Most modern games still don't have AI as good as Half-life 1s

How is this acceptable?

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Supply and demand
Good AI isn't in Demand so it's not being Supplied.

Yeah but why? Shouldn't it be easier with modern tech to make better AI?

It doesn't matter how easy it is to do something, when it comes to modern devs and publishers, if they don't need to do it then they won't.

Most people who play games now a days have never experienced games with good AI, so since people are unaware of it there is no demand and it is seen as unneeded, and if it's unneeded then it's a waste of time and money.
That's how most games are now, since the games industry is treated more like a business now then it ever was.

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these things are neat but they did nothing to improve the game play in hl1.

The only games with good AI are chess games, and no user will have even heard the name Stockfish before, nor will care.

In my opinion, good combat AI depends mainly on the fundamentals, like pathfinding, target tracking, detection radius, etc. I can't recall exactly how good the original Half-Life AI was in terms of active combat, but these subtle touches such as the Houndeye's differing reactions to various intensity of sound stimuli, are pleasing touches to the player, but may not contribute too much to the overall experience of the game. These small touches often differentiate between a developer that actually cared about the game and a developer trying to make a product. I agree with you 100%, though, bad AI can ruin a game's immersion, gameplay, and really just sucks people out of the experience. Now, I have a question. How good was the human AI in half life? I remember the assassins doing flips and such, and the grunts throwing back grenades, but was their pathfinding and other attributes up to par? Or do they just possess these "gimmick" AI quirks which while impressive, do not matter during 70-80% of the game experience

It also has to do with today's streamlined games that have very little enemy variety, making different AIs irrelevant. Why would you need multiple ways enemies react if one: you have at most 4 enemy types, and two: why have good AI if the level design (or design in general) wouldn't let it behave in the best way possible? Half-life 2 is a shining example of the latter. The combine soldier AI itself is rather decent: they supress, cover corners and use grenades quite effectively… But only if they're fighting rebels, because rebels aren't a extremely agile sprinting arsenal. When you fight them however, you negate every single tactic that they use, because you can tank supression, you can return grenades, use instakilling weapons, etc. Even in hard the scales are very much tilted in your favour.
As for the former, every shitty FPS/TPS that the mainstream pretends is awesome (COD, BF, Gears, Uncharted) is an example. Tons and tons of enemies that all behave (and animate) exactly the same. Play COD4 and pay attention to what your teammates do and compare it with what the enemies do. It's exactly the same shit, even though that game puts special forces (1st Force Recon/Special Air Service) against shitty arab mercs and general army russians.
It's also rather difficult to program as I understand it.

good AI isn't necessary and games would be better with distinct enemy types (no, not fucking shotgun guy, smg guy, assault rifle guy, etc.) with 2-3 different behaviors and relied on placement of enemies to create interesting and challenging engagements.

If the AI is bad, how would those engagements be challenging? Find a hole in the AI and exploit it. Stuck running against map geometry but the NPC is still moving a few inches a second so it still thinks it is making progress moving towards you and does not change it's course? Without good AI, your large assortment enemy types are all laughable attempts at trying to appear unique, and sacrificing quality gameplay for a volume of gameplay.

you are mistaking good with functional. if it's getting stuck on map geometry, some part of the game or the AI is broken.

Which ties into the streamlining of games I mentioned. I guess I should've said "good and/or varied AI".

Interesting counter point. So, as long as the fundamentals are good such as pathfinding, finishing touches such as the aforementioned Houndeye quirks don't apply to you much? I can sympathize with that sentiment. I personally disagree with you in thinking that applying small AI touches is a complete waste of time, and to me those small AI touches can really assist in making a video game feel like more than a simple game.

That's a weird way to spell F.E.A.R.

I think it's a waste of time. I think the industry is too deadline focused to rely on gimmicks like what HL1 did with non-gameplay AI functionality. Games need to get their basics down and spend time improving them. If you have consistent AI with predictable qualities and build your combat encounters to have the player dealing with two different types of AIs behaving in consistent fashions but forcing the player to consider the optimum approach to dealing with them, what weapons to use, abilities, etc. How best to navigate the play space, that is how to make the best possible game play.

