I had an idea for an AI upgrade. One area that makes combat easier is you can just run from hunters and runners and they have no way to attack you effectively. They cannot outrun you, and if you just turn tail and go they are eventually left behind.
What if you created an attack specifically geared towards a fleeing human? They should be able to outrun us, and you could use a distance or direction trigger, but one it was triggered, hunters and runners would pursue and melee attack you on the run from behind.
To protect or prevent you would have to use fire and maneuver tactics, stopping to shoot, running, and stopping again. This would negate this huge advantage we have by just running. It would also give you that hair standing up on your neck feeling when you hear them pursuing.
I would say its ok runners maybe hunters also to outperform player for short while, giving you the chase feeling. And act as link between robots notifying your location. So slower Hunters / Tanks can catch player.
But this creates some game mechanic problems, if robots chase you long distances, you will have huge problems to disengage from combat. And some areas might be heavily congested by robots, making high risk of detection again.
Just moving by crouch and/or using decoys might not be effective enough to escape combats.
If more stealth mechanics or someway just to hide long enough, robots would just disperse from the area. (some players might consider this boring game play, wasting time by just waiting 0 - X of minutes robots give up)
Should robots go extensive search mode for while, on last known player location? Lots of small if’s.
While I see your point, be careful what you wish for, honestly. A change like this would most likely turn the game into a camping party, since you would probably be toast out in the open. I know there’s plenty of people on here that likes that approach, but I would think we’re just as many that likes the mixed approach the game offers now. I don’t think you can realise how big a change this would bring, and I think it would make the game next to impossible fighting out in the open unless they also changed a lot of other things to compensate.
I find this game to have a very nice balance currently from a solo pov, for coop they could change things around in some way to bring more challenge.
I think this would make the game impossible for many people, and would give various problems, the “combat mode” would always be On, possibly giving various other bugs and preventing fast travel.
There is another option,as others said, giving the machines the ability to send “search parties”, by going after the player last position but not having a god sense location of where the player is, this could also be applied to any machine in a 500 meters radius from the player last know location.
Although the question remains, would this bring new bugs ?