MMO NPCs with deep AI

quix0te

I found myself watching Free Guy (C+) this week.  Central plot element is NPCs with motivations.
Got me thinking, are there any MMOs that use a system of AI-driven NPCs and a fluid world rather than just NPCs with dialogue scripts?
Thanks!

Amaranthar

These days? You ARE an NPC. 

You are told what you can do as soon as you pick a Class, the places you can go to, and when you can go to them. 

You just think you're a human being. 
Whoever told you that, anyways? Your NPC mom? 

Amaranthar

I'm not sure, but I think Ultima 7 had some of that. I didn't play it, but I've read a few things about the NPCs in that game.

I do think that the idea has real merit to it. It could lead players to new kinds of game play, choosing sides based on the world's factions (even something like one Alchemists shop vs. another), and hopefully a deeper way to handle quests. 

quix0te

Maybe check out ESO?  GW2 has zone levels, but it's still pretty open.
Or were you trying to make some larger point, badly, about real life?
As for nonMMOs, many of the open world games had NPC AI steering the narrative.

Amaranthar

quix0te said:

Maybe check out ESO?  GW2 has zone levels, but it's still pretty open.
Or were you trying to make some larger point, badly, about real life?

If you're talking to me, that was half in jest. 
Only the other half is partially true, but less and less as game companies flail away at trying to fix the issue. 

cameltosis

Elite: Dangerous (not an mmo) kind of has this with it's BackGround Simulation (BGS).

I'm not sure if it really filters down to individual NPCs, but the BGS controls all the various factions in the game....and there are 1000s of them......and sets in motion an ever-changing territory control mechanic. It also controls all of the background trading and commodity prices.

So, over time, certain factions will expand their territory, create new trade routes and stuff. Player actions can affect this - you can help factions expand their territory - but even if no-one was playing, changes to the galaxy would still happen.

I feel like the system in E:D is fantastic....in theory.....but with literally billions of star systems and planets, the actions of an individual player seem pretty meaningless. Also, whether you get a quest from random faction 983 or random faction 1,389,301 doesn't affect the player at all. It really seems to make no difference to the player at all.

I would love to see such a system turned towards a smaller scale fantasy world. Instead of having to simulate billions of star systems, but with relatively shallow interactions involving the players, you could instead simulate, say, 10,000 NPCs on a traditional MMORPG server but give those NPCs more depth and complexity to help give it meaning to the players.

Mendel

quix0te said:

I found myself watching Free Guy (C+) this week.  Central plot element is NPCs with motivations.
Got me thinking, are there any MMOs that use a system of AI-driven NPCs and a fluid world rather than just NPCs with dialogue scripts?
Thanks!

Sadly, I don't think there's much in the way of NPC AI in any game.  AI in games generally equates to path finding -- how to move the NPC.  Little to nothing has been done with dialog beyond scripting combined with some IF...THEN logic.  Some of the IF...THEN clauses *can* get pretty deep, but it never approaches dialog from actual AI research.

Game development companies haven't put much stock in dynamic, on-the-fly generation of content; it's generally too difficult to troubleshoot.  It is simpler to manually script the content and have someone check (edit) it.  Static content is always the same, for everyone.

Scorchien

The majority of MMOS players do not want good AI or much of a challenge , they want to spam and get there participation trophy ..With as little to no resistance

  If you play against other players , you will  get the best AI you can find ...Ironically .. But most people will avoid that kind of interaction , because they dont want there pixels to feel pain

quix0te

I avoid that because BGs and open PVP have no story.  If I want PVP, why glom it on to an MMO?  Better to build a pvp game.  PvP ends up a huge resource sink out of proportion with it's draw, and it forces devs to keep play simple so nobody can exploit interesting abilities or classes.

Theocritus

Amaranthar said:

These days? You ARE an NPC. 

You are told what you can do as soon as you pick a Class, the places you can go to, and when you can go to them. 

