How's the AI?

[Ω]

Thinking of picking this up but wanted to know your thoughts on the current state of enemy AI. Since it looks F.E.A.R.-like, I'm hoping the combat experience is similar.

Thanks in advance.

[Ae]

Depends on the difficulty you're playing at. At lower difficulties they're quite forgiving, but they do play defensive/aggressive where needed. It does shine a good bit more on the harder difficulties.

[Kamachi]

Enemies flank you if you are holding a hostage. Sometimes they do just stand still and wait for you to peak so they can headshot you. But I rather have them sometimes waiting for me to shoot first at them than in Ghost recon breakpoint the enemies just run at you waiting to get shot

[Slap]

not bad. kind of behaves similarly to FEAR's AI where they will try to flank occasionally, but will know that they have an advantageous position and will hold it if it benefits them to do so. also employs the same dialogue tricks to give the illusion of communication.

otherwise, not one to one with FEAR's AI but close enough.

[Abyssal Crow]

FEAR AI was never advanced, it just voiced alot of what it was doing and was serviced by the maps. It ultimately was very basic with some generic flank attempts and cover options, what made it come together was the map maker and AI designer likely working together. This game I don't think has that same level of developer complexity but it does good enough IMO to keep it fun.

I'll say the combat experience is not entirely Fear though, inspired sure but if we were to take the Fear angle it'd be like if someone took FEAR 1, injected it with speed from a boomer shooter and smacked it's ass out the door with a hover pad. Losing quite a bit of the horror vibe along the way.

[Ω]

Originally posted by Abyssal Crow:

FEAR AI was never advanced, it just voiced alot of what it was doing and was serviced by the maps. It ultimately was very basic with some generic flank attempts and cover options, what made it come together was the map maker and AI designer likely working together. This game I don't think has that same level of developer complexity but it does good enough IMO to keep it fun.

I'll say the combat experience is not entirely Fear though, inspired sure but if we were to take the Fear angle it'd be like if someone took FEAR 1, injected it with speed from a boomer shooter and smacked it's ass out the door with a hover pad. Losing quite a bit of the horror vibe along the way.

I'm looking specifically for unpredictability in enemy behavior, almost the illusion of sentience. FEAR was good at that. You weren't sure what they were going to do. If this game has that, I'm buying 100%.

I just hope there's a toggle for the bullet time stuff. Not a fan.

[Nexxtic]

Originally posted by Abyssal Crow:

FEAR AI was never advanced, it just voiced alot of what it was doing

I do not know who keeps pushing this narrative these last couple of years, but this could not be further from the truth. F.E.A.R gave life to Goal Oriented Action Planning (GOAP) which was a very advanced technique to videogame AI. The way they respond to player, team and environmental reactions was nothing short of amazing, especially for it's time.

[Ω]

Originally posted by Nexxtic:

Originally posted by Abyssal Crow:

FEAR AI was never advanced, it just voiced alot of what it was doing

I do not know who keeps pushing this narrative these last couple of years, but this could not be further from the truth. F.E.A.R gave life to Goal Oriented Action Planning (GOAP) which was a very advanced technique to videogame AI. The way they respond to player, team and environmental reactions was nothing short of amazing, especially for it's time.

Yea dude we know.

All I'm looking for in this thread is how the enemy AI is, not a back and forth of whether F.E.A.R. was ahead of it's time or not. We all know it was, is.

[Nexxtic]

There's a free demo you can play to judge it. It's only a few gigs!

[Abyssal Crow]

Originally posted by owl:

I just hope there's a toggle for the bullet time stuff. Not a fan.

You could just not use it and there is a cheat you can unlock (though I think you need to beat the game to unlock it lol) that straight up disables focus. There isn't really a "focus required" part in the game, that being said higher difficulties is definitely geared off you using your focus and invis properly, so if you do get the game goodluck not having slowmo on higher difficulties if you do them.

