Artificial Stupidity/Video Games/Wide Open Sandbox

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Examples of Artificial Stupidity in Wide Open Sandbox games include:

  • The tournament AI in Mount & Blade apparently decides that the best way to win is to drive into a wall. And then get fenced in by dismounted horses.
  • One of the chief reasons why it's practically impossible to not kill any civilians by accident while actively avoiding contact in a ground vehicle in Prototype. It seems like once you induced panic in them, they'll abandon almost all of their reliance on their senses. That's also assuming you aren't convinced of their intention to commit suicide in the face of the game's setting.
    • Oh, Prototype. Thou art a shining example of this trope. Where civilians show absolutely no regard for their own safety, the most dangerous thing a Marine can face is another Marine and where highly-trained military personnel can TD Dance off of a platform to their deaths. It makes you a bit less guilty for killing them, because they genuinely come across as Too Dumb to Live
      • The slightest disruption in traffic flow can cause huge pile ups. Tanks will just drive over anything in the way.
  • Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is a crowning achievement in Artificial Stupidity. Frequently, enemy soldiers will run in front of vehicles, throw grenades at their own vehicles, crash said vehicles when at even the slightest deviation, attempt to plow their vehicles under your tank causing the game to assume the tank has run them over, drown themselves, run off of building ledges and generally kill themselves in a variety of amusing ways. This can be frustrating for numerous reasons, chief among them that Chinese RPG soldiers fire thermobaric rockets that do massive damage to you and the scenery. In fact, it is generally impossible to capture all the HVT's alive, because they will kill themselves or die at the hands of their subordinate troops.
    • The original was as bad, if not worse. Civilian vehicles would instant swerve into you even though you were in the other lane and in no way a threat (as far as they knew). Combatants would drive their jeeps into your tank, which was about as effective as you'd expect, and AI drivers would often run into the adamantium walls known as trees.
  • Dead Rising's survivors were, to put it bluntly, idiots. Half the time, they never followed you or would run off on their own, and giving them a weapon would sometimes result in them attacking you by accident. The sequel improved the AI significantly.
  • In the X-Universe (especially Terran Conflict) series of games, the Autopilot on all the ships loves to smash itself into the nearest asteroid at max speed, or veer into the path of 4 km long destroyers. Then you turn on the Time accelerator to make the slow autopilot dock faster. It Got Worse. X fans frequently refer to the autopilot as the "auto-pillock", and some believe it consists of a gerbil (or lemming) in a box, with a rough sketch of the sector..
    • Player owned capital ships will gleefully jump at exactly the same time to the exact same warpgate - into each other.
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