Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
Often, AI characters don't seem to care if they win so long as you lose. AI racers will ruin their standing just to screw with you, Mascot Fighter combatants will ignore weakened enemies and zero in on the you and RTS opponents will hit you with everything they have even with your AI ally running rampant in their base.
While Spiteful AIs are more obvious in free-for-all situations, you'll see them in other places, too. It could be as simple as that annoying enemy in a Platform Game who leaps to its doom to interrupt your crucial leap over a Bottomless Pit. Perhaps, in an FPS, those terrified guards become reckless, suicidal berserkers as soon as the cutscene ends. In a Tactical RPG, enemy units might insist on certain death meandering around in the poison swamp instead of giving themselves a chance against your men, just to deny you the experience.
In short, this trope applies whenever it looks like the AI puts thwarting (or challenging) the player ahead of its own "well-being," whether in terms of the NP Cs' survival or the objectives of the game. This is often the case.
Note that whatever it may feel like, the AI doesn't actually have it in for you. Right?
Tropes that can make you feel like a victim of Spiteful AI:
- Gang Up On The Human - Apparently, second place and below doesn't care about winning so long as they can stop you.
- Super Persistent Predator - Especially annoying in games that claim to represent whole worlds or ecosystems.
- Collapsing Lair - Specifically, the idiots who often stay behind to impede you as you flee.
- Action Bomb - A gray area: some enemies are simply built, born or trained to blow up on you. Fine. But why would wild animals or average soldiers act like that?
- Too Dumb To Live - On the part of allies, obviously, but also includes enemies that you're trying to capture or that you need to beat up to fill your Mana Meter. Apparently, they're willing to die to stop you from pulling off your infinity plus-one combo.
- Suicidal Overconfidence - Even when they're doing Scratch Damage and you're killing a dozen with each shot, the enemies still charge at you in a suicidal effort to chip off a few Hit Points.
Not to be confused with AI Is A Crapshoot, although a lot of those can be pretty spiteful, too.
Examples:
- In the Pokemon game, wild pokemon such as Geodude and Voltorb will often blow up on you for no good reason. Why would random animals sacrifice their life—I mean, consciousness just to damage you? How bizarre.
- When you start to get stronger, you really start to wonder about the stupid L2 Caterpies jumping out of the brush at you. Are they just trying to slow you down or what?
- In Pokemon Colosseum, there are pokemon called Shadow Pokemon you catch from trainers instead of the wild. They have a self damaging move called Shadow Rush, which they will spam if their health is low and the player has tried catching them with a pokeball (or just if their health is low). One trainer will hit her own Pokemon with Earthquake, just to make sure you can't catch it (and because the AI is actually better than any portable game, she will ONLY hit her Shadow Suicune and no other friendly pokemon)
- That's not spiteful, that's them stopping you from stealing their Pokemon.
- If that was true (which means they know you can steal theirs) why would they use them at all?
- This comes up in other JRP Gs as well.
- Arguably justified in the case of the wild Pokemon - the rules of the Pokemon world make it clear that wild Pokemon can't be captured if they're knocked out, so a wild Pokemon might use self-destruct for the purpose of draining its own HP and thus avoiding capture; it would rather lose consciousness than be forced into slavery.
- But only if wild Pokemon are assumed to be aware of such rules.
- Apparently the canon reason for wild Pokemon being obedient to trainers who caught them or have enough badges is them considering them "worthy", though I suppose they figure if you can't get them before they blow themselves up you must be a pretty crappy trainer.
- Look to real critters for a more immediate reason: Why are poison dart frogs poisonous, when the poison is limited to skin contact? Well, after a predator eats its first frog, they won't be snacking on a second one any time soon. Any wild creature that tries attacking a bright red-and-white Voltorb only to end up with a face full of boom is unlikely to try it again. It's good for the survival of the species; not so good for the individual mon.
- Evolutionary science? In my Pokemon? It's more likely than you think!
