The problem of making smarter stealth mechanics is that it’s kind of like trying to straighten out a bit of poorly-placed wallpaper. You smooth out a bubble, and it pops up elsewhere. So you smooth that out, and now you have two bubbles. You never really get it right, but eventually you get it to the point where the flaws are small enough that you’re willing to put up with them because you’re sick of the task.
Laying aside the mechanics, the big problem for immersion is that foes don’t say the right things in response to stealthy activity. The problem becomes more pronounced when you have spoken dialog. It creates unintentional comedy when the AI barks don’t match up with our perception of reality. For example, in Skyrim you can hit a bandit with an arrow. He’ll run around looking for you furiously, then give up and go back to his patrol. Mechanically, that’s fine. The problem is that he says, “It must have been the wind” with an arrow sticking out of his shoulder.
There’s a lot to keep track of here. Let’s assume we’re trying to fix the Skyrim / Fallout 4 stealth mechanics. An AI is presented with some stimulus (something happens that ought to cause a change in behavior) and we need to work out how to handle this gracefully. Aside from the problem of having an AI navigate an arbitrary space and search for the player in an interesting way that provides challenge without obvious cheating, we need to have our AI say things that don’t make them sound like stupid Bethesda AI.
So the stimulus is presented. The AI can’t SEE the player, but something happens that indicates that the player might be active nearby. Now we have to consider:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 4 EP25: Lonely Week”
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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