Monster Diversity

Great game GGG first of all, very ambitious, well designed and off to a extremely promising future. While I understand the indie nature of the game and that it's still in closed beta, the diversity of enemy encounters in the game seems a bit bland to me. Does anyone else feel the same? Is there any plan to make the combat more thrilling?
I'm currently playing lv25 witch on act 2 normal.

In general every encounter feels a bit homogeneous and most monsters are not that different in terms of how you would deal with them. And sometimes you keep seeing one same monster for quite a long time (for example in the caves in Act 1 all you get seems to be the squid thingy).
For my witch I pretty much use fireball/firestorm to clear everything although I expect that to change later in game.
I'm just wondering what other people's take on this.

If the OP is talking about models, thats one thing, but I suspect he's talking about monster AI

OP: Monster AI is probably the single most difficult thing to program in a game. The more complex you try and make it, the more cycles it eats and its VERY labour intensive to program. Its also a very fine line between "smart AI" and "cheating AI".

For example, take the NPC's in a tactical combat game like JA, they can snipe you from across the map, in the dark, with a PISTOL. Thats just cheap lazy cheating programming.

You know those IBM big iron chess computers? Deep Blue iirc, and the one that was on Jeaporady? Well, in reality the thing works on brute force, its not really "smart" at all. It has been programmed with ALL the answers and works on probability and process of elimination. Not to take anything away from the programmers...they have more skill in thier little toe than I'll ever have.


Half Life was one of the first games to get it sort of correct, where enemies would take cover instead of blindly rushing in to your cone of fire, etc., but even then the devs have to walk a fine line....if they make the AI TOO smart and you die all the time, what fun is that?

From the few paltry hours I've played, I'd say GGG has done a decent job considering its a small dev. team and the game is nowhere near polished yet.

I was incedibly interested in AI programming at one point, until reality hit me hard....I just dont have the math chops to work in that field ;)

EDIT: Speeling

There are tons of designs that professional developers could implement- for example, what about a very defense-heavy enemy that grows new nodes of itself every few feet, and lines between them hurt the player?

At the moment the enemies are mostly melee/ranged humanoids, with five or six alternatives, like small fast movers ranged enemies.

Bit of diversity wouldnt hurt, yeah.

"

Chris wrote:

We spent weeks adding unique behaviour/skills to most monster types in the 0.9.9 patch. I am pretty pleased with them, but there are more new behaviours coming in the future.

To me, its a very good sign to see the LEAD designer and producer come in to the forums.

I suppose people who have been here longer than I are used to it by now, but I think its like a breath of fresh air.

Good stuff.

Certainly there is a fine line and certainly AI processes can become intensive enough to raise hardware restrictions, but it's 2012 and I'm tired of playing games with AI that Half Life 1 pioneered :P

For an aRPG, I'd say the AI is pretty good though. Would like to see zombies be a little more quick to react on higher difficulties though.

Currently I believe there is greater per act variety than in Diablo 2, but it's true that some levels are thick with only one monster type... caves of act one, or the forest of Act 2 (those damn dirty apes!), for example.

I don't know if this needs to be "improved". I'd like to see more monsters everywhere I go but that's just natural. We always want more more more until it gets that point where we finally say "OK maybe we have too much".