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Do you guys think agro in MMOs is realistic?
Zindaihas
Member UncommonPosts: 3,662
Perhaps some of you with development experience can respond to this. I have no problem with the way mob agro in MMOs generally work. They have a certain agro range and if you come within that range, they will attack you. But I was wondering if it is possible to make monsters agro on you by more realistic means. Suppose there's a mob that has poor eyesight, but has a keen sense of smell. You might be able to walk right in front of it, but if you are downwind from it, it might not know you are there. On the other hand, you might not be anywhere near its line of sight, but if you are upwind from it, it might recognize you as an enemy and come after you. You might also have agro based on sounds and/or vibrations. Does any of this make sense or is is too complicated from a programming standpoint?
Comments
Well, the issue with your example that I see is first a game would have to have directional wind forces programmed into the game (or wind for that matter), then a means for the player to tell which way its blowing, followed by a shifting pattern from time to time.
Not impossible to do of course, but sounds sort of resource intensive.
Besides...who sneaks past mobs? Draw your sword and go in swinging!!!!
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Not so complicated as it is "is it worth it"
In MMORPGs resources are valuable (see worse graphics less special effects than single player).
after 6 or so years, I had to change it a little...
If you ever played final fantasy 11 there is something similar to this where some mobs attack you by smell or sound and eyesight or all depending on their raciel intelligence. You have skills that can make you invisible or sneaky and deodarize you. For instance goblins are smart in the game so you will have to cast sneak and invisible in order to get past them undetected. And some mobs you will have to to just one of those skills to get past them.
But to make it more realistic like you said, programmers would have to set a value for smell, noise and some type of camo depending on each piece of armor the character has on. And different monsters would detect those values depending on their maximum range of detection of those values. For instance a hawk like mobs strongest detection strenght would be eyesight while his other senses are weaker but still would have some range in it, you know what I mean?
FFXI has a few awkward aggro. hecteyes aggroed by sound... when they have eyes all over their little blob bodies... Makes perfect sense .
FFXI has a few awkward aggro. hecteyes aggroed by sound... when they have eyes all over their little blob bodies... Makes perfect sense .
"Being an amorph possessing many eyes. It is a little known fact that of these eyes, only the foremost pair actually function. The others are thought to be a clever sort of mimicry intended to confuse those who might strike at the creature's real eyes, and to discourage ambush withal. Unlike most flan, these do not reproduce by division of the entire body. Rather, small nodules protrude from the eyespots, these then detaching from the creature, having attained sufficient mass, to form autonomous offspring."
http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Hecteyes_(Final_Fantasy_XII)
Well bats have eyes but they are blind and sense everything by sound.
FFXI has a few awkward aggro. hecteyes aggroed by sound... when they have eyes all over their little blob bodies... Makes perfect sense .
"Being an amorph possessing many eyes. It is a little known fact that of these eyes, only the foremost pair actually function. The others are thought to be a clever sort of mimicry intended to confuse those who might strike at the creature's real eyes, and to discourage ambush withal. Unlike most flan, these do not reproduce by division of the entire body. Rather, small nodules protrude from the eyespots, these then detaching from the creature, having attained sufficient mass, to form autonomous offspring."
http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Hecteyes_(Final_Fantasy_XII)
Well bats have eyes but they are blind and sense everything by sound.
Interesting.
My main problem with aggro in MMOs is the mechanics of hate and taunts etc.
It is basically an excuse to have anti-AI.
Something that has the approximate intelligence of a human would never be stupid enough to focus on a WoW protection warrior or EQ2 guardian.
Its funny how many people complain that the AI sucks in MMORPGs and then simultaneously cry like little babies when a game has not taunts.
Anyone who advocates for taunt mechanics is advocating for the ability to complete short circuit behavior that even resembles any kind of intelligence.
The OP is not really talking about aggro. This is a matter of awareness.
This already exists to some degree in games like DDO and possibly may exist in AoC.
If we take DDO the stealth mechanics are based on skills one for how silent you are and one for how well you hide.
The lighting of a particular spot in a dungeon affects your ability to hide and various actions may generate more or less noise, like smashing things. Things have various levels of both the spot and listen skill to detect things.
