(NSW)Greybones

You mean react like they’re some kind of general AI, and magically that is what makes a game challenging in a fun way, though I’m not sure how well the demons in Doom would take to acting like humans. I saw your reference to ChatGPT as if it was something we can use in games

I know that the term is overloaded and could stand to be separated into even more nuanced categorisation, so I’m partly to blame for continuing the tradition of using the term “AI” for everything. You’ve been talking about tactics and enemy options alongside showing videos of what’s clearly bugged and odd behaviour. I’m not unfamiliar with things like the notorious pathing of the Power Cell carriers in Excavation, but it’s seriously not so constantly game-breaking as you’re making it out to be; a few videos’ worth, a bit of a laugh, and then back to the game. If DE tightened it up, I certainly wouldn’t complain, but I’ve got more problem with the stupid wall attack animation than the AI

More like your articulation needs work. I’m pretty sure you’ve been bundling all sorts of concepts together; things like buggy behaviour does not equal bad tactics or lacking in AI

Are you talking about those videos where enemies bug out or behave weirdly?

I seriously don’t. You keep talking about military precision and flanking, bringing out concepts that do indeed exist in Warframe and affect how a fight can play out like enemy grouping behaviour and sense of self preservation where enemies hide behind cover when they’re not meant to be pressure units like the MOA or Heavy Gunner who by design just keep approaching. Then you’re bringing Titanfall 2 into the mix and pointing at some gameplay footage where I saw giant enemy Titans flounder ineffectually at the player or just casually walk along getting shot up and some droppods get wrecked and I know how enemies like spectres and grunts and those crunchy guys with the weakpoint on their backs (like a MOA) behave and saying that it’s intrinsic gameplay. Then you’re bringing Elden Ring into the mix, a completely different game where it’s basically on-on-one combat where if an enemy just approaches the player while they’re fighting something else, they’re automatically flanking, and those sorts of games are designed completely around animation timing and limited movement capability and sometimes the enemy stands around and the player has to bait an attack out of them before they can strike back. I’m not even sure at this point if AI is what we’ve been talking about all along and am instead wondering if it’s some kind of as-yet undefined interaction between core game mechanics and player, but I’m still not sure because one of these games is almost completely not like the other

-deleted- blasted quotes disappearing…. Anyways: I don’t get your idea of what good AI is. I’ve watched the AI in Titanfall, I’ve played Elden Ring; they’re not geniuses, they’re just as exploitable. The main difference is the fact that Titanfall and Elden Ring keep a reign on player choice of power to give a chance for the AI to do anything at all, and even then Elden Ring’s sense of power progress is just a bunch of stat boosts, not really based on how the player combines their gear for the mission they’re doing, and a lot easier to scale alongside the player Elden Ring in particular is kind of notorious for its reliance on attacks that come out faster than a player can react, where even seasoned Soulsborne players would complain at what was just nonsense. It’s not smart, it’s not making decisions on more than a few basic criteria like how far the player is and whether they’re drinking a potion, it just hits hard and the player doesn’t really have that many means to avoid being hit, and in particular the player will struggle if there’s more than one because they just keep getting staggered. It’s like saying Monster Hunter monsters are smart when all they do is randomly draw from a pool of attacks, some of which would be absolutely devastatingly effective if they were to spam them

