I have an improvement/addition to suggest for enemy AI (either as a new type of machine or just an improvement for existing ones).
Something I’d like to see is stalker/observational behavior from certain robots. This is something that very few stealth games have, but a good example is the enemy AI in Green Hell where the tribesmen would occasionally just watch you from a distance, or charge at you only to stop short and see your reaction. I imagine that if implemented in Generation Zero the behavior would be more like that of a lion or a tiger, just quietly following you for some distance without attacking. Maybe it’s waiting until another robot is close enough to join in the attack, or maybe this behavior is random. Maybe it’s the kind of thing where if it sees you looking at it then it decides to attack. I don’t know, the point is that it would be really unnerving and create a dilemma for the player.
Plus, I just think that it would be a nice addition to enemy behavior. The AI is pretty good already except that once combat has begun they become a lot stupider. Robots should probably be able to decide to retreat if it’s clear that they’ll be destroyed if they continue to engage (maybe triggered by other enemies being destroyed), and maybe if they do they can begin engaging in that stalker behavior I described above so that they can re-engage you by surprise. (And that when they escape combat initially, the game still says “combat won” so as to trick you into thinking all the machines were destroyed.)
When playing this game you can already encounter scenarios that mimic this kind of behavior, by running into the same robots you escaped earlier but somewhere else. The difference I’m suggesting is that A) it be an explicit AI behavior to convincingly stalk players from a fair distance away, maybe even following a trail left by the player such that it’s possible to lose them again if you’re clever, and that B) this behavior once activated remains active for a really long time. Like a lot longer than your average player would expect from a videogame. I want every enemy in Generation Zero to have the potential to become Mr. X from Resident Evil 2. (Or like Nemesis from RE3 if you want a less good version of the same thing.)
