Even worse than bugs. It's ridiculously bad. It's as if professors of art met with gurus of sound, masters of writing (well, maybe not masters because W3's writing was better, this is good but far from perfect) and a bunch of random coders found on the street, partially AI interns that never touched computers before they got the job. And the overhyped announcements tried to persuade us this will be an entirely different experience when it comes to gaming, city living its own life, made by Einsteins of AI. But the AI is worse than in some 2000s games that I recall, especially when it comes to city crowd. Let me explain in detail.
Quests
AI in quests is probably the best AI in the game, however, it's still quite lackluster. My observations:
- Blue star events are terrible, often you're driving somewhere, you stop to prevent something that apparently needs immediate care. Most often it's about rescuing some people in distress. So you kill/incapacitate their and you'd assume you're getting something for that, right? Nope! The saved NPCs don't even care about thanking you. They run away or stay in "I'm scared" position forever until you leave.
- Friendly characters during missions make absolutely no sense in some situations. Example - the last act 1 mission, escaping the hotel with Jackie. If you try to be stealthy, you can often see Jackie running right in front of enemies without any reaction from them. While on top he loudly makes snarky comments about you being visible...
- Enemies can be blind at times, especially if you're fighting with melee weapons. They can hide around corners and do absolutely nothing until you come next to them and hit their head with a baseball bat. At other times they can spot you through smallest holes (e.g. opened car door) from like 50 metres.
- They are also often not adjusted to the quests. For example, there's a quest where you need to plant a tracker in Russian fixer's car and it is said that the docks workers need to be extra careful. Yet they work like all regular enemies - they can stand in one place and watch in completely irrelevant direction.
- Incapacitation includes short ache cues for opponents to react to, but they rarely do. You can incapacitate someone right next to 2 other people looking in a different direction and they might stay unaware. Sound cues in general seem to be mostly ignored.
- Some quests definitely feel like they should be on a timer/more tight timer. E.g. the guy with broken penis implant, I drove 2 times in the wrong direction and we were still on time, maybe there's a timer but it's too loose if he's really in pain.
Traffic
Vehicles are far from smart. Your car can get to you from anywhere but the rest can't even handle basic road interactions. Many games had better logic for them.
- Blocking entire crossroad with a vehicle in the middle is the complete opposite of expected realism.
- Getting off the predefined path is solved by the simpliest algorithm possible - moving back and forth until they manage to drive in a straight line on any available path. Here's the funniest result I found, a car trying to end its existence by banging its front against a wall, maybe it has cybepsychosis:
- If you flip a car on its side/back it explodes, I don't think that's how physics work. The people inside of it get out of it right before explosion and die.
- Stealing a car results most often in scared people not only not trying to get it back but also waiting next to it to be ran over by you. Police never reacts to stealing a car, even if they're close, I guess it's a crime not worth reporting/looking at?
- There are no public communication or public service vehicles on the roads. More of an issue with world building than AI, but including it because it ruins the immersion. You only see some drones from time to time, but buses don't exist and police cars/fire trucks/food delivery etc. are apparently unnecessary for the city to function.
- Other cars apparently always obey law, even though there are so many gangs and thefts of vans (side quests).
Crowd
People walking around the town are definitely the most ridiculus part. Nothing is good apart from some rare extraordinary events, like someone jumping off a bridge. Here are the worst aspects:
- You can't truly interact with almost anything in the city. Food stands don't sell you food except chosen one because... who knows since the dialogue doesn't really tell you. And of course other random people almost never have anything interesting to tell you either.
- You can punch someone and they don't really react. Other people are panicking though.
- Hitting people with non-lethal weapons seem to kill them regardless of whether they're women or buff men.
- You can kill someone walking lonely in a totally empty place otherwise and someone will instantly report that crime and police will use teleportaton techniques to get to you. Yet they can't use this type of techniques in fights or to catch crimes they know about...
- People that have different type of routines, e.g. repairing something, often keep doing it forever.
- Routines are very unrealistic anyways, I don't think I've ever seen anyone entering a car or building other than a club or shop you can access.
