Games with the best friendly AI & what makes good friendly AI

[rusty_shackleford]

Republic Commando(2005) has pretty good squad AI. The AI nearly always does what you'd expect. If you've got something highlighted, one of them perform the action related to it. They don't get in your way, can pull their weight, and help you out when you need it most.
This game could probably be a case study of how to make good friendly AI: they should never hinder you, be useful in a mechanical way, able to pull their weight, and seemingly(from the player's POV) always be trying to help in some way.

What other games have good friendly AI?

[gerey]

Arguably, Resident Evil 4 (and the remake). Ashely is not particularly useful, but she never gets in your way, and if you view the game as one large escort quest, and then compare it to escort sections in other games, RE4 is a masterpiece of game design in that regard.

Should Black & White count? Granted, the usefulness of your pet furry depends largely on how much time and effort you spent training it, but if you did a good job it can genuinely be useful at the more mundane tasks/miracles and helping your village grow while you're busy doing other stuff.

[Mondain]

Republic commando did a lot of anti frustration features that should be common sense but aren't. If you aim at a squad member they duck and move out of the way. They act just as important as you but their #1 priority is always getting out of your way. They also move if you nudge them.

[wndrbr]

RE5's Sheva is also an example of good AI.

She rarely gets in your way, always heals you if you're wounded, always saves you from grab attacks and always rescues you from near-death state as long as she's close enough, tries her best to follow up with your melee combos. She gets a lot of flak for being dumb and wasteful, but that's only because she's an artifical substitute for a real co-op partner in a game with a big focus on character interaction and resource management. If devs made her very accurate, she would've been too OP and made the game easy.

In RE6 Capcom dumbed the resource mangement down, reduced the focus on character interactions, almost cut the partner melee combo system, and made AI partners nearly useless. Now they are just ******* with infinite ammo.

[Roguey]

A lot of the squad behavior in Republic Commando is scripted as a part of the map which is why it's on such a tight set of rails. Any kind of openness or non-linearity and it'd fall apart.

[Oyster Sauce]

I prefer when they're stupid as hell and expendable, like the Halo marines. It's fun trying to see how many ******* I can keep alive.

[Norfleet]

She gets a lot of flak for being dumb and wasteful, but that's only because she's an artifical substitute for a real co-op partner in a game with a big focus on character interaction and resource management. If devs made her very accurate, she would've been too OP and made the game easy.

The trick here seem to be to make it so that the AI isn't significantly worse than the player. If the AI's shooting accuracy is roughly about as good as the player's, the player won't feel that the AI is a ****** shot that's wasting ammo. Particularly since a literal aimbot shouldn't be **** at its job. By making the companion's performance roughly on par with the player's own, it won't become overpowered, unless the player is already overpowered. If you hard-balance the companion's performance around a ****-tier player, then every player above that will notice how utterly **** the companion's performance is. But if you match the two together, the player will always find that the companion is about as good as they are and have no cause for complaint.

[rusty_shackleford]

A lot of the squad behavior in Republic Commando is scripted as a part of the map which is why it's on such a tight set of rails. Any kind of openness or non-linearity and it'd fall apart.

If I had to guess it's mostly implemented(or could be implemented equivalently) just by tagging certain areas with how they're used by the AI, something that could be expanded to an open world. Could even get meta and analyze the area(e.g., influence map) to add the tags in real time.

[Bertram_Tung]

I always got along well with Barney in Half-Life. He's my bro.

[Norfleet]

Mostly, whether or not the player will perceive the AI as good or at least competent comes down one thing: Does the AI frequently pose a liability to the player, either by obstructing the player, consuming the player's resources, or otherwise getting itself into trouble that the player is forced to bail it out from or notices blatantly? You are unlikely to really notice that an AI is bad if it stays out of your face, doesn't consume any of your resources, doesn't need to be rescued by the player, and doesn't fall down a manhole and die, and, if assigned objectives, can actually carry those objectives out without miserably failing.

[Norfleet]

A lot of the squad behavior in Republic Commando is scripted as a part of the map which is why it's on such a tight set of rails. Any kind of openness or non-linearity and it'd fall apart.

I don't think "stay out of the player's viewcone" is a part of map-based scripting, which is easily probably the most important element.

[rusty_shackleford]

Guild Wars, what a fantastic game and it's a shame that it's the only game like it.
Nearly everything about the game except for the autistic focus on horizontal progression is perfect. Even has a ridiculous amount of sim-like open world elements that never get discussed.