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General: Editorial: More A, Less I
Dana
Member Posts: 2,415
Robert Fitzgerald debuts his writing on MMORPG.com today with "AI: Less A, More I". This editorial looks at the state of artificial intelligence in MMORPGs and explains where he'd like to see it travel.
| Call me silly, slap me with a wet noodle, but please tell me why there is always more artificial than intelligence when referring to AI. Have developers really hit the proverbial brick wall when it comes to improving AI ? Are we doomed to the current iteration of NPCs whose intelligence is on par with the "your door is ajar" voice in your car. Speaking of cars, my car can tell me where I am, where I am going, when it needs a tune up, and as an added bonus score tickets to the big game. The current generation of AI still has problems giving me accurate directions to the next quest. I realize I should be more impressed with the new and improved AI seen in some MMORPGs, apparently now instead of standing in one spot and giving you mundane quests the AI will move around the area giving them "life-like" behavior. Really, the only difference I see is that now finding the AI quest giver can become a mini-quest itself.
OK, so I seem to be complaining a lot. Well, I am. How is it that for $90 bucks my son can own a toy dog with realistic facial movements and understands more than 120 words and for the one time price of $50 and an ongoing $15 dollars a month I can't get a computer generated character to do more than spit unintelligible and boring dialog over and over again. Yes, I get it go kill the rats. Some developers have taken it a step further with their new and improved AI. Now, rather than offering up one or two lines of drivel, the new improved AI offers up two or three paragraphs of drivel with only one or two sentences of relevant information for the player. Am I complaining? Of course I am. I beginning to think I should spend $240 on one of those cool dancing robot sapiens instead of the current fare of games. |
You can read more here.
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
Comments
Very nice article Fitzgerald
I fully agree with you.
(I wrote a rather long reply but then I pressed something wrong and the text window turned all white)
Notice: The views expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com or its management.
Excellent article, I couldn't agree more! Maybe someday we'll have more immersive virtual worlds. I've always felt the general problem in the development of these "games" is a mindset in the companies that they are "games" as opposed to "virtual worlds" which is what they should be, what people are looking for. This is why people are always talking about immersion, people want immersion in a virtual world. It's a subtle (but important) difference in the mindset involved.
More realistic dialog is a matter of priorities. Personaly, I'd rather Devs spend their time on the combate system rather than NPCs. I still wouldn't play WoW if it's NPCs had better dialog because the grinnding is still boring as hell. Meanwhile, Seed focased on their NPCs and what was the feed back? Grinding is boring. Better dialog is nice but I don't think game-making.
As far as NPCs moving, I'd love that too. It'd be cool and immersive, making it feel as though I'm talking with a person. But it's hard to program(As compaired to a bunch of new dungeons, which are easy and market safe) and might provide problems in finding your contact. Once again, Seed tryed it and got "the grind is boring". I'd rather see this than dialog though.
Hands tied to their waist? WOW NOOB!!! Kidding
, CoH implimented this not too long ago, it's really cool. Just shows that CoH owns.
People have been asking for running mobs in CoH for a while, personaly I'd hate it. I always play a melle character, unless I can throw my sword or develop some kind of imaling tenticle, I don't want to chase it. Better tactics are not running unless I get exp/stuff for wounding and not killing.
Sand box worlds would rock, quite simply. Pretty good article.
I agree with the sentiment of the article, but I don't necessarily agree with each point.
There are two different types of AI discussed:
1) Combat AI. This requires the system to anticipate the interactions of multiple PC characters in a group and possibly multiple NPCs as well. I assume that this is very complicated, and there are all sorts of balancing issues that come up. Some games are trying to work on this aspect, but I am not an expert on it. SWG tried various stances. I know that DDO introduced all sorts of fancy rolling moves and other combat enhancements, and I recall that the Conan MMORPG is going to try to liven up combat.
2) NPC AI. I agree that static NPCs can be boring. I disagree that this isn't being addressed, at least on a limited basis. I recall from my FFXI days long ago that some shops close during certain hours of the days. More recently, EQ2 has been introducing quests that are keyed to times of day. For example, the scarecrow quests in Antonica require that certain places be visited only at night or during the day. In the original EQ, there were zones whose MOBs changed between night and day. In the most recent module in EQ2, a mob appears in town in the morning, a crowd gathers and he gives a speech. OK, these may not seem revolutionary, but all fit into the pattern of what is suggested in the editorial as possible improvements.
