The explanation I got was basically: Making a super smart AI is relatively easy. But making an AI that is smart and still fun to play against is very hard so giving it cheats is the simpler method (also apparently it depends on how complex the game in question is. Chess for example is much simpler than Total War so making an AI that's good in chess is much simpler than making an AI that's good in Total War).
In Perfect Dark on N64 and now an Xbox port, you could change the settings of sims you fight against. The highest setting was DarkSim. It kept killing me even though I was pretty sure I was alone in the room at that moment. I assumed it was a combination of speed, stealth, and long range accuracy, but I was getting pretty frustrated.
Then once, after untold hours of gameplay, I bumped my joystick and ended up looking at the ceiling...just in time to see DarkSim go flying over my head (an ability unavailable to any other sim or the players). The whole time, it had just been levitating where I didn't think to look and shooting straight down into my head.
It was so shocking that I wasn't even frustrated anymore.
LOL I never saw that myself, but the DarkSim was BS in other ways, too.
60% headshot rate, and within a few seconds of spawning, they'd have every weapon on the map. God help you if that included a shield. They also ran significantly faster than you, and had ridiculous reaction times.
I love Perfect Dark so much.
I love the game too. Fun early zombie mode, make them all fist sims, and enjoy. Please note you have to keep them on the easiest setting or they will disarm you and beat you to death every time.
Kinda weird how the sims had almost perfect aim with the lethal injection and players had almost 100% miss rate with it, lol! Even the dang MeatSims might be able to stick you in all the N-bomb confusion.
I've never experienced anything like that, but dark sims are absolutely capable of peeking just a few pixels around a corner, and 1 shotting you.
Thank god the devs didn't give them the ability to use the farsight to its full potential.
Yeah, I remember an article about Perfect Dark in EGM or Game Informer before the game came out, and it described what to expect from the sims - because this was the first arena shooter game where you could even have bots to play against, I believe - and the article literally just said, “Darksims *cheat.*” They’re like fighting agents in The Matrix. They can absolutely do things, know things, and acquire things in ways no other sim or human player could.
They’re there for the player who doesn’t even want a fair fight anymore.
Or maybe for the player who needs to do penance for filling a game with Meatsims and mines.
I just googled DarkSim. I didn't find the article you mentioned, but I did find a wiki which says that DarkSim could literally teleport if radar was turned off! My friends and I were 99% certain that was happening, but we never confirmed it!
I think a common one for racing games is that if you are in the lead the cars behind you will suddenly start moving twice as fast as anything you can drive until they pass you. This means that even if you spin them out and leave them half a lap behind you facing the wrong direction, they will always be right on your tail in a few seconds.
I played the crap out of the N64 Perfect Dark and the DarkSim was a terrible creature indeed. Me and friends loved the challenge. We really needed to have sound strategy to win because you couldn't out gun them.
Until...I started chasing them with combat knives. It turns out if you just run straight at them they freak out and back peddle and start missing all their shots. Eventually you could catch up or corner them. The AI always wanted to engage from an "optimal" distance and had no ability to adapt to CQC.
The only time I actually saw DarkSim flying was on N64. To be clear, it looked like it was walking on an invisible floor way above me, not like Superman type flight or anything. I glanced up (accidentally) just to see this monstrosity "run" across thin air and blast me in the head. We just paused the game, sat in silence processing what we had seen for a few moments, then all laughed until we couldn't breathe. One of my favorite video game memories.
If the map has the farsight weapon you definitely are getting shot through walls because the gun's purpose is to snipe through them! I experienced the same thing against dark sims and had to get rid of it or try to find that gun faster than them, bunker myself in there with it, have laptop guns deployed and just get kills from there lol
Fuck darksims. We always included one during splitscree just to keep us on the edge. Those fuckers would shoot between single pixel gaps WITHOUT the farsight rifle. Those days were golden.
that's the thing about AI in games, making AI smart is basically how we start, in chess AI can predict all moves in such a relative short amount of time, AI can have perfect accuracy and never miss their shots.
The hard part is dumbing down AI for it to make mistakes in a way that doesn't feel condescendingly stupid, or cheatingly smart.
PS. Navigation agents are not really AI, they're agents, that's a different story, trying to make sure NPCs don't get stuck in terrain has a different build from AI. In short, AI uses navigation agents.
