Call of Duty: Black Ops AI Complaints

So far enjoying the single campaign in Black Ops. I have an i7 sitting in my basement waiting to be assembled and I think the frame rates in this game will finally give me the motivation to finish it up. It’s playable with my Core 2 Duo e8400, but does get a bit choppy on some of the big set piece maps. Hoping to get a little zombie in today co-op and see how it is. It’s so-so single player but I can’t see to hold the waves of the undead off very well by myself.

My one complaint with the actual game play so far is the variable stupidity of the AI. Sometimes they’re deadly killing machines, sometimes it appears that the militaries of the world are recruiting from the line of folks who got the “Most Improved Student” award year after year in school. I’ve got a few screenshots of my AI teammates running past an enemy soldier who is standing out in the open, never seeing them and in one cases standing back to back with them. I also find it odd that when I’m in a group of soldiers, the enemy combatants always single me out with their fire. To be fair I noticed the exact same thing in the new Medal of Honor.

It seems to me that with all the advances in games over the years we’d have better AI. I remember being all impressed with the AI in Half Life back in the day and admittedly we have far better AI than we did in the days of Doom but there’s still far too much of the “send waves of enemies at you blindly shooting for you to mow down” strategy on the part of game developers. It’s seen in almost ever shooter out there. I realise that programming AI that reacts somewhat intelligently to all of the things that a wide variety of human players are capable of doing in the different enviroments of the game is very difficult but shouldn’t they at least be more than canon fodder? While it is entertaining to mow down enemy soldiers it just doesn’t feel very realistic. Your average human being isn’t going to be just charging at you and standing out in the open during a firefight to act as a bullet sponge. Come on developers!

I’ll have to see if I can get an interview with someone who develops AIs.