Daniel Saner (3503) on 6/14/2008 1:45 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

This thread used to be about me complaining that I can't win world champ race 3. Now it's just me complaining about a very annoying aspect of the game's AI design. The 3rd world champ race (the first in Paris) is the best example for this:

There are 4 waypoints, each one at a different corner of the city. The CPU drivers take 4 different routes, each route heads for a different checkpoint first. If I choose to take one of the routes the CPU drivers take, I always beat the driver that takes the same route as me - by far! Now the funny thing is that the drivers taking the other routes are always that much faster - until I choose to follow them.

The problem seems to be that the game only calculates traffic in the vicinity of the player. That way, the computer drivers can only crash into traffic when they are in the vicinity of myself - hence all the drivers taking other routes are much faster because they don't make mistakes.

It's even obvious when looking at the results. All 3 or 4 drivers taking a different route usually finish at about 2:30. I myself finish at about 2:40-2:45. And the CPU driver that took the same route as I did finished much later, at about 3:00. And this happens everytime, no matter which route I choose. If I don't move and just watch the race from map view, all racers finish at about 2:30.

This turns one of the game's best features, that the AI can make the same mistakes as human players, into a downside for some races. It is only a problem for 2 or 3 of them - unordered checkpoint races where the checkpoints are very far apart.

I noticed all this on the Windows version, so for the sake of still having a conversation topic for this thread - is this effect also noticeable on console versions of the game?