A few days ago, I finished my third playthrough of S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl, a slightly obscure and less well-known kickstarter of the first person survival horror genre.
While playing through it, I chanced upon a random NPC event: two groups of opposing factions fighting.
I realized that this was not a scripted encounter, it was, in fact, completely random, because I had no recollection of this encounter in any of my previous saves.
Upon this realization, I went on Google and did some research. Apparently the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series runs off of an unique engine called the X-Ray Engine, which has something called the ALife AI engine, in which it supports up to one thousand non-scripted entities. NPCs and animals in-game have a complete life cycle and task accomplishment, in which predators hunt, herbivores feed on vegetation, in addition to sleeping, resting, et cetera.
And so I thought: if an 11 year-old game can pull this off on an engine resembling that of ARMA’s, then what’s to prevent our lord ans savior Lord Nelson from accomplishing a similar system?
It’s definitely impressive what they did with their AI. And it would also be cool to run into AI with so much depth that they would even attack each other randomly in 4.x. However, THQ, the company that published this is a multimillion dollar company… Even if it was made 11 years ago, it was made with a lot of money, and a lot of employees. We only have one guy working on 4.x…
Later down the line some interesting AI would be nice, but I wouldn’t expect or ask for anything nearly as complex as what this game features.
I would definitely like AI to at least have basic features; patrol routes, basic reactions to sounds, dealing with infected, using cover (in a nav mesh), different tactics depending on weapon/equipment, AI difficulty levels, and awareness/lack of awareness (stealth mechanics).
That’s just combat stuff though (and I doubt we’d see much more than that to begin with). Seeing basic npcs that don’t fight actually do a bit more than stand around would be great, and I get the feeling that is the first area of NPCs Nelson is going to explore. Combat related stuff is almost certainly going to come later.
I don’t think multiple npc factions fighting each other - nevermind more advanced features - will be possible… in the base game. But I strongly believe that might just happen through the community. Nelson has stated 4.0 will be infinitely more moddable, and thus this leads me to believe the community will come up with some interesting things regarding npcs.
But who knows. Until 4.0 is really out, we can’t exactly say for sure what Nelson plans on regarding AI and in turn, NPCs.
