Talk:Fewer Still/@comment-3187795-20131216190418/@comment-12.77.6.235-20140123020134

Have you ever heard of a game called The Last of Us? The Last of Us is a dark, hard, depressing game about humans in a desperate future. It takes place in a post-apocalypse world imagined with precise logistical creativity. It borrows its game design elements from popular games. It borrows its level designs from common sense. It's a strategy contest with real-time shooting mechanical metaphors, in which the psychology of your in-game artificial-intelligent partners factors into your planning: "If I'm over here and I do this, will she snipe that guy before he can shoot me?" What I'm saying is that for the large set peices and gun to gun battles the AI needs to be impressive. Enemies can't just be all about shooting and cover, they have to have emotion and common sense.

Now that's easier said than done, but The Last of Us.... that game changed things. It showed that games could actually have human-like characters who weren't really human. Games need more things like that. Since most games revolve around shooting other dudes and this game idea happens to be one of those then enemies need to be spot on with their appearence of being human.

As far as having lifelike friendly NPC's, well I would imagine that'd be a very difficult thing to implement. I'm mostly interested in having the player working with the environment rather than NPCs. A s you walk, sprint, climb, and shoot through the game world I want people to consider the psychological exhaustion of its designers as they struggle to keep every molecule grounded in real-world physics and chemistry. All the wear and tear on the corners of the open world you see in the game needs to feel true enough. The petty politics of the marauding psychopaths, the dilapitated buildings, and nature reclaiming the world. All of this combines as a sort of subtle hand that lets players feel like detectives trying to peice everything together.