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Rubberband AI sucks

Dreavus said:
Yep :lol . Mission 7 I think it was? Whichever one was the "grand prix" race. Black shadow's machine suddenly became absolutely perfect in every way, and there is nothing you can do to stop him from cheating his way all the way to first place.

I think I ended up beating that one by restarting until I killed him as he tried to rocket his way past me at the very beginning of the race.
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I think there were a few shenanigans pulled to keep Black Shadow / Blood Falcon / etc always near the top of the pack, but nothing that actually broke the game. I actually beat that mission on V.Hard by outboosting Samurai Goroh at the end, while Black Shadow was a few places behind.
 
Treo360 said:
Next to Rubber band A.I. is the indestructible immovable cars like in Forza 2, where they can bang into you and cause you to spin out, but heaven forbid of you try to spin them out! Not only do you damage your car to shit but you wind up spinning yourself out as the A.I. keeps motoring by.
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Was even worse in Forza 1. If you were ever ahead of an AI car going towards a hairpin turn, the AI would seriously not brake at all, smash your car into a thousand pieces, and then perfectly take the corner with nothing more than a bit of your paint scraped onto their front bumper.
 
Treo360 said:
Next to Rubber band A.I. is the indestructible immovable cars like in Forza 2, where they can bang into you and cause you to spin out, but heaven forbid of you try to spin them out! Not only do you damage your car to shit but you wind up spinning yourself out as the A.I. keeps motoring by.
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I hate this too. It's bad in Gran Turismo as well, with its glued to the path AI cars that bump into shit...without any damage.

But rubberband AI is worse, far worse. I'm not interested in any crap racing game that uses it. Midnight Club purchase deleted.
 
Racing AI is really, really, hard to get right without cheating.

It's either robots on a slotcar like track or reactive AI that needs 'help'. Such a hard balance to strike.
 
Burnout and Motorstorm are about crashing and contact, not racing clean lines. Part of the fun is the exaggerated physics and crashes, and you need other vehicles around for that to happen.

It's just like anything else in games: it takes a skilled hand to implement it properly. MC is awful, Burnout is great. The first Motorstorm was fine until level 4 races. I'd be on-board with the terrible OP had he titled his thread "Poorly Implemented Rubberband AI sucks".

But he didn't so he sucks
 
Dreavus said:
Yep :lol . Mission 7 I think it was? Whichever one was the "grand prix" race. Black shadow's machine suddenly became absolutely perfect in every way, and there is nothing you can do to stop him from cheating his way all the way to first place.

I think I ended up beating that one by restarting until I killed him as he tried to rocket his way past me at the very beginning of the race.
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haha I did that too. If I don't kill him right at the start, restart was the way :lol
But only the missions had shitty AI, GP mod was really fair.

I think nintendo is the king of rubberband AI. MK as cited, but all the others mario doing sports game.

WipEout hd elit is seriously fucked up, sometimes you pass on a boost with an AI just at your side and he's going faster than you without item or boost.
Why can't all racing game have AI like ferrarie challenge or even the race in burnout paradise (can't talk about pursuit mod but it's understandable).

FPS also often used shitty AI: "hey we have more health now, we can survive 4 shots in our head while you can't survive one shot in your foot".
 
grid has good rubberband ai. cpu stays 5-10s behind you, even when you are dominating. allows you to make small mistakes and still stay ahead.

flatout (don't know about the latest one though) on the other hand has to have the most annoying ai after mario kart.
 
Y2Kev said:
I wasn't even thinking about sports games, but you are totally right. The old Blitz games used to cheat like hell on N64.
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The Fifa games did it until they added ball physics. The computer team would just become impossible to tackle and then they'd score in the last 5 minutes.
 
Grayman said:
Gran Turismo: I've heard that the AI only drives at 98% throttle under most cases. I've also heard that if you get too far ahead(ie test track) the AI goes faster than is possible on it's setups to try to make it a race. Both of these did not ruin the game for me but I am not a super racer who could compete with sim level AI.
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The AI probably uses slipstreaming on the test track. People who played GT4 driving missions know what I'm talking about.
 