You just think you're a human being. 
Whoever told you that, anyways? Your NPC mom? 

RIght these games now are pre-scripted to the story...You just go through the motions, just like a regular NPC....well said

user298

Scorchien said:

The majority of MMOS players do not want good AI or much of a challenge , they want to spam and get there participation trophy ..With as little to no resistance

  If you play against other players , you will  get the best AI you can find ...Ironically .. But most people will avoid that kind of interaction , because they dont want there pixels to feel pain

Yea, pretty much this. Vast majority of people who play PvE MMORPGs don't want "challenge" from unpredictable or intelligent AI behavior, they want a predictable and consistently "dumb" behavior so they can just grind something semi-AFK or go through dungeons/raids as fast as possible. They would hate if, for example, some boss would ignore the tank completely and instead just go straight for healer or would try to attack whichever player has lowest health and is likely to die in one hit. Or if some open world monster whom you need for specific quest would just decide to run away from you and would keep running without being bound by "leash" range into every nearest group of NPCs which are hostile to the player, or if such AI monster would kill your character and instead of running back to predefined position would try to "camp" your body while also calling for other nearby AI monsters to "camp" same spot.

Developers know this fact so they don't waste their time by trying to implement sophisticated AI into MMORPGs, especially since developers can just use other players instead of AI to provide all challenge for each other through gameplay designed to promote player conflicts.

eoloe

user298 said:

Scorchien said:

The majority of MMOS players do not want good AI or much of a challenge , they want to spam and get there participation trophy ..With as little to no resistance

  If you play against other players , you will  get the best AI you can find ...Ironically .. But most people will avoid that kind of interaction , because they dont want there pixels to feel pain

Yea, pretty much this. Vast majority of people who play PvE MMORPGs don't want "challenge" from unpredictable or intelligent AI behavior, they want a predictable and consistently "dumb" behavior so they can just grind something semi-AFK or go through dungeons/raids as fast as possible. They would hate if, for example, some boss would ignore the tank completely and instead just go straight for healer or would try to attack whichever player has lowest health and is likely to die in one hit. Or if some open world monster whom you need for specific quest would just decide to run away from you and would keep running without being bound by "leash" range into every nearest group of NPCs which are hostile to the player, or if such AI monster would kill your character and instead of running back to predefined position would try to "camp" your body while also calling for other nearby AI monsters to "camp" same spot.

I love those ideas. They should be implemented somewhere...

ChildoftheShadows

OP never mentioned combat specifically so I'll bring up Ultima Online and their ecosystems.

Depending on the level of depth you want in the AI world cost becomes a factor rather quickly. Cost in development and cost in servers. Everything that happens in the world is computed on the server, or it should be, so every additional layer of depth to the NPC world adds more required compute power.

Akulas

Was tried... somewhere. Players thought it was too inconvenient that NPCs were in different locations at different times. Such as sleeping in their house at night and having to have to wait until a certain time for the shop to open. 

Ungood

eoloe said:

user298 said:

Scorchien said:

The majority of MMOS players do not want good AI or much of a challenge , they want to spam and get there participation trophy ..With as little to no resistance

  If you play against other players , you will  get the best AI you can find ...Ironically .. But most people will avoid that kind of interaction , because they dont want there pixels to feel pain

Yea, pretty much this. Vast majority of people who play PvE MMORPGs don't want "challenge" from unpredictable or intelligent AI behavior, they want a predictable and consistently "dumb" behavior so they can just grind something semi-AFK or go through dungeons/raids as fast as possible. They would hate if, for example, some boss would ignore the tank completely and instead just go straight for healer or would try to attack whichever player has lowest health and is likely to die in one hit. Or if some open world monster whom you need for specific quest would just decide to run away from you and would keep running without being bound by "leash" range into every nearest group of NPCs which are hostile to the player, or if such AI monster would kill your character and instead of running back to predefined position would try to "camp" your body while also calling for other nearby AI monsters to "camp" same spot.

