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With Advanced AI, Will EQN Be Too Difficult For Today's Modern Players?
Dejoblue
Member UncommonPosts: 307
Cross posting because the communities on MMORPG.COM and reddit are pretty different and I would love to hear MMORPG.COM's community opinion and thoughts. (I also wanna see more of you over on reddit!)
http://www.reddit.com/r/EQNext/comments/1kbkzw/with_advanced_ai_will_eqn_be_too_difficult_for/
One of the top retorts of PVP players when defending the merits of PVP is that scripted dumb AI PVE encounters have no equal to a real player making real decisions while engaged in combat.
With the advent of the purported AI that EverQuest Next will have, will PVE players find themselves at the mercy of NPCs that do anything to survive.
I know it has been stated that the "intelligence" of NPCs can be adjusted, but at what point does the PVE encounter become more like a PVP encounter, where you do not know what the NPC has up their sleeve, or that they may simply run away and or get help?
Short of tea-bagging, can we expect advanced scenarios such as spontaneous NPC ambushes and the like?
This may make PVE encounters, at least coming from a traditional "dumb AI" themepark background seem to be more difficult to "master". With all of the handholding going on in todays broken Skinner's box where gamers sate themselves on endless pellets and then move on to the next thrill and with no place left to turn due to these new expectations, has EverQuest Next really turned to PVP emulation?
Will this drive away PVE players?
Will PVP players become advanced AI PVE players?
It is understandable that new tactics will need to be devised to contend with these new enemies but is EverQuest Next going to blur that line between PVE and PVP?
Will PVP players find themselves more and more able to enjoy and become engaged with advanced AI?
What are your thoughts? What should SOE consider? What should PVE and PVP players consider?
Comments
I hate to be Buzz Killington up in here, but until SoE actually shows us this extreme AI in action, I feel its nothing more than PR hype at this point.
Lol every single thing in this game is going to get zerged, and be a joke if they want to stick to this open world nonsense.
Not to mention your probably not going to be pressing more than 5-10 buttons because of this GW2 combat they want to go for so, No I don't think EQN will be too difficult or difficult at all for that matter.
Played-Everything
Playing-LoL
The term "modern" should be removed from the title... It has nothing to do with when someone gamed. The only real difference in most cases past/present was that EQ and DAoC were pretty heavy on crowd control. Which in a game like WoW mostly means something much shorter term unless you are focus spamming someone with stuns/silence.
There was a time of course that if you woke up that mob.. it would wipe the group (or could). In DAoC there were scout mobs that if they spotted you.. would run off and get help. Which again only mattered at the time because the players were weak enough... that the adds might kill them without teamwork.
What was the same in most cases was some form of taunt to keep the mobs focused on the aggro beacon (aka tank).
As far as mobs that actually act less.. well to be blunt stupid... there isn't any prior MMO to give anyone experience with that. You are either going to adapt or you will have a hard time .. of course that assumes the Emergent AI works as expected. So the correct title is will it be too difficult for players.. period.
I think people that dabble in pvp would have a bit of an upper hand. That doesn't mean that people who want to PvP will suddenly be happy fighting mobs (especially not the griefers that hide behind the pvp argument).
Its hard to say without having hands on time with it or at least a demonstration of it actually in use.... I would think most anyone that was in an active guild that raided in past MMO's.. could adapt.. it would just take a bit of time.
I don't think the AI will be what makes EQN difficult to today's players. I think it will be today's players who make EQN difficult for themselves. A lot of people are unwilling to adapt to change (some are incapable even). They will be the ones spending more time on the forums asking for changes to make it like (insert game here) rather than in game learning how to adapt.
Then again, this is pretty much the way it works with everything.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
Today's modern players? You are referring to WoW refugees? Not all players are like that, and I certainly hope that we have players that have at least slight intelligence and are able to adapt to "harder" content.
With that said, if EQNext is going for a niche market, then it doesn't matter if the general populace thinks its too hard. It only matters what the target audience thinks... Sandbox players relish new interactions, and being able to adapt, and some (look up Eve news), have placed months and years of planning into some extraordinary, and extraordinarily hard encounters, done by players themselves. So much so, that they had to slow down time in game for the servers to be able to handle the phenomenal loads that were placed on it by the thousands of players and ships participating in it.
TL:DR: So I would be more concerned about what players can do more than what an "enhanced AI" can do.
What I expect of this "advanced AI" hype:
Bosses will attack and try to finish off those with low HP instead of continuously switching to whatever player hits them with most damage.