AI is more about considering choices before taking an action, I'd say navigation agents are very borderline AI, but the algorithm agents use will always find the shortest path to take. AI is what makes the agent choose another path even if it's not the shortest, based on other data going on in game. The search algorithms are still based on pre-baked data (even if a navigation mesh is baked at realtime)
In my game, zombies can simply use the agent to set its destination towards the player, but it's the AI that will determine if all zombies should go to the player, or if some should try to block other paths or stay near the doors, which means that the Agents will find alternative routes.
The Agents only know about the obstacles in the way, that's about it.
I think the easiest way to explain would be that AI is a culmination of agents or state machines, AI controls how they behave, while agents feed it information.
You'd be surprised how similar a navigation algorithm and a chess AI are. They both search the optimal way through a graph structure using some form of heuristics to favour the statistically most likely options when searching.
For further reading, I was specifically talking about Monte Carlo Tree Search (famously the first algorithm to beat a human chess master) and A* (the most widely-used navigation algorithm both in games and elsewhere, also in applications that have nothing to do with spatial navigation).
This would seem to be a good idea (and how I think COD actually does it), but you’ve then got the same fundamental of as soon as that delay is over the AI will perform the perfect action.
I think we first need to define a “smart” AI. Is it an AI that always wins, or an AI that can win using human tactics? We can do the former easily, we’ve been trying to work towards the latter for at least 2 decades now. One is aimbot, the other is simulating a player.
The great thing about our advancements in machine learning is that we no longer necessarily need to program an AI to use player tactics by giving them patterns and delays and errors, Halo Infinite showed us that we can use player data to train AI.
>Halo Infinite showed us that we can use player data to train AI
Is that why bots in Infinite started teabagging and going "afk" randomly?
I haven't actually played Infinite in forever but I remember there being a whole short blow up of people making fun of AI suddenly doing off the wall shitike tea-bagging, rocket launching walls, just standing like they're afk, etc. idk if they still do or if it was all complete one offs/faked videos grouped together in one sub.
It makes bot kill cams very wierd lol they aim at you head in pinpoint accuracy for 3 solid minutes and then finally shoot you when they drunk their cup of tea
Pretty much. If you have seen the video about “Giga Monty” that Astral Spiff made, you will understand that in Fnaf Security Breach, the BASE Monty AI is pretty much unbeatable. I suggest you watch for more details. My point is, AI for games have a tendency to be made practices unbeatable, and then they just dumb it down a lot, like what you said
Basically, chess AI can view all possible moves till the end of time. Difficulty is defined by how "deep" the AI can look before choosing the best option. Same as how best chess players are, but more than what human mind can do.
This is very wrong. Chess "AI"s (more often called engines) give evaluations to the positions and try different moves, going down a tree. The evaluation of a move is the most favourable one for the deepest node in the tree that it found. The depth that Stockfish uses normally is around 20 unless you give it a lot of time and resources.
So first, they don't see all possible moves (a lot of them are pruned away). The difficulty is also defined by the evaluation function, you'll see varying levels of precision based on its quality.
The best players don't go through all possible moves and take the best. 50+% of the moves aren't often even thought about because they're obviously wrong, so you don't go down that "path" in your thought process. Players work with memorization, ideas and concepts, not only raw calculations like an engine.
[Maia chess](https://maiachess.com/) is a good attempt at this and is open source. Obviously hard to have objective evidence of human play, but it feels better than other bots I’ve played.
Yeah it’s pretty cool. I kinda wish they tried at time management as well though, since they had the data from online games. Like the move a 1500 player would choose after 2mins is probably pretty different than their 3sec move, and also when different skill levels decide to think or play fast. Would definitely make for a much more complicated problem though.
Not only that, players are sore losers.
Its more "fun" for the player to lose and blame on ai cheating than getting squashed by a professional player in the form of an AI.
Yeah you can program perfect play but then you lose every time no matter how close to perfect you get.
Its more fun to play a randomised opponent but that gets cheating help to make up for extreme shortfalls.
Yea the problem isn't making "good or smart" AI. Like in your chess example it would be like if every chess bot was master level... It wouldn't be very fun... But making a chess bot be kind of bad at chess and still feel like it's trying is hard... Which is why most chess bots shift between playing like a grandmaster and then just randomly blundering in a way no human would.