And players are not building for endless energy because they want to deal with energy concerns, they’re not making an SP-worthy weapon build and bringing it to Arbitrations because they want to face death and mission failure, they’re not equipping PSF because they’re willing to deal with the consequences of being hooked, they’re not taking Inaros to a No Shield modified Nightmare because they’re wanting to deal with running around with a build that normally uses shields suddenly having to be played differently, they’re not abusing shieldgating because they want to have to move well to give shields their chance to recharge and defend the player. When a player takes the core components of this game of mission, build, and loadout, and arranges them in a way that makes their intent very clear, the game isn’t going to populate a Sortie with level 9999 Steel Path enemies. Whether it’s a problem or not lies on the individual and what their goal is; endless energy may give players the ability to endlessly turn off the game as expected, but it’s also a way to enable fun ways to build and play, and though there’s things like Energy Drain eximus that affect everyone who gets hit to various degrees of impact, the game’s not going to rebuild the player when the player actively strove for the components and built that way for a reason. And then you get players who absolutely optimise, min-max to an extraordinary degree, use napkin maths and sink thousands of hours into the game to get the perfect combination of components to absolutely turn the game off, spending tens of thousands of Kuva looking for that g-roll; they’re not sitting there going “Alright, this build is sufficient”, they’re looking for infinite optimisation and endless ways to break the game; even if the game gave them somewhere to go, which SP is meant to be with its massive amounts of overtly-crunchy enemies, do you think they’re going to do a mission, sit back with a sense of satisfaction, and not tweak and adjust even more? No! They’re seeking something that’s unobtainable! The players who were absolutely glad to finally have a place to take all of their optimisations when SP dropped found out that they could be even more optimal; it doesn’t matter that DE keeps introducing more ways to increase our damage and survival while also facilitating additional ways to build and play (and take note of how only the stuff that feeds the optimisation is appreciated, while the stuff that doesn’t is tossed into the bin), they’re just enabling, in many ways unintentionally like when some clever bugger threw on a Decaying Dragon key and kickstarted the shieldgate trend, a mentality that will always want more. And DE can sort of stop them, and limit everyone else in the process and basically undermine the variety of ways to build and play, but they will find ways to break the game still

That’s fair. It can take a bit for the game to chew through our revives, but even one death is one death too much for me; even though I don’t lose everything except for whatever Affinity I’ve earned, I feel like I might as well have and need to step up my gameplay if I’m not going to adjust my build. That said though, I’m reminded of how when I switch away from Unairu without Last Gasp (haven’t fully unlocked it yet, and not sure I’m particularly concerned about doing so either), I realise just how sloppy I’ve actually been playing, haha. A lot easier to forget that I technically died when I become the Operator and revive myself

Hm. I haven’t seen Manics much at all outside of Tyl Regor. Personally I like the suggested threat presence of an instant-kill enemy, but instant death is also something that needs to be so carefully considered; that’s why we even have the notion of hitpoints in most games, to give us that gradient of “I’m fine: A little hurt: I’m in trouble!” and give us the chance to react (despite players standing around eating bullets and Toxin Ancient breath and dying nearly-instantly claiming otherwise, instant death isn’t really a thing in Warframe unless you get a particularly nasty bastard like my Toxin Kuva Tonkor lich, and shieldgating was introduced as a way to further mitigate the chance despite it being used for on-demand invincibility)

That’s in un-balanced Steel Path, the gamemode with 4-player spawnrates for one player which plays hell with not only situational awareness and enemy prioritisation, but also does things like drastically shifting value away from single-target weapons towards AoE (as opposed to more-sane spawnrates where a precise shot can have much more of an impact on how the fight flows) and dials up to 11 the effectiveness of density-based abilities like Nidus’ Larvae. I think counterplay was ultimately a good choice, and to this day I’ve still been hooked once or twice since the update, but SP isn’t exactly an accurate measuring stick for adjusting gameplay mechanics

The scorpion pull was given counterplay (which personally I didn’t think it was needed since I almost never got yanked unless I was being particularly oblivious, but… I get the concept behind it). I don’t know, what happened to the manics? I remember players saying that they used to instant-kill the player or something, but if it was a damage-based thing, players were just going to equip way too many survival mods to counter it anyways in your typical “Solve the fight outside of the fight” approach

