Just watched back this video I did about soldier AI in half-life 2 years ago and I still agree with it! What a relief. Later, I got to speak to some of the Valve folks who worked on these things, and they agreed with it, but the chat made me wish the video spent more time on how hard this stuff can be, and especially how delicate it can be.
What people rarely “get” about this stuff when they’re critiquing it (and I should have hit it more explicitly in the video) is that things like “the combat in an fps” are such complex collections of interlocking systems that almost any change you can make, however minor, is likely to have a ton of unintentional knock-on effects. The dynamic resupply thing I talk about is a biggie, but mostly it’s something smaller, like a tweak to movement speed or health or something. You’d never think “if the player goes into this fight with full ammo the AI will look stupid” but it does work like that sometimes, where every little tweak has a chain of implications that’s difficult to perceive, and anything you might do to mitigate any of them kicks off another such chain. A lot of times, probably, something ships worse than it was the week before ship, and nobody quite knows why.
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
“Part of looking smart is looking dumb in the right way”
There’s so much valuable insight into that one line
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