The All-Seeing AI: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

Despite what publishers would like to tell you, there really is no such thing as [[Artificial Intelligence]] in video games. Any video game AI is, ultimately, nothing more than a complex flowchart. Because of this, it's very tricky to make computer opponents behave the way a human player would. While it's possible to design an AI that receives data similar to what a player receives, then analyzes it to make a decision, this is ''immensely'' difficult. Since the AI is an integral part of the game engine, a far easier (and thus much more common) technique is to simply pluck the information directly from the engine, and base all AI decisions on that.

** Also in ''Brawl'', the AI have perfect bearings when the controls or the stage in Spear Pillar is reversed, making the fight much harder and cheaper than it needs to be.

** [[Rule of Three|Also,]] it's rumored that [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|the AI can tell what buttons you press before the attack is sent out,]] allowing them to defend themselves easily against players.

** Not to mention generally grabbing a Cloaking Device in any single player mode in ''Melee''. There was an Event match that had both Fox and Falco permanently invisible just to drive the opposing point home. Evil bastards.

*** Well, the cloaking device also had the useful secondary effect of [[Useless Useful Spell|preventing your damage percentage from increasing while it was up.]]

** The final DC mission of ''Tiberium Wars''' Nod campaign is particularly notorious. If you cause a ruckus in the GDI base with Shadows, it doesn't matter in which direction you flee in. The AI will always follow the Shadows even though it clearly can't see them. If the Shadows are on the ground, the following [[APCs]] just run them down but if they are in the air, the followers just keep circling below until a Pitbull arrives and the shooting begins (since the units now can clearly see what they've been following blindly).

*** Oddly sometimes units will follow stealth units around..and then stand next to them, not attacking but frustrating your efforts to use those units.

* ''[[Far Cry]] 2'' averts this, if the player quickly runs away from a gunfight and slips off in another direction, the AI will presume he's still in the last known location and maintain suppressing fire.

** Also played straight in that once one bad guy has spotted the player, every goon in the area ''instantly'' knows exactly where he is and can fire with pinpoint accuracy even when the player is crouched in head-high grass he himself is unable to see through. Darkness also seems little hindrance.

** It's similar in ''[[Starcraft]]'', with the Terran AI always placing their Comsat Scans at the ''exact'' location of your invisible units. To be fair, though, it doesn't exploit its knowledge until you give it a reason to "notice" the unit, so it's not ''that'' unfair. In a subversion, the AI is actually doing less than a human could. Stealthed units are visible to players, they blur the area they move through. Many Observers, Ghosts and Wraiths got revealed by a scan of an observant player. In Starcraft 2 burrowed Roaches and Infestors can also be seen when moving underground. Stationary stealthed units are harder to spot, and burrowed ones are truly invisible unless in the presence of a detector.

*** Some have reported that [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|the Terran AI can do this]] ''[[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|while its comsat station is still under construction]]''.

** The AI in ''Warcraft'' and ''Warcraft 2'' both fall into this trope as well. In fact, both games feature Invisibility spells that are 100% useless when playing against a computer opponent.

* ''[[X-COM|X-COM: Enemy Unknown]]'': As soon as an alien sees ''one'' of your soldiers, their Ethereals and/or high-ranking Sectoids can make psionic attacks on ''any'' of your soldiers (although they will always target the weakest non-mindcontrolled soldier first). Also, after round 20 the enemy will know your positions automatically.

** Though the second case is understandable, if the last alien wasn't found after 20 turns it might be very boring to track him down, so if he knows where you are and comes for you it gets much better. The problem comes when you're going at an alien base or very large UFO that'll probably take more than 20 turns to clear...

*** Further inverted in DS once you realize that you could just switch to the bottom screen for the short time that the Ink is effecting you.

** Also in ''Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing''(With Banjo-Kazooie), the Pocket Rainbow, which works like the Banana Peel of Mario Kart, but instead, acts like a Gooper Blooper. This is also inverted by the Shooting Star, which makes the player's screen upside-down.

* ''[[City of Villains]]'' has two types of enemy ambushes: the first kind that simply run to the spot on the map where you were when you triggered it and will either run into you along the way or be waiting for you if you come back, and then the kind that make Stalkers scream bloody murder because they home in one you no matter where you go and see right through stealth even if they normally cannot.

** The second type was also a nightmare for Masterminds before the introduction of Bodyguard - the hostile mobs would zero in on the vulnerable player and ignore the expendable pets.

** This is subverted now. Instead of knowing where you or your traps are, the A.I. makes an educated guess on where you are when invisible. Turning invisible, and then using 1 movement point, it will know you are on one of the squares right next to your former location, and have to make a guess based on that, just like any human player would. The same applies to Traps, as they too are invisible, only here they generally fail at guessing, and always assume you placed the trap in a perfectly linear path in the direction you are facing (Which you don't nessesarily have to). Oddly enough, even in high-tier [[PvP]], the players are generally less intelligent than the A.I.'s anyway, as most Self-proclaimed "[["Stop Having Fun!" Guys|Pros]]" Generally assume [[Lowest Common Denominator|everyone are predictable idiots]].

* In [[Battle for Wesnoth]], subjecting the AI to [[Fog of War]] is not yet implemented. This is probably why the single-player campaigns don't use [[Fog of War]] most of the time.

** Ironically, Pegasus easily has the worst AI in the first GBA game, more than making up for his cheating by wasting cards, replacing his cards in play with inferior cards, and pretty much anything he can possibly do to give himself a disadvantage.