Good enough to boast "advanced AI" because a LOT more players will die.
NEW IDEAS that can refresh the STALE state of MMORPGs
The 1st thing the theory crafters are going to do is reverse engineer the AI. What makes the NPCs tick? Who do they go after and why? What is their scripting and their algorithms, protocols, flow charting, etc etc. Then players will build around this to try to optimize every aspect they can that is the determining reason for being attacked. AI? Yeah, players will just figure out as best they can how to bring the Trinity back in.
I do not think this would necessarily alienate average PVE only players, that are used to things like internet knowledge of scripts etc. I think this because, more often than not its more about how they are motivated or their inability to help themselves seeking easy to obtain knowledge of PVE information(someone in the group with a 2nd monitor reading the internet and claiming it as insight into the encounter).
I do not think it has anything to do with the players themselves it has more to do with the handholding. Having said that maybe there will be some hesitation from players used to being handheld through encounters but it will be short lived if the overall game play experience is an improvement(no silliness like elimination of player roles). This hesitation could entice players to consider other mmorpg that still offer the handholding.
But even still if the AI is so advanced perhaps those players may find the motivation and drive they need to step up gameplay and challenge themselves to grow as gamers, sending tails around the interwebs that in everquestnext there is no more stereotypes about pvpers and pveers. And no barriers like more active players beating all the content and leaking strategies down the vine corrupting the experience for players that are less active and did not have the opportunity to try the content yet even.
I have always been a player who in mmorpg does both pvp and pve. I don't see an advanced AI really changing that. I do think my approach to NPCs may change and become increasingly more like the approach I take to pvp at all times, not just when dealing with bleeding edge content and the unknown.
Modern gamers are indeed not that good at gaming thus why the modern genre is so dumbed down.
Dont just take my word for it. Nintendo did a study showing that 90 percent of present 25 and under gamers cannot beat the first level of mario brothers.
http://www.p4rgaming.com/majority-of-gamers-today-cant-finish-level-1-in-super-mario-bros/
You nailed it, my friend.
I also believe it's safe to say that the average modern-day raider would not be able to complete current EQ end-game raid content. I can see it now.... "What?? No on-screen queue for when I should move? How will I ever learn what to do!?!?" Bahahaha....
More like will modern players find a way to exploit the "advance AI."
Players found out with UO that killing all but a select zone of sheep allowed players to harvest dragons to the point of scheduling a kill when it was suppose to be a random encounter.
AI are no simple matter and other gaming head devs are a bit skeptical of EQN trumping their "advance AI" as being a "believe it when I see it" because it is by no means a simple matter. Human thought and reasoning is so random and ingenius I don't for a second they have an "advance AI" to counter act human thought.
"Many thought the coins were enemies and tried to avoid them" who the hell did they get to play the games? These people must have never even played a video game in their life.
LOL
i think the advanced ai is just a gimmick. It will just be a combination of several games ai behaviour. Metal Gear, Deus Ex, Fear..etc all meshed together. Visual tracking listen footsteps bullshit.
I cant think of how advanced an ai can be in a mmo without ruining the enjoyment of a MMO.
Another One, this time its from the game dishonored about how people couldnt use their own heads to progress without clues.
“People would just walk around. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t even go upstairs because a guard told them they couldn’t. They’d say ‘Okay, I can’t go upstairs.’ They wouldn’t do anything,”
People really are drones these days fed by the media, not just the gaming community but the general population.
It's not because wow is still the top dog that their players are considered like modern minded players.
We're up for the challenge and dark souls proved that already. Dark souls sold more than 2million copies so expect a good chuck to adapt.
For me, EQN will bring me back to the mmo genre. No other mmo can bring me back. Mortal online almost, but i can't stand all the bugs and crap combat.
C:\Users\FF\Desktop\spin move.gif
The people in the study i linked included a great deal of 25 and below who 'played video games' among other target groups.
That site is the video game equivalent of The Onion. It's satire.
The problem of the AI is that it is predictable and created to lose to players.
When you beat the AI once, you can beat it again and again.
So the only solutions to that are:
a) AI that learns - not here for many years;
b) keep changing the AI so it can beat the previous strategy used by players - resource intensive.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
The whole "kids today want things handed to them" meme needs to die. That meme is about old as the human species. Btw that Nintendo article is satire.
Normally I like to speculate but tweaking mob difficulty is hard to predict. You can have ai that is smarter than you but if it can be one shotted then it's still easy.