for SoD. (I am basically buying SoD so that Beamdog stays on to develop more goodies, including especially better AI one day.)
That's why mods are so modular (man I am on FIRE today).