Improving NPC AI +

The bottom line problem with non-player mob (that is, NPC and creature) AI is that it's reactive, not active. NPCs and critters are either loot bags waiting to be popped or mindless quest dispensers. They don't act; they exist only to be acted upon.

To some degree, that's how it has to be. Those are functions players want NPCs/critters to have, so that's what developers give them. Except that developers stop there. But why stop there?

Well, partly it's because there are only so many hours in a day, even if you work programmers like galley slaves. (Something that courts are beginning to take a dim view of.) Stop for a second and ask yourself: How many important systems are there in a major MMORPG?

Go ahead, come up with a number.

Now multiply that number by 10, and you'll start to be in the ballpark of how many systems there really are that somebody has to design, implement, and test. (And you can easily double or triple that number if you also take into account server code, behind-the-scenes "helper" systems, and tool development.)

With so much to do that absolutely has to get done, I'm sympathetic to not implementing super-AI. "Minimally plausible" starts looking like a more appropriate goal.

It's also the case that you don't necessarily want your mobs doing things when there's not a player there to be affected by those behaviors -- that can be perceived as a waste of processor cycles. (Do you want more lag?)

Finally, there's the argument that despite what some of them may say, most players don't actually want mobs that are smart enough to wipe the floor with them. The highly gameplay-oriented players -- to whom most MMORPG developers cater slavishly -- want mobs they can beat so that they can take their stuff. (Actually, that applies to PvP as well, but that's another thread.) Making mobs smart enough to run away or gang up on a player might wind up being very unpopular with many of today's gamers.

And yet... what a waste of good mobs. If a MMORPG is a game world, then shouldn't "world" be roughly as important as "game?" In which case, shouldn't mobs be designed to support the goal of making the gameworld feel like a living, breathing, dynamic place?

Bearing in mind all the objections, I think the answer to that (as the editorialist said) has to be "yes." To make the gameworld as dynamic as it should be to make it feel "alive," mobs need to be more than loot bags and quest dispensers. Instead of just existing to be acted upon, they need (to some degree) to be independent actors themselves.

I believe that accomplishing this will require non-player mob AI to improve in at least four specific categories: agenda, environment, communication, and ecology.

AGENDA

Agenda is easy to describe, but hard to implement: mobs need to have goals and desires and interests, and then (according to their level of intelligence) should be able to devise and carry out plans that will plausibly allow them to achieve their goals.

In some cases, that will mean that they do exactly what they do right now: stand around and wait to be activated by a player. Maybe they're in "guard" mode, which means patrolling a certain area to protect something (shops if they're NPCs, babies if they're critters). Maybe they're just lazy and don't have a job. Maybe they're injured, or lost. There are plenty of reasons why some mobs could do exactly what they do now; the differences would be that there's a plausible reason why they're doing it, and other mobs are capable of doing something else because now they have a reason for that.

Being able to form and carry out plans -- in other words, having an agenda -- along with the subsidiary capability of being able to describe this agenda to players who ask would tell players that they are part of a world that has a life of its own. Creatures would seek to feed and breed. NPCs would have player-like aspirations that they, like players, would attempt to fulfill.

Not being at the center of the universe could be a shock to some players... but there are, I think, a lot of other players who would feel much more satisfied to be playing in a gameworld where even the mobs have interesting stories to tell.

ENVIRONMENT

Why is it that I can unleash electric death on an NPC and another NPC who is three feet away -- who belongs to the same faction as the first NPC -- will simply continue lounging against the wall?

How can that some creature can detect me from a hundred feet away when I'm behind a tree, at night, wearing all black, downwind and masking my scent, and not moving?

I cannot think of a single MMORPG that implements the gameworld as a place where the various emissions of the electromagnetic spectrum are used to any serious degree. Most games let their mobs do simple A* pathfinding around collidable obstacles. Some games give you line-of-sight. A few games allow terrain or character position (standing/crouching/prone) to matter. But how many really incorporate sound? Smell? Environmentally-appropriate camouflage? Reduction in visibility due to darkness/rain/dust/fog/smoke? UV or IR detection/masking? Heat or power signature detection/masking? Weight/mass detection (as for pressure-sensitive switches)?

