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Well I don’t think we fully appreciated what impact the drop was going to have.
So once we sorted that out,
once we realized that we needed to have these open environments the player could move around in,
we could start standing up technology to solve that problem.
We sort of had this legacy AI system from older games in place which
seemed like it could handle lots of different situations.
But as it turns out, we started trying to do these dynamic open world encounters
and it became apparent really early on that we needed some sort of system
to handle all these different entry points into our encounters. So that’s really when it started.
And Affordance basically is an attractive place to be when you’re getting shot at
or if you have to shoot at someone else.
In a combat space it’s cover, it could be a tree, it could be a bunker.
It’s basically just where you want to put yourself in order to give yourself an advantage over your enemy.
So we had to throw out all of our bags of tricks.
We couldn’t use triggers, couldn’t use monster closets.
Because we didn’t know where the player was going to come from.
So instead we just encode this information in the environment.
So that the AI knows what cover is good, where to position themselves if the player attacks from a particular direction.
Then the designers got used to just throwing AI in and seeing what they could do.
Not only now are they knowing where to defend, they also know how to attack.
They also know how to flank, all these things that are built into the volumes,
built into the environment now that they have access to.
On a moment to moment basis, they’re always trying to find somewhere that they can be safe
and somewhere that they could potentially pop out and shoot at their enemies.
The enemy NPCs, the enemy soldiers,
coordinate by leveraging the affordances in the environment
to try to flank or put pressure on top of the player.
By the same token though, if the player starts to succeed,
he can push the Axis back, cause the Axis to retreat again through affordance and falling back to better territory.
This does two really cool things,
one, makes the player feel like a complete bad ***,
because he’s just mowing down NPCs and claiming territory for his Allies.
And by the same token, having the Allies advance,
leads the player through what otherwise would be a fairly open and confusing environment.
More of the time is sort of front loaded
in planning your encounter and planning the configuration of your affordance network
so that the fight can play out the way that you want it even if the player comes from all these different directions.
So there’s more planning and there’s more initial set up involved,
but after that, you kind of don’t want to do the fine tuning because you want it to play differently every time.
We pulled off a lot of really cool environments for a first person shooter in this game with this technology.
We had narrow interiors and corridors, exteriors, vertical spaces.
I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of what this thing’s capable of.
And I can’t wait to see what we pull off in the future.