Fiend AI

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Ok so, I know no one will give a crap about this probably, but I want to remind people about the Fiend/Chort AI bug in the game and that it's still an issue on the PS4. Fiends and Chorts in the game are terribly passive, doing next to nothing. PC users can get a mod for it but I hope that someday maybe in the distant future, CDPR will resolve it for the consoles too. Maybe, I don't know.

Again, it's for the PS4. Also, I realise this belongs in the gameplay category and not here but I'm not allowed to post there yet so I thought posting here is better than nothing. Hope someone will get to fixing this, one day.
 
I've also had them suddenly stop reacting during a fight. It would stalk around and leap aside if I attacked it, but never attack.

It can happen on all platforms, but it seems to be completely random. In my own experience (on PC), if I wound up with a very calm and understanding chort or fiend, I would reload and re-engage a few times. Eventually, it would start attacking again.

Also, blasting it with a light tap of Aard seems to piss them off, sometimes. One or two of those will sometimes make it respond with the leap-slash attack, and then it goes back to proper aggro.

As stated, it seems wholly random.
 
I've also had them suddenly stop reacting during a fight. It would stalk around and leap aside if I attacked it, but never attack.

It can happen on all platforms, but it seems to be completely random. In my own experience (on PC), if I wound up with a very calm and understanding chort or fiend, I would reload and re-engage a few times. Eventually, it would start attacking again.

Also, blasting it with a light tap of Aard seems to piss them off, sometimes. One or two of those will sometimes make it respond with the leap-slash attack, and then it goes back to proper aggro.

As stated, it seems wholly random.
From what I've read, the bug was introduced in the Blood and Wine update for the game. On PC I hear there's a mod that reverts the Fiend/Chort AI to how it was before the patch but on consoles we're stuck more or less. Still, I searched the issue again and someone had replied about reloading the game multiple times (maybe it was you? I don't remember screen names)

I'll try it next time I'm off to fight Morvud and see if maybe for the first time I can actually fight a decent Fiend. Come to think of it, Fiends and Chorts aren't the only monsters I've found problematic. Leshens also appear to be a bit underwhelming though not as passive as the aforementioned Fiends. Though I suppose it could be on my end because I usually end up fighting them a few levels ahead. The only reason why it caught my attention is because I'm playing on Blood and Broken Bones difficulty so I expected something more brutal.
 
This is what I can tell you for sure (and I play 100% vanilla for gameplay mechanics, so it should be the same across all platforms):

1.) Fiends and Chorts are problematic. Comes and goes. Not a big issue, but I've never had a playthrough where it didn't happen at least a few times. On my end, I have always been able to coax a real fight out of them by saving before entering the mission area, then reloading if the monster becomes a pacifist.

2.) I do remember it becoming a blanket issue at one point, then becoming far less regular, but still there. (Don't remember when it happened, but Blood and Wine release sounds good. :p)

3.) Leshens, I've never had any issue with. Normally, I'm dancing around, quite busy, while dodging its stupid root-dash attack and fighting off 4 or 5 wolves.

4.) Blood and Broken Bones is my preferred difficulty (for ALL of The Witcher games, actually!) In TW3, levels 1-10 levels will be fairly brutal unless players are very good with the combat system. Levels 10-20 will remain challenging, especially for bosses. Around levels 20-30 (if the player builds an effective character with complimentary gear), Geralt starts becoming the boss. I like this, as it speeds up the later parts of the game. (However, HoS and B&W can still be challenging -- especially boss fights, even at levels 40+.)

5.) Death March is sort of annoying to me. I like challenges, but I don't like drawn-out sponging. DM basically feels like it's wasting my time and trifling with me. I think people will like this if they enjoyed '80s and '90s arcade-mode bosses: the enemy has 5,000 HP, and you have 10 HP. If that's you're bag, DM will not disappoint. :D
 
This is what I can tell you for sure (and I play 100% vanilla for gameplay mechanics, so it should be the same across all platforms):

1.) Fiends and Chorts are problematic. Comes and goes. Not a big issue, but I've never had a playthrough where it didn't happen at least a few times. On my end, I have always been able to coax a real fight out of them by saving before entering the mission area, then reloading if the monster becomes a pacifist.

2.) I do remember it becoming a blanket issue at one point, then becoming far less regular, but still there. (Don't remember when it happened, but Blood and Wine release sounds good. :p)

3.) Leshens, I've never had any issue with. Normally, I'm dancing around, quite busy, while dodging its stupid root-dash attack and fighting off 4 or 5 wolves.

4.) Blood and Broken Bones is my preferred difficulty (for ALL of The Witcher games, actually!) In TW3, levels 1-10 levels will be fairly brutal unless players are very good with the combat system. Levels 10-20 will remain challenging, especially for bosses. Around levels 20-30 (if the player builds an effective character with complimentary gear), Geralt starts becoming the boss. I like this, as it speeds up the later parts of the game. (However, HoS and B&W can still be challenging -- especially boss fights, even at levels 40+.)

5.) Death March is sort of annoying to me. I like challenges, but I don't like drawn-out sponging. DM basically feels like it's wasting my time and trifling with me. I think people will like this if they enjoyed '80s and '90s arcade-mode bosses: the enemy has 5,000 HP, and you have 10 HP. If that's you're bag, DM will not disappoint. :D
I never tried reloading to get the Fiend AI to work but I'll do it now. Blood and Broken Bones consistently made monsters more challenging, even 4 Alghouls can be a handful to deal with unless you know dodging. So far, I agree that it's probably the best difficulty to play the game if you're experienced at it, no less because you don't heal when meditating which made the game less enjoyable.

