Over the last few weeks we’ve been hard at work implementing the biggest new feature yet to Fragmental – AI Players!

You’ve possibly lost most of your friends over the last 2 months through arguments while playing explosive and ultra-competitive matches of Fragmental. Never fear, you can now replace them with AI opponents so you can keep playing the game on your own!

Games in Fragmental are arguably still at their best on a couch with 1-4 human players, so that you can elbow them in the ribs and make fun of their inferior skills, but if you don’t have 4 flesh and blood players, you can now choose to fill any empty slots with AI Players, and set the skill level of them depending on how masochistic you are.

We’ve also done some other bits and pieces that have made it into Update 3, and everything is listed below.

AI Players

Behaviour

• AI seek cover if they have an inferior Weapon to an attacking opponent.
  
• AI have an understanding of which Weapons are more powerful than others and will choose the most effective one.
  
• AI will also take the distance of the chosen Weapon into consideration, sometimes a weaker Weapon that is much closer, is a better move.
  
• AI will avoid Death Walls and environmental hazards as often as possible.
  
• Predictive aiming. AI will try to lead their shots for a moving enemy.
  
• AI will use and fire through teleporters.
  

Difficulty Levels

3 different Levels – Cautious, Normal and Aggressive.
These are the different variables that change between these 3 different Levels of Difficulty.

• Reaction time to getting line of sight of a target.
  
• Min and Max Accuracy with a sine wave timer that controls the speed back and forth.
  
• Min and Max Movement Speed – while Attack and also while going for Cover or to pick up a Weapon.
  
• Rate of Fire.
  
• Min and Max Confidence – how likely they are to run headlong into a fight they think they may not win based on Weapon differences.
  

HUD

• Player names are now permanently displayed under Player Character.
  
• Player names scale depending on the size of the Map / distance that the camera is from the action.
  
• New curved Ammo Bar.
  

Game Controller Vibration Feedback

• Every Weapon now has a different vibration setting for firing.
  
• You will get vibration when you are hit by a thrown Weapon.
  
• You will get vibration when you are hit by a Melee attack.
  
• You will get mild vibration when you pick up up a Modifier.
  

Known issues

• The AI are first pass, so they are very much a work in progress. They will undoubtedly show behavioural issues, and they will make some less than ideal decisions at times, and a few of the Maps with moving platforms absolutely baffle them. Rest assured we are continuing to work on them, we just wanted to get them into the hands of the Players as soon as we could.
  

We’ve been looking forward to this Update since we first created our Roadmap, as it will open Fragmental up to a wider audience with the addition of AI Players allowing anyone to play on their own if they want.

It’s great that we now have a gameplay experience for solo Players, but as we said this is the very first pass of the AI, we still have a quite a bit to do to get them to play as well as the best human Players can. They will provide a challenge, but they’re not at the highest level, not yet anyway!

With that in mind, we would love for anyone out there to give us their feedback on the AI as it stands. The more comments we get, the more chance we have of refining the behaviours to provide the best challenge possible for the most skilled of Fragmental Players.

Our plans for Update 4 are more content based, with more Weapons, more Front End information and a completely new AI focused Game Mode – as well as the usual tweaks and bug fixes as we go. We hope you enjoy playing against the AI Players, and that our future plans are in line with what you believe should be added to the game.

As ever, community feedback is incredibly useful, so please give us your thoughts on the current status and future plans, add them to the Steam Discussions board and we’ll do everything we can to respond to your comments as fast as possible.

The Ruffians