Hello, sorry for being gone so long but I was experimenting. No, not with drugs, with something far more dangerous...audio. However, such experiments came to naught, so those who don't want to read and just listen to my voice serenade them to lands of anger, hatred, or agreement must wait awhile longer.
Now, here's a question class, what does AI stand for? No Mr. Racist it doesn't stand for Angry Indian. Sorry Mr. Alien-conspiracy, it doesn't stand for Alien Igloos. Uh...no crazy person, it doesn't mean Automatic Iguana either. Ah, there we go Ms. Gamer, it stands for Artificial Intelligence. Now calm down all you sci-fi nerds, I'm not talking about a fully sentient computer that wants to kill us all and use the corpses in a puppet show. No I'm referring to that essential part of video game code that tells the NPC's (Non-Player Characters) what to do. When the AI is done well you shouldn't even notice it. Enemies should take cover and shoot at your ass, monsters should try to chow down, allies should come over to heal you and throw grenades at bitches, everything that you're not controlling should function perfectly.
However, at times the AI doesn't work right. Sometimes it fails horribly. An enemy will see you, toss away their gun, draw a knife and run screaming towards you across an open field of one hundred meters screaming bloody murder. That's not good AI, you know what else isn't good AI? Programming the multiple characters the player controls to just stand there scratching their ass as the enemy chops them into Salami.
That last reference was a poke at a classic game called "Icewind Dale." This game is a classic RPG for the computer. It has buckets of customization, multiple classes and you can even multi-class a character. Several races, and if you really wanted to you can, quite literally, write an entire novella of backstory write in the character creation area. Its a pretty big game with a colorful variety of enemies, items, equipment, and characters. By all accounts it is one of the great games of the good old days...but I can't play it. You know why? The AI of your six clueless fucks, not the enemies, just your guys, is shot all to hell.
Let me explain, say you rest to recover your health. While your resting a pack of angry rabid wolves with rocket launchers ambushes your party! Oh know, they immediately start attacking you but what do your guys and gals do? Sit there and pick their noses as the wolves chew on their limbs. They won't start attacking until you tell them to attack. Now, don't even try to put up that speech about, "Well its not an RTS its an RPG and blah-de-blah blah blah." No, that doesn't apply. You know why? It has a button that lets you turn player AI on. Meaning it does use RTS style controls, and it still does this. It has no pardon, and that just breaks the game for me. I can't stand playing a game where if I forget to pay attention to one guy, they won't even have the decency to wail on the dragon with a bit of twig, they'll just stand there and get roasted.
So, I have no other problems with the game, I don't mind the graphics, the story is great, the enemies are fine, the equipment is good, everything is fine. Except for that fucking AI!! Now, AI won't always break the game, in an RTS(Real-Time Strategy) it will make or break it, no exceptions. However, in other games, where you only have to worry about yourself, or one or two others, or those others aren't that important, its not that big a deal. For instance there are shooters where you can summon allies and they will all walk single-file off the same ledge and die. Doesn't break the game because you can get along without them. Still, it makes the game annoying (and rather hilarious) when it shouldn't have that one annoyance.
So to wrap this thing up, AI is important. Just how important varies with the type of game, but for us strategy lovers, whether we be hardcore fans of Starcraft or the infinitely superior players of Dawn of War, AI is essential to a good gaming experience.
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