What HL1 did with things like body stinks is neat, but here's the thing. It made a lot of work. It made work for the animator, the programmer, the level designer, the sound editing guy, the recording studio, the actors, etc. It made a lot of work and the 7 people that worked on getting stinky corpses that AI would react to within 30 seconds just for the sake of variety was pretty much universally unnoticed outside of HL fans who dug into the games code and observed behaviors in control groups.

That is where the problem is. Those 7 people could have spent time refining something players would have been doing for 8 out of 12 hours of the game doing instead of including smell AI.

This isn't to say I want these things to disappear. I feel ultimately it's far more important to get the basics down first and foremost in games. I look at a game like the witcher 3 and I see how they got the basic principle of an attack wrong. It had so many secondary and tertiary qualities but the primary quality was totally ignored.

Please knock this shit off

It took awhile, but here it is. The perfect opinion that weighs both sides of the argument and comes to a congruently satisfying solution. If I were to argue any further, I'd just be shitposting. Good discussion.

Yes it does faggot. The way Hound eyes sleep was pretty important for getting past them. You are an idiot and have never played the game making you underage.

pff haha

exactly the issue im pointing out here:

because of all these extraneous qualities to the game, no one ever said "how does stationary AI locked to a turret in the script react to the player obfuscating their own view when the AI relies on what the player can see so to create a fair combat engagement"

it's exemplary

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You can just shoot them, though.

The latest GPUs now can perform double the calculations when done in half precision which is what most machine learning AI runs on. I am hoping devs will leverage them, using a second GPU solely for AI.

There was no real AI, the hostile NPC's are just scripted well enough with some detail. It's not something hard to do, you just need to love the game you are making.

real AI doesn't exist anyway, when we say AI we mean the set of scripts and conditions that make game entities behave with convincing intelligence

Black&White had the best pet system AI of all time.

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Half life as a series is a prime example of cancer. It ruined FPS forever.

Bravo, Todd.

I joke, but we actually live in a world where the extent of AI is:

Most modern games have worse AI than Skyrim. Let than sink in.

Simpler is not necessarily worse. I'll take mobs that attack constantly over ones that go through a tiresome song and dance routine every time their health gets low.

And I'll take an enemy that turns permanently alert when attacked instead of going through an alert-caution-calm routine every time I put another arrow in their back.

Halo under Bungie had good artificial intelligence systems. Covenant Squads operated under a command heirarchy and if the leader died the forces would panic/retreat, which included the few seconds after the player died. Most levels were designed around taking the marines with you as your own fireteam. This came about because originally Halo 1 was meant to be an RTS, but got turned into an FPS. The Sentinels would draw back and try to draw you into long corridors where they could fuck your shit up with laser weapons.

Halo 2 continued this trend. There was a notable difference between how the marines and ODSTs fought, and how Elites and Brutes fought. Elites would squad up with others, retreat when shields were down, and focus fire priority targets. Brutes stayed in packs until damaged enough to go into a bloodlust, targeting the nearest enemy. The Flood would pool with other groups into larger and larger numbers and try to overwhelm enemies.

In Halo 3 Brutes were made even smarter. They wouldn't engage the enemies if their chieftain, a melee class, was engaging their targets up close. They would use a variety of equipment such as shields or regen, and would coordinate with their tank/arty to retreat before impacts to minimize friendly fire. Humans could now use a greater variety of weapons, and the higher Flood units would use hit-and-run tactics to wear your shields down.

Halo Reach had large scale battle AI planned, but eventually the tech had to be used for backgrounds. The main issue was that the Xbox 360 is a piece of shit, and players preferred a more graphically impressive Halo title to one that captured the feeling of a battle on Reach. But basically, the Marines could operate fluidly in groups of 20 or more, and would use cover fire and suppression to control areas on the map, while the Covenant used their varied alien soldiers to overwhelm. For instance, a Covenant squad would fall back and recover if Hunters were deployed, some Grunt classes would suicide bomb you if their leaders died or even ordered it, while other grunts would retreat. Minor Elites fought very poorly in comparison to Elite Zealots, and AI responses varied based on which of those Elites they saw die. No one cared if a Minor Elite died, but a Zealot?

