Ridiculousness of Encounter Chat/Attack Text

gtdcarthage

Hi, guys. I just used the rather cynical, attacking-sounding title to attract you all here. This is also my first post here, and I, like some other people perhaps, rushed to L15 to gain the keys to the Foundry.

This is probably a minor problem for a lot of you but this is something I personally find that makes creating more believable enemy behaviors difficult. I personally like sneaking behind a nearby encounter and listen to them talk random things such as the weather or how many houses they looted the other day and screaming in disarray when ambushed by a player but at the moment, the implementation of encounter chat and attack text is... weird.

Instead of allowing us to enter a list of things to say (or really, just a long line of sentences divided by semicolons) in which members of an encounter randomly pick and spout out as if they're conversing with each other, we get an entire group of mobs saying *the same exact thing all at the same time*. When the group spots you, every member of the encounter also shouts the same exact thing.

At this rate, the whole idea of having chat/attack text for AI is almost pointless as it results in everyone saying the same thing in unison, always causing instant comedy. I know some here might say, I could just easily place other members of the encounter in a distant place or mix members from different encounters to say different things - but what if this particular encounter is part of an objective to kill them all? Do we really have to do all that just for a believable conversation between bad guys?

Just my two cents from the bottom of the barrel. I suppose someone might have mentioned this before. Or is there some special feature I'm missing out on?

vanturi

You can't modify behavior for individual creatures of an encounter. The whole encounter acts the the same. It is a bit frustrating.
Personally, I haven't cared so much about making them chat with one another, but I have spread out the individuals of an enounter in an attempt to add some realism.
For instance, in a quest I'm working on, I've created some gnoll workers that are engaging in a construction project. The animations are all sync'ed. In using the "hammering" animation, they all appear to magically sync their movements. I've spread them around so that as a player, you can't see them all at the same time.

I think the bottom line is that the way things are right now, you really have to be creative with solo encounters and costumes if you want behaviors to make any kind of sense to the player.

zaphtastic

Yeah, it's annoying (especially compared to the COH Mission Architect, which had a lot more options for enemy text). For now, I just use encounter and attack text as sparingly as possible.

I did raise this issue in the beta, and Robobo said that they're considering improvement in this area... so here's hoping!