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A short rant on how not to make game AI

Name:	Tom Bampton
Date Posted:	Feb 23, 2006
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Blog post

I am not usually one to blog on the ins and outs of game development. I prefer to leave that stuff to the likes of Jeff Tunnell. He always does it so much better then I ever could.

I am busy as hell right now. I was just playing Need For Speed Most Wanted to blow off a little steam before getting back to work. Just do a couple of races, get my blood pumping and in the mood for coding. And here's where the AI rant comes in.

Obviously, the races get progressively harder. This is fine. However, when you win the pink slip for the opponent's car you've just spent a while swearing at because he mysteriously zooms past you near the end of the race from a few seconds behind to win it, that's annoying. Sure, you can explain it away with he had loads of NOS left. Fine. What's NOT fine, is when you get in the shiny new car you've just won, and its utter crap compared to the car you were driving.

Being challenged by difficult opponents is great. It's part of what makes games fun and worth playing. AI that blatantly cheats like a bastard is just plain annoying and makes me want to throw the damn game out the window and into a vat of acid. Unfortunately, I don't have a vat of acid.

I could rant for hours on how annoying various aspects of NFS' AI are. But I wont, because I have better things to do. So, I leave you with this (censored) quote:

GAMES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE FUN. THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO MAKE YOU WANT TO HIT THE PEOPLE THAT MADE IT IN THE NUTS REPEATEDLY WITH A CHAINSAW.

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Bryan Edds (Feb 23, 2006 at 02:05 GMT)

ABSO-FREAKIN-LUTELY!!!!!

I swear to God some game developers equate pissing the player off to a great challenge.

"So, all of our beta-testers are slamming their fists into their console while chewing on their game controllers in a fit of blind rage? Wow! We have made the most awesomely challenging game ever! Now our game will stand out!"

When I come home from a frustrating day of work, there's nothing I look forward to more than being cheated and cheap-shotted and lynched by a damn video game. Who needs to relax or do something that actually gives them pleasure? Certainly not someone playing a game!

AAARRRRGGRGRGGRGGFGFGRRR!!!

These developers should be tied and a chair and be forced to play Mortal Kombat 3 on the hardest difficulty level, receiving a kick in the NUTS each time they lose a match. Once they manage to beat the game, say, oh, 10,000 losses later through some random fluke of luck, they will be released, and then upon leaving the holding area, be shot in the knees and taunted for not being skillful enough to dodge the bullets.

Seriously.

Freaking seriously.

Hmm... which makes me wonder - should we come up with a list of the world's top 10 CHEAPEST CHALLENGE video games? What's your most hated cheap-ass challenge game?
Edited on Feb 23, 2006 02:14 GMT

Jesse Hall (Feb 23, 2006 at 03:40 GMT)

LOL...

For me the worst is when an RTS AI cheats..

Treb Connell (formerlyMasterTreb (Feb 23, 2006 at 03:44 GMT)

I hate it when I'm playing a first person shooter and I go into the bots eyes and it clearly apparent that they can see you through walls and wait on the other side of the door for you thats darn annoying.

David Montgomery-Blake (Feb 23, 2006 at 03:46 GMT)

Death status spells in the first round for bosses in SNES RPG's.

Grrrgggggl!!!!!

EDIT:
@Master Treb
Heh. This reminds me of Nightfire...but in a very different way. I feel horrible thinking of it since I have a strong affiliation with Gearbox...but I loved that I would walk up to soldiers with a gun and shoot them point-blank in the face, but when looking through walls with devices, I would see the guards active when they couldn't see or hear me. But when threatened with a gun in the face, they looked at me docilely.
Edited on Feb 23, 2006 03:49 GMT

Unk (Feb 23, 2006 at 03:47 GMT)

Actually these frustrations are great reminders of how easy it is to f things up without adequate testing.

Those developing a game are the least able to actually provide viable feedback on difficulty and usability. This is mostly due to the fact that they are too close to the game to be able to provide non-biased input.

Unfortunately for many developers out there they are simply not given enough time for testing and polish before games are pushed onto the shelf. Yah, this assumes that they know what they are doing in the first place... it just isn't the entire problem. =)

Regardless, I get super frustrated with this stuff too. Hell, I have a whole shit list of rants I could share. =)

The real question is what can we learn from these issues to enable us to make better games?

-Unk

Tom Bampton (Feb 23, 2006 at 04:35 GMT)

The thing to take away from this post, is that good AI is hard. As a game developer, you pretty much have to cheat a lot on AI ... but, if you cheat too blatantly then you just piss off the players. It's a very fine line between what you can get away with and what pisses people off.

The thing that annoyed me most about NFSMW is once I had noticed how blatantly the AI cheated in the blacklist races where you can win a car, I noticed how blatantly bad it was in all the other races too. Thus, it totally killed the game for me. It's annoyed me enough that I'm probably not going to play it again, and will also probably never buy another game from the series.