Can you imagine a game where mobs could detect and recognize other mobs (including players) through all these environmental cues, and could incorporate that information into their agendas?

Creatures could stalk their prey, and prey could use various means (natural, technological, magical, whatever) to avoid or break detection by predators. NPCs could see or hear when their allies are being attacked and run to the rescue. Mobs in general would become able to interact with each other and with players in a vastly more plausible way because they would finally have access to the same kind of environmental information that we as players take for granted when we’re deciding what to do.

COMMUNICATION

Some mobs are social. While individuals, they are also members of a group or groups. Accordingly, these mobs ought to be able to communicate information to and among each other.

A mob who enters a "danger" or "opportunity" state ought to be able to transmit that information to other mobs who could benefit from the knowledge.

When a creature makes a kill, why can't he alert his packmates to come share in the bounty when doing so helps to insure the group's survival? When an NPC sees an enemy force coming over the town walls, why can't she race to the watchtower to ring the warning bell, then run through the town calling for all allied NPCs (and players!) to help repel the invaders?

A decent level of communication capability would allow mobs to share these kinds of useful information. Rather than acting purely independently, they would be able to act together as a group. And that would finally allow mobs to effectively match the ability of players to act in a coordinated way.

Which brings me to:

ECOLOGY

Why is it that I can whack the same mob eight zillion times, and he will respawn in roughly the same place to allow himself to be whacked for eight zillion more times? Why is it that I can wipe out an entire zoneful of orcs, and they'll just reform in the same place as soon as I turn my back so I can wipe them out again? How come I and other players can all take the same quest from the same NPC for weeks at a time and he never learns to recognize us?

Here's an answer: Player actions have no long-term consequences because mobs have no long-term memory or social decision-making capability. There's no ecological response to repeated external stimuli.

(The larger answer is of course "to make the game fair for all players." But there has to be a way to do this that doesn't turn the gameworld into a bizarrely static place! When it comes to gameplay challenges, is "equivalent" good enough? Or is "identical" required? Right, back to mob ecology.)

The last major component of a full, integrated mob AI system would be to allow groups of mobs to change their behaviors over time. Creatures (as less intelligent mobs) would simply react to player incursions by migrating elsewhere from their hunting or feeding grounds. (Unless of course they happen to regard players as tasty snacks, in which case maybe breeding rates go up to take advantage of the unexpected bounty.)

NPC mob groups would have even more types of long-term behavioral choices available to them. Maybe when you wipe out an orc encampment several times, the orcs move somewhere else. Now they're someone else's problem (or opportunity.) But perhaps instead you've stumbled across a particularly warlike band of orcs, and they don't take kindly to your depredations. So they've dispatched a runner to invite some of their friends over to hide in the woods around their encampment. The next time you show up to casually mete out destruction, you discover that you're facing not five orcs, but fifty. Surprise!

Or suppose a group of NPCs realize that a lot of players have been asking them for a particular type of quest. What if the rewards for that quest become less valuable to reflect an increased supply in reaction to demand? Conversely, what if those NPCs decided to offer more quests like that one, since obviously it's very popular? Why shouldn’t NPCs be able to change their behaviors in response to the ways that players interact with them?

As a final example, what if an entire faction of NPCs decides that players have been beating up on them a little too much, and coordinates a massive assault (maybe physical, maybe economic) on some player resource or location? Isn't that exactly the kind of large-scale action many players say they'd love to see in a MMORPG?

An ecological AI capability could enable precisely that sort of event.

...

Agenda, environment, communication, and ecology. Design your mob AI to incorporate those capabilities, and you will have a gameworld that players will remember with pleasure for years to come.