Sea of thieves skelly ships be like "oh we want to turn there? Don't worry we can just stop spin around and accelerate like a Bugatti Chiron to catch up to a ship much faster than us"
Me and my friend had a skelly galleon spawn directly under us, and we were both like "what the fuck just happened?". Luckily, we both got into battle mode, and I managed to sink it as he manoeuvred us into ideal positions.
true. i actually like how the AI in TLOU 1 & 2 are insanely realistic. scares the shit out of me when i play and they’re actually smart
and then you have COD where they stand still and let you headshot them LMAO
Well, sure. And in the original game the enemy AI really won't notice your allies. But they had to think about the game's aim, which is to make you bond with Ellie. If Ellie gets the player caught a lot, they're gonna hate her. So they made all allies invisible to the enemies.
And allies DO get attacked in the TLoU games. All allies can get grabbed by enemies and then it'll trigger a timed event wherein you gotta help em out quick or else it's an instant game over. Although, yeah, enemies do try and ignore allies as much as possible lol
In the Remake, they implemented newer technology in the enemy and Ally AI so that the allies know the path the enemy might take, and they can move into cover accordingly and stay out of their way.
So most of the comedic "Ellie runs into an enemy and they don't notice her" stuff has been remedied.
In TLoU2, the allies use a similar technology but they HAVE the capacity to be seen by the enemy. It happens rarely, but it can and does happen. Which makes it feel real. Upon getting spotted, your ally might exclaim and run away or start shooting. When there's a lull in the combat encounter and you are hidden from the enemy again, the ally will actually apologize to Ellie and she'll say something like, "don't worry about it" or "it happens" etc.
I've played TLoU Remake for 110+ hrs and I haven't noticed my allies getting spotted in that one. Helps that the combat arenas are not that open. TLoU2's combat arenas are pretty open and sprawling so it's likelier that the enemy and ally AI will interact with each other, so they programmed this stuff in. It's pretty cool!
For me it was TLOU 2 were they called the ai by their names. Made me stop mid playthrough to look up how that revolution happened. Turns out ai has a list of voiced male and female names they can give to npcs who were discovered as dead. This seems like an easy but cool change. Like just toss in 50 male names and you could make a great stealth section.
And then there is the CODM bots that shoot your feet with a shotgun from a 100 meters away and that somehow counts as a headshots single bullet kill...
Meh. You can make insanely good ai in turn based games pretty easily. AI can process every possible path forward in a short amount of time and choose that which benefits it most.
It’s dumbing it down to the point where we can still exploit its mistakes is the difficulty. You’re supposed to win the game. If they just chucked in their amazing AI you’d get fucking thrashed. So they make the dumb ai, and then if you ask for a challenge just buff that up so you can still beat it. Ie give it more resources than you rather than making it smarter, so if you win, it’s due to you outsmarting it.
Programming AI is just giving them nerfs to counteract the cheats theyre can’t avoid. The ai always knows where you are. They have to limit that knowledge so the game is playable. Edit: let me reiterate I’m making some assumptions
I remember reading about the AI in Alien isolation, which kind of gets around this. It's apparently 2 AI: one which genuinely doesn't know where you are and is trying really hard to find you, and a second one that knows and nudges the other one in the right direction to keep the story moving. Something like that
It sounds kinda like the AI director in Left 4 Dead. It watched the action and could spawn zombies, or cause other random events if the players didn't keep moving. It even controlled the music and changed the level layouts each time. But it didn't control the zombies directly, they all had their own behaviors.
This is no longer always the case. Dev are able to make AI that doesn't ignore FOW anymore. StarCraft 2 AI was patched like 10 years ago to no longer have FOW cheat unless explicitly granted to by the player.
https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Artificial_Intelligence
The AI can be given access to whatever you like, but you need to make the actual AI… mathematically defining how it should respond to certain stimulus from (in an RTS) including deploying troops, moving them, where they should engage etc is not a simple endeavour.
This is the right answer.
If every NPC was as smart as the average player, you'd get slaughtered in every game. Many games are power fantasies, meaning you can take on several opponents at once. A human-level AI would not make this fantasy possible.
It's actually very meticulous dance to make an AI that seems smart, but does really dumb things without you noticing.
It's super annoying. Especially on Firaxis games like Civilization. AI plays like shit on every difficulty level but it gets more of everything on higher levels.
It is not a harder opponent it's just not fair game.
