Guild Wars 2

The other day I say some cliff bats above me at the top of a cliff. I started shooting at one. It approached the cliff edge, stopped, then went invulnerable because it couldn’t find a path to me.

Problem is, it’s a bat. It has wings. The only time it isn’t flying is when it’s dead or knocked down. It should have no trouble traveling up and down the cliff without injury.

Honestly, I think a lot of MMO’s have this same issue. I think it’s because they all use the same pathfinding for all mobs, so it looks for cliff edges and avoids them lest the more terrestrial creatures plummet off a cliff to a messy end. On the plus side, it means escaping those nasty veterans and champions becomes a bit easier.

But flying pathfinding is much simpler:
– Plot a straight line along the ground to the target.
– If there is anything in the way, adjust the flightpath to go over it.

hooray Anet for not actually changing the way MMOs are played :P

Actual flying creatures would be awesome, but I’d just be happy to see my arrows actually fired at them based on their current height rather than being fired over their heads all the time and registering as hits. To create true flying creatures would probably mean they’d have to take out all those terrain-based invisible walls that creatures aren’t allowed to cross and design some actual form of pathing AI, which would be great because then we’d be able to knock them off edges and they’d probably be able to reach us more often without going invincible.

It’s a feature.

Actually, the flying pathfinding should be much simpler than I said previously. ANET just needs to copy the underwater pathfinding code.

Yeah. At least some enemies should be able to jump, and fliers should be able to go straight to you without going around stuff in the floor.