Lunchtime Discussion: AI Teamwork

Today the Football World Cup starts down in South Africa. Now I would write something about the football and how great of a sporting event any sport’s world cup is, but I don’t really know that much about football apart from their are eleven players and what I’ve managed to pick up from loosing 40 or 50 games of FIFA 10.

So whilst I’d feel remiss if I didn’t at least make an attempt at connecting today’s discussion to the World Cup, I can’t really write about the actual event. So after hours of racking my brains I (and by I, I do mean teflon via Twitter) came up with the idea of teamwork. I mean there’s an awful lot of that in football, and it isn’t really something I’ve touched upon yet.

Whilst there are the obvious occasions of teamwork, primarily in sporting games, what is becoming more common these days if teamwork and partnering in other genres. Although co-op has been around since the days of arcade dominance, it seems to have had a significant growth on consoles in recent years. This new level of co-ordination and teamwork that’s been brought into gaming has helped to revitalise some genres for me, adding new set pieces and making campaigns feel a more social experience.

Of course the one major issue here is if the AI understands how to work as a team.

Some games have the AI’s team work nailed almost perfectly. For me Gears of War is definitely in this group, whether or not you have a human partner playing along with you the game continues to flow correctly and you feel supported by the AI if you’re playing by yourself. On the other hand you’ve got titles like Killzone 2, where it seems your AI partners frequently decide to shoot the wall instead of valid targets.

This is only made worse by the lack of co-op, meaning you’re stuck with inefficient AI partners who don’t really seem to understand the basic objectives, let alone how to work as a team.* From my experience with Modern Warfare 2 I’d say it seems to suffer heavily from the same issues. I have distinct memories of my team mates running around doing not very much.

Of course how could I miss out the teamwork involved in increasingly large and complex online games. From watching my old flatmates play raids on WoW it’s clear that the level of co-ordination involved in modern MMOs really is above and beyond any other genre. Sure there are some clans in shooters that are incredibly well coordinated, but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

It’s perfectly possible to be successful in a shooter with almost no co-ordination, a raid in an MMO seems impossible if you’re not well coordinated. MAG seems to have tried to resolve this, but I’m not sure how successful it’s been.

The issue today is I don’t really have a question to ask you about teamwork. I guess I can boil it down to simply ‘do you enjoy it?’. Do you like working as a team in games, or do you prefer to play the loan wolf? Do you like games that encourage team work, or do you prefer to be left to your own devices.

Finally here’s a little teaser for next week’s Lunchtime Discussions. They may have something to do with a little expo going on in Los Angeles. You know, in case you couldn’t have guessed that highly classified information by yourselves. Enjoy the World Cup!

Note: My Killzone 2 comments are based on video I’ve seen and complaints I’ve heard. I may have been misinformed, if so I apologise. Lee did call Rico “as useful as a third armpit” though.