[JtDarth]

Originally posted by Nexxtic:

Originally posted by Abyssal Crow:

FEAR AI was never advanced, it just voiced alot of what it was doing

I do not know who keeps pushing this narrative these last couple of years, but this could not be further from the truth. F.E.A.R gave life to Goal Oriented Action Planning (GOAP) which was a very advanced technique to videogame AI. The way they respond to player, team and environmental reactions was nothing short of amazing, especially for it's time.

Except that it isn't actually that advanced. It just wasn't strict programming. AI weren't told 'do x, unless y', they were given a list of options and left to choose amongst them, with a few options given higher weight (The most impactful of which was the preference to not move or advance into enemy line of sight. That one priority is what caused the infamous flanking and retreat behaviors that made FEAR's AI stand out).
The actual AI code was insanely simple, and ONLY worked well when the combat environment was specifically designed to support it. Hence why when the same AI was used in fear 2, it came across dumber than a box of rocks in most areas of the game.
Also, yes, the AI communicating DID leave a lot stronger impression of intelligence than it's actual code would support.

[iliekP3aches]

Originally posted by owl:

Originally posted by Nexxtic:

I do not know who keeps pushing this narrative these last couple of years, but this could not be further from the truth. F.E.A.R gave life to Goal Oriented Action Planning (GOAP) which was a very advanced technique to videogame AI. The way they respond to player, team and environmental reactions was nothing short of amazing, especially for it's time.

Yea dude we know.

All I'm looking for in this thread is how the enemy AI is, not a back and forth of whether F.E.A.R. was ahead of it's time or not. We all know it was, is.

You literally just said a couple posts before this about how you wanted the illusion of sentience like FEAR and everyone is saying you are wrong because you are. FEAR 1 and the expansion Extraction Point were top tier because of the map design. Otherwise the AI was not at all special as evidenced by the other expansion, Perseus Mandate, which had open maps and poor design.

By comparison Trepang2's AI is pretty decent, probably the best I've seen in the current gen, at least that was my experience on Hard. Kudos to them if the AI changes behavior based on difficulty because that's the right way of increasing difficulty- not turning them into bullet sponges like most games do. Most of enemies had attack patterns. I noticed that by the final mission or certain units in some missions simply did not care about me taking a hostage, they just shot them. If I ran from a firefight I would often hear "He's running away!". I managed to juke some AI enemies as well, popping out from cover, then sliding away in the opposite direction in the dark only to hear "Where'd he go?" after they shoot at my previous location for a bit and seemingly flank and check. And that was without using the cloak ability. Naysayers are either not playing the game or have really poor reference. I say this as someone who has replayed FEAR 1 within the last year and just beat Trepang's campaign.

[Ω]

Originally posted by iliekP3aches:

Originally posted by owl:

Yea dude we know.

All I'm looking for in this thread is how the enemy AI is, not a back and forth of whether F.E.A.R. was ahead of it's time or not. We all know it was, is.

You literally just said a couple posts before this about how you wanted the illusion of sentience like FEAR and everyone is saying you are wrong because you are. FEAR 1 and the expansion Extraction Point were top tier because of the map design. Otherwise the AI was not at all special as evidenced by the other expansion, Perseus Mandate, which had open maps and poor design.

By comparison Trepang2's AI is pretty decent, probably the best I've seen in the current gen, at least that was my experience on Hard. Kudos to them if the AI changes behavior based on difficulty because that's the right way of increasing difficulty- not turning them into bullet sponges like most games do. Most of enemies had attack patterns. I noticed that by the final mission or certain units in some missions simply did not care about me taking a hostage, they just shot them. If I ran from a firefight I would often hear "He's running away!". I managed to juke some AI enemies as well, popping out from cover, then sliding away in the opposite direction in the dark only to hear "Where'd he go?" after they shoot at my previous location for a bit and seemingly flank and check. And that was without using the cloak ability. Naysayers are either not playing the game or have really poor reference. I say this as someone who has replayed FEAR 1 within the last year and just beat Trepang's campaign.

Whatever dude. Got my answers. Thread closed. ♥♥♥♥ off.