I'll only play Death March for the trophy since I'm aiming to take this game to 100% but I'll see how it feels when I get there. The issue with Fiend AI is what troubles me the most but if I can get them once to work properly through reloading, I'll be glad, I suppose. It's understandable that CDPR has better things to do now than spend time on a small issue like that, but I'll be hopeful for the future nonetheless. At least the graphical issues the game had since the PS4 Pro update seem to have lessened somewhat now, and I'm thankful for that.
 
1.) Fiends and Chorts are problematic. Comes and goes. Not a big issue, but I've never had a playthrough where it didn't happen at least a few times. On my end, I have always been able to coax a real fight out of them by saving before entering the mission area, then reloading if the monster becomes a pacifist.

No effect. Tried it on 3 fiends: the one on the Isle of Mists, the one during Bald Mountain, and Morvudd during his contract. At least 3 reloads every time, no Fiend was ever aggressive, remained passive all the time, and your suggestion of using the Aard sign didn't work either.

Perhaps the issue is different on PS4. The only way I have of making Fiends put up a fight is continuously attack them so they will counterattack. Thanks for your help but I guess I'll just have to keep hoping CDPR will fix it someday, though monsters coming to our world seems more probable.
 
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For me everything was aggresive including fiends. But I played on a death march so maybe that is why
 
For me everything was aggresive including fiends. But I played on a death march so maybe that is why
It's a bug, this means it won't happen to everyone. Even with the most disastrously buggy games, say Fallout: New Vegas, there were people who were able to play them without experiencing many bugs. Rare, but such is the nature of bugs. Chances are you got lucky.
 
It's a bug, this means it won't happen to everyone. Even with the most disastrously buggy games, say Fallout: New Vegas, there were people who were able to play them without experiencing many bugs. Rare, but such is the nature of bugs. Chances are you got lucky.

Yeah, definitely. This is probably one of the most common bugs to encounter.

Sorry to hear it's being so stubborn for you. I have no way of knowing exactly what's causing it, but I can confirm that it has popped up quite a bit over time. Sadly, as work on TW3 is finished, I doubt it will be addressed any further. :( It's just going to be one of those blemishes.

The only other suggestion I can think to offer is to ensure that your console has as many resources free as possible. Try playing offline, clean out the HDD until you have at least 20% free space available, ensure there's nothing else happening in the background, etc. My best guess for what causes the issue is that something gets caught in the RAM. Sort of like how pathfinding can start to fall apart in certain games if there's not enough RAM allocated. Having more readily available may help prevent the issue. Just a guess, but it can't hurt to try.
 
Gotta say it's a joke at this point this bug has never been addressed.

There's mods that fix this on pc, so them saying they can't find a fix is not a valid excuse.

It's on pc, xbox, and playstation. You'd think they'd give a shit about something like this, but I guess not.
 
To be able to squash a bug one must be able to find it first, or in this case reliably reproduce it. I've competed TW3 plus both expansions 3 times and I've never had a passive mob, let alone fiend or chort. So what causes it? If it's fine for one but not for the other how do you track down the cause? And development and bug squashing on TW3 stopped a few years ago - it's 6 years old now, plus I daresay CDPR have their hands full with CP2077.
 
No excuse when there are mods that fix it and with the current state of cyberpunk, one cannot say they put all their effort into it. The game is a half baked, that failed to deliver on at least half of the promised content and features.

It would literally take me a few hrs to implement the fix, and others like the roach eye glitch for carapace, or the rolling down stairs bug, or the lady of lake sword poking out beneath the sheath.

Legally, they can take and use mods without giving credit as the ip is cdpr property and mods use cdpr code to function. I know many would not mind and would gladly give up code for a better experience... Hence why they make them for free in the first place.
 
No excuse when there are mods that fix it and with the current state of cyberpunk, one cannot say they put all their effort into it. The game is a half baked, that failed to deliver on at least half of the promised content and features.

It would literally take me a few hrs to implement the fix, and others like the roach eye glitch for carapace, or the rolling down stairs bug, or the lady of lake sword poking out beneath the sheath.

Legally, they can take and use mods without giving credit as the ip is cdpr property and mods use cdpr code to function. I know many would not mind and would gladly give up code for a better experience... Hence why they make them for free in the first place.

Modders very often do manage to create fixes for things before official fixes come out. But they can just as easily create other problems. What "seems to work 100% in the mod" may actually be causing bigger issues under the hood, though it may take a while to manifest or may only affect certain system configs. The thing is: modders do not have access to the source code. Therefore, they have no way of knowing if one of their solutions will actually wind up introducing problems down the road. This is very often why what seems to be such "obvious" fixes are never used by a studio, and some alternative method of correcting the issue takes more time to develop.

At still other times, the issues a mod addresses simply are not a priority. A studio will need to devote manpower to much more serious things first. And those things take time.

Overall, I'd rather celebrate a fix or workaround that someone comes up with as an achievement, and offer thanks to that person for contributing...rather than somehow try to blame a studio for not coming up the same thing faster. Studios are not thousands of people fiddling with one or two things in their spare time. (Even huge, complex mods don't come close to the sheer number of man-hours that went into creating the tremendous amount of code that such a "huge" mod was based on.)
 
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