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Why do mobs no act like single player game enemies?
Gintoh
Member UncommonPosts: 329
I know about the AI and how it can't stack b/c of the resources required etc. I'm not talking about that.
Why don't mobs attack on sight, why must hostile mobs act like you are invisible until you walk close to them, it's absurd to walk into a bandit camp, but you just have to pull them one at a time, and the others don't see you until you shoot/blast with a spell/stab them. Is there a reason for this or is it just laziness?
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To make the game easier for players who cannot accept a challenge. Which makes up a lot of the population.
Because AI takes a lot of server resources.
What game are you talking about? I've played most of the major games, and none of them allow you to walk into an aggressive mobs radius without being attacked.
In EQ, some of the mobs do attack you as soon as they see you. One zone in particular was Western Waste, I believe. Also, some dragon named Wuoshi would attack people even before we saw her/him(can't remember that zone name). It was hilarious to port in, and have some dragon kill you in about 5 seconds.
Um, like every game, they won't see you until you walk within a certain range even if they are looking right at you.
Because, ya know, you don't want to be zerged the moment you enter that particular zone. RL ranged vision as a detection method simply doesn't work in MMOs, it's all based on aggro ranges for a reason.
I've never "walked into a bandit camp", and not been attacked. Also, most games I've played if you hit one of their friends the ones in a certain radiius will help defend. Are you maybe exaggerating? Or playing cheap f2p junk games?
I don't think it's laziness as making the game playable as well as supporting a style of play that mmo's have come to rely on.
Also, mobs are meant to be defeated. They are essentially powerups that offer a small bit of challenge or perhaps challenge if one makes a mistake and lures too many.
But if one person entered a camp the reality would be that the entire camp would hunt them down. Now, that's fine but that would essentially weight the game for large raid type groups in order to take out camps. Again, that would be fine and something that I often thougth of as a way to include raids taht weren't about one large raid boss.
There is also a bit of suspension of disbelief where one is too assume that all eyes are not on you at all times.
There are some atrocious mmo pve mobs such as warhammer, where two guards are talking and you can literally pull one of the guards and the second guard still remains "talking" to no one".
My thought is that it should be so that if one mob is surrounded and is intelligent and is pulled then all should be alerted. If they are hidden or are quite far then they should either be pulled without drawing others or they should run back to get help. Some games actually incorporate this. But again, mobs are meant to be killed, they are powerups for leveling in the typical mmo.
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This is why I like EQ1 style.. Was it perfect? NO.. but compared to the carebear style of today, it was perfect.. If you were going to take out a mob in a camp, lets say Orc Camp.. It was almost a sure thing you were going to get agro from the entire camp.. ALL 5, 7 or 8 of them.. Social agro was always present.. And the agro range was bigger then today's mobs.. This is why I loved a good puller, mezzer, rooter, tanker, healer, etc etc.. It was fun having to group like that.. The chances of something going wrong was high, and the penalty severe.. Mobs didn't lose agro when you ran 50 feet away.. I dont' know how many times I ran across the entire zone with a train of Orcs on my ass.. ha ha ha.. Where are the damn guards when you need them.. lmaoooooooo
What if there were less mobs in a zone, but you still had the same "rate" of killing them that you do in typical mmo's because they would attack on sight? What if, to avoid 1 person getting tottaly overrun by mobs when they enter a bandit camp since there are so many, mob numbers would scale to the number of players in an area?
This.
The logic for mobs has changed. It used to be that people complained that mobs chased you too far because it seemed like splitting and pulling was artificial. Some might say mobs shouldn't chase you into an ambush (that you prepared for them). Well, should they chase you or shouldn't they?
If there was huge line of sight aggro, i could see everyone just waiting by the guards for a mob to pop 1/4 mile away. It sees you and instantly runs to you. No need to explore, all the mobs come to you! If a couple pop together, thats what the guard is for. Making the player leave the safety of the guard seems better.
Actually, popping into existance with an instant hate for the player seems silly as well. And running any distance just to kill an enemy seems stupid as well. If i were a mob I'd much rather gather some friends and wait with an ambush.
A smart mob picks its fights, and doesn't just attack anything. You don't grow up to be strong by attacking everything in sight.
Mobs are a means to an end. Most players aren't fighting mobs for the fun of a mob encounter. They are fighting the mob to get their gear, materials, gold or experience. In that light, the ideal mobs for most players are fast-spawning oblivious creatures with static spawn locations.
There's many other reasons as well. If I can find links to any of the previous threads on this (it's a regualr monthly topic it seems), I'll post them here.
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To extend on the second post: This is also designed this way to give the player a feeling of "Power" or "Superiority" over their enemies. If, as you say, every enemy would just swarm your character, you'd be a pile of dust. Basically, in a one on one fight your character should be beefy.