*** Pegasus is always extra blatant about this in any game he's in. This is most obvious in Duelist of the Roses. In this game terrain bonuses and penalties come into effect. Most of the [[A Is]] will walk into losing battles if you play your card face down on occasion, and can be bluffed some of the time. Pegasus will accurately calculate the attack of your facedown card after all effects, and make sound decisions based on it.

** In particular, this made the card Magical Hats utterly useless; the AI would always attack the monster you were trying to protect!

** It's not quite as bad in Oblivion; enemies actually have to see you, and there has to be a witness to the murder for you to get a bounty.

*** ...Except for a special condition for both of those. Enemies know exactly where you are even if you 1-shotted their friend with a Stealth shot from a bow (even if they were looking away from you and their friend AND there's no way they could see your hiding spot), and killing a guard gets you an automatic bounty even without a witness.

*** Like the Warcraft example above, the computer will always go for your least defended base without seeming to even know where it is before the attack.

* Blizzard really made an effort to prevent this in [[Starcraft II]]. On difficulties other than Insane, the AI does ''not'' see the entire map. But it ''does'' like to send scouts to every nook and cranny, and adapts to the units and buildings it sees.

** And other times when he is all alone and you come from behind a corner he waits long enough with firing so you could introduce yourself.

* Guards in ''[[Metal Gear]] Solid: Portable Ops'' are practically psychic. Even if you're playing as one of them, wearing the same face-obscuring uniform, with the same equipment, if ''anything'' suspicious happens, such as an explosion, they will instantly know you were behind it, even if it would be completely impossible for any of them to have seen you plant the bomb.

* Oddly inverted in the obscure real-time strategy game [[Metal Marines]], at least in the PC version. A side loses when all three of its "bases" are destroyed. Normally, the AI will ruthlessly attack any assets of yours it "discovers", but it will completely ignore any base hidden under a camouflage unit until one of its missiles, [[AI Roulette|which it fires at random locations on your map]], happens to hit its location. A human player, on the other hand, will recognize the distinctive camouflage unit icon and immediately target it with a missile. This particular bit of [[Artificial Stupidity]] turns the camouflage unit into a complete [[Game Breaker]]; you can just build a single missile launcher, fire it, let it get destroyed, and repeat this process until the AI no army left, because it never quite gets around to actually killing you.

* In ''[[Soldier of Fortune]]: Payback'''s final stage, "Club Evolution", the dancefloor's disco lights are blindingly bright to you, but they don't faze the [[Mooks]] one iota.

* ''[[Operation Flashpoint]]'' has enemies that will shoot you. Without any chance to see even one pixel of them even if you look exactly in the direction you see the bullet coming from. This starts going downhill but continues anyway in the later games - it isn't until ''[[Arm A]] II: Operation Arrowhead'' that the AI finally plays fair (which is rather ironic, given that the expansion's [[Qurac|Takistan]] doesn't have as much foliage for the AI to magically see you through anyway).

** In ''[[Operation Flashpoint]]'', this trope is inverted for the effect "the AI sees perfectly through the night". Any AI soldier (except those wearing [[Night Vision Goggles]]) has his aiming and vision capacity very handicaped in night time... even when standing in a well-lit town or under a clear and starry sky (where a human player will see a lot better ''without'' [[Night Vision Goggles]]).

* A video-yet-not-video game example comes from ''[[Re Boot]]''. Whenever put into a game, Bob is able to use [[Do-Anything Robot|Glitch]] to scan the game and tell him every facet of the game he otherwise should not know. In short short, Bob (the computer) is a cheating bastard.

** Perhaps as a nod to this, one of the most frequently used Glitch powers is a scanner pinpointing the exact location of the user (i.e: the human player) and his progress.

* In [[STALKER]]: Shadow of Chernobyl, once you blow your stealth, all nearby enemies will know where you are. Fortunately, this is fixed in just about every [[Game Mod|mod]] out there, except for Oblivion Lost, when the AI get [[Improbable Aiming Skills|incredible aim]], and can see you from a hundred meters away in pitch darkness.

** Though it is somewhat averted, seeing how if you open fire on a group of enemies, but flank around, for example, the building that the they are in and enter through the back, they'll still be scrambling around near the front, trying to find you. In fact, when facing multiple enemies in close quarters, using this tactic is practically a requirement.

* If you blow your cover in ''[[Splinter Cell]]'', the enemies in the level will all know your position.

** ''Conviction'' refined this; enemies now fire and search Sam's last known position, allowing him to sneak around and flank them. Sam himself gains "Sonic Goggles" that let ''him'' see enemies through walls. {{spoiler|In the very level he gets them, he faces foes armed with similar devices. Uh-oh.}}

* The hostiles in [[Minecraft]] are like this, but only after they've already spotted you the normal way. Then they can track your movement through any kind of wall and even [[Action Bomb|explode]] from behind a thin wall. Results in [[Artificial Stupidity]] in that transparent blocks like glass count as walls, so mobs cannot see you through glass unless you've already been spotted through just air.

** Played straight with Spiders and their poisonous relatives Cave Spiders. They can sense you through walls.

** In the sequel, since the Omar are a [[Hive Mind]], if you kill one, the entire race turns against you.

* A particularly egregious example involves information ''only the player'' is supposed to have. It's bad enough the cops in [[Grand Theft Auto IV]] already manage to appear within their own line-of-sight of you just as you're getting out of their "arrest zone", but it becomes even more blatant when they appear ''specifically'' on a GPS route you've laid out for yourself.