Anyone who has played a group-style video game always complains about the same thing: stupid allies. It’s interesting to me that the engines that run the ally behaviours is called artificial intelligence, where in fact it’s more like actual stupidity.

It’s an ultimate paradox in video games: enemies supermen gifted with X-ray vision, super-hearing and eagle-eye targetting and you’re stuck with bozos who barely know which end of the gun to hold.

And then I played Left 4 Dead. 

Of all the video game’s accolades, nobody mentions HOW BLOODY GOOD the ally AI is. It saves you, covers you, backs you up and follows your lead like no other game AI, without giving explicit orders (Rainbow Six, take note.)

This conclusion came to me while playing Left 4 Dead online, where my allies were playing like complete and utter morons, and I quickly realized that not only was the ally AI in Left 4 Dead quite good, it was smarter than humans. What a revelation.

Now if only games with 4 players on consoles with 4 controller ports would let me decide if I want to play 4 player split screen, instead of limiting me to 2 (I’m also looking at you, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games).

Tags: geekery, online gaming

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.