Written by Citizen Alpha Thursday, 01 April 2010 01:15

It's an inescapable truth that bad artificial intelligence in video games can make or break the experience.  Stellar graphics, killer premise, and state of the art game engines suddenly become nothing more than background noise when a non-player character your forced to rely on turns out to be nothing shy of a complete idiot.  I’ve comprised a list of the top 5 things that aggravate players into controller chucking monkeys.

Everything, then something catastrophically dumb

Squad based games are more and more common and when you’re playing single player and on a team with NPC’s you need to know they have your back to some regard.  It could be to do nothing more than provide distraction for all most of us care but sometimes you come across a game that has some overzealous NPC’s.  Most player’s chief complaints center around doing things poorly and rightfully so.  Occasionally they’re just too damn good making you wonder if you’re going to get to have some fun too.  They always turn out to be Trojan horses however.  I remember playing one of the Rainbow Six games and tactically moving like Team Ninja, all my guys greased every baddy before I even saw them.  I never fired a shot but I felt good from a commander’s standpoint.  That is, until we reached our objective.  I ordered the team to go cuff our future prisoner only to have them line up single file and get shot, one at a time, by a single enemy with a hand pistol.  It’s like they waited until the climax of the mission to lobotomize themselves and die.

Block your path

Nobody likes being claustrophobically crowded and it’s no different in video games.  When the rounds are flying and you stick your head out to shoot just to find a NPC teammate nabbed your sliver of cover you really want to punch the guy in the face.  Of course the game typically throws in some sort of mechanic that prevents you from blasting your way back through your own men to cover to make things that much more fun.  This isn’t just limited to shooters either, a lot of us have gone through some sort of drone bee dance around a room trying to get some idiot NPC to follow you long enough to move the hell out of a doorway or away from something your trying to work on.  RPG’s are notorious for also making the “Use” button the “Talk” button so sometimes you’ll find yourself in a conversation you never wanted to have in the middle of a bomb countdown.

Poor threat priorities

I touched on this a bit with my Borderlands first impression article in regards one of the player classes having the ability to throw a NPC hawk.  There’s a ton of games out there that accommodate for some sort of threat assessment.  There’s also a ton of games out there that don’t.  You’ll be squaring off against an enemy mob with a two story battle mech, paired up with a marine who’s carrying a tank-fucker-2000, only to have him blast the aborigine spearmen that crossed the battlefield after a hard day of fruit picking.

Wander off with your stuff

This mostly applies to RPG’s that sport some sort of inventory juggling system and a team.  Bioware’s titles are notorious for this kind of setup.  Anyhow, part of the fun is balancing out all the gear amongst your squad, of course favoring the few that you use the most.  This isn’t really so much an AI problem but at some unexpected points in the game you’ll lose members to plot devices such as death and abandonment.  I can’t count how many times I’ve decked out my favorite guy in top notch gear just to have him deep sixed 30 seconds later with all my best loot.  Now I’ve got the second stringers sporting packing nerf guns and paper mache armor.  Screw that, reload last save.

Nothing

This is the cardinal sin of every NPC teammate across all game genres.  It might be a medic that watches you die, a RTS army that parks in your base, or a squad that involuntarily turns you into a lone wolf point man because they refuse to move.  Sometimes doing nothing is a godsend when your friends are boneheads though.  Even still, sometimes this type of behavior puts you at a huge disadvantage.

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