The answer is still any enemy in F.E.A.R. It’s crazy that it’s been like 25 years and it’s still got the best A.I. ever put in a game.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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Recently replayed F.E.A.R. and can confirm. Holy hell the AI is legitimately impressive, especially for the time.
That said, they still storm the same hallway I just threw a mine down in clear view of them. Well.. there's only like 15 mines total in the entire game.
The AI can take you from full health to dead in about 3 seconds on normal difficulty.
The mech suits can single-burst kill you with their attack.
Lastly, that mission where you're running along the rooftops with the soldiers shooting at you through the windows? Yeah I see that shit in my nightmares. Was too careless and got that checkpoint with no health packs and 35ish HP to my name.
The Prowler in Doom Eternal is pretty impressive. For an enemy that is sneaky and teleports, he always makes sure he is somewhere in the corner of your vision so you don't lose track of him.
Add that to how doom enemies communicate to avoid attacking all at once, and you have a very interesting enemy.
Presses F.
Nightmare fuel.
Press F to ~pay respects~ outrun the yeti.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl all NPCs. The intelligence ranges from impressive squad tactics that intelligently flank and corner you or flush you out with grenades to a group of dudes in a huddle walking straight into a wall, though. Really imperfect but it has its moments.
Those games will rock your shit if you play them with the mindset of traditional meatwall AI attacks.
Fucking monolith troopers were the worst. Or Duty, if you manage to piss them off.
I've lost track of how many times I've nearly pissed myself because an enemy NPC crept up behind me and put a round in the back of my head while I was busy doing something else. I'm not sure which of the STALKER games has the best AI but it can get really clever. I've never played another game that has enemies that can spot you from a distance, recognise that you are an enemy and that you haven't spotted them back, and then sneak up to you to assassinate you stealthily. You might've never even known they were there in the level with you until you're staring at the game over screen.
That's of course why a lot of games don't implement AI like that. It works for some genres but you wouldn't want smart AI in Call Of Duty or Doom because it would ruin the immersion of you as a super soldier.
Also why those games are super boring
Doom's got pretty good enemy AI, especially for its time. Takes good level design to really shine, though.
Dreamrunners in DmC need to be opened up. They deny most moves unless you break their combos and don't get greedy or they will counter hard. They feel scripted a bit tho.
F.E.A.R. soldiers are quite intelligent. They will flank, retreat, suppress and hide. Still the best NPC enemies if you ask me.
F.E.A.R. enemies are very good for their time period, but there's also quite a lot of smoke and mirrors involved that make them appear much smarter than they actually are. The voice lines are a great example, making you think they're actually much more coordinated and intelligent than they are. The combat arenas are also very deliberately designed in tandem with the AI, both to maximise the efficiency of the AI that exists, but also to give them a bunch of opportunities to do manoeuvres that were unusual for the time - again to further the illusion. Good examples are ledges they can jump over and windows they can smash. It's a much less smart and dynamic AI than it appears, but these small interactions give the impression of a highly intelligent enemy that interacts with the environment a lot.
They still do do some cool things sometimes though, like retreat and close the door behind them and wait in ambush.
The enemies in FEAR aren’t smart, they were just thoughtfully and meticulously designed in tandem with the levels to provide an experience that outshines most modern game design by miles.
Huh?
Well, illusion or not, all I see today is zombies or monster rushing you or soldiers beelining to the objective and stopping to shoot.
Find me better soldiers/bots to fight in single player games and you'll make my day :)
It was mentioned elsewhere but the S.T.A.L.KE.R. original trilogy and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly has pretty good AI. I guess Clear Sky has a little too much grenade spam but Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat both have good AI, though I haven't sat down and made exact A-B testing with F.E.A.R.. Anomaly has a bunch of mods too that make the AI even better.
That's all videogame "AI", though. It's all basic algorithms that provide an illusion. That's why it's so great when they nail it.
Hell, even the real "AI" like Claude is still just an illusion, and there are WAY too many dumbass ELIZA effect suffering motherfuckers on this planet...
Yes of course, I'm not suggesting any video game has any sentient actual intelligence. I'm just using the old terminology where "AI" means "whatever controls enemy and NPC behaviour in the game".
My point is that even F.E.A.R.'s "Goal Oriented Action Planning" is much less sophisticated and complex than it first appears, thanks to excellent design and clever illusions.
Haven't played it much, but I'd assume there is some enemy in dwarf fortress with 30 years of development.
Dwarf Fortress is a boss fight of video games unto itself.
