Guild Wars 2

As the title says, this is an idea thats not exactly necessary or game-changing, so I dont expect immediate, or even soon handling of the topic.
I know game development is long and intensive work and the team does not have limitless time.
Still, i think changes like these would benefit the gameplay and feel.

These propositions are by no means final or unfailable, so feel free to add, criticise or comment!

Every player knows this:
You’re in an epic fight with giant dragon minions, massive white mantle armies or other crazy lunatics, throwing, dodging and tanking one impressive skill after another,
only to get dropkicked by an unimpressed doe as soon as shes hit by the first AoE.

Probably the worst break in immersion right after a PC crash…
(or wrong-sided toilet paper)

This isnt the only thing i want to discuss with this topic, though.
Wildlife in general seems generally boring in GW2.
Aside from the rare predator dieing in a fight against its theoretical prey, there seems to be almost no life in them.
- Deer just stand around doing absolutely nothing, waiting to be attacked and so do
almost all creatures.
+A neat counter-example f.e. are the skelks – they wait for prey to appear, go stealth
and then attack (sadly, easily predictable) from the shadows.
+Another positive (although arguably lazy installed) one would be the idea behind
wolves summoning other wolves to attack in a pack
Still, they are seemingly lifeless when not attacking and just stand around idling, too.

Why not add a little more realism and interaction?
Ill not just complaint about stuff while not offering at least examples of a solution,
so Ill talk about my examples;
but before doing that, heres general ideas, sorted by implementability and complexity:

1st: Idling animation
The characters we play in game and many npcs have beautiful, well done idling animations. Why not add such for mobs aswell?
Wildlife grazing or eating from a carcass, drinking or sleeping would be an immense improvement on the looks, feel and immersion, and im sure many would appreciate it.
(Most of these could, the way i understand programming, f.e. be solved by the same engine that determines step sound.)
1.5: Better attack animations
Like many early NPC of GW2, the wildlife tends to have huge pauses in between attacks, which tends to make fights look really kitten weird, especially with animals.

2nd: Interaction
The way wildlife is acting through the fraction system does make a lot of sense and is interesting to see.
However, those situations are extremely rare and often lazyly executed. More often than not we see predators dieing to prey, or killing said prey and then aimlessly walking back to their idle area.
Rather than this why not make predators stay at their kill for some time, make the prey flee when their enemy comes near and the predator chase?

3rd: Reaction areas
The best way to explain this are the already in game “pugnacious cancers” [freely translated using google, dont hit me pls ].
While near them , theyll threaten the player, and only attack after some time spend not leaving or getting too close.
Personally, i loved that little feature, and im sure others did so, too.
Furthermore, this is really natural and realistic behaviour. Instead of just flat out attacking you, passive predators or aggressive prey should threaten or observe you until you get too close, and aggressive wolves or panthers should lurk around you until they attack or you leave their territory (or idle spot, as they are already in use).

4th: Level-based action
Most time, wildlife wouldnt appear to have any gain from attacking your character, but superior predators do. So why not make animals flee from characters with superior level?
Of course not every one, but especially solo-predators and non-territorial prey should have no intention to go full Leroy Jenkins on that Level 80 Reaper passing besides them.
(Example: Wolves and Spiders would attack, but Skelks and Panthers would just stalk them or even flee).

Example solutions will be in the first comment

Heres said example solutions:

Example1: The deer
Deer in the game, as of now, behav weird as hell. They just stand around doing nothing until they get hit by something and decide to reenact their very own version of Rambo.
So heres an idea ive had: Let them appear in groups of 3-5, similar to the way we have Moa flocks already roaming plains.
Since they are prey, they mostly flee: Instead of attacking alone, the group gaines Fear (or just runs away somehow else) when a predator or character gets too close. They all cast Superspeed on themselves for a second, aswell as Swiftness for 2 seconds on the group (with a fitting cooldown on Fear and Superspeed, so that this doesnt happen everytime one gets hit, but theyre). Also they give each other Regeneration and re-gather after the Superspeed or Fear, depending on how its implemented.
This way theyre not only interesting to observe and hunt, but also way safer in the herd which gives another interesting interaction – to kill one, predators must focus one or split them from the group.
Aggressive ones, like males or does with offspring, could start attacking when too close, others when reaching a certain point of low health or being split from the group.

