I don't agree. Smarter AI just forces the player to think about their surroundings and tactical situation before engaging enemies. If developers have had to tone that down so brain dead gamers wouldn't rage quit, it's the fault of the gamer for thinking every encounter can be met with run and gun tactics. In other words, it's yet another situation of games being developed for the lowest common denominator, when they should be built to their full potential with an easy mode for those who can't handle it.
The trick is to balance it give let an opponent flex it muscles without having it resort to having computer like targeting systems. It needs to replicate the actions of a computer. Not that of a human. You don't want a computer AI. You want a computer to fake trying to act like a human. Outside maybe two or three games (TLoU comes to mind) they don't even try that nowadays.
I still don't agree, but we never will, so no matter really. The first thing I would do in this situation is tone down the enemy accuracy, put a timer on certain AI actions, or even give the player more health or defenses. Removing AI abilities would be an absolute last resort however, unless they were seeing through walls or had super hearing.
I have no problem believing that several devs have SAID that they have developed extremely complex AI for their own games that they simply couldn't use because they were too good. I have a VERY hard time believing that is true. That implies that developers can accurately model human behavior, but we can't handle it so they fall back to AI which gets struck on building corners as it charges straight into our fire. Methinks if someone can develop such incredible AI, one could also develop AI which is enjoyably challenging without continuous immersion-busting stupidity. If nothing else, placing artificial limits on this supposed too-good AI would do the trick, giving us AI notably better than in F.E.A.R. but not so smart as to be unmanageable. This just seems like a "you're too stupid for me to not suck" defense of one's shortcomings as a developer.
Well said, and I agree 100%.
That's an excellent point, and somewhat ties in with NikolaeVarius's point (which I'm not fully buying.) What we want isn't reality so much as a satisfyingly challenging subset of it. There's a reason people say war is hell, as opposed to war is fun and challenging. We want the illusion of war, but fun and challenging, in the same we want cop games without annoyingly defeating laws or racing games with enough realism to make us feel we are world class drivers without requiring us to be world class drivers.
Henry Ford hated horses, he did something about it. Okay you are right I was off base with my logic, it makes no sense and probably never lead to any other discoveries or progress either.
What would be the point of these discussions? Every possible game flaw could be countered with "You don't like it, go produce something better".
Good games still hold up years later, and I regularly replay older titles for this reason. Sometimes with newer hardware and enhancements such as source ports and community content, the experience is even better than the original.