I'm not sure if it is boss or not, but the xenomorph in Alien: Isolation has a great AI that does some wickedly mean things.
It's AI is actually really interestingly implemented. In most games involving stealth the AI knows where you are but is programmed to ignore you if you're crouched in bushes or something. But in alien isolation it genuinely doesn't know where you are, there is a master control AI that does no wjere you are and it directs the xenomorph to your approximate location, but then it has to use its AI to look for you.
I'm not quite sure what the advantage of doing it that way is but it's certainly an interesting approach. Of course it's not an original approach, left 4 dead did it decades ago but it is rarely done this way.
I'm not quite sure what the advantage of doing it that way is
If I had to guess, it just kept the programmers from being super lazy about it. If the individual enemy AI doesn't have exact coordinates of the player, it actually has to move around, search a space, potentially manipulate the environment, and possibly fail to find the player, versus doing what is effectively an idle animation while waiting for the player to step out of cover.
Left 4 Dead [...] decades ago
😫
I kinda feel halflife soldiers are pretty smart.
Not an enemy, but Kaepora Gaebora (the owl) from The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. Feels like every time you talk with him and try to skip the dialog by mashing A, the question changes and you get stuck having to hear him repeat what he was saying.
I wasted so much ammo trying to kill this owl
Suddenly I hear the song
havent played prey but it has heaps of praise for its AI
the raider AI in fallout 4 is pretty good, they are kinda smart for some drugged out maniacs
The AI is actually really good, but nerfed to hell by default, even on survival.
If you use GCM to set search times to 60s and 'forgetfulness' (can't remember the actual variable right now) to ~5 mins, they're tough. They don't just give up and go back to doing what they're doing and you need to keep moving since they can (*but won't always) locate gunshots by sound and will start moving to your last firing location.
Second this for Pray. It was quite the experience for me.
Before that I loved Half Life 2s AI.
HL2 was amazing. Playing Alyx as well gave me the creeps hiding from Combine. I loved it.
HL1 had AI that was so good for the late 90s it ruined games for me
It did for me too! And the scripted events layered in seamlessly in all three games. It's easy to forget it's a game.
Not necessarily smart, but very aware: a lot of NPCs in Red Dead Redemption 2.
They'll often comment about Aurther when his clothes are bloody, dirty, he has long facial hair, etc. One of the NPCs in your main camp will complain if you stay in the camp for a while.
It really makes the world feel alive.
One of the NPCs in your main camp will complain if you stay in the camp for a while.
This one annoyed me, to be honest. He's like "Arthur, Arthur, you need to go out and earn some money for the camp!", but when you look at the logbook most of the NPCs are bringing in about a dollar fifty per day in pocket watches and so on, whereas I've paid in over a thousand bucks in the past week and have singlehandedly bankrolled every single improvement to the camp since the game's start. Ungrateful sons of bitches...
They'll also come looking for you if you avoid the camp
Not sure if you'd count it as a boss but the Alien in Alien Isolation is pretty good.
Far Cry 2 gets an honorable mention for scary realistic flanking and rush mechanics. Shame Ubisoft lobotomized them for the sequels.
Two games I remember for having tons of interactions are Hitman (World of Assassination) and Breath of the Wild.
It’s all a lot of preprogrammed, precise reactions you can count on, but they’re built to let the player schedule out specific ways of outsmarting enemies, and they’re made to sometimes be overwhelming in a straight, brute force fight.
My favorite moment in Breath of the Wild was when I put a balloon on a piece of meat, blew it to the edge of a cliff, and all the Bokoblins saw it drop and followed it. Then I came out and blew them off the cliff.
The enemy behavior in FEAR was very good, especially in groups. They didn't just attack bluntly from the front but also flanked you and other stuff.
Maybe the memory is some nostalgia, but it was really good at that time.
Elites from Halo.
The Executioners in Bloodborne. Fuckers.
~~Strelok from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:Shadow of Chernobyl~~
Misunderstood the assignment.
A-Life from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:Shadow of Chernobyl is pretty great. If you move from where you're shooting at people and run around and shoot them from a different spot, if they didn't spot you moving, they'll be looking for you from the last spot they seen you. AND if one ai didn't know where you're at you'll hear the ai with knowledge share that information. It's kind of wild once you know how it works.
I remember F.E.A.R. having a lesser version that worked better in rooms.
Probably over rated but Metal Gear Solid had one that would clear rooms and search lockers
I heard Selaco basically remade F.E.A.R. engine with extremely stylized graphics.
Much lesser known is "The Signal From Tölva" you can listen to robots try to kill you like a group.