NPCs: Taking The Good With The Bad‏

I was talking to Sean about AI in video games the other day and it got me thinking about the ally NPCs we have to deal with in the majority of the games we play. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it's awful, sometimes it's customizable and sometimes it's so irrelevant it's practically non-existent.

A+

For me, customizable AI for your teammates is a must. Games fitting this bill include Final Fantasy XII, Secret of Mana, and Kingdom Hearts. Do note how all these games happen to be from Square Enix (or SquareSoft in the case of SoM). Looks like Square knows what they are doing when it comes to AI, at least on your side; enemy AI is a whole other story I won't bother getting into.

Secret of Mana, being a Super Nintendo game, had a pretty simple yet very flexible system in place to control your allies. A grid is set up for each ally and with this grid you can set how close you want your ally to approach in enemy and how aggressive they should be.

Looking at the grid, you can see how simple it really is. Don't let simplicity fool you though, the grid works! The only issue is that all this was only for melee combat. If you wanted an ally to use magic, you always had to manually do it. This isn't so bad though, since NPCs tend to abuse their mana reserves a little too liberally.

Now in FF XII and KH, Square put more of a programmable AI in place. Basically you have a list of tasks—such as “heal ally once they reach a certain HP level”, or “attack flying with magic”— and they add these tasks to each of your allies, in ranked order. The top most task takes priority over the others and if the requirements aren't met, (i.e. No one is below a certain amount of HP and needs to get healed) then the AI will go on to the next order of business. The system is considerably more complex than SoM, and considering there are quite a number of tasks at your disposal, everyone can create unique AI to their play style.

B-

Sometimes doing nothing isn't horrible, as long as you do nothing right. This is the case in The Last of Us. Instead of creating some crazy elaborate AI to follow you around properly, Naughty Dog decided to just make all the NPCs invisible to the enemies. I have absolutely no problem with this because a large part of TLOU’s gameplay is stealth, and there is nothing worse than going through an entire level without being seen and getting completely destroyed because the AI shat the bed. It was a ballsy move, but it worked wonders in my opinion, and it's the only reason I kept it above a C. That said, I'm sure there are some people who thought this move with the NPCs was sort of a cop out by the developers.

The only downside, if you can call it that, was that you could really abuse the system. Since the NPCs were invisible to the enemy, they never got attacked or died, but they also still did damage. Essentially you could hang back and let them do some damage for you while you just held your junk. The effectiveness of this strategy wasn't amazing, but if there was only one guy left and you were low on health, it worked.

F...inal Thoughts

Can't really think of any game I would flat out give an F, except for maybe God of War... I know you don't really have any NPCs to care for in God of War, but there is one sequence where you do have to suffer the fate of protecting your family. I remember playing on the hardest difficulty trying to beat that stupid sequence, and it's nearly impossible. You're atop this mountain, on the very peak and, while it's slowly crumbling away, getting ever so smaller, thousands of Kratos' are flooding the area trying to kill your family. I get it's supposed to be hard, but if the family would even try to run a little bit I would have been happy. Instead they are completely inept and just stand there like morons.

Sometimes AI is just AI. You suffer through it, relish the times they help you out and sigh when they ruin everything for you. Not sure there is too much in between.