I think that the problems arise from the fact that it is hard to incorporate all of these into a single game that also has good gameplay, content and player-base.
While I agree with some of the points in the article, I just don't see anything really changing anytime soon. The problem with having a more dynamic system is that you'll just get a whole seperate group of complaints from people. I like the idea of having to actually use a tracking skill to find something rather than just going to your trusty stategery guide or fansite and find some co-ordinates, but I think it would end up just giving people something to complain about. The same thing for shops having certain hours. While it would really help with immersion, it would end up probably causing more problems than anything else, though it would probably depend on the length of time for the day/night cycle. I mean, more and more MMOs coming out are trying to cater to a "casual" audience, people with limited time to invest logging in and actually playing. What happens to people with only a few hours to play if the shops are all closed when she logs on? What about all the time she will have to spend tracking down quest givers or specific mobs for quests, especially if they don't have or know of anyone with any tracking skill?
I agree that these ideas would be great in a "sandbox" type MMO, where it's not all about going out and getting quests for uber loot and more about interaction and making your own story with your character (similar to the original SWG or EVE), these things would help make the world more alive and realistic and help bring home the idea that your character is part of a larger, living world; but in a heavy questing system, like WoW or pretty much everything else out there now, it would just cause more problems. I mean, look at how often you see people spamming chat in WoW looking for roaming mobs, and they just roam around a fairly specific area. I cringe at the thought of people traveling around the entirty of the world looking for their rare flying cupacabra monkey turtle beast to complete the ultimepic Shadowhat quest.
As far as combat AI goes, however, I couldn't agree more that there needs to be work, but what can they really do? Most MMOs are basically quasi-turn based PnP systems with fancy graphics. Generally speaking, if you shoot a bow at a mob and it's standing still, it has the same chance of hitting them if it's moving, and it will hit them even if they move out of the way or go behind an object after you fire the weapon. Changing things like that move MMOs into the world of more "twitch" based games, and to me at least, that's a negative thing. When SWG came out with Jump to Lightspeed, it was a fundementally different game than the ground game at the time. I adjusted fine, being a flight sim veteran and an old fan of the X-Wing line of games from back in the day; however, my wife, who I enjoy playing MMOs with whenever we find one we can both enjoy, absolutly despised the space game. She tried to get into it, but between her lack of flight sim experience and general dislike of twitch like games, we could never really do anything in space together. Not only that, we're both more social type gamers and trying to fly around and stay alive with a joystick and still chat with the guild and such was near impossible.
The only thing I could see is similar to the migration thing or the NPC day/night cycle type chore list, where mobs, depending on what they are and such, go out hunting certain times of the day, play around other times of the day, and sleep or hide other times of the day. Perhaps make some mobs food for other mobs and even have plants that are harvestable that lower level herbivore type mobs could eat. IF they can't find their chosen food, they may then migrate, or become more aggressive and start activly seeking player characters. That, to me, falls back into just general AI stuff and really doesn't change combat in so much that you may find two mobs fighting each other on their own and, thus, won't have to work as hard to kill whoever is left and also change the general agressiveness of the mobs. This already almost happens in CoH, but as soon as you attack, the mobs forget their squabbles and start to attack you. It'd be neat if it was different once in a while, perhaps they continue to fight and when one falls the victor gives you an option to fight them or let them go, or maybe as soon as you start fighting one of them, the other runs away immediatly.
Really though, I think the biggest hurdle to getting better AI isn't lazy developers or whiney customers, it's greedy publishers. Why gamble on innovation when you can pay someone to crap out another DnD inspired WoW clone and at least ensure yourself a bit of Blizzard's scraps as people get bored and quit.
Good editorial. (Insanely lengthy response follows -- thanks to anyone who wades through it.)
The bottom line problem with non-player mob (that is, NPC and creature) AI is that it's reactive, not active. NPCs and critters are either loot bags waiting to be popped or mindless quest dispensers. They don't act; they exist only to be acted upon.