I love those ideas. They should be implemented somewhere...

It's great, till it's your body being camped.

As for Raid Bosses with working Knowledge. Sure that would be great.. so how do you make that fun? Realistically, outside everyone being the same, and thus no weak targets for the raid boss to exploit, and the whole thing being pretty much just a DPS encounter, a glorified trash mob fight, where your group's single goal becomes doing more damage to the boss before it can kill you all, how do you end up making that fun.

Imagine, the AI of the boss mob is smart now, so, it will think about killing the weakest or getting rid of the member of your team that will crippled your group the most. So, that means, If I need a healer, and the AI is smart enough to know that you should kill the healers first, not the tough ass Heavies, then to be successful, the Healer would need to be able to withstand being targeted by the boss mob, and thus have to be on par with the tank in Defensive Stats. No doubt while this is happening, they would need to healed by another healer.. as such, the whole group becomes DPS/Tank/Healer builds, with everyone being pretty much the same, so, you would have to play the game with pretty much an entire raid group of solo builds.

Slapshot1188

If we could get a more realistic AI we would not need to do 5 million points of "damage", nor someone to "pull" 3 mobs from the group of 5, or have a "tank" that somehow would hold "aggro" or many of the other trappings of modern games.

How refreshing that would be.

Sovrath

Scorchien said:

The majority of MMOS players do not want good AI or much of a challenge , they want to spam and get there participation trophy ..With as little to no resistance

  If you play against other players , you will  get the best AI you can find ...Ironically .. But most people will avoid that kind of interaction , because they dont want there pixels to feel pain

While I agree with you on the first part, I would say they avoid playing against others because some of the "others" are petulant, obnoxious children who lack any ability of social interaction.

Kind of wish gm's could send them to their room. No matter their age.

Octagon7711

quix0te said:

Maybe check out ESO?  GW2 has zone levels, but it's still pretty open.
Or were you trying to make some larger point, badly, about real life?
As for nonMMOs, many of the open world games had NPC AI steering the narrative.

One the reason I like ESO and GW2.  I can take newly created characters to high level areas, collect pets, pickup ports along the way, and there were even one or two high level quests that could be done.  Yes you got one shotted a lot and had to run a long way to get back to that area if you hadn't found a portal but players would revive me and it was an intense fun at times. ESO & GW2 once you knew the ports you can port over to any starter area you liked if you proffered the questing there.  

OldKingLog

I remember before The Elder scrolls Oblivion was released how much people were drooling over how great the NPC's AI was going to be. They'd have real little lives and time schedules, it was going to be awesome. The reality? They were just boring little scripted drones, little better than moving scenery.

AlBQuirky

AI never misses. Unless the developers places that possibility.

AI never mistimes a dodge or block.

AI has ZERO hand-eye coordination response.

AI does not even "see" a player, but rather coordinates on a grid.

AI does not care.

AI is tireless.

"Be careful what you wish for."

As for other players (PvP), It is a rare PvP proponent that wants either a "test of skills" or "fair fight." That's why so few of them challenge anyone of higher level, or better than them.

Sovrath

OldKingLog said:

I remember before The Elder scrolls Oblivion was released how much people were drooling over how great the NPC's AI was going to be. They'd have real little lives and time schedules, it was going to be awesome. The reality? They were just boring little scripted drones, little better than moving scenery.

But remember, Bethesda dialed back and who knows, practically removed most of that because the npc's would start doing things that they couldn't predict and that would break the game.

one of the things was that the npc's would start killing things they didn't like. This was an issue where quest npc's could be killed.

Now, in line with that, I don't understand why they couldn't add code so that the quest npc's couldn't be killed until their quests were over.

Slapshot1188

AlBQuirky said:

AI never misses. Unless the developers places that possibility.

AI never mistimes a dodge or block.

AI has ZERO hand-eye coordination response.