Under 343, there have been some minor improvements and additions but not nearly on the level Bungie was doing. The Protheans merely tried to close the distance between you and them and retreated only if their shield buddies were there to help. All the covenant seemed to just want to shoot at you until they died. The Spartan IVs operated exactly the same as ODSTs from Halo 3, which lead to this shielded super soldiers dying just as often.

I don't know about Halo 5, but I don't want to play Elite Feminism simulator while a regular black guy manages to fight a near Herculean figure like Master Chief


Yeah, except if they regenerated enough health they would leave the begging phase and go right back to fighting with you, and then could be dragged back into begging phase again.

The end result is the same, a program with a list of conditions with reactions to those conditions. The only difference is how it was created.

Are humans not a program with a list of conditions with reactions to those conditions?

thats acutally a good idea but Todd fucked up execution
a sec later

All bethesda games are full of good ideas with botched execution
Thats what makes them horrible, all the wasted potential.

and thats what modders are fixing

Congratulations, this has to be the dumbest comment I have read this year.

Well yeah, I'm not the one arguing that scripting isn't AI. The human brain is just a computer made of flesh.

b-b-b-b-but halo i-is shit

It's kind of a sad thing so many've fallen for this meme. Maybe the later Halos dropped the ball, and maybe CE wasn't exactly amazing, but it was a damn fine game what really did revolutionize at least the console shooter genre. Which might not seem like all that much, but do keep in mind, for a long while, that was the best way to play with friends. Online was finicky at best, even during the time of 2, you ask me.

It's definitely not a flawless game, but it's a fair ways decent. It made a lot of good boosts to the industry as a whole. Maybe it introduced a few bad ones, too. But on the whole, I'd say it was a good game.
Hell, I say the same thing about Doom, come to think of it.
Point being, people need to stop hunting for a scape goat, while also limiting the nostalgia glasses.

GoldenEye and Perfect Dark revolutionized console shooters long before Halo did.

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Halo brought nothing new to the table that PD didn't already do.

Halo was just babby's first FPS, launched with the Xbawcks for little Chad and the next generation of kids who would grow up to play CoD and shout in microphones while eating a bag of doritos.

nice meme, kid

I'd disagree with that, though that might be due to not knowing much of Perfect Dark beyond what I quickly looked up.

Doesn't seem to have any vehicles or allies, for the biggest thing.
Halo's big selling point, I'd argue, was big battles with comrades, combined with fun vehicles.
AI also looks exceptionally shit. Well, maybe good for its time, but not Halo's tier.
Maps also seem quite constrained. Halo's stuff was quite open, by large. Enemy variety is also quite flat.

Watched some of the posted videos. Played through Half Life a few times and had no idea the AI was this advanced.

Skyrim is unsalvageable though. I appreciate the efforts they go, but its a fundamentally broken game from top to bottom.

In most games it's not actually that important.

How is anybody supposed to see how good the AI is, when you are forced into killing everything? Good AI is wasted because nobody can see it. That's why people don't make it anymore.

You can still appreciate good AI even if you have to kill it.
The AI in half life is functionally retarded as it will frequently throw grenades at its own feet.
Compare that to something like STALKER where the AI will throw grenades to flush you out of cover instead of killing themselves.
Theres also FEAR which has standard AI but with level design which complements it instead of linear hallways and scripted events.