For the most part most games do not bother with this except for stealth. Its just easier to have everything be the same except for the people who really do want to sneak around. Also most MMORPGs are pretty simplistic basically every just attacks you. Its not like they are brain surgery or really complex, no matter what people like to pretend MMOs are rarely very deep. People tend to mistake breadth for depth.
Anyway it is more than possible it already exists to some degree.
Perhaps the agro system is slightly unrealistc, but with how long the average MMOs current development cycle is implementing a system like that would be time consuming and open it to numberous bugs and testing purposes.
As a player I would rather have the developers concentrate on more important features and fine tune them, Furhter more as a player I do not want to worry about how the wind or what boots im currently wearing and how they effect my agro, I have enough things to consider in my gameplay already. With a system like that you run the risk of overwhelming some of your player base.
>>> MMOs From A Players Perspective <<<
Mob detection had been implemented with some degree of sophistication in various games. Take EQ1.
Players enjoy a skill called invisibility, which only hides himself from living beings (yeah its crazy, right in the middle of the sunny day you go invis). Undeads will see all invisible players. There is a different skill called invisible to undead which will fool an undead but won't beat a living creature's eye. There are more variants like that in other games. Even if you are invisible some mobs like dogs or wolves will sense you, presumable b/c they smell.
Aggro range is related but not the same as social aggro. Sometimes if a mob is social he will bring his friends (BaF, aka bring a friend, when pulled). However the social aggro has a range. A mob wandering too far away from his friends will not BaF.
Is it realistic? In a way all games are not realistic. How can I summon a fireball and throw it at you without burning my own hands and glove first? :-)
I don't recall playing any game because it was realistic.
Not even 1.
The wind itself could be FUN and a gameplay element, but I can't care less if it is realistic or not, I care if it is FUN or not. The wind would bring new interesting challenges and feature (train, easy to flee if you go in the direction of the wind, smell intensity (need a new stat, so if your fresh out of town, you are harder to smell than if you just exit a dungeon and kill bazillions stuff)).
Don't think in a realistic way, thinks in a FUN-factor.
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren
What has realism to do with gaming? Sorry but that sounds quite a bit too complicated for my taste.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Wind adds a lot of complications. If wind direction changes, static camping spots are vulnerable. If mob wander around, and run into the path of down wind, aggro range will change, static camping spots are vulnerable. If winds move along dungeon corridors, we might have a train coming and we don't know because wind bring our smell further deep into the dungeon. Oh boy, games becomes very complicated.
Oh yeah there will now be a new derived statistics, odor factor. Or many aspects of odor factor, some sensitive to noses of dogs, others sensitive to nose of dragons. Oh how about solubility of armor. Some leather may be slightly soluable in water, so if you wear leather armor with special kind of oil coating do not cross the river or you will draw in the aligators. Likewise, chain/scale armor will bring so much noise that the ogre village over the hill will be awakened.
I feel sorry for the game designer if we are serioius about these. :-)
Hehe. Many good ideas/points which I wouldn't even have considered.
I don't care if wind is in or out a game. I also don't care if part of this is integrated and part isn't...as long as it is CLEAR and that the player INTRESECLY understands it...or have HUGE information support about that without troubles to find it, yet never spamming (maybe have a red stat on the gear).
I see that as more options, not as restrictions. For the designers. More tools to play with. However, it has to be done nicely, or not at all. CLARITY!
Same with sounds, if it is in, then the player needs to make noise accordingly to his actions.
Hehe. It has to be clear. Maybe you would see peoples walking instead of always running, when in an hunting area. Walk-pulling. :P
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren
No, i dont think agro in MMOs is realistic and i think it is getting less so as games supposedly get more advanced.
I think the ideas of smell and hearing agro are good but i also think they could get pretty difficult to program. Im no programmer so i might be wrong but that seems much harder then just setting an agro range for a mob.
What really gets me about Agro today is the implementation of leashes and autoreturn to spawn. I dont really have a problem with leashes i guess, it makes sense that a mob will get tired of chasing me sooner or later and decide to go home. I just dont like the set aspect of it. But then i dont really see how my dwarf is outrunning a cougar anyway.
I really hate the auto return to spawn. I know that people hate trains (i dont) but if a mob gets tired of chasing you he should agro on anyone else he doesnt like on his way back home. I would really like it if vis going right home they decided to wonder a little bit first and agro if they see someone new. The WoW thing of the mob walking right by you on his way back to his hut is just stupid.