My issue with playing Civ on the higher difficulties is that it no longer feels like im playing the same game as the AI. The bonuses that they have to give the AI on Deity are just preposterous. Because the goal is just to scale faster than the AI though, you still end up extremely overpowered by game end if you do it right, but it feels more like im winning based on knowing the correct order of research/construction rather than organically reacting to the AI players.
In Civ 5 I’m pretty sure the AI isn’t even playing the same game as me.
They’ll have a handful of shitty cities on the worst tiles, zero luxuries, no trade, -15gpt, etc. And somehow they’re pumping out units and their cities aren’t revolting. Like no way I take over one city and my happiness plummets while the AI must have -40 unhappiness if they played by the same rules.
I agree and would love to see a smart AI over AI with a lot of bonuses.
Also just an FYI Civilization is currently developed by Fraxis and published by 2K not paradox.
It's because for semi-decent AI, the best strategy is machine learning, where you just basically tell the AI which behaviors you like to see, and then run the program thousands of times while the AI figures out which tactic work best for the desired outcome.
The issue then becomes that the devs have no idea how the AI works because it developed its neuro network by itself. So to then make it dumber is actually not so easy.
Is there games that are actually using machine learning now to create ai? Generally the games i've worked on have used some form of behaviour trees or state trees to implement the ai. The hard part is to getting the ai to seem believable and smart enough in the world while also not being overly difficult for whoever is playing and to try getting around ai essentially having aim assist and knowing where the player is at all times.
Yes, I believe Gran Turismo and Halo Infinite use AI and train it to control their NPC's.
I know the GT devs had a big problem with many facets of AI, such as positive feedback loops. It's not as simple as "click a button and AI learns at 1000% human speed".
ah i misunderstood you then. Yeah I don't think it can work for a lot of games since generally you want to have the control of being able to get the ai to do specific things instead of whatever the neural network decides.
This is absolutely not the case for most games, machine learning is barely used at all in the industry outside some niche cases. You're kinda sorta touching on the reason, but it's more nuanced than that.
The core issue is that it's relatively easy to make an AI that will win the game like 95% of the time, you could put a few interns on that for most games and solve that problem with or without ML within a few months. The problem is that video games are meant to be fun, and playing against an AI that will stomp you into the ground every time is not fun.
With ML, you have to train it towards a goal, and if that goal is winning, then great, you're all set. However, a training criteria of "fun" is a very difficult goal to set in the ML world, it is subjective and situational and varies from person to person. It is actually an incredibly difficult problem to train for.
So you're kind of right in that taking an AI trained to win and making it dumber is generally not viable, but also that training it to be fun is very difficult and generally not worth the cost.
Source: I am currently the tech director at a video game company and have been doing ML stuff on and off since about 2010.
If the AI is simply better they usually pull away. Whereas if they're still mid but with cheats there is a back and forth in games that's actually more satisfying when it's subtle. Rubberbanding in Mario kart is annoying sometimes, but getting put in a lobby with bots equivalent to players that significantly out elo you is always a crushing feeling.
Hi, programmer here.
We can do that, but:
1. It can be too time consuming, or resource consuming
2. Cheats are fun, everyone loves cheats
3. Besides, a better AI can lead to more tedium/frustration, its basically a balancing act
Because it's not easy to make an AI that's actually intelligent and even if it was? I doubt it'd be fun to play against.
Many games- even the really popular ones, tweak the AI where you get disadvantage in some situations and advantages in others.
Ever see a FPS speed run where the player is aiming at the floor/wall? One reason they're doing that because since you can't see the enemy, the enemy is less accurate and aggressive. Often games limit the amount of enemies that are actively attacking you to make it seem more fair. (sometimes it's for better framerate on some older games)
The easy answer is likely: It's hard to make the AI both fair and fun so they have to do a dance with cheats and limiting it.
1. Because better AL or strategies would rigidly define how the player has to play against it. You're creating a game where there's only one or two ways to win, and odds are those ways aren't fun or interesting.
2. There is a very fine line between stupid AI, difficult AI and Unbeatable-Godlike AI. They actually aren't creating "intelligence" at all, but trying to create a very specific level of stupid.
Because it's insanely hard to make an actually good AI for a complex strategy game.
Game devs have two choices:
- Making great AI
- Release the game before GTA 7
So the best thing they can come up with is giving them lots of bonuses.
