Blake_
Captain Obvious
Well, yes, I hope so in the short term... in a sense? 3x the cost might not be THAT huge. It means obstacle avoidance, basic team tactics, a bit of weapon switching, basic covering and peeking, and MAYBE: item/weapon pick up, driving and/ or trigger activation, like levers, buttons, etc. Those last few don't require huge amounts of power to compute and can be done effectively.Last I heard it was 3x the cost !? Are you assuming that will slip with further development?
But 5x the cost needs more, as they could become basic bots, that "build" and plan, with a proper dedicated AI manager, with something like behavioural trees or even tied to a "shadow of mordor" system in which a bandit escapes or somehow survives your sledgehammer and generates a quest in which he becomes higher level and spouts a couple of phrases and all that. It might be possible to avoid that huge of a big-shot AI and just make an event system that tracks bandits that escape and despawns them to evolve them later. They talked about road encounters and stuff like that, and an AI manager is already in for zds, so it can really go either way.
Emergent gameplay is the sole reason why this game has a high resistance to boredom, anything that adds to it will just be a boon. Also, it's not really the same to kill a bandit called "bandit marrauder" vs killing one named "Trolland the mathematician" . Named entities like Grace are the
go-to method for flavour and sense of acomplishment.
And just imagine how all of that comes together with a huge storm and a bunch of zds thrown into the mix. 3x. Yeah. Maybe.