I really thought EQ and DAOC did agro pretty well, some of the newer games i dont like so much.
I especially liked in EQ where a wolf or bear would walk by my druid no problem and then jump on the mage i was grouped with. I thought that was fantastic, i sometimes even pulled the Druid card and would not help him fight them off.
(unless of course he was going to die)
Slightly unrealistic? How is it at all realistic to shoot a guy and he blindly charges at you while his buddies stand there 10 feet away and do nothing? This is how it works in virtually any MMO, and it's getting old.
So of course it will take extra work to create something new, as opposed to copying every other game that's existed. By that logic, why do we get new graphics? Why aren't we all playing varients of Pac-Man?
AI is no exception, and it's improved in every genre of game except the MMO. Part of the reason is technical; it takes a whole lot more resources to have complex, realistic AI in an MMO world. But that's no reason to ignore the problem or handwave it away. We may not have realistic behavior in MMOs today, but that's no reason not to work for it as the technology becomes
Aggro mechanics are a subset of AI, which can be a quite important component of gameplay. Certainly, there are other aspects of the game that need to be worked on, but why do you feel this is one particular element is something that deserves to be skimped on.
A pet peeve of mine is the "shooting fireballs" argument that people always throw around whenever "realism" is mentioned in games.
In the universe of the game, magic exists that allows people to shoot fire from their hands or turn people into sheep. Is this same "magic" somehow responsible for the staggering stupid behavior exhibited by the world's inhabitants? Does it allow people to naturally pass through each other as if they were intangible?
"A wizard did it" does not fly when talking about external game mechanics that are just outright illogical - and are only there because of technical limitations or adherence to archaic convention. Things like Bad AI. No Collision Detection. The list goes on.
It's fine to accept the practical limits of technology, as long as you see it for exactly what it is: a compromise.
Stupid AI is not "fine", due to the existence of magic in the game. Stupid AI is a necessary evil, until we can do better. We should try to do better.
Slightly unrealistic? How is it at all realistic to shoot a guy and he blindly charges at you while his buddies stand there 10 feet away and do nothing? This is how it works in virtually any MMO, and it's getting old.
So of course it will take extra work to create something new, as opposed to copying every other game that's existed. By that logic, why do we get new graphics? Why aren't we all playing varients of Pac-Man?
AI is no exception, and it's improved in every genre of game except the MMO. Part of the reason is technical; it takes a whole lot more resources to have complex, realistic AI in an MMO world. But that's no reason to ignore the problem or handwave it away. We may not have realistic behavior in MMOs today, but that's no reason not to work for it as the technology becomes
Aggro mechanics are a subset of AI, which can be a quite important component of gameplay. Certainly, there are other aspects of the game that need to be worked on, but why do you feel this is one particular element is something that deserves to be skimped on.
A pet peeve of mine is the "shooting fireballs" argument that people always throw around whenever "realism" is mentioned in games.
In the universe of the game, magic exists that allows people to shoot fire from their hands or turn people into sheep. Is this same "magic" somehow responsible for the staggering stupid behavior exhibited by the world's inhabitants? Does it allow people to naturally pass through each other as if they were intangible?
"A wizard did it" does not fly when talking about external game mechanics that are just outright illogical - and are only there because of technical limitations or adherence to archaic convention. Things like Bad AI. No Collision Detection. The list goes on.
It's fine to accept the practical limits of technology, as long as you see it for exactly what it is: a compromise.
Stupid AI is not "fine", due to the existence of magic in the game. Stupid AI is a necessary evil, until we can do better. We should try to do better.
I for one 110% agree with you. You cannot compare realism to fantasy.
Couple of points.
1) Situation awareness is not new to gaming. It is in MMORPG but lots of stealth games have it. Mobs in stealth games would have a visual range & a hearing range. If they see you, they will raise alarm. If they hear something, they will go investigate. (The metal gear solid series is a good example).
2) Technically, it may be very difficult to do in a MMO. It is one thing to handle, on a local machine, awareness & AI for 5 mobs. It is another to handle thousands, if not 10s of thousands. However, a water down version can certainly be created. For example, it is probably easy to program an aggro mob to sound an alarm and get the whole dungeon to search for you. Now the question is whether that is fun.