I know how Titanfall 2 plays. I’m not familiar with that particular gamemode against pure AI opponents who are actively toned down to not destroy the player with their aimbot capabilities, since I typically played Attrition, but I’m not unfamiliar with TF2’s concepts of enemy variety and prioritisation, enemy spawnrates and location and behaviour like clustering or repositioning, player movement and survival, options available for how to approach a fight or deal with a situation, on-the-fly decision making to facilitate either a successful fight or escape, how to do basic things like aim, updating situational awareness of how the fight is going and where to be, the impact of level design on how a fight flows (I could go on and on about how Titanfall works, since I think Respawn have done a fairly-fantastic job of navigating the challenging balance decisions presented by mixing giant Titans and little Pilots). But it’s not far-removed from something like Doom Eternal or what Warframe can do, and is actually often a little slower-paced despite the parkour and jumping around. Destiny has similar concepts, but there’s a decidedly strong sense of a front line due to not only pre-defined spawn locations and rates, but also due to the player’s slow-ass inability to move through a fight and having to push through, which makes more-tactical approaches for the enemy more viable (though they’re not entirely useless in games like Warframe or Titanfall, either)

And the players who run past wielding weapons built for higher-level content or stand in front of enemies loaded up with survival mods are either a.) not interested in AI gameplay in the first place since they’re typically chasing the easy and convenient grind, and will typically not even be interested in build/loadout variety while they eschew the options they earn unless they provide easier grind on their way to an L3 who then stands back and says “I got it all, now what?” in an almost tragic tale of the game having been bypassed in order to no longer play the game; or b.) they’re just not interested in a fight, often achieved by simply building for a certain level of content and then just taking it lower, which lessens the build variety as the player has to be perpetually offset to overpower the content, and the game gets even more restrictive with build variety the higher an offset player goes than it normally would. I’m reminded of how often players (and myself at the start) will be like “Why not just make everything instantly dead?”, and the answer is “Because doing only that means the game’s boring as all hell and I’m not using the stuff I earned in the ways I want to (which can include instantly deading everything)”

I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to be looking for. I see fairly standard Titanfall 2 gameplay (a game series which I adore, mind you) where a somewhat-mediocre player moves and shoots and am reminded that Titanfall is slower-paced than Warframe. Is there AI military accuracy going on…?

S#&$, you have my sympathy. It absolutely sucks to lose one of those moments when RNG actually aligns with player goals, and not even to the player over-estimating themselves and their build for the mission but to nonsense network stuff

I… feel like you’re trying to distil complex mechanics that hinge on player capability as much as enemy capability and the resulting interaction between a variety of systems into some buzzwords or something. All of that sounds like things that already exists in Warframe to various degrees and have been considered and applied where it was decided to be applied. Flanking: Check, you’re going to get shot up from multiple directions if you stand around. Team behaviour: Check, enemies will gather under an Arctic Eximus shield or Shield Ospreys will hang around friends or enemies will hide behind the Shieldbearer. Aim, Accuracy: Check, basic gameplay concepts that range from aiming projectile-based weapons and missing because we dodged or hit-scan getting an accuracy penalty to their guaranteed-hit while they’re shooting at a mobile target. Initiative: I dunno, enemies jump into the fight, so Check, I guess This is a 25 minute video and you want me to pull a specific concept out of it. I’m going to need to know what I’m looking for

What is AI military accuracy?

I don’t know what you’re considering good intrinsic gameplay, but I’m no stranger to shooters. Sci-fi shooters are absolutely my jam; Unreal/Unreal tournament, Titanfall, Quake. Name a shooter and I’ll have either played it or am willing to give it a solid go, and Warframe successfully scratches not only my shooter itch, but also my perpetual extrinsic reward itch, and it does it with so many different ways to build and play that it makes me feel like trying to scrape out alternative approaches to the same repeated missions in Destiny is scraping the bottom of the barrel. I’ll not deny that some bosses can do with an update, but my standards are definitely not aligned with what your typical Warframe player wants and some bosses are actually closer to that standard than one might think; I was just fighting Tyl Regor recently and was thinking “He’s so close to being someone I’d like to go toe-to-toe against in pure melee, he just needs some minor refinements”, and when I was fighting Alad V and Zanuka it feels proper good. Players may like the flashy and bombastic Ropalolyst fight because it forces them to engage with invulnerability mechanics when they’re bored of the game not forcing them to play, but it’s so limited in ways to approach the same fight that I dislike it, cool as it looks. I’m no stranger to the various ways that game designers design shooters; how accurate enemies are and how often they’re programmed to miss, projectile versus hit-scan, how strongly enemies know where the player is and how they navigate the level to deal with the player. Spawn rates and enemy composition and TTK versus damage enemies do; these are all complex things, and while every game had its stupid AI moments (I’m no stranger to exploiting enemy AI to my own ends), Warframe’s enemies have enough behind their design and implementation that I’m sometimes left feeling like I just fought a round in Doom Eternal. There’s always room for improvement, but I’m not convinced you aren’t inventing a standard that’s either impossible to achieve or extremely unfun to play because you think you can handle something like human-level AI opponents when game designers go out of their way to limit what the AI can and will do to a player

