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Ever had those moments where the AI in a game seems to be missing a few dozen brain cells?

I think I remember mine being in Halo 2. I parked a warthog on a cliff with a few marines in it with a good sniping position. I was going to snipe one of the elites when suddenly...

I hear the warthog's engine turn on. Apparently the marines decided they couldn't wait for ten seconds to me to snipe the the elite and drove down the slope. At this point, all covenant were moving around way too much to get a clear shot so I had to go down the slope too. After reaching the bottom, the marines seemed to want me back into the warthog and came to the conclusion that slamming the warthog right into me, killing me almost immediately, was the best way to make me get back into the warthog.

Bad AI ruined my playthrough of Deus Ex.

Basically I got bored of my first playthrough since I was doing it extremely sloppily, and started a new game. I had a plan to focus on the Sniper Rifle, and play stealthily. It worked, and got all the way up to the raid on your brothers apartment. I had an awesome rifle, a huge amount of skill points in it, lots of ammo, and my playthrough was working exactly as intended.

Then, right when it called for the agents to raid the apartment, they just... didn't. They stood there in the default Vetruvian Man unrigged position, and even after unloading a few dozen headshots on them, complete with blood splatter, nothing happened. All exits to the area were locked, including the main exit to the subway. The game just wouldn't progress, and wouldn't let me progress. It just broke.

Even through I really enjoyed the game, that just killed my enthusiasm. I just uninstalled it then and haven't tried again in all these years.

Don't know if this counts but the first Modern Warfare had really awful scripting. Enemies would "spawn" from ridiculous places and would continue to do so until you hit the next "zone". Then POOF! All the previous enemies disappeared.... O_o Unless it was a specific parameter (e.g. a certain kill count), I figured out you could just run from zone to zone and breeze through most of the game.

That's not the AI breaking. That's just how CoD AI works.

 -Loki- wrote:
That's not the AI breaking. That's just how CoD AI works.

The thread title talked about bad AI. That's bad AI

I would concur. Bad AI is bad. Let me see here...

Company of Heroes Actually scratch that. All Relic RTS' I've played I think. There were times where the AI would get itself hung up made much much worse by some mods. Lets say artillery became radically more effective when this happened. The infantry and vehicles would all try to move through a gap all at once causing a huge traffic jam. You could sit and watch this for upwards of an hour and the AI would never manage to resolve the issue. The explosions were fairly spectacular. Other times the AI just built a horde of units and sat them somewhere, seemingly for no reason until you rolled your army in to kill them. I want to say this error also on occasion in DoW2 but I can't remember. I saw it once when playing Company of Heroes 2 in its beta.

Not strictly AI but also a coding/engine wonkiness. In Rainbow Six Vegas 2, which as we know used the Unreal Engine I think they allowed the AI to keep the accuracy of the bots from UT games, cause they had occasional bouts of supreme accuracy going so far as to be able to turn around instantly as you turned a corner and shoot you in the head in Terrorist Hunt.

League of Legends back when I started it and before they revamped the bots in the vs AI mode could be funny. Using the right path a player could lead a bot all the way back to the inner tower line and get them killed by the tower and the bot would always do this at the start of the match or before any outer towers falled prior to the ten minute mark. You could do this over and over and rack up easy kills in the bot matches.

EDIT: Oh and of course; nearly every escort mission in any game. Ever. Stupid bots just want to get themselves killed.

That girl who you go through Resident Evil 5 with. Couldn't believe how much ammo she'd burn through without having much of an effect on the enemies.

I was actually pretty impressed with Shiva/Chris Bot. Not particularly useful, but I never felt like they were in my way so I'll give them a pass personally.

Surprised the first one to come to my mind wasn't the Marines of Halo. Worst. Drivers. Ever. Took me off a cliff once @_@

Chris/Sheva bot was utterly badass with the sniper rifle. I've seen that bastard literally headshot zombies climbing over a fence or in midair.

Single shot sniper rifle. Easy to keep ammo for, they don't burn through it etc.

Gears of War probably has the worst AI I've ever seen.

 BlaxicanX wrote:
Chris/Sheva bot was utterly badass with the sniper rifle. I've seen that bastard literally headshot zombies climbing over a fence or in midair.

Single shot sniper rifle. Easy to keep ammo for, they don't burn through it etc.

That's interesting. I only played the first few levels with her tearing through handgun bullets (I was also coming from the early series mentality about ammo conservation)

Good to know playing it one player is viable with the later weapons.

In any Fallout game where you have to follow or lead an NPC ......oh my god that would get frustrating

Oblivion was surely the worst, having to reload because that dumb-dumb Baurus had bit it all the flipping time. Basically anything that involved following or relying on the AI in any way, certain sneaking segments could be impossible if a guy decided he was just going to stay put.

Gah - rescuing that argonian thief from a castle (can't remember which though) who WON'T TRY TO SNEAK. Just kept running off and getting caught...

C&C Red Alert. Oh look, the computer has built it's base in a corner, made too many vehicles and jammed up the map, causing ridiculous slowdown....again...