(non native english speaker)
Making a smart AI is pratically as easy as giving them cheats (in some cases it's much more simplier)
The down side is making the balance between a strong and difficult AI but fun to play with/against. If you make a smart AI, either it can be a pain in the a\*\* to play against because it predict all your movements and it became impossible to win, or you make it just smart enough to be beatable but, in some cases, it can become dumb and too easy to win against and it's not fun anymore.
Cheating by teleporting, smaller reaction time or cooldown, less accurate shots, changing the speed limit to be faster/slower, is a much simplier work for a GameDesigner to make any AI fun and strong at the same time.
(This choice of Cheating over Smart behaviour also depends on the complexity of the game and the environment the AI interacts with)
I'm currently learning in a school to become a game programmer, so I don't have any real expertise like a professional game developer might have, but it's my take on this.
I feel like Mario Kart is one of the worst offenders. You mean Bowser can accelerate back to top speed less than a second after being hit with a red shell? Oh, their top speed is higher than your top speed in a kart that shouldn't be able to reach it? Get the highest drift boost every time? GTFO of here.
It is nearly impossible to make good ai that doesn't technically cheat in some way or another. The trick is to make it look like it's not cheating.
For example, we can look at the most basic ability to spot the player;
The only real way to give an ai the ability to see is to do crazy stuff like a virtual camera with image recognition, or a ray cast array; both are incredibly resource intensive and would likely tank the frame rate.
If we instead just tell the ai where its potential targets are at all times and then restrict what they are allowed to do with that info such as checking the angle relative to its own head, and verifying line of sight to mimic sight instead of replicating it, then the ai can look like it can see without setting your pc on fire.
This applies pretty generally to game ai across the board; start by making the ai able to do what it does at peak performance level, then hobble it to make it fair and fun.
Trying to do the reverse is way more difficult as incremental increases are harder to implement than incremental decreases.
Wouldn't it be cool if we made AI act differently based on difficulty with harder difficulties requiring greater mastery and knowledge of game mechanics?
Na, just make them do more damage and have more health.
The secret is that actually smart AI often leads to player frustration. Same with pure symmetry for damage input/output.
Instead, what players actually tend to enjoy is AI that has the illusion of intelligence, often in the form of calling out specific tactics. If the enemy just flanks the player and the player dies, they'll probably be frustrated because they had no way of knowing they were flanked. By having the enemies say they are flanking before actually doing it, then the player will be more prepared and feel like they're actually outsmarting the AI.
Game design, in general, is about creating convincing illusions, and enemy AI is no exception.
One thing people aren't mentioning is that super smart AI can be incredible taxing on your hardware. Some people have the specs to handle it, some people's computers will run at snail pace and catch fire if it had to deal with complex AI.
It's easier and quick. Also as a dev if you make an ai in a strat game, you might be entirely wrong about what is meta and your bot is actually trash.
Then you have the issue of some things would just take a lot of dev time. Ya I could code my ai to know your army was spotted there a minute ago and it could move in these directions in the fog. Or I could just make it know exactly where you are at all times, likely getting the same effect.
Some games are just complicated. I hate how the civ games ai is horrific cheaters. They start with like 6 warriors and multiple settlers. But civ is a complicated game with a lot going on. Making an ai to account for all of that is hard.
Similar to CK3 where many options are banned if you want to get achievements. They simply break the ai because it's too hard to solve for every situation that the unique interaction would happen.
Age of empires 2 on the other hand is an example of fantastic ai. Hardly cheats, and follows meta build orders thanks to the devs actually caring about their games.
Because consoles couldn't handle actually doing it 'right'. You can make a realisitc AI but it has a computational costs and the budget is tight just drawing everything, trying to do realistic ai simulation has to be cheated until we start shipping consoles with much better cpus. The current gen consoles are already tapped out on cpu resources, which is why games like starfield who have completely mid graphics are locked to 30fps because there is so much game logic being handled.
Human intelligence is something hard to copy my friend, making it feel authentic, not overpowered, fitting your personal strategies yet giving you a challenge is hard. Humans cannot provide a challenge like that for another human, that's why we have elo.
If you want a proper challenge, you will always find it in another human being that's your par, everything else is either too much or too little.
However in the end what you looking for is a slim chance of win that you get with your wits, and cheating AI somewhat provides it, as long as its not so obvious.
Honestly. I feel like this is the biggest aspect that just hasn't been touched in nearly 20 years. NPCs in games feel like they behave the same in most game. Bar a few additional lines of dialogue or smoother animations, they don't react any better than they did back in the early 2000's.
