I completed Drakengard for PS2 a couple days ago. The game was janky and bullshit, but it also gave an equal amount of opportunities to cheese. I accidentally broke the ai for final boss (B).
I played this air battle pretty aggressively. While chasing the boss I found a position diagonally behind where I can keep it stuck flying in a big circle. I could just eat its healthbar in peace while the boss was confused and doing nothing.
So, anyone got interesting experiences in breaking enemy behavior?
In Horizon: Zero Dawn you come upon a quarry and a quest asks you to go in and… I can’t remember. Save someone? Check what’s going on? When I stumbled upon this quest, I was severely underpowered and could get that boss down in that quarry.
But I soon found out that said enemy wasn’t able to pathfind its way to the way leading down to the quarry although it was still considered part of the arena. Also there was much cover there.
In the end, I stuck to said path, sat behind a rock and just put a fuck ton of arrows onto the boss until all my resources and its healthbar were depleted. Took me way too long, lol.
H:ZD and the sequel has their AI fenced in an invisible fence, but you can still attack from outside the fence. They’ll run towards you, stop at the fence, walk back, repeat. So easy to get through most of the open world this way, and broke the games for me.
For most encounters in the open world that even makes sense. You don’t want enemies chasing players across half of the map. Especially if you can have enemies that are faster than the player. Fence them so that they will eventually give up if a player runs away. This also helps if a player doesn’t want to constantly combat and would have to constantly sneak through the map (or exclusively fast travel).
But two points to make this less cheeseable:
for bosses - make sure that there are spots that are relatively safe to e.g. craft ammunition, catch a breath, develop a plan, scan its weak spots,… but don’t make it 100% safe. The boss may be able to snipe you from some areas, so you might be moving around some rock to constantly to stay out of line of sight or such. Find an „excuse“ on how to make the whole map accessible to the attacks of the boss and (at least for real bosses) how to lock the player in. Make the auto save before the lock down, not after.
for other enemies: don’t fence them in a specific spot and create an invisible border. Better: define a point on the map as their home. They may chase the player, but randomly decide at which range X±Y% from that point they rather return home. Also randomize the time it takes for them to loose interest in you after loosing LOS. That way it’s not an obvious invisible border you can abuse- more like a zone in which they will probably stop hunting you. Maybe even combine that with other data like- is the player generally sticking around and trying to kite the enemies to some location (and trying to cheese combat/an objective) or is the player just running straight away indicating they stumbled upon the enemy but have no interest in fighting.
In the end - a game is not realistic but a kind of simulation. Do what looks cool and feels right and is fun. Not what is realistic - if you were to sneak into a camp of the army, they probably won’t stop searching you after a few seconds when you slip around a corner after they saw you…
Oh, I totalt agree, but when you then target them, they shouldn’t be blocked by a fence, but run after you. If you run away, then they should give up eventually, unless you target them again, but in HZD, it was just too visible and easy to use.
It looks dumb, but being able to lure enemies way out of their intended spots could also cause issues, depending on the game.