AI does not even "see" a player, but rather coordinates on a grid.

AI does not care.

AI is tireless.

"Be careful what you wish for."

None of that is necessarily true.  What most want is a more REALISTIC AI.  One that would more mirror a living/thinking entity.  Such an AI would certainly miss, mistime, react to what is seen and grow tired.

What I would hope it did,  was not return to standing at its spawn after it was “pulled”, 3 fellow guards were killed, and the perpetrators ran to leashing range.  I would hope the “King” would not sit on his throne while his guards were killed 2 at a time right in his throne room…

Stuff like that.

Mendel

Slapshot1188 said:

AlBQuirky said:

AI never misses. Unless the developers places that possibility.

AI never mistimes a dodge or block.

AI has ZERO hand-eye coordination response.

AI does not even "see" a player, but rather coordinates on a grid.

AI does not care.

AI is tireless.

"Be careful what you wish for."

None of that is necessarily true.  What most want is a more REALISTIC AI.  One that would more mirror a living/thinking entity.  Such an AI would certainly miss, mistime, react to what is seen and grow tired.

What I would hope it did,  was not return to standing at its spawn after it was “pulled”, 3 fellow guards were killed, and the perpetrators ran to leashing range.  I would hope the “King” would not sit on his throne while his guards were killed 2 at a time right in his throne room…

Stuff like that.

I was always upset at how NPCs would stand idly by and let their comrades be murdered.  It would be painfully simple to put an Investigation radius, where anything, including noise or movement, would trigger the NPC to investigate.  Battles are pretty loud things, and every PunyGuard_081432777 should be able to yell, blow a whistle, ring an alarm gong, etc., that would result in *much* more than a 2-pull.  At least if he wanted to stay employed.  (Falsifying information on a resume).

Ungood

Sovrath said:

OldKingLog said:

I remember before The Elder scrolls Oblivion was released how much people were drooling over how great the NPC's AI was going to be. They'd have real little lives and time schedules, it was going to be awesome. The reality? They were just boring little scripted drones, little better than moving scenery.

But remember, Bethesda dialed back and who knows, practically removed most of that because the npc's would start doing things that they couldn't predict and that would break the game.

one of the things was that the npc's would start killing things they didn't like. This was an issue where quest npc's could be killed.

Now, in line with that, I don't understand why they couldn't add code so that the quest npc's couldn't be killed until their quests were over.

As the logic went, if you don't want players to kill it, don't let them attack it.

That is why newer MMO's don't allow you to attack anything the Dev's don't want you to kill.

AlBQuirky

Mendel said:

Slapshot1188 said:

AlBQuirky said:

AI never misses. Unless the developers places that possibility.

AI never mistimes a dodge or block.

AI has ZERO hand-eye coordination response.

AI does not even "see" a player, but rather coordinates on a grid.

AI does not care.

AI is tireless.

"Be careful what you wish for."

None of that is necessarily true.  What most want is a more REALISTIC AI.  One that would more mirror a living/thinking entity.  Such an AI would certainly miss, mistime, react to what is seen and grow tired.

What I would hope it did,  was not return to standing at its spawn after it was “pulled”, 3 fellow guards were killed, and the perpetrators ran to leashing range.  I would hope the “King” would not sit on his throne while his guards were killed 2 at a time right in his throne room…

Stuff like that.

I was always upset at how NPCs would stand idly by and let their comrades be murdered.  It would be painfully simple to put an Investigation radius, where anything, including noise or movement, would trigger the NPC to investigate.  Battles are pretty loud things, and every PunyGuard_081432777 should be able to yell, blow a whistle, ring an alarm gong, etc., that would result in *much* more than a 2-pull.  At least if he wanted to stay employed.  (Falsifying information on a resume).

That's why "crowd control" was an integral part of "the trinity", way back when

[edit]

On the flip side, I hated when Orc Shamans in EQ would blind/root me! Their DoTs killed many a player

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