Example 2: The wolves
Similar to deer, wolves are acting in a pack and, while i like the idea behind the wolves ingame already summoning another wolf, there yould be way better.
F.e.: Wolves would roam around in packs of f.e. 3-4, maybe with an Alpha thats stronger and has different skills.
When getting triggered, they howl before Attacking (not before stalking), giving each other Might or Fury and Swiftness. They focus on one prey and the first attack of each wolf causes few seconds of Cripple, maybe using a jump attack.

Example 3: The Skelk
Skelk are Solo-hunters, meaning they dont have to have any complicated group behaviour. The fact that they use stealth to fight is already pretty interesting, although weirdly used.
I’d alter few things only – they try to hide while idle and deal more bursty damage and Cripple to give them more chance against prey. Meaning you avoid their first attack, they are strongly inferior and might even get Fear and/or flee.
They could use a second, less strong invisibility for fights, too.
Also, there should be semi-aggressive skelk in the skelk dens, which gain like Fury buffs from baby skelks.

I’d rather like this, but in my head it sits next to “focus on bringing out new dynamic events on an existing map every two weeks” as an approach to constant growth, as “too expensive both computationally and design-wise.”

Yeah, more realistic wildlife is cool…coupled with fishing! Get your outdoors fix on.

Nice suggestions, but worth the effort? If Anet were to add such improvements, wouldn’t you rather see similar things added to actual enemies?

I really like this idea! The wildlife in game is very blah at the moment. I doubt anything will be done about it though, sadly.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

I’d rather like this, but in my head it sits next to “focus on bringing out new dynamic events on an existing map every two weeks” as an approach to constant growth, as “too expensive both computationally and design-wise.”

That’s what I was thinking. More realistic wildlife would be fantastic but I suspect it would be extremely difficult to do without adding a lot of lag and it would take a lot of time to design and program, especially if it involved creating new animations.

All of which would have relatively little benefit for players. Many people probably wouldn’t even notice. I know this was the case when Ultima Online launched with a fairly elaborate wildlife system, including predators moving into new areas if their prey got harder to find, prey hiding from predators etc. – most players fell into two groups: ones who killed everything and barely took the time to notice what it was and ones who ran past all the animals because they weren’t enemies. Hardly anyone even knew about the system until they announced they were removing it to improve performance.

Even those who would notice would probably only stop to go “Oh that’s cool”, maybe take a few screenshots before moving on. Even I would probably do that 99% of the time and I have a degree in behavioural biology and an on-going fascination with attempts to replicate animal behaviour with computers thanks to a game/simulation from the 90’s called Creatures.

It’s definitely a cool idea, and there’s definitely a place for it within video games but I’m just not sure this is the right game for it.

Love this idea, been wanting for this same thing since release basically. But then again I’m a nutcase for exploring open world nature.

Unfortunately I do admit that it probably isn’t worth the resources. But I know that if I got a summer job or something at ANet, it’s the first thing I’d ask about “Can you guys teach me how to fiddle with the animal AI’s on my free time so I can make some of this?!”

This would be neat if the wildlife were more than an occasional source of amusement and/or a nuisance.

Update:
I recently noticed the wolves in the new maps, f.e. around Doric Lake, to be behaving really interesting in battle.
They “roam” in a pack, and attack as such – making them an actual threat and challenging foe, similar to Pigmy Raptors.

That once more confirmed my confidence in the opinion such behaviour makes “basic” (non-Event or meta) combat far more entertaining.

Props to the devs!
(I doubt this thread has had anything to do with it, but still)

While I think that there are some good ideas in this thread, I think that any increase to the “AI” of the huge amount of wildlife in the game would add add quite a bit of “overhead” to the processing of the game. Both for the servers and for our computers.

The only change I would make is that realistically wildlife should flee in the face of combat (even bears, etc). I’m not sure if Anet has included wildlife when considering the scaling of events, but the wildlife is a big pain

if they want realistic wildlife they need to do it like in skyrim, any skittish wildlife runs away from players and predators don’t just attack, they really wanna kill you.

It’s probably too late for then to go back and rework the mobs in the game. A shame though. One of the things I find immersion breaking is “non natural” behavior, such as deer that ignore you when you walk up to them and animals that stand in the middle of a fight oblivious to what’s going on around them. If possible I’d prefer yellow mobs that react to players or nearby combat, but that’s probably something that isn’t going to happen.

Although, there are some flocks of birds in TD which do react when you approach them. It’s even an achievement to scare them. Maybe future episodes/expansions might have slightly better animal AI, if the six gods will it.