About the AI and game in general (potential spoilers)

[dzonzla]

Wanted to share my thoughts, maybe devs find it helpful. While it was fun seeing AI go rogue when that amusement died down actually progressing through the game was miserable. If you go to google and search for "basic detective work" you get this:

Detectives often use the latest technology and scientific techniques to examine crime scenes and search for evidence. They may also complete in-person practical work such as interviewing suspects and witnesses.

Let's deconstruct this and see how this works in the game. There are no crime scenes to look at ourselves which is fine but that assures us that our colleagues gathered all the evidence. Except they are either irrelevant because AI makes stuff up about it when you "show it" to them or are in never ending forensic analysis that sometimes points to the made up character that's not even in the game. Other thing is that you can make up evidence or use whatever you can come up with to try and get a response from an NPC. Instead of helping the investigation the evidence just accelerates AI to go rogue and send you on a wild goose chase.

The second part of detective work which is 100% of the game, interviewing suspects and witnesses. AI is questioning you more then you can question them. You, even though they see you as a detective, don't appear to them as any figure of authority with whom they should cooperate even if it's trowing you off or straight up lying, they just dodge questions and/or answer with the question how relevant what they say is and I think this is because AI really knows that there is no consequence to how they treat you or present themselves to you while you don't have any power over them like arresting them or something like that. They like to throw arrogant insinuations and you can't do anything about it. Alibis are not a familiar concept to them, they don't understand why it's relevant for them to know where they were and what they were doing at the time of the murders so there is another classic detective "shtick" down the drain.

After a while you will notice that all of them want concrete evidence and not rumors gossips and baseless accusations and in the end the solution is rumors, gossips and baseless assumptions but the ones hardcoded by developers.

Edit: Forgot this, generally game was fun even though it's early access and has potential and while I am not a developer i think what i mentioned would really improve the flow of a game when people get tired of bullying the AI.

[Yondar]

Yeah they really need to nail down the time of murders and what the characters were doing at that time and who saw them doing it. Because alibis is the first thing I tried to check, but was promptly bogged down because there wasn't even a stable time when the murders happened. If an AI didn't know it, they would make it up when I asked. Then they make up what they were doing, and the answer is different every time you ask, and you cannot catch them lying because they'd just apologize and shrug it off as there are no consequences for lying.