If your ambition is to make a world feel alive, you’ve got to take some time to make the AI of the things populating that world seem believable, even if they are weirdly adorable giant flea monsters like the ones pictured above. Life Beyond, the persistent open-world survival MMO, is doing just that with its latest alpha build.
Up to this point, AI behavior was mostly a “hack” to let creatures like Ironwood beetles follow scripted paths and give an idea of the complex relationship between flora and fauna that the devs at Darewise wanted to work towards. With update 0.7, however, adds a sort of behavioral tree that tells critters to periodically check around itself to see if it needs to adapt its routine to player characters; for example, the previously mentioned Ironwood beetles will attack if they hear Ironwood being harvested. A wide variety of other social interactions are possible such as sleeping, idling, playing, patrolling, and grooming.
Further down the road, this new Ai system will allow for a variety of interactions including AI to AI behaviors, or even allowing players to tame creatures. In the immediate future, however, the devs are working to make Ironwood beetles a little more varied and less aggressive in its behavior; right now, the new AI system is effectively making the beetles stick to one place and attack anyone who gets close.
It’s been a little bit since we’ve checked in on Life Beyond, so as a refresher, it’s an in-development sci-fi single shard title that started life as Project C. It comes to us from the devs of ROKH, which saw its development suspended in 2018. Life Beyond, however, has been pressing onward at what appears to be a more successful clip, landing itself the official support of in-game market trading platform DMarket and an Epic Mega Grant.