- Darth Bob, from Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 2, a Tie Fighter that kills you by crashing his ship into you. It is generally accepted that this wasn't what the programmers intended, and that it's a
flaw in the programming the AI taking things into its own hands to kill you.
- Enemies in Disgaea will sometimes kill their allies with area attacks, depriving you of experience and items.
- Enemies in Phantom Brave will sometimes waste attacks on the corpses of your party members, even before you get the ability to revive. This does absolutely nothing to help them win the match, but makes it much more expensive to revive your guys afterwards.
- Likewise in Disgaea, the first thing that enemies in the Item World will try to destroy is treasure chests, even if you are a much bigger threat than that chest.
- This rarely happens in Final Fantasy Tactics, but given that you don't get EXP for killing blows, it's less of an inconvenience. Now, when your allies do it...
- In Final Fantasy Tactics A 2, there are quite a few escort missions, and while in some the allies will actively flee your foes, some insist on diving right into the action, exposing themselves to certain doom as the enemies will usually target them when able. The Paladin's Cover ability can solve this problem, though.
- Furthermore, sometimes, an enemy near death will abandon all strategy and blindly launch a physical attack on your clan members, even if they'd get KO'd by the counterattack. This is often done to prevent players from Mounting their Chocobo Knights, or getting the finishing strike with Hunting for more loot.
- The AI in Civilization IV sometimes do this, sending all of their armies to pillage your country while they themselves are being crippled. This can sometimes be explained with the 'personalities' of the civilization rulers, and other times it's just the AI taking leave of its senses.
- In Smuggler's Run, the police cars don't really do much except try to crash into you as hard as possible. They don't mind flipping over in crazy ways that no normal human could survive, or brutally totaling their car every now and then. They just want to TAKE YOU DOWN. To be fair, the only way to get arrested in this game is for a police car to touch you after your engine has been stalled (from crashing too much).
- Same thing happens in the Grand Theft Auto series. Even if you're driving a tank and their cars instantly explode when they hit, the Lemming Cops will still constantly ram you just to slowly drain your Hit Points.
- The pirates will fight you to the bitter end in Metroid, even by attacking you as you flee after killing the Load Bearing Boss. They might have an excuse, though, since it's often a whole freaking planet that's exploding. Where would they escape to?
- Presumably your ship. One assumes they know it's not big enough to hold the both of you.
- However, the ship recognizes Samus and won't open for anyone else... though there's no reason to assume the pirates know this.
- According to a pirate log book in Prime 1, Samus' ship uses an advanced cloaking device that makes it impossible for them to detect it without accidentally walking right into it. This makes sense, as not only would the ship be an excellent target for the pirates, it is also parked in a very visible spot and should therefore not be very hard to find when you got troopers with jetpacks and thermal visors.
- The entirety of Fire Emblem 6 hard mode consists of this. The enemies are too generally too weak to kill you normally, but have at least a 1% chance of scoring a critical hit, which will probably kill their target. There are often 50 or more of them per level, and they will gladly suicide themselves into a situation that WILL kill them the next turn, just in the hope they get to kill 1 of your dudes, forcing you to restart the level, essentially making the entire Fire Emblem 6 hard campaign a Luck Based Mission. Fortunately starting from Fire Emblem 7 (the first American one), enemies rely less on lucky critical hits to kill you, but are still willing to sacrifice their lives when they have no hope of winning.
- The military in Prototype is hell-bent on stopping you, and will open fire on you with everything they have, regardless of where you're standing or how many innocent people are between you and the tanks. Soldiers will shoot grenades into groups of pedestrians in the hopes of shooting you and they will run people down in tanks just to chase you farther. Sometimes it seems like the death toll would be much lower if they just let Alex kill a few thousand people without interfering.
- This is not specific to the player, they attack the infected just as recklessly.
- In the Lego Star Wars games enemies will only attack the character you control (unless you're a droid). This becomes extremely frustrating when Obi-Wan is swinging a lightsaber in the face of some stormtroopers, and all Han Solo wants to do is build a switch to open a door. Needless to say, the enemies don't give a damn about anyone but the guy who isn't attacking them.
|
|
