So. I’ve had Left 4 Dead 2 for what… 15 hours? Due to the expected release-day bugs and my own day-to-day life (i.e. school) I’ve only been able to play for a total of about three; I’ve got through the first two campaigns, and the first section of the third.
But one serious problem has become apparent to me. In fact, I saw it in the demo, and hoped it would be resolved… Alas, it has not. I’m talking about the survivor AI.
As I’m sure you’ll know, Left 4 Dead’s survivor AI was the butt of many jokes on the internet. I don’t think it was all that bad, and I certainly hoped that it would be improved for L4D2. Alas, I have been proven wrong.
I can understand some of the AI’s weaknesses compared to a human player, even though I don’t like them; things like chest paddles, ammo upgrades, explosives and carryable items are too situational to be used effectively by an AI. I can also understand the AI not being able to help carry fuel cans for the Dead Center finale. But the AI in Left 4 Dead 2 have several flaws which simply serve to irritate, and to make the game much harder than it needs to be,
For starters they seem generally slower to respond, and a bit stupider. They seem to take longer to rescue you from special infected, choosing to run up and melee or shoot and point blank range rather than shooting while they are further away. I can understand this with jockeys, but with chargers and smokers especially they should be shooting; the charger offers a huge target, and the smoker will often be far away from the player. if they have a clear line of sight, they should shoot from a distance. They can’t friendly fire anyway! Additionally, when I first got to the Dark Carnival finale, the AI went the wrong way. I got to the helicopter, turned and they were on the opposite side of the arena. I tried covering them, but they seemed to be making no efforts to get to me. Eventually they got incapped, and just as the helicopter started to leave a common infected came THROUGH THE BOTTOM of the helicopter and incapped me. Even as the leaving animation played, I was sent back to the saferoom.
There is a larger problem, though. The AI seem very stupid when it comes to picking up items; they are, in my experience, far too likely to all end up with the same gun, along with a host of other problems. As I said, I fully understand the fact that they can’t carry ammo upgrades or defibs. But the fact that they are in the game creates a new choice for me; do I carry a healthkit or one of those? This would be made easier if I could rely on the AI to carry healthkits for me, but the problem is I CAN’T. I don’t know how many times I’ve been standing in front of a healthkit, often spamming “look” at it, with three AI with empty inventory slots staring at me blankly. I’ve even had Rochelle standing ON TOP of a healthkit, somehow unable to see it or pick it up despite not having one.
When I’m leaving a saferoom with only one healthkit carried between the four of us, there should NOT be another healthkit left sitting on a table beside the door. There’s no reason that I can see for the AI to be leaving it there. When I walk past two healthkits within 5 minutes, and neither gets picked up, there’s a serious problem with the AI.
Unless, of course, you mean this to happen, perhaps as some kind of balancing. But for goodness sake, that’s a really, really silly way of doing it. it just infuriates players who have to deal with incompetent AI. Balance by making the Charger harder to kill (he’s pathetically easy compared to, say, the jockey) or by altering the damage values. Not by making the AI stupid, which doesn’t even carry over into Multiplayer!
I understand that Left 4 Dead is a mainly multiplayer game. But if I choose to play single player for whatever reason, I should be able to play without these kinda issues with the AI. Not only that, but this rears its ugly head in multiplayer as well.
This letter will be posted on the the ubercharged.net forum, Boomercharged.net and the Steam forums, as well as being emailed to Valve.
Yours sincerely
Phoenix
Ubercharged/boomercharged editor
phoenix@ubercharged.net
