Another State of the Game for The Division 2 has come and gone, and this time it’s all about the AI and NPC behavior found in Ubisoft and Massive’s title. The show also covered various talking points about the upcoming maintenance schedule that will debut sometime in the near future, and ended on a relative high note as the developers showed off some amazing creative work from community members.
Check out the State of the Game full stream below for the whole thing, followed by a quick recap after the jump. Also, check out the previous State of the Game recap here, where the Operation Dark Hours Raid results were discussed at length.
Maintenance Updates
- Issues that were addressed and rightfully fixed earlier this week
- Fixed issues preventing some players from entering Nelson Theater Classified Assignment.
- Fixed a major issue where some players could not progress to World Tier 5.
- Made various improvements to the delivery of the arm patch for first week completion of Operation Dark Hours. All active players who managed to beat the raid in the first week should now get their arm patch rewards retroactively. If you’ve somehow completed the requirements and are still missing your patch, you can let the team know right here.
- Another maintenance scheduled for Friday this week
- Will fix more NPC behaviors, specifically AI aggressiveness.
- Fixed several issues where players can fall through the world when matchmaking for Classified Assignments.
- Fixed an exploit in the Bank Headquarters mission.
- Patch 3.1 is planned for release sometime next week
- The patch will include further fixes, including face masks being too small and semi-automatic weapons' rate of fire being too low. You can also check out last week’s State of the Game recap that covered more of the planned fixes for this patch
- Title Update 4 still in development. It also includes planned changes to the Reviver Hive and Reinforcer Chem Launcher.
- There’s no concrete information to share yet with regards to updates to skills, build diversity, and loot. However, the team is very aware of these topics, gathering feedback, and working to design appropriate changes.
Intro to Drew Rechner and The Division 2 AI
- The Division 2 is built on the Snowdrop engine and uses powerful, low-level architecture to drive AI behaviors.
- Work on the foundation for TD2 AI began when they developed Hunters for The Division Survival DLC.
- TD2 enemies are more challenging and have more behavior options than in The Division.
- e.g. They can go prone, there are more archetypes, they respond to more situations, etc.
Two major NPC bug groups have arisen since TU3
- NPC aggression
- NPCs have been flanking over-aggressively or running directly up to the player to melee attack.
- Cause: NPC failing to realize where the player is and not taking that into account when running.
- Cause: NPC positioning themselves in ways they should not have been (i.e. engineers or medics flanking behind player).
- NPC speed of movement
- NPCs have been accelerating to high speeds briefly, making them hard to hit.
- Cause: Issues lie in and around turning animations or vertical navigation (climbing up or dropping down).
- Vast majority of the fixes for these issues are coming in Patch 3.1
- Future updates bringing further improvements.
Pants
- Control Point Officers now wear pants. A relief to us all.
To check for the full list of topics discussed, plus a full VOD of the livestream itself, check it out here.
The Division 2 is now available to play on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