To some degree, that's how it has to be. Those are functions players want NPCs/critters to have, so that's what developers give them. Except that developers stop there. But why stop there?
Well, partly it's because there are only so many hours in a day, even if you work programmers like galley slaves. (Something that courts are beginning to take a dim view of.) Stop for a second and ask yourself: How many important systems are there in a major MMORPG?
Go ahead, come up with a number.
Now multiply that number by 10, and you'll start to be in the ballpark of how many systems there really are that somebody has to design, implement, and test. (And you can easily double or triple that number if you also take into account server code, behind-the-scenes "helper" systems, and tool development.)
With so much to do that absolutely has to get done, I'm sympathetic to not implementing super-AI. "Minimally plausible" starts looking like a more appropriate goal.
It's also the case that you don't necessarily want your mobs doing things when there's not a player there to be affected by those behaviors -- that can be perceived as a waste of processor cycles. (Do you want more lag?)
Finally, there's the argument that despite what some of them may say, most players don't actually want mobs that are smart enough to wipe the floor with them. The highly gameplay-oriented players -- to whom most MMORPG developers cater slavishly -- want mobs they can beat so that they can take their stuff. (Actually, that applies to PvP as well, but that's another thread.) Making mobs smart enough to run away or gang up on a player might wind up being very unpopular with many of today's gamers.
And yet... what a waste of good mobs. If a MMORPG is a game world, then shouldn't "world" be roughly as important as "game?" In which case, shouldn't mobs be designed to support the goal of making the gameworld feel like a living, breathing, dynamic world?
Bearing in mind all the objections, I think the answer to that (as the editorialist said) has to be "yes." To make the gameworld as dynamic as it should be to make it feel "alive," mobs need to be more than loot bags and quest dispensers. Instead of just existing to be acted upon, they need (to some degree) to be independent actors themselves.
I believe that accomplishing this will require non-player mob AI to improve in at least four specific categories: agenda, environment, communication, and ecology.
AGENDA
Agenda is easy to describe, but hard to implement: mobs need to have goals and desires and interests, and then (according to their level of intelligence) should be able to devise and carry out plans that will plausibly allow them to achieve their goals.
In some cases, that will mean that they do exactly what they do right now: stand around and wait to be activated by a player. Maybe they're in "guard" mode, which means patrolling a certain area to protect something (shops if they're NPCs, babies if they're critters). Maybe they're just lazy and don't have a job. Maybe they're injured, or lost. There are plenty of reasons why some mobs could do exactly what they do now; the differences would be that there's a plausible reason why they're doing it, and other mobs are capable of doing something else because now they have a reason for that.
Being able to form and carry out plans -- in other words, having an agenda -- along with the subsidiary capability of being able to describe this agenda to players who ask would tell players that they are part of a world that has a life of its own. Creatures would seek to feed and breed. NPCs would have player-like aspirations that they, like players, would attempt to fulfill.
Not being at the center of the universe could be a shock to some players... but there are, I think, a lot of other players who would feel much more satisfied to be playing in a gameworld where even the mobs have interesting stories to tell.
ENVIRONMENT
Why is it that I can unleash electric death on an NPC and another NPC who is three feet away -- who belongs to the same faction as the first NPC -- will simply continue lounging against the wall?
How can that creature detect me from a hundred feet away when I'm behind a tree, at night, wearing all black, downwind and masking my scent, and not moving?
I cannot think of a single MMORPG that implements the gameworld as a place where the various emissions of the electromagnetic spectrum are used to any serious degree. Most games let their mobs do simple A* pathfinding around collidable obstacles. Some games give you line-of-sight. A few games allow terrain or character position (standing/crouching/prone) to matter. But how many really incorporate sound? Smell? Environmentally-appropriate camouflage? Reduction in visibility due to darkness/rain/dust/fog/smoke? UV or IR detection/masking? Heat or power signature detection/masking? Weight/mass detection (as for pressure-sensitive switches)?
Can you imagine a game where mobs could detect and recognize other mobs (including players) through all these environmental cues, and could incorporate that information into their agendas?