3) "Realism" is not necessarily needed in a fun game. In Diablo, horde and horde of monsters just came at you to get themselves killed. It is not realistic for monsters with any intelligence but it is damn fun.
4) I think the aggro range of mobs are made short intentionally for gameplay reasons (so a solo-er can actually kill mobs .... one by one). It is trivial to make the aggro range larger. In this case, more realistic gameplay (the whole section of dungeon aggro on you), may not be fun. They have to either space out the mobs more, or give players a lot more power. And there is balancing issues connected to both of those.
The only think I would like to see changed with aggro is for all creatures to have a intelligence stat. The higher the intel the less likley it is for a mob to be "Tauntable". Taunting has always been the one thing that bothered my in games. I'm not a realism nut but come on. If I am a mob and am engaged in a fight with a group of people and I notice the person standing in the back is healing everyone I hit then I'm going to go kill them. Doesn't really matter if the "tank" calls me a nasty name.
-Currently looking forward to FFXIV
-Currently playing EvE and Global Agenda
If it helps, you can think of the "taunt" as the fighter jumping in front of the Healer. With no taunt, the mob just goes after the healer first, then the nuker, then everyone else dies.
No need for classes, everyone can just play the same toon.
Yeah I actually hate how you can be clearing boss trash, and the boss is just standing there having a cup of tea: 'Oh look. This new raid party is having a pretty easy time taking care of my guards. *takes a sip* Wow this earl grey is simply lovely!' But at the same time if mobs had real intelligence, how would a raid party actually ever get to the boss? It would have to be like 500 to 20 odds because the whole 'fortress' would attack at once, like old world castle warfare. That would actually be pretty sweet, but very very hard to code with the time limitations of most teams.
Also the taunt thing is just a lazy way around the use of ... not hit detection ... it's called something else in the industry, but basically the ability of the engine to know when two mobs (mobiles - yes players are mobiles too) come in contact with one another. I guess it's a real b*tch to code correctly. So anyway, in current pen and paper, the 'tanks' block a doorway to keep the mobs off the clothies, but even still you have to wonder why archers wouldn't just tear the casters a new one by firing over the tanks' heads.
It would be sweet to see a new MMO tackle these two soft points in current MMOs. PvE would be more about actual tactics in fighting instead of being ability based. It would also mean monsters would be smart enough to use their whole force at once, and we would get some really cool actual 'battles' for raiding, while the group stuff would have to be against smaller groups of enemy or maybe like special ops hit and run tactics or whatever.
nethervoid - Est. '97
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I believe you are referring to collision dection. It is difficult to code in an MMORPG, and it opens up other problems, like players deliberately blocking doors or pathways, or someone standing in the way of an NPC merchant, and then going to get a sandwhich.
IMO, the best solution is to help Players with immersion with simple techniques. While you clear boss trash, the Boss is not visible, then only appears once the trash is cleared, looking like it just arrived on the scene.
That might make it more immersive, than a boss that just stands there waiting to fight.
A clear example of this is in WOW, the Scarlet Monastery, the Cathedral. There you have lots of soldiers praying inside the cathedral, with the boss on the altar facing the crowd. When you open the gates, nobody moves, then the puller hits one soldier and then two or three attack, not more. The boss stays there, until all the soldiers are dead and he is the only one alive.
Just a thought that might solve this. Make all the enemies that can see or hear the fight stand up and move around facing you, pointing, screaming, things like that.
Then, make them attack with an intensity depending on the distance they are from you. The close ones, the ones being pulled are at 100% attack and it quicly drops to 0% in a few meters. That means that some mobs will only attack at 50% of their capacity, others at 30%, and so on.
Make them approach the group slowly, so you have a steady flow of enemies, but also give the chance to retreat and the hability to scare them off, like a scream or a display of force, that will make them stay there not daring to attack, for a while at least, so the group has the chance to heal, recover mana etc, but not forever, this way you will have the tension of the fight all the time and it would feel a bit more logical.
By making some mechanics in a game more realisitic the gameplay can become more complex and challenging which can make it more fun depending on the person.
This is already done to some extent in WOW. *Some* (but not all) bosses do not appear until some event triggers it.
There are also bosses with spawn of weaker monsters.
Having said that, there are still lots of boss standing there watching his henchmen killed one by one cases.