I can assure you that if you stop focusing on a few of the most meta optimal builds and wanting to break the game (while simultaneously wanting the game to be… unbroken, somehow) and start working with the notion that we only need X amounts of damage and survival for a mission (which frees up mod slots and build opportunities) and stop taking higher-level builds lower where you’re rocking redundant amounts of damage and survival instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to equip other mods or whatever, the game plays very much like any third person shooter with enemy diversity, on-the-fly gameplay decision making, and risk/reward. Plus it rewards more ways to play and is perpetually rewarding us, and breaking the game is merely one option in how to play You have to be willing to actually play the game though, which as a sandbox build-crafting game that tasks the player with deciding how they want to play and what they want out of it, isn’t a bizarre concept; Warframe doesn’t force you to play a certain way or hold your hand, it just gives us the gear, the ways to modify how it works and what it can do, and various missions to take the result to

Hm. It’s not like Warframe can’t test everything you’re talking about, and how a player builds is only part of the equation; there’s still the loadout and mission to be considered before player skill comes into play. Aiming, positioning, enemy prioritisation, all that comes to the front when sufficient amounts of damage and survival are identified for the missions designed to facilitate build variety by enabling us to not be locked into a few ways to build, and then it’s up to the player to take a build the rest of the way and can take said build/loadout to more places and into higher-level content the better they play and more they know how the game works. Usually when I see players min-maxing, I’m not expecting them to want anything other than a brokenly-easy fight or game. I min-max at times and in other games, and while under that mentality I’m never thinking “I have sufficient power for what I want to do”; usually I’m pushing it as far as I can go, beyond the point of reason and what any game developer would design for, working glitches and bugs and clearly un-intentional interactions into the mix to the point that expectations for what a developer will address becomes unreasonable if I wanted the result of my min-maxing to still fit within the game

My quotes keep messing up and disappearing when I go to post and it looks like I’m asking a random question to no-one in particular, so I need to re-post 😑. The mobile interface is not ideal for this Out of curiosity, what is it that you’re looking for when chasing maximum levels of power? It’s not often that games with a progression element don’t then reward players with ever more powerful stuff that actually starts to undermines the requirement for skill

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Suit yourself, though it’s worth revisiting fun builds every so often to keep things interesting. If you can’t work with some randomness though in a pretty optional bit of content, it’s going to wreck your moral as you seek ever more specific choices and RNG kicks your attempts to the curb until it accidentally coughs up what you’re looking for. It can surprise with unexpected reward and make every roll attempt a moment of excitement, but it can also be downright cruel when it wants to be; you’re free to complain about it, and maybe DE will reconsider aspects of it, but right now if you’re going to keep engaging with the RNG-based system, you’ll want to reconsider your perspective to preserve your sanity and not become a victim of chance

Look, I get that you don’t like the random nature of Rivens, but I think you could stand to consider what value randomness can have instead of perpetually treating it like a hated enemy. I’m not sure how the random nature of Rivens nullifies their purpose when that randomness is how weapons can be made desireable in surprising and unexpected ways, but if you stop trying to fight RNG tooth and nail, you might find an unexpected ally while simultaneously not destroying your Kuva reserves; even when choosing how to play the game I sometimes Randomize my loadout to potentially break up same-old gameplay, and it hasn’t been uncommon for players to find the random nature of Duviri’s Randomiser a way to re-introduce some fun back into their gameplay

Give me your riven and I’ll do something with it