Creatures could stalk their prey, and prey could use various means (natural, technological, magical, whatever) to avoid or break detection by predators. NPCs could see or hear when their allies are being attacked and run to the rescue. Mobs in general would become able to interact with each other and with players in a vastly more plausible way because they would finally have access to the same kind of environmental information that we as players take for granted when we're deciding what to do.
COMMUNICATION
Some mobs are social. While individuals, they are also members of a group or groups. Accordingly, these mobs ought to be able to communicate information to and among each other.
A mob who enters a "danger" or "opportunity" state ought to be able to transmit that information to other mobs who could benefit from the knowledge.
When a creature makes a kill, why can't he alert his packmates to come share in the bounty when doing so helps to insure the group's survival? When an NPC sees an enemy force coming over the town walls, why can't she race to the watchtower to ring the warning bell, then run through the town calling for all allied NPCs (and players!) to help repel the invaders?
A decent level of communication capability would allow mobs to share these kinds of useful information. Rather than acting purely independently, they would be able to act together as a group. And that would finally allow mobs to effectively match the ability of players to act in a coordinated way.
Which brings me to:
ECOLOGY
Why is it that I can whack the same mob eight zillion times, and he will respawn in roughly the same place to allow himself to be whacked for eight zillion more times? Why is it that I can wipe out an entire zoneful of orcs, and they'll just reform in the same place as soon as I turn my back so I can wipe them out again? How come I and other players can all take the same quest from the same NPC for weeks at a time and he never learns to recognize us?
Here's an answer: Player actions have no long-term consequences because mobs have no long-term memory or social decision-making capability. There's no ecological response to repeated external stimuli.
The last major component of a full, integrated mob AI system would be to allow groups of mobs to change their behaviors over time. Creatures (as less intelligent mobs) would simply react to player incursions by migrating elsewhere from their hunting or feeding grounds. (Unless of course they happen to regard players as tasty snacks, in which case maybe breeding rates go up to take advantage of the unexpected bounty.)
NPC mob groups would have even more types of long-term behavioral choices available to them. Maybe when you wipe out an orc encampment several times, the orcs move somewhere else. Now they're someone else's problem (or opportunity.) But perhaps instead you've stumbled across a particularly warlike band of orcs, and they don't take kindly to your depredations. So they've dispatched a runner to invite some of their friends over to hide in the woods around their encampment. The next time you show up to casually mete out destruction, you discover that you're facing not five orcs, but fifty. Surprise!
Or suppose a group of NPCs realize that a lot of players have been asking them for a particular type of quest. What if the rewards for that quest become less valuable to reflect an increased supply in reaction to demand? Conversely, what if those NPCs decided to offer more quests like that one, since obviously it's very popular? Why shouldn’t NPCs be able to change their behaviors in response to the ways that players interact with them?
As a final example, what if an entire faction of NPCs decides that players have been beating up on them a little too much, and coordinates a massive assault (maybe physical, maybe economic) on some player resource or location? Isn't that exactly the kind of large-scale action many players say they'd love to see in a MMORPG?
An ecological AI capability could enable precisely that sort of event.
Agenda, environment, communication, and ecology. Design your mob AI to incorporate those capabilities, and you will have a gameworld that players will remember with pleasure for years to come.
--Flatfingers
Great editorial. I agree 100%
I have always found it extremely annoying that mob AI is so predictable. Real creatures do not react in totally predictable ways when attacked or when they themselves hunt. Evolution doesn't favor predictable fight/flight behavior for obvious reasons. Why make mmorpg mobs so predictable? Programming easily allows a random selection from among several reasonable alternatives.
As for mobs running away from fights they can't possibly win ... I'm all for it. Any game design that requires a mob to do something suicidally stupid so we can advance our characters is a flawed game design. Maybe some day we will get a game with good AI that also realizes the difference between "fighting" and "hunting".
In terms of implementing an ecology, I wholeheartedly agree. However, one thing that you may have forgotten, is that implementing a more realistic ecology would mean a whole lot less of the "cool" creatures and a lot more or the snakes, rats, and birds.
Really, they way most MMORPG's are set up is essentially a reverse ecological system, where you have an equal number or more of the elite type creatures than than the more mundane versions.
Plus, if they were running a more realistic ecology, there would be a LOT less players, as the density would be unsupportable with the existing food base.
