What's the future of AI in this game?

What do we have now?

Some kind of dynamic difficulty adaption together with obvious level sensitive bots and minidrones.
(Some) Bots that have total reaction times of less than 100ms.
A more ore less broken bot mechanics that results in a systematic disadvantage for the player avatar (delaytimes of approx. 1.5s for the avatar, however, bots can do what ever they want in this timeframe).
Phone bots which are spawned very close to the action for less than minimal prewarning time and... lots of them.
High precision mollys/nades without LOS towards the avatar. And alot of other strange things.

Sorry guys, but this is not a difficulty level management. This is simply game manipulation at it's worst.

The activity of AI bots must be plausible anytime and under all circumstances. That's a common and very basic rule in AI programming. This rule is completely broken. Result: bs moments, dissatisfaction and endless discussions.

Also the defenders of the actual situation should be possibly even more satisfied with regular, humanlike acting and challenging bots that could beat the hell out of human players. Without the feeling beeing fooled by devs using "lame trick" programming.

So... why not make quality bots that deserve the name Artificial Intelligence which is helping all gamers. Such bots could be an unique selling point for this game.

The bots actually are just a quality issue in this game.

Will it stay at the current level? That would be a pity. Playing becomes a waste of time...

lvl 90+, 400h+

I suspect NWI will invest in their AI resources in time, and the current behaviors are just placeholders. The game was rushed to market with a whole lot of features broken or incomplete, though thankfully NWI is amazing about releasing post-launch content and improving the game. DOI eventually got improved bot AI and was truly challenging to beat on Coop Commando, so they can get at least to that level in-house.

Naaah… lost optimism in this regard.
Stopped playing.
Probably will have a look again on this after next update.

Sometimes it feels like bots are on easy mode. But not everytime. Agree with this post, but tbh have never experienced any frustration playing coop.
And "Jihadi Mobile Operators" are pretty easy to deal with. (If you have some ammo in your chamber)

@smoussie I sometimes feel ike when dominating too much in on round I`ll get 1 headshot kill threatment every time when I show my head for 1/2 seconds to enemy on the other side of map in next round 🙂

@n4thani3l Happens to me a lot. I get the feeling bots seem to weight priority on players at the start of a match. Could be that the game logs your success in previous games and adjusts the timing of bots for the player specifically. Thats what it feels like anyway. Though I very much doubt it its the impression I get.

Running nearly a 20kd in coop (not very hard really tbh) with 250 hours almost exclusively in coop.

I would love to see some of the bs removed from the AI. I might get one shot from 150m away by a dude with a pistol while theyre moving and then spectate someone whos 20m away from a bot getting shot at but never hit. Happens a lot actually.

Iv learned that the FAL is the best gun in the game where COOP is concerned. Since its generally a 1 hit one kill and with a 1.5x or 2x its hard to beat. Fantastic at long range and still a monster in CQC. Since its a one hit I find myself getting shot after taking the first shot and landing a hit happens far less often.

What you see is the effect of some kind of puppies protection for the levels till approx 40/50 and the overreacting so called elite bots targeting for the higher levels. Even winning a game isn't fun anymore, because you never know if you won because you're skilled or the system just decided to let you win. It's the poor man's approach to AI.

What frustrates me is that the same problems in the last game (aimbot, inability of bots to respond to dead bodies or fire, binary between laser vision or just walking around like idiots) have been ported over to the new system.

We knew they were problems in the last game, now they're in this game, and the "elite mode" or whatever simply turns up the knobs on the gimmicky behaviors to the point that I can't really enjoy it.

In the last game, console variables were exposed and I was able to make the widely-used "better bots" config to make the bots more mobile, suppress more, have slightly slower reaction times, and increase pressure on players in line with how fast and aggressive the human team was being.

These problems being brought into a new engine tells me that this is either the intentional design, or that fixing these problems wasn't important enough to warrant the work.

Neither option is good, especially since myself and a huge number of the players only want coop and can't be bothered with competitive or pvp.

@plppln

In the last game Ins2 it was different mechanics governing bot behaviour from what I have heard from other people (I have no insight into the actual code), for example even on brutal difficulty, bots would often use RPG if the bot with an RPG had visual of 2 or more players at once - This made your chance to survive a lot higher if you knew this, as you would constantly avoid being close to your teammates. Another feature from what I heard, was that bots prioritized to kill sniper players when far away, this meant that putting on a scope with higher magnification demanded that the player was much more careful when moving around too avoid far away bots - Maybe similar mechanics is at work in Sandstorm so that players with iron sights gets less punishment - Its a balanced feature if so in my book anyway.

@jballou

I sincerely believe the game release date was rushed because of contract with Focus and that we will see a long time of updates with Sandstorm, though what these updates will consist of is anyones guess - I hope coop with focus on bot "ai", optimization and balancing of pvp maps will be mostly what they do in the update period. Nobody needs more guns or cosmetics above mentioned priorities (focusing on cosmetics and other extra features creates wow-factor short term that quickly dies off while ppl feel the game is not solid, so avoid that).