Super Mario Kart had the AI paths set in stone, but at least it didn't have this annoying rubberband bullshit. I fully agree with the op. Dynamic difficulty FTL.
 
squicken said:
Burnout and Motorstorm are about crashing and contact, not racing clean lines. Part of the fun is the exaggerated physics and crashes, and you need other vehicles around for that to happen.

It's just like anything else in games: it takes a skilled hand to implement it properly. MC is awful, Burnout is great. The first Motorstorm was fine until level 4 races. I'd be on-board with the terrible OP had he titled his thread "Poorly Implemented Rubberband AI sucks".

But he didn't so he sucks
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In the latter part of the game Motorstorm 2 is all about clean lines and not crashing. Otherwise you'll never win all events.
 
I don't know, I don't think it's that bad, it keeps the race alive, being ahead with 1 minutes of advance isn't that fun, and AI that is struck on a rail is even shittier (I have a very back memory of GT Prologue for exemple, the races are just time trial with annoying drones that gets in your way). I like the AI in Motorstorm, and being in contact with the others is always fun :D But yeah the game can be frustrating in the highest difficulty.

I'm not a big racing game fan though, what games have better AI than that? And what are the alternatives?
 
it's good; it's my favourite racing AI, it keeps the adrenaline pumping.

the only thing that keeps the adrenaline pumping in Forza 2 is the possibility that my tyres might go off. Oh my God so boring.
 
Why do they have better AI in other games that are arguably more complex? At least with racing you're limited by the design of the track, but in FPS games for example, you have load more freedom and possibilities.

If racing games just had bad AI I would understand it being difficult, but rubberbandding just seems lazy. The whole excuse of racing AI being difficult honestly just sounds like the "coop is difficult" excuse devs used to give before every game seems to have implemented it, I don't buy that, they were just never compelled to get to it.
 
Yeah, rubberband AI is awful. I hated Motorstorm 1 for it.

I'm glad they released a patch to make Midnight Club easier.

Gran Turismo has done it fairly well. You could pull ahead 10 seconds and there is no chance in hell the AI will catch you. I find it pretty satisfying pulling so far ahead.

But I also think sport games suffer from cheating AI. For example, in PES2009, there have been instances where the AI decides to score a few unstoppable goals. It feels completely fixed. Their players also run faster than mine, which annoys the hell out of me, despite the play stats similar in terms of speed.
 
While Motorstorm and Burnout were already incredibly annoying on their own, they're no match for the rubberband A.I. seen in Ridge Racer 6. The amount of times I've caught the CPU cheating in that particular game was unbelievable...
 
Well that Razorback Mountain "Punch the Rolls" stage in Pacific Rift did the following on me:

Gave me bruises
Hair torn off
Nails bit
Almost one broken Sixaxis

I won't buy the next Evolution Studios game unless they confirm rubberband is gone.

EDIT: I might add that I've been stuck on this stage for around 2 weeks now. I've tried for a couple of hours every day, I must've reached around 500+ tries with it, which sums up around 40 hours FOR ONE FUCKING STAGE.
 
-viper- said:
Yeah, rubberband AI is awful. I hated Motorstorm 1 for it.

I'm glad they released a patch to make Midnight Club easier.

Gran Turismo has done it fairly well. You could pull ahead 10 seconds and there is no chance in hell the AI will catch you. I find it pretty satisfying pulling so far ahead.

But I also think sport games suffer from cheating AI. For example, in PES2009, there have been instances where the AI decides to score a few unstoppable goals. It feels completely fixed. Their players also run faster than mine, which annoys the hell out of me, despite the play stats similar in terms of speed.
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PES has always had cheating A.I. where it decides to go into God mode. Not sure if 2009 is any better as I have gave up on that series.
 
oh man Blitz on N64 was the worst. Don't think I ever played a game where a team won by more than 7-14 points. If you were ahead in the 4th quarter suddenly it was nothing but interceptions and fumbles when you were on offense...
 
