f13.net

What I want to know is why the fuck I don't see games where the monsters/creatures/enemies fight amongst themselves more often?  Ever since I was pitting zombies against imps in Doom and Doom2 I have been absolutely in love with the concept.  Even id seemed to have abandoned the idea with 3, so now I'm on a quest, for other games that have this awesome mechanic.  Am I alone in thinking monsters fighting monsters would make tons of games better.

Several MMO's have this concept and some of the upcoming also. The problem with this is that most games have goodies vs baddies so you need a third faction or cannibalistic zombies etcetra to make it work. I also enjoy it, I sometimes stop by to watch the fights and kill the winnar as reward. Survival of the fittest, motherfuckers!

I was doing a mission in GTA4 a couple of nights ago and was in a firefight on some docks.  I hear some vocals like a cop, and soon enough a fat LCPD flatfoot runs up next to me and starts helping perforate some triads.  His use of cover was terrible, though, hiding behind a barrel that was smaller than him, plus he was five feet away from three asians with SMGs.  After he died, I leaned around and shot up the joint.

Also this thread's subject sucks.

Most games in general need at least three factions. Faction vs faction is boring as fuck. Allow the third guy to sneak up while the other two are distracted, and you've got something interesting. My old Quake 2 routine was to get the BFG, lay low until the other guys got into a fight and then unleash it through the room they were fighting in (we played a lot of three-man LAN deathmatch). I made a Quake 2 level once where it was just a big platform over a room filled with bad guys. Lob a few grenades down and they try firing back...can't hit you, spray the other bad guys with friendly fire and the whole room turns into a mosh pit of monster carnage.

Anyway. This can also go badly, as evidenced by Thief: Deadly Shadows after the factions start to come into play and it turns into keystone kops. It's funny, but it's not great gameplay.

It's going to be a tall order to name a game with this sort of element where it actually worked well.  Best case I think you will have a distracted enemy you can drop explosives on.

I seem to recall seeing some of this in the Age of Conan beta - slavers fighting Picts, something like that.

Yes, and in Sanctum.

Lots of this in Fallout 2.  And lots between your NPCs, too.  Fucking Marcus.

Jagged Alliance. Fidel and ...bah, can't remember the wimpy medic's name. Fidel was fucking awesome, he was an explosives expert that worked very cheap, but he had a horrible temper, especially when paired with weaker characters. He'd kill a couple guys eventually, and your team would start falling apart if you didn't fire him. God I loved that game.

CoX has done this for a while now.  Originally there were only some preset spawns doing a 'hey we're fighting but not really fighting' emote, but later on the devs set certain factions to actually aggro on and kill each other.

Stuff like that happens all over, also the prey system as well.

The fun thing about the old Doom system was that it wasn't in any way pre-scripted.  Monsters would aggro on whatever last damaged them (or the player by default).  I don't think any of the enemy-on-enemy violence I've seen in games since has been quite that freeform.  (And I was disappointed to see it gone in Doom 3.)

Oh, I remember where I've seen some more of it - it pops up reasonably frequently in RTSes, but specifically in Dawn of War there's some good stuff with it. In Dark Crusade attacking the Ork base, for example, you can turn the various Ork tribes against each other by destroying the big boss guy's banners in each of their camps.

I can't speak to MMOs anymore, though when I was on AC1 the server guys lived in fear of mobs fighting each other. Their logic being it consumed server cycles and bandwidth, but gave little gameplay to the users. As nevermore said, mob-on-mob fighting is done quite often in CoX, post-CoV.

Just last week I discussed the possibility of a three-way fight with one of the Mass Effect 2 tech designers. He didn't recommend it. To have a second bot faction in UE3, hostile to both the player faction and the first bot faction, you have to give them the AI equivalent of your squad members. (No comment on the ME1 squad member AI, please. We know all about it.) That means you can put fewer enemies on the screen at once before the 360 hardware is overtaxed.

In this case, he suggested the only way to get a decent fight would be to have Team A with two sub-bosses and Team B with two sub-bosses, plus you and your two squaddies. It would not be possible to have any more than that active at once, and still get acceptable performance.

So is it a hardware issue then?

Definitely not in general. Most engines, even UE3 supports this simply, but when you have the force of heavy AI scripting as in Mass Effect I can see the hardware issue, at least when presented on the 360, would be somewhat different on PC naturally and the hardware Mass Effect 2 is made towards (speculation). And yes, Age of Conan has this and several upcoming MMOs do this great pretty neat, but :nda:

EDIT : Its more about how it is integrated to the actual game. I can see several games where this is done and can be perfected: RPG, RTS, MMO, GTA-sandbox style games, horrors. Some others might be hard as I mentioned since they give you baddies vs goodies. Like some FPS games. Sport games. And others I can't think of right now. Pacman?

Saints Row (GTA clone) on 360 has this between the various gangs and the cops.

Halo had a bunch of this type of stuff.  Seems like when they made Halo 2 they made a conscious effort to fit in as much as possible.

I should note that ME does have some unique problems when it comes to AI control. Most shooters don't have character skill levels that affect weapon accuracy and damage, or dozens of different varieties of assault rifle and armor that bots can wear/use, or crazy not-really-Jedi-honest powers.

:)

:oh_i_see:

This may be why people say DUMBED DOWN. Not knocking you, Stormy, I doubt it was your decision, and I know 360 = $$ and we pc jews are all stealing babies from dev houses. But fuck. I hate fucking consoles for fucking up good games. El Ceedee.

Sorry, had to blow off some steam there. Please continue with the thread already in progress.

I'm less concerned about the AI and more concerned about the UI.  Good AI is a reason to upgrade my PC, while a good UI is a reason to purchase a software sequel.  Hint, hint.

Also, good AI is a reason to choose turn-based in your design process.  You don't have to worry as much about a hardware tax since you can take many more milliseconds to do calculations.

I'll resist the chance to do a turn-based rant.  :grin:

Stalker. Seeing a bunch of wild dogs going nuts on a small band of army men was fantastic. As well as the ensuing firefights between 2 factions in a huge abandoned factory.

Yeah, Stalker had some great implementation of faction fighting. And unlike Freelancer, they didn't drop everything to come after you once you fired on them, they'd still fight NPCs, too. Freelancer stands out as one of the worst implementations, the AI was so bad it would chase you even if it meant getting killed from behind by the horde of npcs following it. Bad.

We talking single, massive, multi-player, or all games?

The Covenant vs. The Flood vs. The Sentinels. Toss in a few of your own friendly NPC's and stuff gets really interesting.

Half-Life soldiers massacring scientists only to get wiped out by a horde of aliens. I can't be sure that ever happened but I do remember the military getting into firefights with aliens in the original.

Getting involved and tipping the scales in fights between groups of AI is always fun for me. This was why playing a mastermind in CoV was so fun I suppose.

But its a great way to give the illusion of affecting a virtual world.