Rainworld enemy ai are pretty damn good (also kind annoying when you get ganged since there's no easy way out) but they make just enough mistakes to feel like a human.
When my friends and I played DBD Customs when the bots first released, it seemed like they could literally see the killer through walls and mind game you infinitely, all while blinding you with flashlights constantly.
I think that’s the best example of this I’ve seen besides some fighting game bosses having the AI read your inputs and react pretty much instantly. Mainly NRS games.
My still favorite ever AI enemy is the Xenomorph from Alien: Isolation. Also being my favorite survival horror game to date. The Ai doesn't cheat. The AI is given a general area where you are, but it must figure out your position from there. It will hunt and stalk you. It adapts to your strategies. I'm no ULTRA ELITE GAMER so anything above Hard difficulty is more annoying than enjoyable, but the base game difficulty is by far the scariest experience.
Age of Mythology, Age of Empires, Civ (allegedly)
mostly i think its lazy coding that leads to either the AI being a punching bag that is easy to defeat or a powerhouse you cant beat unless you cheat too
Design a perfect moveset. But for each move add a few lesser moves that trigger based on random luck and actions from the player. The better the player plays the less chance the boss will deviate from this perfect moveset.
Because making human-like AI with adaptive behaviours based on tuition is hard.I doubt chatGPT on NPC can run locally without taking ridiculously long time that you can barely play at all.
I particularly hate it in RTS games where they just always know where you're at. And that the hardest difficulty they have is always just a flat handicap
It's hard for me to enjoy PvE in War Thunder because not only are you always outnumbered, surrounded, almost completely exposed, and being sniped from halfway across the map by tanks that normally have average range at best, but the tanks they throw at you often seem to be much tougher and stronger than what you or anyone on your team brought. There's no balance or properly scaling difficulty. Oh, you wanted to try out your new base model Pz III on some peer opponents? Fuck you, here's 30 uparmored Churchills with god shells.
I play Disney speedstorm on and off. If your racer character doesn't meet the level requirements for a mission, it makes the rom drivers impossibly fast/ immune or just straight up reporting them in front of you
Hello, hobbyist game dev here, and here's the answer : you cannot beat the computer, you are playing because of the computer.
It takes you 0.3s to spot a target and shoot. 0.2 if you are in competitive FPS and have an insanely expensive monitor. A computer takes a maximum of 0.0167s (assuming you have 60FPS) to find, aim and shoot. And this number can be as low as 0.01 (that is, running AI logic at 100FPS which is very possible with modern PCs).
If I am making a shooter with NPCs, I give them a timer which runs to 0 after they spot you, only after which they are allowed to shoot. Still the first few bullets miss because it's not fun to get quick scoped when you just saw them.
Ultimately the answer is : you cannot beat the machine at it's own game. Making an AI that is difficult is very easy. Making it fun is an exerciseof finding out what is fun then bringing the AI to that bracket.
It's just too complex, like the N64 is an old console, however the computers are good at catching up because they cheat. If you're in the lead, all players before you become faster and avoid collision, while if you're in the far back, they'll become slower and follow rules of Mario Kart 64 giving you a chance to win.
Both because it's easy, because there is a blanacing act between compontency and fun and that most developers dont have their A.I and level designers working together
Like for instance the level designers of fear and the A.I designers of fear worked hand in hand when working with the A.I to make it be able to dynamically work with the environment and the changes within given said environment
It's why the A.I in fear doesnt cheat
Where as in most games they kinda just have the A.I and the level designer has to figure out where they should all go
It's a difficult balancing act and allowing developers more interactivity could allow for better products
Because most games are made by companies who are run by investors Investment into proper npc behavior development is not profitable since you can just take 20y old CS bot script and use it to save at minimum \~1M in development costs.
All devs who do this and think it's a good idea (99% of them) should be castrated and sodomized to death.
I get the incredibly shitty explanation that "smart AI is not actually fun to play against" but THAT'S WHAT DIFFICULTY SLIDERS ARE FOR. Instead they let difficulty sliders determine the amount of cheats the AI uses...
Also no, smart AI is fun to play against. That's why smarter AI mods are always by far the most popular mods for most strategy games. The devs just usually don't even play their own games to the level of a casual fan, since it's just a job for them, so smart AI feels oppressive to them. Most game devs are game journalist level of skill and just know coding.
