It seems that in most games that I have played, the friendly AI (whether it be wingmates, or or members of the assault force, etc.) is very poor. In many cases it seems worse than the enemy AI they are fighting against. The most definite example I could think of, in the FPS ELITE FORCE, your team mate may have the same weapon but it only causes 1/4 the damage of the same weapon in your hands. I can understand why this is so, so that you see more action and get more glory, but stupid friendly AI is a gripe I've heard from many, many game players.

One of most difficult issues when trying to design a friendly AI is exactly what you mentioned - the glory factor. If the AI is too good at what it does, it overshadows the player, obviously. More interestingly, this puts a totally different set of pressures on the game design, however. Take Halo 2, for example. There is a scene where you open a door and the two enemy sides are just ripping each other to pieces. In most games, the enemy factions stop, turn, and start firing at you when this happens. In Halo's universe, people aren't fighting just for you to have something to shoot at, they're immersed in a big storied world and you're set down in there with plenty of room to kick ass.

The problem there is that the game almost becomes not-fun sometimes, precisely because the act of playing puts you at a disadvantage. You're better off waiting for the two sides to finish their conflict, or to play a kind of metagame wherein you lend your support to the side which is suffering most. This is not, at its heart, what you buy the game for, and it can be very harmful to the experience.

In general, the problem seems to be one of tuning - the range over which a single-player experience is measured to be fun is much smaller and lower than the high-end player would like. If your grandfather was playing alongside you, you wouldn't mind even though he's probably no better than that AI. On the flip side, if he might mind a lot, just as when you play with players of extreme skill you very seldom get to feel heroic. This is exacerbated when the player in question is not really a player but just a ghost in the machine.

We've covered the topic of wingmen and support characters several times in the past in this forum, and it usually comes down to the idea that you can start the game as a support character, but it's not really fun to finish as the same. Even in MMOGs, the support classes usually get some potent ass-kicking tools of their own, eventually. Everyone gets to feel some level of empowerment, everyone goes home happy.

I think that the key to fun, effective AI "friendlies" is a degree of control. I love Halo 2, but I wish Bungie had bound some simple commands to the D-Pad, which isn't used in the game. Something along the lines of the team commands from Freedom Fighters would have been adequate, and would make me feel a lot better about my role relative to the other soldiers.

With friendlies, there are three things they can do: Act autonomously, support you, and die. Autonomous action runs into the problems that liquiddark describes above, an erosion of the "hero factor". Support is nice, but requires the weakness and dependence that you lamented in Elite Force. Dying is good for the hero factor, but has less to do with actual gameplay than with story.

Limited commands are just the thing for me. Playing Unreal Tournament 2004, I find the command interface invaluable when fighting alongside bots, and even rather handy in multiplayer contests, but that's largely irrelevant.

Being able to tell a competent AI comrade how assertive to be allows the NPC to be believable and useful without stealing my thunder. That's the compromise I like best.

ICC, that's being fair, as far as things go. It allows the player to decide how the AI should behave, which is similar to having AI that is "capable" in and of itself.

However, have you ever played Co-op in a game with more than two people? The feeling of working with other players, especially when they are not sitting next to you so you can't just yell at them what to do, is incredible. I do not think it is out of the line for some situations for you to not be the hero. here is an example scenario..

You and a group of space marines are defending an elevated fort, perhaps 500 m from another such fort. You are being attacked by an almost infinite number of small, swarming aliens, and over time perhaps 20 or so larger, powerful ones. during the mission, several things could happen, which you could choose to do, or not to.

* defend the base from enemies that climbed in
* take out the twenty or so larger enemies
* fly a shuttle to the other base and help evacuate
* go into the underground part of the base and bring the automatic cannons online

now, each of these events don't have to necessarily be done by you. And, while you're doing them combat continues, and the other players hold their own. Lets say you go underground, one of the AI's could fly a shuttle to the other base.

Instead of being the games only hero, if the action is intense enough even the other AI's can be heroes. if the AI's can defend themselves, it lends to the action being able to be far more intense.

If it was implemented effectively, we should be able to see competent friendly AI in games of the future.. and the players of those games will love us for it.

Team combat for first player in my oppinion, will never be good enough. No matter how good the AI is, there will never be a replacment for the feeling of being a one man army.

Recently, I started to play medal of honor for the PS1. Only team play with real people can be a comparable experience. I love to rock and roll. After a long boring day of working behind a desk, nothing feels better than chucking 'nades around and killing nazis. And not worring about killing one of my team mates because he decided to do a glory run and loose the mission.

