Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs Discussion Topic Part 1

[FlawlessHappiness]

Yes, Amnesia depended quite heavily on the player willingly "playing along", that is, on him pretenting that the monsters were smarter than they actually were and that dieing was an actual threat (which it wasn't). But I think that's okay. Most games require some suspension of disbelief and if someone's trying too hard to break the game then he wasn't willing to immerse himself anyway

Still, a bit of AI improvement won't hurt, especially in places where their dumbness decreases immersion. (Pathfinding etc) But keep in mind - if the monsters become too smart they could also ruin the experience because they become too unpredictable for the person designing the level and fleeing or hiding from them could be too hard thus making the player die too often.

I mean think about it: Having the monster for example search every possible hiding spot in a room after breaking the door sounds awesome in theory. But in practise all it means is that you'll either have chase sequences all the time because the player has to jump out of his hiding spot and run or that the player will get killed every time he tries to hide somewhere. But if you make the monster so that it only ever searches the places where the player isn't, players will notice that what seems like intelligent behaviour is nothing but a facade.

Its a problem with stealth games in general. Most maneuvers from stealth games would be near impossible to pull off in real life because they depend on the enemies being somewhat stupid and predictable. If a real life security guard heard a suspicious sound, he wouldn't have a half-hearted look around and then simply forget about it. He'd search the whole damn place and he'd probably also have a pretty good idea of where he would try to hide if he was the intruder

Though this would make the monsters even more scary, because that would force the developer to rarely use monsters.