Enemy behaviour

Frankly, I don't care all that much about enemy AI in the new Doom. What I do care about is their behaviour (ok, some of this might be AI all the same - I'm not an AI specialist).
I'm tired of seeing id's typical human soldier enemy be killed in less than two seconds as soon as they begin to fight something slightly tougher than themselves, i.e. a former human soldier fighting an imp, - and they always do it the same stupid way: The former human just walks up close to the imp so that the imp can rip the ex-human apart. The former human doesn't even take advantage of their ability to instantly harm their enemies at the distance.

This is the kind of behaviour I wanna see improved: I want to see former humans try and keep a certain distance to their enemies. If their enemies move closer, they'll just try and move further away, which is exactly the opposite of the melee enemies who should just use the same old straightforward behaviour (but spiced up with some flanking tactics and such).
Also, I'd like to see some of the monsters use better tactics when fighting one another than just run up to their enemy and slashing away at them. That is, any non-melee enemy should typically try and take advantage of their long range attacks. Those who have an additional melee attack should occasionally move up close to throw a slash at their enemy, but they should quickly move away again to avoid retalliation.

I don't know how much of all this goes under the "behaviour" label and how much of it goes under "AI". AFAIK, AI is the enemies abilities to actually "think" for themselves, whereas what I refer to as "behaviour" is more like the tactics the enemies employ.

Anyway, just thought I would sketch up what I at least hope how "Doom 3's" enemies would react and "behave".

About all monsters: yes, of course they have to have some unique behaivior.

Imps (if there will be any...) can not only kill and hang around - they can hunt...

Deamons stalk for some meat curiosly snarking and URGGGHKing...

Some of the monsters should use advantage of the dark areas (they can also fear the light and go insane from turning on the lamps!!!)...

Some types of monsters could be passive and geek when they are alone -and they can go skirmish when they are in pack...

About ex-humans: nahh, they should walk to the enemy without any fear, loosing limbs and etc. Its cool psycho attack - they just walk to you shooting and whispering, without any fear, sorrow and other human crap...

wasted said:

About ex-humans: nahh, they should walk to the enemy without any fear, loosing limbs and etc. Its cool psycho attack - they just walk to you shooting and whispering, without any fear, sorrow and other human crap...

Naw, I'd rather reserve that one for the zombies (the REAL zombies - not the regular former humans, but the zombie displayed in the Macworld movie - if it's really going to be in the game).

Former humans should still behave somewhat human (but without emotions of course) - I'm tired of dumb zombie humans.

The actions of the former humans would be greatly influenced by the definition of what exactly they are. If they are zombies (dead reanimated for any reason) then the basest desires of self gatification (eating, namely) will take precedent over the conscious thought to plan ahead and use sense in battle. Think of it like trying to work on something when you have something else you can't get off your mind. Since survival is also one of the key human desires, I doubt that a zombie would walk straight into it's demise, but it would (seemingly) needed to be "jolted" out of it's hunger mode in order for it to realize there is danger and to act accordingly. This is, however, based entirely on the assumption that zombies still maintain the concept of pain.

Now, if former humans are merely possessed, then we have to ask, by what? If there is a singly consciousness controlling all of the former humans (Spider Mastermind), then concept of a collective consciousness comes into the picture. This allows the single master entity to flawlessly coordinate all of the sub-units to allow for certain "traps", and the ability to outsmart the player. This, however raises the question of the psychological state of the player as he fights off the influence of the master entity. If each former human is possessed by a single spirit, then the survival instinct (in theory) is still intact. The intelligence level is also fairly high, but not as high as in the "master entity" theory. Also, the singularity and the "battle for control" issues would prevent any higher level of cooperation between former humans, and may lead to some loss of individual coordination representing the situations in which the human begins to momentarily win back control of the body.

That's all for now... I'll get into general monster actions later.

Ok, there (in DOOM3) could be survived marines/ tech-personell/ colonists/ etc. which:

1. Went insane - they are fight for them selfs only, using all combat expirience that they have. If so, they should be a really though - something like bots (of course they will scream and damn everything around...). BTW, insane techs can deal lot of problems - remember Dr. Veir, from EH!!!

2. Were controlled (by Psionic waves; infestation; possession & etc.) - MasterMind can programm his minions to do some special gigant tricks and traps, and of course they can use their combat expirience to outsmart player - embushes (enemy holds fire until you'll come closer to take metal shower!!!), tactikal use of weapon (granades tricks and etc.);
infestation can work pretty weird - soldier crying for help, you coming closer... and tada! his infested!!! BTW, this trick with wounded soldier is easy to script...

3. Were reanimated and had lost all their memories and consciousness. Anyway, in this case AI is not so important - no pain, no regrets, just kill, kill, kill... (as i sad before...:))

...what you think about light feared beasts?

I think of former humans as "possessed corpses". Dead marines that have been resurrected (preferrably by the Archvile) and instilled with a demonic soul - doesn't have to be controlled by a spider mastermind, it could be an independent soul that takes over the human body and USES the knowledge found in the human body's brain (gun handling, basic combat tactics, knowledge of operating machines, etc.) but has the hateful and evil "emotions" (if any at all) and the mindlessness of a demon. By 'mindless' I mean fearless (but not brainlessly fearless) and without consideration for anything else than bloodthirst.

It might seem like a paradox that I want formers to be "intelligent" yet still mindless, but what I mean is that the former humans would rather want to kill than be killed - they don't fear death, but they gain no pleasure from being killed, they would thus rather want to be victorious in a fight than lose and be killed.
The pleasure of killing is what controls them according to my idea and they aren't exactly "smart" - they just know certain technigues.

I prefer former humans to be like that because I find that it adds a far more interesting diminsion to former human troops imo, as well as making them more entertaining to fight instead of some dumb, shambling zombies that just go like: stagger around a bit, shoot, stagger around a bit, shoot, stagger around a bit, shoot, etc.
I wont mind actual zombies in the new Doom, but if they're there, they should definitely be more powerful. It should either be so that zombies can only be really killed if you gib them (like in Quake1, except that you can also kill them by shooting the body repeatedly, while it lies down, until it gibs), or they should be more like RtCW's zombies which are very tough, but have some sort of powerful magical attack to make up for their slow movement speed.

Personally, I would prefer something like Quake1's zombs.