You could try Op:Flashpoint. IMO the only fun missions were when you were playing as part of the team, the solo missions were dull as very well used dishwater. The AI on both sides was excellent, plus the virtual one shot kills made the whole thing a rush. So it can work to be 'just part of the team', although the balance in that game was superb so you still tended to feel like the man, just you also felt good that your buddies survived (or bad if they didn't).

Racing games have "auto catch-up" to keep them exciting
Unreal Tournament has AI Auto-adjust

Do you know of any game where friendly bots have AI auto-adjust?
they could check how fast/accurate you are, and adjust accordingly to a skill just below yours. That'd keep things snappy.

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Original post by Madster Do you know of any game where friendly bots have AI auto-adjust? they could check how fast/accurate you are, and adjust accordingly to a skill just below yours. That'd keep things snappy.

I don't know of a game that does this but it certainly sounds promising. For a pure shooter it would be interesting to be able to set how fast the AI adapts based on certain factors like how close the enemy is, how much firepower they're carrying or how badly injured you are.

For ego purposes, you'd have to keep some of this under the hood, though, as even the auto-adjusting enemy can lead to some gripes like "it just won because it has my x,y,z".

PS: Elite Force II fixed the "dancing laser lights" problem, Chokki, such that your allies can now hold their own. Of course, part of the fix was sending you off on your own more often and giving you some really oblique puzzles to solve.

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Original post by JuNC You could try Op:Flashpoint. IMO the only fun missions were when you were playing as part of the team, the solo missions were dull as very well used dishwater. The AI on both sides was excellent, plus the virtual one shot kills made the whole thing a rush. So it can work to be 'just part of the team', although the balance in that game was superb so you still tended to feel like the man, just you also felt good that your buddies survived (or bad if they didn't).

Actually the AI was quite limited, it's just the skillful mission design that manages to overcome the stupid AI behaviour (it will definately show once you start to make OFP missions on your own). Still, I think your other points are quite valid; operating in an OFP squad was a great experience.

Generally, I do not have a problem if my AI team mates play better than me, as long as they're realistic enough as not to consistantly kill enemies at 100 m range with a pistol. However, to get the hero feeling (of your team in this case), the enemies almost invariably have to be much more stupid than your team, or your team will quickly be annihilated. Many of the team missions in OFP were like that; they relied upon the faulty enemy so that your squad could in the end have survived a total encounter of five times greater enemy forces.

When I say more stupid opposition I do not mean the AI should be jackasses (as still was the case in OFP). There is no excuse if the programmers implement sloppy pathfinding code so that enemies,or friendlies for the matter, which is even more annoying, get stuck on cornors of buildings in a small town. What I mean is that enemies should in general be given a bit more slow reaction times (and a bit more random aim), so that the player always has a chance to take them down if he spots them in time and that his tactical situation is not one where he is faced at a 1:10 friendly to enemy ratio (for which he can blame himself if mission design is fair). Of course, this decrease should be balanced enough hardly to be noticable by the player to help immersion and his feeling that his enemies are just as capable as he is.

Such as system also helps the friendly AI to survive a bit longer. Due to the lack of advancement into AI today I can safely say that there is vary little in the way to simulate a military education's ability create tactically superior situations. What I mean by this is, when for example an elite commando unit is supposed to slaughter a far greater number of conscripts of the opposing force according to the scenario, the scenario designer is not likely to be able to simulate this with a pure more intelligent AI. The only consideration here is an articial decrease in reaction times etc. as discussed earlier. (Of course, other scenario parameters such as better weaponry for the commandos can also be added, but it cannot fully explain an outcome as the desired one).

Conclusion: Make the friendly AI as intelligent as possible without breaking immersion (unless the scenario is supposed to be of the kind where all team mates die and you're all alone). Make the enemy AI a bit less intelligent in terms of actual statistics, with this degree depending on their desired efficieny (conscripts vs. elite soldiers). Of course, I have only been thinking about an OFP-esque game for this; there might be another incentive to make friendlies more dumb in a more player-hero centered game.

im in favor of a intelegent allie that recact to player commands, i heard of a few games with voice recignition to communicate with allies though i dont think they worked vary well though if you had FPS setup that requres stealth and stratigy to survive and you could order you teamamtes into ambush position befor ordering them to srike it would be cool though this would requre a very good AI.
Though a smart allie could take away from gameplay a doubt many are intetinaly dumb, especily since path finding is usally the number one problem.*
I guess eigher way is good though it is frustrating wen a dumb allie is requred to complete a mission.

*typical allie AI problems
-get stuck at corners
-get lost at map transition points