Why is it that we don't see this more often? Most video games seem to add a lot of unnatural balance to allow the player character to fight through difficult odds. But the odds themselves would not be so difficult if the AI wasn't so easily prepared to give their lives to get in the player's way. Many games don't even seem to touch on it, having AI characters continuously run blindly into certain death like a meat grinder. If 15 bad guys just ran through hall A and instantly took a life-costing bullet, running through hall A probably isn't a good idea. If there's no other hall, then damn, run away. Or just stand there. Anything's better than throwing your life away. Sometimes it feels like the bad guys have so many soliders, they're trying to fight me by forcing me to run out of bullets. Changing strategies to avoid certain death is an obviously good thing to have for AI. But that's not what this is about. It's about when the AI has no choice but to die, and when his death would cost his enemy very little. Imagine a room full of 20 bad guys. The player runs in and starts beating the crap out of all of them. First he fights 5 at a time, then 4, then 3, then 6. What should the two remaining bad guys do? Unless they sport brand new fighting styles, I think they should run like hell. Any thoughts on this in general? What are the costs of adding fear of death to living-being AI?

Baldur's gate featured morale failures based on ADD2 rules. When the morale of a being failed, it could panic (run away from the source of its fear), stand in awe (no reaction to anything) or berserk (start fighting back physically). Triggers for morale failures were seeing the death of an ally (or the freshly dead corpse of an ally, but that wasn't included in the video game), receiving large amounts of damage (relative to one's max HP), seeing scary effects (undead, spells). Some creatures are naturally more resistant (undead and madmen have no morale failures, trained soldiers/assassins have high morale, wizards and non-combatants have low morale).

For instance, casting a fireball at a group of 20 black talon mercenaries would kill 10 and make the other 10 soil their pants (so they would be too busy firing arrows at the characters). Similarly, when a character was covered in acid, he could panic (and thus become unable to use his healing spells on himself).

That's exactly what I would like to see more of. I forgot to mention X-Com as well.

Many RTS games have morale. Rome Total War comes to mind as one in which morale is very important, troops frequently run away, and many battles are won or lost because of it.

I can also see this being particularly useful in a stealth-oriented game, where AIs who escape may worn others of your presence, or an RPG, where NPCs who once ran away from you may improve their skills or enlist help and then seek you out for a rematch.

It would definitely be interesting to see more morale in an FPS. It has to be balanced well, though, so you can't win just by being scary. And single-handedly fighting masses of weak enemies can be part of the fun, so you don't want them to all run away on sight.

Making NPCs afraid of death obviously adds to realism. Whether it adds to fun depends on the game's design and its goals.

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Original post by martiandragon It would definitely be interesting to see more morale in an FPS. It has to be balanced well, though, so you can't win just by being scary. And single-handedly fighting masses of weak enemies can be part of the fun, so you don't want them to all run away on sight.

There's a lot of room to play with between too frightened to go through with an action and aware of one's own worth enough to not run into certain death. Moral changes would only kick in when other friends die, or after results have shown themselves. But the AI's awareness of it's own worth should always be present.

An enemy biker shouldn't ram my car to slow me down. A guy carrying a club shouldn't attack me if I'm holding a rifle at his face. Even if there are 12 guys with clubs on the way. I think it would add a lot more common sense to AI behavior if the AI didn't think of overall victory so much as a group in this way.

Most AI in games that I've played don't really focus on being a challenge as a group, but that's what happens anyway. The AI chips away at the player, spending one life at a time until the player needs more health. Countless numbers of them stream in to die, giving their own lives for the cost of an unlikely single hit. This kind of thing seems pretty crazy to me in almost any situation other than one where the AI is defending their lives to begin with.

It's not that I have a definite answer to it. There are a lot of games that would not be very fun to play if the AI were extremely self-aware. But I think at least a small balance of it could add a lot of flavor to any game. At least enough to reduce the thought running through the player's mind that the AI themselves know that they are nothing but mindless clones being launched from an infinite source.

CRPGs have implemented this all the way back to Dragon Warrior 1 on NES. If you bumped into a enemey that you would greatly overpower, they took off running. It has been happening in lots of RPGs since.

It just sucks when you are trying to get the XP, and you keep having to load battles only to watch the bastards run away.

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Original post by Vampyre_Dark CRPGs have implemented this all the way back to Dragon Warrior 1 on NES. If you bumped into a enemey that you would greatly overpower, they took off running. It has been happening in lots of RPGs since. It just sucks when you are trying to get the XP, and you keep having to load battles only to watch the bastards run away.

I don't think the AI should be capable of seeing how tough the player is. Maybe weapons, or fighting skills after they fight. But if you wanted to get experience by fighting a weak enemy, why not put your sword away and beat them up? If the fear system was implemented well, the fear should vanish if the player mocks the AI in this way. Similar to the ending of The Matrix where Neo puts one arm behind his back [lol]

I agree with you, though. I hate cowardly AI. But I still think there's a big difference between fighting a very tough enemy and running into a gun barrel.

It is very annoying to be playing a WWII shooter and have next to no I in the AI, and a great example is Call of Duty, where you are taking out the hydro dam.

You are one guy, and you kill what? 100 men, all of which wait for you in small, easy to kill groups, never falling back. Also you fight you way in, then fight your way out. That part of the game really really killed it for me. It no longer feels like a war game, but shooting paper targets on a range.

Also while fighting through a town or something, you have to KILL every single soldier. This is something that is very rare, usually after someone has seen a few of their friends shot up, they'll pull back, or drop their gun and run.

It's one of the biggest failings of AI, especially in FPS, and it's something I've wanted to address for nearly a decade!

One of the ideas I worked on back in 1999 when I was working on an SAS-based FPS was the idea of group dynamic AI, so that individual's AI would be also linked to a group dynamic. For example, four cowardly NPC might still hold it together if their leader is still alive but, kill the leader, and they are more likely to make a break for it...or maybe they'll just panic and come running at you with all guns blazing!

Equally, the use of tactical AI could be improved massively. In one of the levels, we wanted the enemy NPC to co-ordinate their attacks so that NPC group A would provide supressing fire and then communicate the player's position to NPC group B could flank the player.

In far too many military FPS, the enemy behave merely as isolated groups who are capable of limited reasoning within the context of their group, but there is no real consideration of how other enemy groups in the environment would respond.

It's certainly an area that I'm sure we'll see some improvements in soon (but then I've assumed that for quite some time!)

To simplify things, it's because it's annoying when enemies run away. In a typical RPG, the way to get XP and items and generally advance is to kill, kill, kill. When an enemy runs away in these games, you have to run after it and kill it. It's annoying; you know you've already won that battle, but you need to go racing behind the monster click-click-clicking while it's just out of reach so you can get your deserved XP and loot. The same concept applies to some degree in a lot of other genres.

Now, I'm sure you could argue that playing this way isn't "true roleplaying" and that instead all players should let the enemy flee and consider it realistic, but that's not the way most people play. They feel like they have to chase after it. In fact, that's why most MMO's and RPG's have "snares" to catch "runners". It's pretty much engrained in the video game consciousness that enemies that flee are just an annoyance that you need to stop and kill.

The only way I can see to make the player feel "ok" with things running away is if they actually run off and then vanish never to reappear, they don't alert any other enemies on their way, and you get full credit for defeating them, whatever that is (XP/loot in an RPG, ammo drops in an FPS, powerups in an action game, etc.) Anything else basically means you constantly need to kill everything, and you will spend the whole game chasing down runners, which gets annoying fast.