Resident Evil 5, there's a dark bit in some tunnels where you have choose who gets to carry the torch - illuminate or shoot, basically. I preferred to direct the gun fire and took the torch, yet when I had the big monster all lit up she was aiming at it but seldom firing any shots; frustrating.

To be honest Resident Evil 5's AI partner was thicker than a gak milkshake.
There were some instances of them being okay but largely they made everyone's life much more difficult.

I've had some bad AI in Dishonored. Either the enemies are super soldiers who can detect a pin drop at two hundred metres.

Or they are completely blind and do not notice the crouching man with a skull mask standing directly beside them.

Age of Empires 2.
Horrific.

Oh yes.



Not bad so much as hilarious. I'm pretty sure its on purpose.

The halo AIs were pretty bad.

One minute you find 4 marines and they follow you, the next they are all dead and you are alone once again.

Halo Marines on Legendary difficulty is a new level of gaming hell. They can't drive worth gak. Driving off cliffs, getting stuck on the only fething tree on the level, random stops in front of a Wraith, the list is endless. Put them on the turret, they ignore threats and pump round after round into a Grunt corpse/wreckage/passing butterfly. At best I viewed them as convenient ammo dumps.

Halo 4 has brought new lows. Piloting Banshees in the Covenant forces now seems to involve flying into a crate/wall/ground and getting stuck.

 KingCracker wrote:
In any Fallout game where you have to follow or lead an NPC ......oh my god that would get frustrating

Oh god friendly A.I. is the worst I think.

I'm playing skyrim some more and sadly whenever I summon an atronach or undead and want it to do something it just wanders around f*cking nowhere. Sometimes it avoids enemies completely even when i'm fighting them. Possibly this is because the frost atronach is so f*cking huge and gets stuck. It even has the stuck in a hallway problem with followers. They'll just look at you like 'a dog in the hallway' preventing you from moving through and getting in your way. In the case of followers they'll find the worst spots to stay in like an arch-way of a door and stare at you blankly unless you back up and somehow force them out of the arch-way. In one case a follower followed me and set off a trap which forced them to crawl on the ground, it then got up and did it again and then again about 3 times. Funny thing is I don't even think you had to go over that particular space to activate the trap so much as the middle of the hallway. Basically if you just stepped off to the right or left just a bit you could avoid it. It's like having to deal with somebody that has no memory and no ability to learn from past mistakes. It was funny for the first couple times but then got sad.

 LordofHats wrote:
I was actually pretty impressed with Shiva/Chris Bot. Not particularly useful, but I never felt like they were in my way so I'll give them a pass personally.

Surprised the first one to come to my mind wasn't the Marines of Halo. Worst. Drivers. Ever. Took me off a cliff once @_@

once?. your lucky.

on topic, I was playing ghost recon future soldier. had just got to the middle of a gak-load of enemies. was not worried about the squad because of how good the ai is. and then one of them stands up, de-stealthing the rest of us, three second and several dozen bullet holes later I fall to the ground dead. stopped playing for a month after that.

I think I remember one time in halo with marines driving their warthog off a cliff and having it drop on me.

GTA 3 was pretty funny when you had a wanted level of several stars, parked under the edge of a bridge or cliff somewhere and just looked up to see loads of police cars sailing through the air to their destruction.

I don't know about the worst, but one of the worst was the EDF in Red faction Guerilla. They were frothing at the mouth maniacs. Their vehicles would literally come flying out the air at you, and a lot of the time they'd surround you, crashing into each other, being super aggressive.

I think they could've toned it down just a little.

Skyrim companions were dumb... I leave Lydia at home after the time she pushed me into a trap, alerting three draugr deathlords, then didn't bother helping me fight them off.

Selena was probably the best companion I had on that game.

Even she could still be idiotic at times.

 Dark Apostle 666 wrote:
Skyrim companions were dumb... I leave Lydia at home after the time she pushed me into a trap, alerting three draugr deathlords, then didn't bother helping me fight them off.

Yeah, they're pretty moronic.

 Velour_Fog wrote:

 Dark Apostle 666 wrote:
Skyrim companions were dumb... I leave Lydia at home after the time she pushed me into a trap, alerting three draugr deathlords, then didn't bother helping me fight them off.

Yeah, they're pretty moronic.

That video is brilliant

Also I get annoyed by lead blockers in Madden, whenever there's a run off the edge the FB or pulling Linemen has a really annoying habit of just going past the LB to get to a DB mean you get tackled for a loss

I think the original XCOM comes to mind here (admittedly it was made in the 90s so it's kinda expected).

The AI wasn't so bad overall (I guess the more accurate way to say that is the aliens have so many advantages stacked on their side that the horrible ai doesn't really handicap them that much), but the path finding was the absolute worst I have ever seen in any video game ever. I can not count the number of times I have told one of my soldiers to go somewhere, only to sit dumbfounded as they either go the long way around by some ridiculously inefficient path or else just sit there staring at me because the game can't path to where I'm clicking (I'm not asking for much...I ran into that issue when the total walking distance was under 10 squares sometimes).

And don't even get me started on what happens once they get the 3D movement capable flying suits...you have to micromanage them to make sure they don't mess up getting out of THEIR OWN AIRCRAFT!