If you think about it, in most fantasy or sci-fi, or comic books (which the vast majority of MMORPG's are based upon) you have one Aragorn, and untold thousands of "anonymous goblin with bad dentition missing right ear."
What MMORPG's do, and really have to, is allow a lot more people to be Aragorn, or something near him. Yeah, you can become even more uber by getting towards end game content, but how many anonymous goblins from the LOTR do you think could kill a cave troll?
I like the ecology idea, but I think that maybe it should be taken beyond the environment, and apply to the players too. Probably not an economically winning idea though.
Good points, Brendak.
In response I'd just point out that I wasn't using the term "ecological" in the basic predator/prey, who-eats-what sense, but in the larger sense of how groups interact over time across a wide variety of possible behaviors.
That includes survival (food) relationships, but those are just a small fraction of the full set of possible relationship types. As in the examples I gave, there are also economic relationships. You could even add social relationships to that list -- mobs could choose to react in groups over time based on long-term shifts in faction in their area. (Basically any point on Maslow's "hierarchy of needs" can be an ecological relationship type.)
Thanks for giving me a chance to clear that up!
--Flatfingers
[Edited for grammar.]
I agree that what we're seeing in MMORPGs right now is infantile in many cases, but so is the industry. The NPCs are dumb as posts. But -- what if they were actually spread around, and constantly moving, and you couldn't find them when you wanted to? You want to do a quest with your friends, and you spend an hour just finding the NPC so you can do the quest? And then your other friend logs in and he needs to get it too?
You get my drift, I'm sure. We have to separate single-player design ideas from multi-player design ideas, because the two are not at all the same, and the design goals have to be different.
Our main problem at this stage of the development of the MMORPG genre is that designers are still too much stuck in the single-player game mindset.
I think it is the reverse. Developers are working in a multiplayer universe to create multiplayer gameplay and all the wish lists for their universe come from a single player perspective.
I agree with the wandering NPC that can't be found as a great thing on paper but a huge problem in game.
The time cycle stores as well are great in idea form but horrid in gameplay. Who remembers having to reset or change their system time for Animal Crossing so that they could complete a quest or even shop at a store?
Developers and designers have to build off the idea that their content will be accessible to all users in the easiest way possible. This can mean that NPC are static and have very few dialog strings to pull from but I imagine that the NPC that is smart enough to track everything that i have done up to the point of talking to the NPC and form an opinion about me is not something for a persistent multiplayer universe.
Reading the Editorial and posts I thought of a mission that could be in this more I less A world.
Imagine:
You get a quest that sends you to get a piece of string you NEED to craft something you MUST HAVE. The string is a MAGIC SPACE STRING that weighs about 3 moons. It takes 10 people to carry the string and you must travel across a burning zone of hate and jellybeans to another NPC that may or may not be at a location you were informed of. On your way your friends kill a NAMED suckling worm for +Str and -Drain to assist you in the task of the string and the delivery. When you all FIND the NPC it is "smart enough" and meeting your immersion criteria to tell you all that the odor you all have from your incredible journey has made the NPC sick and they wont talk to you until you shower in a tomato bath found only on the 17 level of a dragon tower located in the 12th dimension and all this must be completed in 15 minutes before the NPC will leave for her own travels- You leave the string with your 9 friends to watch while you make a mad dash for the tower but as you approach the tower you are stopped by a guard that sizes you up and asks why you are there. As you answer him he sniffs on you a smell that causes him to pause and draw his razor bow. You have no time for this so you run past the guard and make your way to the 17th level. The guard RUNS to the watchman spire and sounds the alarm. Every NPC critter in the tower is now alerted to your presence and knows what the guard knows from the code of the alarm. You run up the tower, floor by floor you go, head and feet you chop, until you are at the door to the 17th level. -A BOSS- You attempt to bypass the BOSS and get to the door to save time but cannot get past. You draw your Spork of Turning and begin to turn it at the Boss. You expect to beat the boss or be defeated but either way 54 seconds is all you have to figure it out. The Boss does not attack as you thought he might. Instead he looks to you in fear and asks you what you want at his tower. Having killed so many on you dash up the tower, the Boss is brought to his knees in complete fear of you awesome power. He will not attack because he knows you will best him in combat but he may still have another way to fight. You tell him in a voice only heard when doom seeps from the mouth of the elder goats of chaos -"I have no time for this! I NEED TOMOTOES!"- Smart enough to keep from fighting you and smart enough to see desperation the Boss decides his fight with you is going to be one of triksy fun. Get me the last of the worms in the burning plain and my tower is yours. In the time of your talks with the Boss the room had filled with guards you have no time to chop through them but might have time to complete this task. I will go, you say with determination. "But how will i know the worm to get"? The boss smiles at you and says only. By NAME!
