AI Surrender Mechanic in Video Games

[unstabLized]

Payday: The Heist has this mechanic. You get the enemy to a certain low health, then keep shouting at them to drop their weapon, and if done at the right time, they will surrender. Then you tell them to get on their knees and cuff themselves. Then they count as a hostage, and can be used in a trade to get dead/jailed teammates back. Great mechanic. Amazing game overall.

 

[BaronUberstein]

Civilization does it wrong. I can literally make their empire only 1 square big surrounded with 6 GDR's and they still won't surrender.

SWAT 4 on the other hand is hands down one of the best FPS's ever, if not the best.

I always found that odd in Civ 5. I take half their cities, crush their army, and they still demand that I give them gold for peace.

 

[the_green_dragon]

The surrender rule in paintball doesn't even work. I ran up behind this bastard and a point blank yelled surrender the son of a ***** turned and shot me.

I unloaded 3 shots into him as well but shit, if people won't surrender why would a computer

 

[Shadowcreed]

I completely agree, its a great mechanic.

I remember paying Soldier of Fortune, where you could shoot the guy in a limb so he'd stumble around if it were in his leg or just grab it and jump around in pain, same goes for the arms.
Once you did that he'd be holding his arm for a second and it gave you the opportunity to shoot his gun out of his hands (you could do this in a single shot as well if you didn't hit any limbs, but its likely they were pointing the gun to you and if you miss you'd hit his heart so that wasn't ideal if you wanted to spare the guy).

If you hit the gun it would drop to the floor, allowing you to pick it up. The guy that has been disarmed will give up, holding his hands in the air and when you don't watch him he'd run away as fast as he could, depending if you hit his leg or not he would stumble or just sprint away.
Really neat feature. I recall playing the game attempting to -NOT- get any kills, just surrenders. That did ramp up the difficulty quite a bit xD

Oh and C-4 could blow through walls, HELL YEAH I love mechanics that allow me to create my own path. Really awesome.

 

[dontlooknow]

I may be wrong because I haven't played it in a while, but I'm pretty sure that most NPCs in GTA4 had a mechanic that told them to get up and limp away if they recieved a curtain amount of damage in a curtain area (usually the leg). More importantly, they didn't do the mentioned 'come back for some more' thing, but if other unarmed NPCs saw that someone - either dead or injured - had left a weapon on the floor, they'll pick it up and give you a go.

This sort of dynamic behaviour was particularly effective at getting you to forget that you are actually trying to outwit a cloud of 1s and 0s, and I was quite surprised / disappointed that Skyrim didn't have something like this.

EDIT: OH! I've just remembered MGS2 and (I think with some NPSs) MGS3, where you can hold a guy up, shoot him in the right arm, which makes him drop his gun, then the leg, then shoot his radio, then put your gun away and watch him panic, try and fail to call for backup on his broken radio, then hobble away for help. It's not technically a surrender mechanic, but it is a pretty neat example of the detail in those games.

 

[CrazyCapnMorgan]

When the AI is getting massacred in Starcraft 2 it surrenders. I've found that if the human resource production reaches so many times above theirs, or if they have no possible way to rebuild, they call it good.

This, though they do surrender at progressively longer times as your crank up the difficulty with Insane practically NEVER giving up. You have to beat them down pretty hard in Very Hard difficulty before the A.I. finally gives up the ghost.

 

[Bindal]

Love the idea, but it's done too rarely. Most recent release I can think of is "Payday", where the AI (some, not all) can surrender under specific circumstances. These are overall rather simple - be wounded enough, be alone (Blue SWAT, Heavy SWAT or Murky) or a weak unit (rest), don't be a gangster, no assault wave.
If all that is true, they MIGHT surrender when called out on it - they can then traded in for a teammate respawn.
It is a nice gameplay-mechanic and adds somewhat to the game.

Otherwise, I can't really think of a game, where the enemy can actually SURRENDER. Most of the time, they just run away. Which is fine, too, in Open World games. But an actual surrender is very rarely used.

 

[aivalera]

I think it's cool if the AI shows enough intelligence to say, "Oh crap. I'm so screwed. Don't hurt me!!!" and they give up. That would add a ton of immersion into the game world you're in and is probably feels pretty awesome.

That said, I feel bad for the poor bastard designing the AIs programming to do that. Things aren't as simple as the Skyrim way, where they just crawl away, because thats just if you lower their health bar. Meanwhile, if the enemy surrendered every freakin time you'll just end up just disliking the concept because they aren't really broken, just scared. I also recall that sometimes enemies would run away and that just made things a chore because you have to kill them to loot their bodies.

No, it only feels great if their spirits are truly broken (a somewhat evil thing), which is hard to put into numbers. I would love for games to do this though.

 

[Dogstile]

They do it in timeshift. If you freeze time and take weapons off soldiers they'll put their hands up and surrender. The problem with this is that if you do it in an area where more soldiers are going to be attacking down the road, you have to take their weapons too, because otherwise the previously surrendering soldiers will run for the gun that is dropped when you kill them.

 

[Sande45]

I think surrender and escape are going to be very important aspects of enemy AI if it's ever going to even try to be realistic and humanlike. Sadly, besides strategy games, I haven't really seen them done right. Skyrim is the most recent and possibly worst offender, because it has a half-assed surrender mechanic that forces the player to kill the enemy anyway. MGS games have the hold up mechanic but that's more about sneaking up on your enemies than decimating them in battle.

Last of Us looks like it might be able to pull it off. In the E3 demo we saw that one guy surrender when facing the barrel of a shotgun unarmed but we didn't get to see where that would have led. Given the style and feel the game is going for there's really no other option than doing some kind of a working surrender mechanic.