This.
I've tried playing it recently, gave the SE with some decent mods a shot.
It's okay. But there's really no substance to it.
Nothing is interesting to fight, and fighting feels sluggish and dull. You end up chopping the same Dragur for the 50th time, slowly chipping his health bar away with the same attacks that seem to do the same damage as they did when you first started.
Magic was completely destroyed from Oblivion, or heaven forbid, Morrowind. Even mods dont' seem to add half its depth, seeming to lack the ability to modify certain aspects in the way the prior games allowed you.
Exploration is dull, as everywhere you go is pretty much copy-pasted, and there weren't that many besides. It's just caves, dwarf places, nord tombs, or old forts by large. And those tend to look similar a lot of the time, outside of the dwarf places.
Cities are even worse. There's nothing to them, except for dull, uninteresting characters who's quests are all worthless, because nearly every reward you get is complete and total trash. All you go for is a vendor. Not that it matters, anyway, because the cities are pitifully small. Biggest city seems fucking tiny, compared to prior games. Mods help this a bit by at least opening them up to the overworld, in some cases, which allows for a bit more feeling of depth to them, but by large, they just come across as microscopic villages.
The leveling system is retarded in general, mostly due to that as you level, you drag enemies along with you. So if you're grinding up your blacksmithing, or your alchemy, or your speech, next time you go to dungeon crawl, you're fighting some big asshole zombie, who looks and feels the same as all the others, except his health bar is ten times as long and he does five odd times damage. Oh, and all this while carrying no good loot. This game, in general, has an aversion to good quality loot. Most the shit you find, late game, is iron. I know, Oblivion's daedric-clad bandits were stupid, but at least that gave you a fucking reason to fight said bandits. At least you didn't kill a bunch of iron-wearing shits, who were somehow just as powerful as you, while getting what's worth two odd fucking coins for your trouble.

Bethesda games actually have decent AI with interesting abilities. At the same time, it's also buggy and pointless.


Ever since Oblivion, Bethesda has been trying to cater to the console crowd. Oblivion lost a lot of customization and diversity Morrowind had, Skyrim took it even further. With Ken Rolston gone and Todd Howard having less influence on small things than he was in Morrowind, the simplification became even worse.

I think Skyrim is Bethesda's worst game, excluding some of their pre Morrowind releases. Even Fallout 4 is better, the combat is far less tedious and there's more customization.

Like what.

Mostly stuff what adds more weapons, armor, spell variety, that sort of thing. Enemy stuff wasn't very common, but I did get one what adds some patrols out in the area.
Also got of course the one what lets you skip the cancerous opening lot. Whole lot of small mods that do little tweaks to things, like removing interior fog, or boosting the pickpocket cap, and so on. Unlimited shouting is something of a must for me, as otherwise, I just simply never use the shout, saving it for that 'emergancy' that never comes.

I'd have to disagree on the 'fallout 4 is better' lot. Mostly because that game doubled every problem I listed. Will give it credit for a decent builder, but that's about all I can say.
Guess it's a better action game, to Skyrim, but then, if I wanted a shooter, I'd play a good shooter.
Only credit I see to that was the wide range of weapon mods.

Personally, while I liked Morrowind, I found Oblivion to be quite a lot better in a wide number of ways. It did cut back a lot, but at the same time ,the shit it cut back was largely trivial or redundant things. Meanwhile, it seemed to add a fair load.
Only complaint is that it somehow looked worse to me than did Morrowind. Doesn't help that hte landscape was dull as all hell. Story was also pretty forgettable, compared to Morrowind, but then, I never really played for the story as much as the roleplay. Oblivion seemed to really allow a fair load of roleplay, to me.

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The Xbox generation = the Chad dudebro normalfag generation who killed the FPS genre by over-saturating it with casual military brownbloom shooters during the 2008~2012 dark ages of vidya.

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The towns are smaller and the dialogue system is bad, but I think everything else is better.

If there were more open world sandbox shooters with inventory management and RPG customization out there, I would.

It cut a lot of important stuff. You can't 1 hit kill enemies anymore since the strength attribute is capped. You can't levitate and jump around really high anymore. The alchemy is severely underpowered compared to Morrowind, even though the UI is better. What I hate the most about Oblivion is how it cut the overpowering mechanics that made Morrowind really fun. Oblivion is boring.

Half-Life enemy behaviour was a huge improvement over Quake / Quake 2. So, Valve could say "our game has intelligent enemies" and make their game stand out from the quake clones of the day

And then you had CS which overdid that behavior to the extent that you'd sometimes have a rain of grenades flying at you with almost pinpoint accuracy.
Not really that hard to dodge if you keep moving though (or pay attention to what the AI is saying), but it can feel a bit retarded.

Because modern game devs are talentless hacks who abuse basic psychological trickery and conditioning to make retards think that mediocre gameplay and bright flashing lights make a game 10/10.

