I’ve noticed a pattern in problematic AI behaviour.
I’m sure we’ve all seen a bot walk face-first into a heavy attack from a Chaos Warrior or similar and they don’t even move, flinch, block, or make any attempt to survive, just present their face for the axe and you’re then down a team member.
This seems to be entirely down to the bots only responding to certain events if they are the target of the attacker.
It certainly feels like the AI relies on some form of unseen “handshake” between the bot and enemies in the game, but only once they are targeted by an enemy.
This would also account for bots straight up ignoring enemies that are attacking the player e.g. you’re trying to heal and something agro’s you only for the bots to stand around and watch you get hit.
Now what I also suspect is that one bot is all bots.
They aren’t treated as individuals.
This is why they can sometimes all stack on top of each other and perfectly duke a monster and take no damage, and other times (when the monster is targeting a player) they can’t dodge at all and get killed.
Hasnt it been noted that bots will often ignore all other enemies if a boss/specials are about? For instance i watched my bots get killed by 3 skaven slaves because they were too busy attacking a troll to bother with those tiny rats.
They literally did not hit or block anything from those slaves, they just ate hits from them until they died so that they woulnt have to stop hitting the troll.
I´ve also watched the bots pull out guns and run towards a gas/fire/Gunner even if they are in melee with other enemies and just eat hits right away-
Yes, and playing around with and without the mod that changes their focus priority, it seems they have a limit to what they can pay attention to. Or that issues with that priority mean they often only pay attention to one thing and ignore everything else.
There’s certainly more going on, but I kinda feel we need to isolate behaviours if we want to see anything improved. We’ve had a lot of threads about how bad bots are recently, at least since Chaos Wastes dropped. As many people commented that previously improved behaviour by the “bot improvement patch” was broken with Chaos Waste launch.
If we can isolate and report on singular behviours that are widely observed, perhaps there is hope that it can be addressed in a way that general dissatisfaction isn’t easily actionable through coding.
I’ve had an previously deleted clips of bots eating overhead attacks while totally oblivious to anything around them and deleted them rather than posting a report as I never felt “News at 7, bot gets hit by an attack, more at 11!” would have anything more happen that it be marked as acknowledged then closed internally the second it got looked at by a programmer.
Maybe I should start a new collection of clips, but I’m not sure if improving my ability to kill my bots is a skill I want to be working on (as what I’m actually working on is soloing all Helmgart missions on cata with 3 bots and I’m down to the last 4).
Hopefully this is seen as something worth improving for V2, Darktide and any future projects, as good AI can go a long way.
The fact the mod is able to put a bandaid over many of the common bot problems at least gives me hope that there is a possibility that bots can improve at a base level.