- Gangsters on streets never seem to react to anything that isn't you. I only managed to have them interact by like forcing some random car to drive into one of them while trying to get back on path (see vehicles above). And they shoot that person instead of me causing the chaos but apparently it wasn't dead after few shots since it still was struggling. But it died to the first baseball bat hit of mine
I really hope at least some of those will get fixed in January's patch. But then they had 8 (!) years to develop a better AI so I doubt it will get fixed much in any near feature.
Quests
AI in quests is probably the best AI in the game, however, it's still quite lackluster. My observations:
- Blue star events are terrible, often you're driving somewhere, you stop to prevent something that apparently needs immediate care. Most often it's about rescuing some people in distress. So you kill/incapacitate their and you'd assume you're getting something for that, right? Nope! The saved NPCs don't even care about thanking you. They run away or stay in "I'm scared" position forever until you leave.
- Friendly characters during missions make absolutely no sense in some situations. Example - the last act 1 mission, escaping the hotel with Jackie. If you try to be stealthy, you can often see Jackie running right in front of enemies without any reaction from them. While on top he loudly makes snarky comments about you being visible...
- Enemies can be blind at times, especially if you're fighting with melee weapons. They can hide around corners and do absolutely nothing until you come next to them and hit their head with a baseball bat. At other times they can spot you through smallest holes (e.g. opened car door) from like 50 metres.
- They are also often not adjusted to the quests. For example, there's a quest where you need to plant a tracker in Russian fixer's car and it is said that the docks workers need to be extra careful. Yet they work like all regular enemies - they can stand in one place and watch in completely irrelevant direction.
- Incapacitation includes short ache cues for opponents to react to, but they rarely do. You can incapacitate someone right next to 2 other people looking in a different direction and they might stay unaware. Sound cues in general seem to be mostly ignored.
- Some quests definitely feel like they should be on a timer/more tight timer. E.g. the guy with broken penis implant, I drove 2 times in the wrong direction and we were still on time, maybe there's a timer but it's too loose if he's really in pain.
Traffic
Vehicles are far from smart. Your car can get to you from anywhere but the rest can't even handle basic road interactions. Many games had better logic for them.
- Blocking entire crossroad with a vehicle in the middle is the complete opposite of expected realism.
- Getting off the predefined path is solved by the simpliest algorithm possible - moving back and forth until they manage to drive in a straight line on any available path. Here's the funniest result I found, a car trying to end its existence by banging its front against a wall, maybe it has cybepsychosis:
- Stealing a car results most often in scared people not only not trying to get it back but also waiting next to it to be ran over by you. Police never reacts to stealing a car, even if they're close, I guess it's a crime not worth reporting/looking at?
- There are no public communication or public service vehicles on the roads. More of an issue with world building than AI, but including it because it ruins the immersion. You only see some drones from time to time, but buses don't exist and police cars/fire trucks/food delivery etc. are apparently unnecessary for the city to function.
- Other cars apparently always obey law, even though there are so many gangs and thefts of vans (side quests).
Crowd
People walking around the town are definitely the most ridiculus part. Nothing is good apart from some rare extraordinary events, like someone jumping off a bridge. Here are the worst aspects:
- You can't truly interact with almost anything in the city. Food stands don't sell you food except chosen one because... who knows since the dialogue doesn't really tell you. And of course other random people almost never have anything interesting to tell you either.
- You can punch someone and they don't really react. Other people are panicking though.
- Hitting people with non-lethal weapons seem to kill them regardless of whether they're women or buff men.
- You can kill someone walking lonely in a totally empty place otherwise and someone will instantly report that crime and police will use teleportaton techniques to get to you. Yet they can't use this type of techniques in fights or to catch crimes they know about...
- People that have different type of routines, e.g. repairing something, often keep doing it forever.
- Routines are very unrealistic anyways, I don't think I've ever seen anyone entering a car or building other than a club or shop you can access.
- Gangsters on streets never seem to react to anything that isn't you. I only managed to have them interact by like forcing some random car to drive into one of them while trying to get back on path (see vehicles above). And they shoot that person instead of me causing the chaos but apparently it wasn't dead after few shots since it still was struggling. But it died to the first baseball bat hit of mine
I really hope at least some of those will get fixed in January's patch. But then they had 8 (!) years to develop a better AI so I doubt it will get fixed much in any near feature.
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