Edit: I think GTAIV and Red Dead Redemption had something pretty good going on but can't really remember how it actually worked. This could be a good excuse to finally do another run of RDR and roleplay as the kind of guy who tries to avoid casualties.

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

Quite like surrender mechanics personally. Especially in a role playing game it would give you the opportunity to really get into whether your character draws a line between being truly lawful good or is more of a knight templar.

But I say give it a few years huh? We still only managed to get 'leader and subordinates' right about ten years ago, a complex and realistic surrender mechanic won't be around for a while.

 

[Magus44]

Payday the heist has it. Its actually a game mechanic as well. If a team mate goes down and bleeds out he goes into custody, and you need to trade him for a hostage to get him back in the game.
Best way to do it I've seen is waiting till an assault wave is over, getting a cop alone, smacking him in the face with the butt of your weapon then yelling at him to drop his gun and cuff himself.(I love the yelling in this game, makes it so much more in your face IMO.) I've saved a few friends in custody this way when we haven't had any hostages to trade.
It's actually a great game.

 

[DugMachine]

Never gave it much thought but the Skyrim point really interests me. Many of the so called "surrenders" I don't even pay attention to and just kill em because I know they'll come back for seconds but if a full on surrender was real... man adds a whole new RPing element I love it.

 

[Magikarp]

Payday: The Heist has a system in which certain enemies can be injured & forced to surrender if there are no enemies near them. Then you can trade them for team mates in custody.
My only real problems with this are that you have to interact with them 3 times to make them handcuff themselves, which can take up to about 5 seconds, which is bad if you're taking fire, & that they'll sometimes start to surrender, but then start shooting again if another enemy get near, which is pretty frustrating.

 

[Noswad]

Galactic Civilisations 2 handles surrender in quite an intelligent way, actually the whole diplomacy system in that game is probably one of the best implemented in my opinion.

Enemies if surrounded and out gunned will often surrender rather that see their last stronghold decimated, also if one of your allies is doing incredibly badly, they may occasionally hand control of their worlds over to you in hope that you can better protect them.
In addition, while most strategy games will always treat a war as an to the death situation, in this game I've always found it more profitable to give my wars objectives, take control a few planets then press for a ceasefire. Enemies, if they are clearly on the losing side, will accept peace rather than throw all their worlds and people away in a war they cannot win.

Seriously if you've ever played total war or civilisation and ever thought I wish diplomacy played a larger role here check this game out.

 

[Brendan Stepladder]

I like it. Though Im not too worried. It would have been a nice touch if in Halo if you could get the grunts to surrender.

I think running around screaming for mercy counts as surrender in anybody's book.

 

[daveman247]

hmm lets see. MGS did it with its "hold up" thing. But they started to attack it you kept your gun holstored long enough. But on peacewalker they get down on their bellies and stay there, unless one of their mates finds them

I remember arresting was a thing in the judge dredd game too. You could get perps to surrender by either sneaking up on them and yelling at them, shooting the gun from their hands, mortally wounding them or decimating most of their group. The cool thing was that every now and then there would be a guy who just thought "fuck it" and tries to punch you to death XD

- front mission 3 had it too. When an enemy suffered a bad hit, there was a chance they would lose morale. And if you kept attacking them they surrendered, ejected from the mech and ran. Letting you jack the mech or take it for parts later.

 

[514d3]

I really love the arrest mechanic in SWAT 3 and 4, it's just such a novel and unique gaming experience to burst into a room and not be expected to kill everyone contained within but instead be penalized for it should you try! Police can't just go around shooting people after all, they've got to follow the rules and the rules say they can't use deadly force save in very specific circumstances. Ideally your goal is to bring everyone in alive; the civilians, the police officers, and yes, even the 'villains'.

Made for a great multiplayer game as well in SWAT 4, easily one of my favorites. The truly skilled people in that game were the ones that went for arrests rather than trying to kill the other team, meanwhile the escort mode was just a ton of fun.

They should make another of th... no, I take it back. They'd just end up making it like Call of Duty with points popping up over your screen for every 'perp you bag' or somesuch nonsense or like every other game with a 'surrender' mechanic where it really has absolutely no meaning or purpose other than to try and annoy you save when it's during some scripted event.

So done right it's a great mechanic, but I really only know a few games that do and only two FPS that do: SWAT 3 and 4. But the rest of the time it's just a waste of said time.

I'd forgot about those games, multiplayer in that game was brilliant; a team of four of you trying to storm a building and getting everyone to surrender, and sometimes you'd have that one person who would crack under pressure and start unloading on all the crooks. Brilliant game.

I completely agree, its a great mechanic.

I remember paying Soldier of Fortune, where you could shoot the guy in a limb so he'd stumble around if it were in his leg or just grab it and jump around in pain, same goes for the arms.
Once you did that he'd be holding his arm for a second and it gave you the opportunity to shoot his gun out of his hands (you could do this in a single shot as well if you didn't hit any limbs, but its likely they were pointing the gun to you and if you miss you'd hit his heart so that wasn't ideal if you wanted to spare the guy).

This was one of the other games I remember doing this well, I used to do the same thing.

I may be wrong because I haven't played it in a while, but I'm pretty sure that most NPCs in GTA4 had a mechanic that told them to get up and limp away if they recieved a curtain amount of damage in a curtain area (usually the leg). More importantly, they didn't do the mentioned 'come back for some more' thing, but if other unarmed NPCs saw that someone - either dead or injured - had left a weapon on the floor, they'll pick it up and give you a go.

Yeah it's one of my favorite things about the Euphoria animation engine that Rockstar uses; I'm not a huge fan of Rockstar because of the way they treat the PC platform, but this one thing makes me want to play all their games (Max Payne 3, GTA 4, and particularly RDR).

I'll have to take a look at 'I Am Alive' and 'Last of us' both sound like pretty interesting games