I absolutely hate rubber band AI with a passion. Why'd you have to tell me it's in F-Zero and ruin the game for me... i never noticed it before.

I simply cannot take any racer with rubberband AI seriously, at all. I go so far as to wish every last one of them where never made.
 
Minsc said:
I absolutely hate rubber band AI with a passion. Why'd you have to tell me it's in F-Zero and ruin the game for me... i never noticed it before.
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I never noticed it either. How would it ruin the game for you if it didn't when you were actually playing the game? Maybe we were both just good at the game.
 
You'd think that there'd be a way to do it using developer runs of the track and then developing an AI routine that would blend them together into unique runs by the CPU. You could rubber band it a bit, but without doing something that a human couldn't do by having the AI tend towards the faster paths if it's falling behind the human player.

That'd also give you some variance and individual personality in the AI competitors in the race if you did that process with several different developers plus some QA testers.

Of course, this ignores drifting and some other stuff that's in newer games you'd have to account for.
 
CajoleJuice said:
I never noticed it either. How would it ruin the game for you if it didn't when you were actually playing the game? Maybe we were both just good at the game.
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Just knowing that it is in there will torment me every time I lose, I will have to wonder if I lost because I didn't race as good as I could have, or if I lost because the AI cheated. I probably will have little desire to revisit it now as well.

I don't like it when I know the AI cheats in games.

Edit: I guess it depends on how exactly the rubberbanding occurs too. I have less of a problem with the AI getting more things to keep up with the player to allow for more challenge, but if it is infinite and always triggered to keep the player in check, to the point where your skill is always matched by the AI cheating to catch up, then I think that's crap.

And in F-Zero's defense, you can blow up the other racers, so there's some justification to the cheating, which I'm still wondering just how bad it really is.
 
Need for Speed Most Wanted had some of the worst Rubberband AI... I hate this feature in racing games, luckily it seems most games are staying away from it.
 
Minsc said:
Just knowing that it is in there will torment me every time I lose, I will have to wonder if I lost because I didn't race as good as I could have, or if I lost because the AI cheated. I probably will have little desire to revisit it now as well.

I don't like it when I know the AI cheats in games.
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I guess, but I still don't believe it at least in regards to the GP mode. Always seemed fair -- just hard as hell -- to me. I always felt my place correlated with how well I raced.
 
Minsc said:
Just knowing that it is in there will torment me every time I lose, I will have to wonder if I lost because I didn't race as good as I could have, or if I lost because the AI cheated. I probably will have little desire to revisit it now as well.

I don't like it when I know the AI cheats in games.

Edit: I guess it depends on how exactly the rubberbanding occurs too. I have less of a problem with the AI getting more things to keep up with the player to allow for more challenge, but if it is infinite and always triggered to keep the player in check, to the point where your skill is always matched by the AI cheating to catch up, then I think that's crap.

And in F-Zero's defense, you can blow up the other racers, so there's some justification to the cheating, which I'm still wondering just how bad it really is.
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F-Zero GX's rubberbanding isn't as bad as you're thinking; it's only really visible in the occasional story mission from what I've witnessed, while the regular championship races are still pretty well balanced.

I hate rubberband A.I. with a passion as well, but you shouldn't worry about in F-Zero GX. Rarely did I think that game was unfair.
 
Madden is pretty bad with Rubber Band. I swear they put a little in most games, this is always a discussion if me and my friends are having a gaming night.
 
Puncture said:
It is the king of rubberbanding. Followed up only by Mario Kart 64 where you could cheat using wall hops and gain 2 laps on the competition and watch then burn ass to catch up to you before you finished, absolutely impossible speed, and they would do it. Insane.
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You lie. You can wall hop (I'm assuming you're talking about Wario Stadium) but they won't come anywhere close to you by the race's end. They do rubberband but its not nearly enough to catch up.
 
