Do you feed like player data into it? Are you familiar with the Super Guide and the Cosmic Guide in recent Super Mario games from Nintendo.
No.
They kind of walk you through difficult parts of the game. And what you’re actually seeing is a developer playthrough that’s been recorded and slotted into that certain game. So, are you gathering the data? Like, OK, this is how players’ behave. Are you data-mining multiplayer match-ups all throughout the infrastructure? Where are you pulling that from?
That’s way more complex than the practice dummy is. The stuff you’re talking about, I would need to get some graph paper to chart that. [laughs] I would need a whiteboard, for sure. We had the dogs in World at War and the dogs are back in this game too. And the dogs have path node data that directs them as to where to go. Larry’s built similarly. So basically, Larry is saying randomly, “I’m going to pick a spot somewhere out there and I’m going to path towards it.” And then, depending on the difficulty of the Larry, he’s got this cone of sight and he can decide whether to engage you or not. So there’s all these sort of tuneables that go into that. How far he has to go. If his gun’s a shotgun, he needs to close the gap. It’s simple math. It’s not as involved as trying to learn what other players do and emulate.
It’s just smart programming, smart rule management. He has a rule manager. All he has to do is let you pwn him so you’re satisfied, and you’re learning, and you’re getting better, and you’re practicing, and you’re having fun, and then he’s been successful.
People always complain about campers in FPS multiplayer. Is that type of behavior possible to address?
So, did we get rid of campers? Is that the question? In the map design? Well, you have to be the judge. Here’s what I say: There are new tools to combat camping, I think is the better way of thinking about it. I don’t know if you can ever solve the camping issue by map design alone. That’s what the motion sensor’s for. That’s what the jammers are for. That’s what the RCXD is for, hunting down campers, in a way.
But the maps are fairly clean. There’s certainly some maps have more hiding spots than others. Some people feel this is a significant issue. But remember, we also changed the killstreaks too. So you can’t sit around and camp out for killstreaks either. So you have to solve the camping problem with lots of things, not just map design alone. In some maps, there’s no place to hide. And in other maps, there’s plenty of places to hide, and you need variety in maps.
The jungle maps, they’re a little more open. The urban maps have a little less by way of places to hide. But hiding is actually part of the game too. That’s how you defend objectives. So you have to have balance. You can’t have a purely transparent, “I can see everything all the time” locale, or the maps will be really stale, and they’d all look the same.