Dee (Feb 23, 2006 at 06:10 GMT)

NFSMW
I'm #3, and I actually found that the cars you win, do have more umph and can be upgraded much faster than the time it would take you to build up to the same specs, even if they're lower intially than what you won with.
I do also however, get extremely pissed especially now, as each opponent, as mentioned, seems to warp into your space near the end of each race.
i.e. 1/2 track ahead, and then lose! I don't think so...
But then the game, like most with AI, is weighted towards the end.
It would be nice to see more games that progress STEADILY all throughout, vs. the recent ones, which seem to be playable until you get to that 70% completion mark, at which point, the bars to complete tasks, levels seem to be exponentially higher....

James Laker (BurNinG) (Feb 23, 2006 at 08:21 GMT)

You NFSMW newbs :-P

But I do agree... the Catch-up is not cool... and that was something that was present since Underground 1.
You have to give them some credit... They have improved alot though since then.

Peter Dwyer (Feb 23, 2006 at 08:22 GMT)

Any burnout game after burnout 2! These had blatant rubber banding, which was supposed to make things more fun. The stupidity of that statement was best summed up by trying the win a race with the formula one cars. A single crash while being 10 seconds ahead would result in you being 10-15 seconds behind! Funny that as the crash lasted a full 3 seconds!?!?

Burnout 2 allowed you to show your skills by avoiding the traffic and being rewarded by winning a race a full minute ahead of the competition! There was no rubber banding and so you stood a reasonable chance even against the fastest cars in the game.

I think that for me was a classic case of the developers loosing site of what made a game fun in the first place. Even burnout revenge is less fun than burnout 2 in my books (graphics be damned!)

Sam Redfern (Feb 23, 2006 at 10:57 GMT)

The problem here was that the cheating was blatant. For the foreseeable future, cheating will continue to be the most powerful component of game AI. It's important that it's not blatant however!

Billy L (Feb 23, 2006 at 12:17 GMT)

I have a friend that is a NFS freak , he takes 1 week vacation every time they do a new release .
He loves this new AI behavior , so the taste is different .
I don't like it , but this is NFS in a box i think , from version to version you hate it or love it .
Edited on Feb 23, 2006 12:17 GMT

Allyn "Mr_Bloodworth" Mcelrath (Feb 23, 2006 at 14:08 GMT)

while im not disogreeing, i think the intent, or reasion why AI or games do that is to slow the "Eating" of content. If they gave you the car with the same setup as the one you just raced (as in, the same car not the gimped one like you got) you would tear threw the content like crazy, not to mention, some of thoes cars (becouse you just changed the "Max apex" of the speeds and cars in the game) would drive, and have speeds that would not be real world bound, and i do think that is what Need For Speed Most Wanted is going for, slightly above normail reality.

2c

Tom Bampton (Feb 23, 2006 at 14:10 GMT)

I remember when NFSU1 came out, a friend of mine got really addicted to it. When he was about 80-90% of the way through it, there was this one race that really annoyed him. It took him about 2 days of swearing at his XBox to complete that. I remember going round to his place and his dad said to me when I got there "he's been playing that bloody game for hours, and hasnt stopped swearing once." That was due to the same AI issue as with NFSMW.

Strangely, NFSU2 didnt seem to suffer so much from it. Maybe it just wasnt as blatant, or maybe it was just because I got bored of the game beyond about the 70% mark.

Incidentally, when complaining about the annoying AI to the same friend, his response was "NFS is the reason I have no fully working PS2 controllers." The last time I got annoyed to the point where I broke a controller was playing Mortal Kombat on the Amiga. There was this one fight (I forgot which) that got me so annoyed that I grabbed the joystick by the stick and smashed it on the desk.

I wonder how long it is before someone sues a game developer for loss of controller due to aggravation from a game.

Neil Marshall (Feb 23, 2006 at 14:26 GMT)

The solution is simple. Just don't buy EA racing games until they fix their AI. You know they'll come out with a sequal. Rent it, check it out, if it still sucks leave it at that. Maybe you'll find a competitors product that is better.

The inverse is Mario Kart. I swear the opponents break at the finish line so that you can pass them for a last second win. It's not always good but it tends to make the game more fun most of the time.

Tom Bampton (Feb 23, 2006 at 14:28 GMT)

Neil,

I already mentioned that solution :) The last one I actually bought was NFSU1. U2 and MW were both christmas presents. NFSU2 I had for almost an entire year before playing it :)

T.

Phil Carlisle (Feb 23, 2006 at 16:49 GMT)

Looks like EA are putting those 35+ AI programmers per project to good use no?

Jeremy Alessi (Feb 24, 2006 at 00:44 GMT)

Good rant.

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