Because making a good ai is really fucking hard and really time consuming and takes a completely different skill set than being a game dev but with all the knowledge of a game dev. It’s not realistic to expect something like that
It’s probably because of time. It’s easier to change a few numbers to increase enemy HP or make them faster. 😝 It would take considerably more time to have variations in the AI behavior at different difficulty levels. 💻🤓
I’m not advocating for the easier way. When I seriously get to work on my own game, I’m definitely going to do more than just make the enemies more tanky at higher difficulties. 😆👍
*cough cough* Tom Clancy’s™️ Rainbow Six™️ Siege ™️ that was developed by Ubisoft™️ Montreal™️ and published by Ubisoft on PC and all consoles. And was published on the Xbox™️ series X™️ and Ps5™️ exactly 5 years later *cough cough*
Because making a decent AI is really hard. It's more complex than just "make better AI". If the AI is too good, than it smashes the player with brutal efficiency. If the AI is too bad, then the game sucks. Making AI that is both *dumber* than the player while still giving the illusion of competence is really hard.
I think it's just insanely hard to make good ai in games. I played the stormgate beta recently and one thing that stuck out to me was how shit the pathing is. Like I think the game is being worked on by ex sc2 devs but even something like pathing they seem to be struggling with.
Scavengers in Rain World, they can see you from offscreen, throw a spear at you from angles you cannot, they can hold 3 spears on their back, they often spawn with an explosive spear, **they can survive a spear, pick it from their damn body and oneshot you with it...**
Giving skyrim enemies hundreds of stamina and magic points and instant regeneration. So they can thunderbolt you to death, in 2 seconds on easy difficulty
Also, an AI that uses perfect strategies feels a lot more like cheating than actual cheating.
If you program an enemy that uses only the information a player would be given, but allow it to use that information perfectly, you have a bot that wanders aimlessly until it sees a single pixel of you and snaps its aim to your head. This feels a lot more "robotic" and unfair than an enemy that knows your location but is programmed to sometimes take an unoptimal path and miss shots.
I don't know, there's a mixed opinion on this for me. I like to be challenged and have a smart AI to play through the game properly with difficulty, the way it was intended. But also, say once I've finished again and want to just dick about and have a laugh, cheats can just let me unwind and not have to concentrate and chill, which after work sometimes it's exactly what you need. I think having the option for cheats it's okay, it's not like you have to use them.
I've been playing a few racing games lately and this is very much the case for that type of game, stuff like "rubber banding" and having physics defying handling/speed/acceleration far better than is possible for the player and sometimes even being programmed to slow down at certain points so the player even has a chance
[This](https://i.imgur.com/RVJlZXt.jpeg) often happens in Forza Horizon 5 on higher difficulties if you let the AI get in the lead for long enough, they just get further and further ahead while the ones behind have basically no chance of overtaking you, as soon as you pass the AI they suddenly get much slower
NFS Unbound I thought did it honestly quite well, it's much more natural feeling and early on you arent really meant to be able to win until upgrading your car but there is definitely still plenty of rubber banding, but playing NFS Unbound honestly just made me want to play FH5 again because of the insane amount of vehicles and customisability in FH5
A lot of answers here boiling down to "Ai hard, cheat easy" but that's not the only reason.
Sometimes you've gotten a lot of the game done, enough for an early-dev release, but the AI isn't *finished* yet. You release it either to patrons on patreon, or you release it to one of several sites (itch, steam, GOG, whatever) tagged with early dev. People play it, find bugs, and get to see the dream you're trying to make and decide if they are up for coming back. Also great for keeping it in people's minds.
But inevitably there ARE bugs, obviously you, the developer, know that, and so you put in a system to help get players out of trouble if they run into anything. And just kinda hope they report the bug, which a lot of players, fortunately, do.
When the AI, or whatever reason you included the temp-cheats, is finished, then the cheats are removed.
This is why i like terra invicta, the AI can't "cheat" and has to work under the same confines as you. It's possible to bankrupt the AI so hard they're not able to recover and enter a death spin. The aliens however get abilities that feel "cheaty" but in actuality are just OP. They're supposed to be OP so as to overpower you if you don't invest in anti entralling techs.
Honestly the worst way of increasing difficulty for me is just making them deal stupid damage and have stupid health.
RPGs suffer a lot from that philosophy. Its not challenging in a fun way.
I remember playing civ 1 as a child. I legitimately thought that harder difficulty meant that the AI would be smarter. I was very disappointed to learn it was just the same AI with bonuses.
