Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General (Spoiler) LightHouse fight too easy

I'm playing on Hard difficulty with Source Difficulty mod. Two lone wolf characters at level 4.

This fight should by all accounts be very difficult. I managed it with careful usage of barrels to create a smoke cloud, which caused some of the at that point dead wolves, and the LightHouse boss to not see my two characters. They never attacked before I went to them, and at that point the enemy were dead.

I really wish the game would have some sort of enemies alerting each other to an threat, so inactive wolves for example who are an integral part of the fight do not just sit and wait for their friends to die.

Using built in battle mechanics is part of the fun. And they finally do make every fight easy - in the end there is little you can do against it. The development of an AI able to beat the best humans on a battlefield of 64 tiles with just 32 figures took IBM 20 years and a 10 digits dollar budget (including special hardware).

Regards,
Thorsten

Nice reference.

I've heard that even within the gaming industry it's admitted that AI tech is lagging behind.

Also consider that the AI can't "think" as a group. Far as I know, all AI patterns commonly used in gaming today are for single entities. Could be wrong, though.


That means that it's probably impossible for there to be an AI good enough to not fall for our humanly tricks that the Larian devs can develop (or even afford to).

I believe, problem is not in ability to make AI good enough. Problem is making battle with this AI fun enough. If good AI can beat (almost) any human, how am I supposed to _play the game_?

"Pure challenge" games, as chess, go, checkers, etc. is the totally different matter. Here attempt to beat opponent is the whole game, and losing is always an option.

At least the AI is not cheating in D:OS. I *hate* games where the computer is cheating to compensate for bad AI - like RTS'es where the opponent get a lot of resources they could not possibly have.

Worst example I recall offhand was Stalker Clear Sky (I think) where opposing forces could throw grenades with pinpoint accuracy, even in the dark and when they couldn't see me. That was very irritating.

I would not call it cheating by AI.

I certainly would not think that summoned / resurected creeps getting 'activated' by enemies close by in battle seeing you would be bad.

I would neither compare this with say, aimbots and the like. Unreal Tournament against AI on hardest difficulty, heashot sniping in milliseconds, anyone?

Unfortunately that's how most of the fights seem.
The NPC or creature AI's just don't cover enough possibilities or maybe just the right possibilities?
Or they don't have ways to look for key events so they can break out of bad branches... (not going to start building a model for how to write an AI I think)

You'll find that a lot of creatures don't know what to do when surrounded by hazardous terrain.
So if you pick a masochistic combat style where you taint the battle ground at the start and fight on it, at lot of creatures just get stuck in some early branch of code meant to keep them from killing themselves by running in to the fire/poison/radiation/spikes/whatever.

I think that's a big part of the problem with the light house fight.
It almost always ends up with broken oil barrels catching on fire and creating smoke screens.
And the creature AI's don't really have much code for dealing with that.

There are complaints about creature responses to being blinded as well.
The common creature response is to stand there and do nothing at all even if it is standing in a hazard or getting hit repeatedly.
If nothing else the creature should try to run away. Of course I don't think they game has any mechanics right now to penalize creatures for trying to move while blind.
If a player is blind they can still move freely I think.
They just can't use spells or abilities that require a target.
AoE spells though can be cast without limitations still.
Similarly any targeted ability cast on a party member seems to work as well.

One the one hand, writing a good AI can be difficult
On the other hand a combat oriented game pretty much requires decent AI scripts

Basically this game's combat handling capabilities have serious gaps.

I wonder if the problem is expectations: Larian's a small studio with limited resources that they have to spend carefully. I think the risk is that if they'd put more effort into combat, it would have to be taken away from somewhere else, and I think that would be at a greater cost to the game overall.

But the expectation part is what one wants from the game: for my tastes, the game is already leaning a little too much towards combat, but I guess some people would disagree; there is no "right" answer, simply a lot of different opinions. I guess I am surprised at the number of complaints about an RPG not being more combat-focussed and not being hard enough; though I am someone who tends to play e.g. shooters on easy as I'm more interested in seeing the sights and story (and who gets bored quickly if there's not much of either!)