A smart Quest like this is possible. Is it fun?
There are to many variables to take into account when creating the assets for gameplay.
NPC and Quest interface is not AI driven but content driven. An NPC may not talk to you due to faction issues but if they do it is not due to any AI.
Mob or critter combat is AI driven but how much "I" do you want there? What is the happy mediuim so all players play a game together and not the game tuned to one group of people? If mobs played like players few would be able or even want to keep up with the PvE combat that acts like a player. Mob linking or group alerts would be nice and seem like they would not impact the players too much. BAF alerts have been done in games but could be done better. I running mob that runs through another mob group could alert that group of threat.
There is so much that could be added but what is added could detract from the overall gameplay and available to all target.
I'm a fan of "happy medium," too. In fact, the one word I keep using when talking about MMORPGs is balance.
But pushing for gameplay, gameplay, gameplay -- as in, "content will be accessible to all users in the easiest way possible" -- is not the path to balance. All that does is punt immersiveness and worldy-ness out the door and turn the game into a grindfest... and the MMORPG universe is more than full enough of those already.
Players who want immersiveness (including in NPC and creature AI) need to understand that a MMORPG is not a simulation, that there need to be reasonable gameplay challenges and rewards for skillful play.
But players who want fun gameplay likewise need to accept that development time spent making the gameworld deeper and richer is not wasted time. Immersiveness, plausibility, narrative -- these things matter too, or it's not a MMORPG.
Not every cool idea for mob AI needs to be implemented. But some do, because the loot-bag/quest-dispenser model is no longer good enough.
Asking for mob AI to be enhanced to help provide both a reasonable gameplay challenge -- something between "impossible" and "instant gratification" -- and a satisfying level of immersiveness is a perfectly sensible request.
--Flatfingers
I'll be a voice of dissent here. I don't want a realistic game. I want a FUN game.
I could go point by point through the editorial and write out another wall-of-test reply but instead I'll just include one example from many.
Mobs that are 'smart' and run away? City of Heroes used to have mobs that ran away A LOT. They ran away and would hide and wouldn't come back. It stank. Your character was forced to try and chase down an idiot mob just so you wouldn't have wasted the entire combat and not gain anything from it.
This has been changed now, CoH mobs now run a short distance but they don't act as 'intelligently' and hide. Mobs in City of Villains hardly run away at all. They stand there and get clobbered by vastly more powerful superbeings. Just like goons in any comic book should.
If I want to explore ecology and migration patterns I'll watch the National Geographic Channel. You don't need any of those things to make a fun game. If you want to create the *illusion* of things like that to make the world seem more 'alive' fine, but that doesn't mean you need any level of realism to any of it. You need to maintain the level of FUN, not real-world detail.
(And in case anyone thinks that's the only point I could bring up - Shops that close down at night? Great way to ruin the game for people who can only play in the evenings.)
Very well put.
Some mobs should know when to quit.
Creatures in game that normally would seem to migrate should. Such as herd, birds, etc.
NPC's should have some kind of day and night cycle. That way you get almost 2 games in one. More shady characters come out at night and the regular NPCS at night.
For the last reply the night/day thing refers to in game time not real time. No publisher in the right mind would ever try to implement a game night/day system based on real time for the simple fact you pointed out.
Faranthil Tanathalos
EverQuest 1 - Ranger
Star Wars Galaxies - Master Ranger
Everquest2 - Ranger WarhammerOnline - Shadow Warrior
WOW - Hunter
That's right I like bows and arrows.
As for the article, I agree on just about every single point.
By the way, this is my first post. Hello everyone!