Horizon Forbidden West's AI is to Provide a Good Challenge
Enemies in Horizon: Forbidden West are meant to be more perceptive and varied than typical video game mooks.
- Guerrilla Games published another entry dedicated to Horizon: Forbidden West;
- This time the devs discussed how to create more varied and challenging enemies, including better AI to make enemies more perceptive and capable to find their way to Aloy.
While there's still some time left until the release of Horizon: Forbidden West, for months Guerrilla Games has been detailing the subsequent elements of the sequel. Apparently, December will also bring a lot of information about the game. The official PlayStation blog published an entry devoted to combat in the new Horizon.
Previous entries mentioned the battles, both with mechanical fauna, as well as humans inhabiting the world of Forbidden West. Of course, the former are the main attraction, but clashes with human opponents will be much more frequent than in Zero Dawn. Therefore, the creators wanted to make sure that these fights were as interesting and challenging as those against machines. In practice, this will translate into a greater variety of this type of enemies and their behavior, as well as visual cues (read: animations) and sounds to make it easier to react to their actions.
Aside from thorough research of scientific (and other) sources when designing enemies to create unique "personalities," Guerrilla Games is paying special attention to their artificial intelligence. Humans will notice such things as an arrow landing nearby or the machines we defeated, and if they lose track of the protagonist during combat - they will immediately begin a coordinated search as a group. What's more, enemies won't hesitate to follow us into the water (at least those who can swim) and will be able to better navigate rough terrain, jumping and climb over obstacles to get at Aloy.
Of course, the heroine won't be defenseless. She'll have more experience in combat than she did in Zero Dawn (which, again, will be visible in her animations) and players will also get new equipment and skill system to further customise their play style. This, along with Aloy's increased mobility, will enable us to approach battles in a variety of ways.
Horizon: Forbidden West will launch on February 25, 2022. We'll be able to play the title only on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 (at least for now).
