Accounting for the Interestingly Tuned AI Parameters in Brink
In this post, I propose a potential explanation for the ‘interesting’ design decisions made by Splash Damage in regards to the implementation of the Artificial Intelligence of the ally and opponent computer-controlled players (i.e. bots) in Brink…
…where I use the term ‘interesting’ as a euphemism for ill-conceived and poorly executed, as judged by the “broader gaming community”
…where the “broader gaming community” represents the majority of non-super-hardcore video game players who hail from FPS franchises such as Halo, Call of Duty, etc. including the members of the press who review video games, but necessarily excluding (solely by virtue of this definition) elite gamers who themselves include but are not limited to the testers and developers at Splash Damage.
i.e.
broader gaming community = a + b - c - d - e
a. First Person Shooter fans familiar with the FPS mechanics in franchises such as Halo, CoD, etc.
b. Members of the Press required to review new commercial properties by virtue of their profession
c. Elite (“Super-Hardcore”) FPS Gamers (excluding testers and developers at Splash Damage)
d. Developers at Splash Damage
e. Testers at Splash Damage who worked on the development of Brink
Defining What People Mean When They Criticize Brink’s AI as “Poor”:
Richard Ham, Creative Director of Brink, gave an excellent interview with Machinima’s Hutch, where Richard explained Splash Damage’s rationale in defining and setting the parameters that govern the way that AI (ally and opponent bots) behave in Brink.
[Part 1 (starts at 36:04); Part 2]
Before we get to that, I’ll attempt to summarize what people seem to consider sub-par about the AI in Brink. The following list is not comprehensive.
- Ally AI players will stand around “doing nothing”.
- Ally AI players do not seem to support the player in completion of primary objectives when the game timer has more than two minutes remaining on the clock.
- Ally AI players labour excessively over the achievement of trivial secondary objectives [i.e. Command Post capturing]
- Ally AI players make a predictable and concentrated effort to complete the primary mission objective when roughly less than two minutes are remaining on the objective game clock.
- Ally AI medics will go to heroic lengths to traverse the entire map, completely ignoring objectives, their teammates, and enemies with the sole purpose of tossing a downed human-controlled player a revive syringe.
- Enemy AI players have poor situational awareness but have uncanny response time and accuracy as soon as they are fired upon by a human-controlled player.
- AI players sometimes bug out and get stuck on objects.
With the exception of item 7, which represents a bug that I have not been privy to, every “behaviour” in the above list is governed by a set of parameters that Splash Damage defines in a “configuration text file” which can be tweaked, updated, and modified at any time according to Splash Damage’s discretion and does not, supposedly, require the release of additional patches.
If you don’t buy this explanation up front, and insist that the ‘stupid’ AI behaviours are the result of incompetent programming, then consider the following:
The enemy AI has no problem completing primary objectives and otherwise overcoming the combined efforts of you and your AI allies. Furthermore, the enemy AI ramps up in difficulty when additional human-controlled players are added to a team.
When one starts to understand that the AI behaviours that initially seem manifest of poor programming are, in fact, the culmination of defined parameters and deliberate game design choices, one can appreciate why the manner in which the AI has been tuned is ‘interesting’ as opposed to “terrible”, “pathetic”, “broken”, “inexcusable”, etc.
Richard Ham states that many of these choices were implemented with the intention of providing players with the experience of “being a hero” on their team, as opposed to having the game seemingly play itself on auto-pilot while the AI complete primary objectives for the player.
Although this is a noble intention, the implementation does not achieve this lofty design goal in instances where the skill of the player is unable to compensate for the disadvantage that the human player is subject to by virtue of the nerfed ally AI.
That is, Brink is quite clearly a team-focused objective-based first person shooter that relies on cooperation and coordination with your teammates.
As such, in the absence of solid game-sense and significant FPS skill (not to mention the cooperation and coordination necessitated by Brink’s game design), a human-controlled player is at a loss to compensate for the disadvantage that they are placed at by virtue of Brink’s AI design. The result is more of a frustrating experience for players than a rewarding one, at least for a significant component of Brink’s player-base. Compensating for deliberately inadequate ally AI just isn’t fun for this demographic.
Furthermore, these design choices are obscured from the player and come across as the result of a far more endemic problem among video games: poorly designed and programmed AI*.
* - As opposed to Brink’s robust but apparently toned down ally AI
Accounting for the Interestingly Tuned AI Parameters in Brink
So, how can we account for the disparity between the intention of Splash Damage’s developers and the actual gameplay experience in the release version of Brink?
Well, some believe that we lack the programming language to describe a perfect world in Brink… however, I have a different explanation.
I propose that members of Splash Damage and its testers didn’t properly accommodate the skill variance among gamers, and that they tuned and balanced the game for the limited player-base that they had at their disposal.
The player base that I am referring to consists of the developers of Splash Damage and the testers who worked on Brink. This player base is a skewed representation of the gaming population, and reflects a pool of gamers who possess, on average, markedly higher levels of both game sense and skill than the broader gaming community.
In conjunction with their own biases of familiarity (i.e. they know the Brink gameplay mechanics inside and out) and according lack of an objective frame of reference, they couldn’t properly anticipate or account for the relative lack of game sense and skill of that the remainder of gamers would have in regards to Brink. Brink is a complicated game, after all. Likewise, Brink has a number of elements that have attracted a relatively wide variety of gamer segments who initially found Brink compelling for one reason or another and who ended up playing (or being mandated to commercially review) the game despite not having backgrounds as super-hardcore FPS players (i.e. Splash Damage’s videogame developer lineage).
How Have AI Design Decisions Affected Brink’s Reception Among Gamers?
The result is that Brink has been met with harsh criticisms of it’s AI.
However, as Richard Ham has stated, these AI choices have apparently been more of a reflection of game design rather than the limitations of the AI programming itself.
What’s Next For the AI in Brink
Now that this wide variance in game sense and skill among players has been recognized, hopefully Splash Damage will make the appropriate adjustments to more-successfully cater to a wider audience… which was supposedly their intention from the outset.
Richard Ham has stated as much.
As an obvious starting point, allied teammate AI, in one implementation, could be beefed up on the easier campaign gameplay settings. That is, easier game modes should allow AI controlled allies to place an emphasis on completing primary objectives provided that they receive an appropriate level of human-controlled player support or involvement.
I trust that making these improvements to Brink’s AI is far easier said than done, but the current implementation of AI in Brink seems to be inadequate in the eyes of a wide variety of players.
Whether or not this is considered ‘game-breaking’ in the eyes of said players depends on where their gaming preferences lie, be they multiplayer, co-op, or single-player (in conjunction with their aforementioned FPS skill and game-sense).
If you made it this far, thanks for your time and consideration.