I like it in arcade racers, based on fun and approximative driving. I understand how it can be horrible for simulators (but I don't play them much), but in "action-based" games I think a race is more fun when you are allowed to make a few mistakes and still can hope for a comeback, rather than aiming for the perfect race. Actually the comeback is probably more fun than being first from beginning to end. Of course it shouldn't feel cheap, it should rely on the opponents speed and not power ups or special items if there are such.

The main example where I appreciated rubberband AI was in Full Auto. This "racer" is based on crashing and shooting, so it's highly possible that you'll lose some time at one point or another in the race. But I could say "darn crashed again ! at least I know I can catch them up..." rather than "ok let's start again from the beginning".
A not so well executed AI was in Looney Tunes Space Race, the game was fun but there was simply no point in leading the race since you would always get smashed before the finishing line and overtaken by half the opponents in 3s.
 
MicVlaD said:
F-Zero GX's rubberbanding isn't as bad as you're thinking; it's only really visible in the occasional story mission from what I've witnessed, while the regular championship races are still pretty well balanced.

I hate rubberband A.I. with a passion as well, but you shouldn't worry about in F-Zero GX. Rarely did I think that game was unfair.
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That's a relief, glad to hear it's not as broken as I first feared. I thought I remembered being able to get ahead and stay ahead in F-Zero, which is why I was surprised to hear it had rubberbanding.
 
Alx said:
The main example where I appreciated rubberband AI was in Full Auto. This "racer" is based on crashing and shooting, so it's highly possible that you'll lose some time at one point or another in the race. But I could say "darn crashed again ! at least I know I can catch them up..." rather than "ok let's start again from the beginning".
A not so well executed AI was in Looney Tunes Space Race, the game was fun but there was simply no point in leading the race since you would always get smashed before the finishing line and overtaken by half the opponents in 3s.
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Crashing in a racing game should make you almost always lose the first few places imo. I tend to enjoy games that HEAVILY penalize crashing, I'd much rather be rewarded for slowing down enough to make the turn than feeling fine to risk crashing in to everything along the way and still be in the race. Nicking off the wall a little is different than a head on crash that flips you over or stops you completely because you were going to fast to turn.

Actually I enjoy games without walls the best, just open cliffs like in rally racing, or like in F-Zero, where there's not many there either, or perhaps like in Mario Kart's rainbow levels, no walls in those I believe either.
 
Y2Kev said:
Mario Kart is different. The item system is a type of rubberbanding, but there can be balance in the item system so that it's not so strong. The difference between one mushroom and three mushrooms, for example, is not that bad, and it's certainly not going to cause me to fear first place. I think something like Mario Kart Wii (and DS has some of this but not a lot) takes it to an extreme. The items are so unbalanced that basically you could potentially win a fair sample of races by sucking. But I don't usually go into Mario Kart looking for the perfect lines on each track.
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Mario Kart Wii rules, anybody who whines about rubber banding or unfair items just havent got the skills.

You think Nintendo would fuck up gameplay to give novices a chance? This is one of Nintendos biggest franchises, they have hundreds of people working on each iteration, Nintendo just wouldnt let its hardcore down.

Edge Magazine and any one else who says 'SNES MarioKart was better' please go play both versions and come back to me.

Retro gaming is just rose tinted bullshit
 
Minsc, F-Zero GX has no rubberband AI in the Grand Prix mode (the meat of the game), and is in fact perfectly fair as far as I can tell. It's also continuously thrilling and challenging (even when you're way out in first), and it destroys all arguments in favour of rubberband AI.

Now, I pretty much automatically write off any racing game that has rubberband AI. It's too bad, because I was really interested in Motorstorm until I heard about the rubberbanding.
 
Captain Chaos said:
You think Nintendo would fuck up gameplay to give novices a chance?
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That's a trick question right?

Retro gaming is just rose tinted bullshit
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Which is better than the brown tinted bullshit of the current gen as often as not.
 
Varna said:
Yes. It's retarded.