Half-Life (1998)
F.E.A.R. (2005)
Dragon's Dogma (2012)

Halo was a great game that lead to bad things, just like Resident Evil 4.

It really wasn't
I can give you that it was a good multiplayer shooter but the single player campaign is just bad.

Half Life-tier AI wasn't even in demand when it was released and it had details people didn't even notice. Valve did that shit simply because it was neat, they could, and they weren't giga-kikes yet. It's hard to believe they were once a group of talented people out to make the best game they could, but they were, and it was so very long ago.

They run from grenades, you retard. Try actually playing Half Life and I don't mean on babby mode.

lol dipshit

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Because most modern games are made by people who don't care about vidya and are only there to hopefully shit out the next Skyrim, Minecrap, or Flappy Bird and retire at 25 with millions of dollars.

I've found that generally games with higher attention to detail are also better overall games, with a dev team that actually cared. Ones with minimal to no attention to detail are often on the flip side are shit and had dev teams that didn't give a shit.

What killed video games was the rise of AAA and the gradual transition from it being a mostly small industry full of people who actually made video games because they liked them, to a multibillion dollar industry that now has broadened its audience to the most bottom of the barrel normalfags with people who make video games because they want to be the next Notch.

an old technique in hl1 is using damage interrupts to cause the ai to stay still.

A long time ago Bungie made and wrote Marathon and made Myth. When people tell me I have nostalgia goggles I recall a time when developers actually tried. Sure, many a time they just fucked up and the game was a mess or barely functional features and gimmicks, but at least you could tell they really wanted to make something unique and share it with others. Back then games were a passion for developers just as they were for players, whether it was about creating an impressive world, pushing technological boundaries, experimenting with gameplay and narratives, everyone was trying.

Today it's just a shitshow. The industry is filled with soulless artists and code monkeys whose only reason for doing what they are doing is their paycheck, while their leftist overlords think up new ways to alienate and antagonize the core demographics of their games out of simple spite.

The mass compartmentalization with excessively huge dev teams means that the sort of shit devs did in the 90s and early 2000 are simply not being done anymore because if you don't do your pointlessly specific job then you're fired. The new blood being hacks more interested in making pretty cutscenes and virtue signaling with their bad writing really doesn't help. For instance instead of "the lighting guy" you have "the guy who changes the color of the ambient lighting in caves" lighting guy, and if he so much as adds a new ambient light he's going to get a visit from his boss.

So by your definition there is no intelligence whatsoever? Not that I disagree with your point, but think about what you're insinuating here.

Deus Ex has much better ai.

Your brain isn't simultaneously running the bot and the environment the bot interacts with at the same time. I'm sure there is some semantics involved that it may be "technically true" but your brain only has to deal with itself.
If the game has a truly sapient AI, that is because the game itself is sapient. The bots, and other NPCs are just puppets.

youtu.be/bBvgRJlNOf0?t=2m42s
Your own video contradicts you retard

The squad leader was issuing them to stand down just before they saw the player, and one of them decided to throw their own grenade. Every other enemy the player throws a grenade at in the video runs away from it.

More like they keep running like spastics because the AI doesn't know how to do anything else
A minute before that a soldier was literally running up and down the stairs not even shooting at the player.

I'd put that more on HL2, yeah there were a couple of sections in HL1 that locked you in a room with talking scientists dumping exposition, but those stopped after the first chapter. Most of the "walk scenes" you're talking about in HL1 were easily skippable by running by and ignoring the npc or just shooting them and moving on. HL2 went overboard pretty much locking you in a room as exposition was dumped on you by 2-3 npcs with no other option.

What made HL1 stand out, even to this day, is that there is only as much story to it as you want there to be. It wasn't sacrificing gameplay to tell a story, which is the chief problem with the video game industry as a whole right now. Couple that with the cancer that is the sjw leftist tumblr fan-fiction tier writing and you have the abomination that the industry is becoming now. HL1 is the one that did it right, HL2 is the one that started the trend.

This is the virgin economy class.
In the Chad one, you create demand with innovation.