Or, at least it sounded good in my head.
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Take this scenario. You are in Elwynn forest (wow/ human starting zone), you just started playing your 1st MMO, and you wanna go from point A to point B.
Now, if every mob that sees you attack you, you would have 30 boars, wolfs, kobolds, spiders... running after you.
If that happened to me when I first started, I robably wouldn't play next day, or ever.
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Go play darkfall..the agro radius is gigantic and they even run away and call other mobs...some of them hide behind rocks and trees and make fun of you because you cant hit them.
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Some games are better than others. Tabula Rasa, D&D Online, Vindictus, and Fallen Earth all use (or used) realistic aggro distances. You don't see it often in the big open world MMOG's since the worlds are so densely packed. I wish we would see it more often since I greatly prefer it.
WEll becuase the bandit camps can stomp you.
Think about it in most single player games a bandit camp is ment for you to fight what you see. In a mmo if you fight an entire camp of bandits your problably dead.
To balance size of your group, baf was invented a long time ago... wow and some other mmos don't use a group size baf rule but a proximity baf rule. Regardless, maybe the ai is just super good in mmos.
Think about it your standing around with your bros and then one of them suddenly runs off to the bushes, what is he doing, taking a dump or vomiting, would you follow him?
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Hmm. And here I always thought the main difference between MMOs and singleplayer games is the aggro mechanism. The aggro mechanism is to control which opponent attacks the mob in question, so you have to control aggro to make the mob attack the tank and not the healers or dps. Even if Dragon Age recently copied that one for a singleplayer game.
Other than that, singleplayer mobs really dont attack you before they see you, either. I dont get where the OP got that idea.
Make it so mobs adjust to how many players are in an area, problem solved.
To the people criticising the idea try not to think of it in terms of current MMOs... it's obvious that this wouldn't work in a game like WoW. A mechanic like this would work brilliantly in a game with very little open space (think urban setting) with plenty of things to obscure line of sight. It would also cause open spaces to be dangerous just as they are in real life in a combat environment.
This is essentially an FPS mechanic though so expect to bring over other FPS concepts (such as cover) to make it work.
The fact is if you compare the mob ai in a fps an in a mmorpg you will see that these are not even the same thing. In a fps a bot is designed to mimic a human player. The ai in fps (and all kinds of other games genres) has made grate progress in the reached years but in mmorpgs things remain static or even going backwards. In wow most of the mobs just randomly stand around in the field until someone steps right next to them, and then they just rush to the player while their buddies continue to stare into space. Ok, if the mob is a zombi from Night of the living dead or a giant amoeba that type of ai could be ok, but having that as the standard behaviour for all mobs in a game is just stupid, especially since other game have so much better ai nowadays.
The two aguments for ai being so low that I constantly hear are:
- The server can’t handle it.: Come on that’s just an excuse
- The players like it his way: At least I don’t. Maybe some players like their mobs as dumb as possible, so they can burn throw the game as fast as possible without any thought, but is that what you want?
Imo, the reason for the bad ai is just the developers being lazy. Come on, the standard ai in wow must be something like 10 lines of code:
if (player closer than 5 meters): charge
else: do nothing
The ghosts in Pacman had better ai then that.
The problems seems to be that mmorpg players, unlike in all other genres, for some reason don’t really ask for better ai, like they ask for better graphics. So the developers remain lazy and keep things like they where and never innovate anything.
It must have something to do with mmorpg being all about reward and levelling nowadays. So it is irrelevant if a fight was fun, as long as you get your xp.
Isn't it funny that in some MMO healer mobs sometimes heals you?
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Aggro range is a common setup for MMO mobs. Enter inside that range, possibly modified by your player level, and the mob activates. Other than that it's a toaster either running an idle animation or a very basic 3 point walk-look loop.
Some mobs have a zero aggro range. If you don't interact with them, they ignore you completely.
As to why. I think much of it has to do with scoping and that's tied to the resource issue you mentioned. Your player character can move through an area with hundreds of mobs, but without having them aggro the data required to put them in your 3D space is nominal. Once active, they have to update more quickly which eats bandwidth and server CPU.
In instances, CPU is a very real issue. There might be a hundred or more instances running on a single physical server so keeping load damped helps it run well with a large number running. If each instance had 100 mobs truly active, the machine would be doing 10,000 mob moves per tick and even at 4 ticks per second, that 40,000 mob moves per second on one computer. That really adds up.
Yes, I'd also recommend giving Darkfall a go. It has the best AI I've seen in an mmorpg. It really is challenging, and compared with the rest of the offerings in the genre, it's quite impressive.
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