Kind of like level scaling in RPGs. It just makes it so it never feels like you are progressing.
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Utterly agreed. RPGs with level scaling annoy the hell out of me. I'm a Disgaea fan, I like to grind beyond what's neccessary and pound enemies into dust. I don't want to have enemies that match me every step of the way. Why even have EXP and levels at all, if they're going to get stronger with you?
 
I totally agree. Rubberband AI needs to be killed off. It's a sign of lazy programming or lack of skill. The PS3 and Xbox 360 have more than enough processing power that this tactic should never need to be implemented. It was the one drawback in Motorstorm 2 that really made it needlessly frustrating. It's a frustration thats even worse because of how random it can be. Really lame and a sad black mark on an otherwise excellent title.
 
Rubberbanding in Motorstorm is fucking disgusting. It fees like I bought 75% of a game because the rest is NO FUN AT ALL.

I thought it was gone from MS2 going by the demo, but it seems like the ratbastards only hid it until the final races. I want an explanation from Evolution ASAP on why they won't bother to implement decent A.I.
 
Another game with rubberbanding is Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey. If you were 2 goals down, ANY shot would go in the net. If you were up by 3 goals, the goalie would be unstoppable. In the game, if the goalie would save 8 shots, it would become a wall. I once saw the goalie become a wall 3 times in a row (therefore saving 24+ shots in a row) before the other team finally took control and got a mid-rink shot that went in.

The worst part about Mario Kart races is hitting someone with a shell, just to see them on your ass 5 seconds later.
 
jett said:
Rubberbanding in Motorstorm is fucking disgusting. It fees like I bought 75% of a game because the rest is NO FUN AT ALL.

I thought it was gone from MS2 going by the demo, but it seems like the ratbastards only hid it until the final races. I want an explanation from Evolution ASAP on why they won't bother to implement decent A.I.
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This.
 
KevinCow said:
That's why I mostly do time trials when I play racing games. Don't have to bother with other drivers rubberbanding you the whole way. You get your satisfaction from driving well and beating your best time.
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I'm pretty much the same. If I absolutely need to race the AI I'll set it on a low difficulty, so that I'm well ahead and can drive my own Race and chase lap-times.

It's either (modified - see above) Time Trials or the Sega Arcade Racer AI, with a Villain car to beat and a whole lot of static cars to pass. Be it Daytona 2 or F355 Challenge it worked very well in both games. Even today with all the advances in AI, I couldn't think of any way to improve the Sega Arcade Racer AI. Attempts at simulating a real person fail because I know it's just the AI, and frankly, losing to a machine ain't fun. Losing to a human opponent is perfectly fine, but I want to comfortably beat any kind of AI.
 
I hate this in the EA NHL games I used to play. You can be completely dominating and up by 3 and having their goalie make impossible saves. Then the computer comes down the ice and score a bunch of cheap goals a baby could stop.
 
Rapping Granny said:
I just hate shitty scripted cheap AI in general. and the COD series are the best on delivering that every year in their games.
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I love the accuracy and the superb vision of the COD A.I.

I think the A.I. should react based on how well you use cover. There was a full on war around me, and I was hiding in the bushes in COD5. Despite all the sound, the A.I. recognized where I was. Cunts.

This would not have been the case in MGS4.

Also... the rubberband in Midnight Club is fucking awful. I'd rather pull away for 6 seconds as opposed to see the A.I. constantly on my tail.
 
Android18a said:
Utterly agreed. RPGs with level scaling annoy the hell out of me. I'm a Disgaea fan, I like to grind beyond what's neccessary and pound enemies into dust. I don't want to have enemies that match me every step of the way. Why even have EXP and levels at all, if they're going to get stronger with you?
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Awww come on, you can VOTE for stronger or weaker enemies. That's actually the catch to the winged slayer power levelling trick.

And once you are done, vote them down back to normal. Ahahahahaha :D

That said, GOD, is rubberbanding annoying. I wouldn't mind if the effect weren't so severe that often, after having done 80% of the race perfectly, a signle mistake would kick you back to 3rd place. *cue Charlie Brown* AUGH!!!
 
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