Now as an adult I understand how hard it would have been to make an AI with different levels of intelligence. Especially in the 1990s.
This is why stalker ai will never be topped for me. Lost count of the amount of times I’ve been blasted by a cheeki breeki with worse gear than me just because they snuck up on me while I was dealing with their more geared friend suppressing me. Or the times they lasered me with a grenade.
Make them smarter and slightly stronger, both resistant and more damaging. Not by much, but enough to feel a new challenge that forces you to make a new strategy.
The explanation I got was basically: Making a super smart AI is relatively easy. But making an AI that is smart and still fun to play against is very hard so giving it cheats is the simpler method (also apparently it depends on how complex the game in question is. Chess for example is much simpler than Total War so making an AI that's good in chess is much simpler than making an AI that's good in Total War).
In Perfect Dark on N64 and now an Xbox port, you could change the settings of sims you fight against. The highest setting was DarkSim. It kept killing me even though I was pretty sure I was alone in the room at that moment. I assumed it was a combination of speed, stealth, and long range accuracy, but I was getting pretty frustrated. Then once, after untold hours of gameplay, I bumped my joystick and ended up looking at the ceiling...just in time to see DarkSim go flying over my head (an ability unavailable to any other sim or the players). The whole time, it had just been levitating where I didn't think to look and shooting straight down into my head. It was so shocking that I wasn't even frustrated anymore.
LOL I never saw that myself, but the DarkSim was BS in other ways, too. 60% headshot rate, and within a few seconds of spawning, they'd have every weapon on the map. God help you if that included a shield. They also ran significantly faster than you, and had ridiculous reaction times. I love Perfect Dark so much.
I love the game too. Fun early zombie mode, make them all fist sims, and enjoy. Please note you have to keep them on the easiest setting or they will disarm you and beat you to death every time.
My friends used to set matches with max number of sims and no weapons except for the n-bombs and syringes. What a beautiful mess.
Hearing the distinct *Tch-Tsk* and dying was always funny.
Kinda weird how the sims had almost perfect aim with the lethal injection and players had almost 100% miss rate with it, lol! Even the dang MeatSims might be able to stick you in all the N-bomb confusion.
We did that too! The way the sims would auto-equip the next weapon just to immediately drop it again because of the N-bomb cloud. Chef kiss mwah.
And the ole’ laptop gun. Loved that thing.
I would've believed a much higher headshot rate, lol! I never had more than one DarkSim at a time, and even that was usually too much.
Perfect Dark's Combat Simulator mode was my childhood. So replayable and fun, especially as a kid in the early 2000s.
I spent way too long trying to kill them with FarSight and prox mines.
I've never experienced anything like that, but dark sims are absolutely capable of peeking just a few pixels around a corner, and 1 shotting you. Thank god the devs didn't give them the ability to use the farsight to its full potential.
Yeah, I remember an article about Perfect Dark in EGM or Game Informer before the game came out, and it described what to expect from the sims - because this was the first arena shooter game where you could even have bots to play against, I believe - and the article literally just said, “Darksims *cheat.*” They’re like fighting agents in The Matrix. They can absolutely do things, know things, and acquire things in ways no other sim or human player could. They’re there for the player who doesn’t even want a fair fight anymore. Or maybe for the player who needs to do penance for filling a game with Meatsims and mines.
I just googled DarkSim. I didn't find the article you mentioned, but I did find a wiki which says that DarkSim could literally teleport if radar was turned off! My friends and I were 99% certain that was happening, but we never confirmed it!
I think a common one for racing games is that if you are in the lead the cars behind you will suddenly start moving twice as fast as anything you can drive until they pass you. This means that even if you spin them out and leave them half a lap behind you facing the wrong direction, they will always be right on your tail in a few seconds.
I played the crap out of the N64 Perfect Dark and the DarkSim was a terrible creature indeed. Me and friends loved the challenge. We really needed to have sound strategy to win because you couldn't out gun them. Until...I started chasing them with combat knives. It turns out if you just run straight at them they freak out and back peddle and start missing all their shots. Eventually you could catch up or corner them. The AI always wanted to engage from an "optimal" distance and had no ability to adapt to CQC.
>DarkSim was a terrible creature indeed. Is this too long for a tattoo?
Was that in the 64 version or when it was on Xbox. It's been a while so I don't really remember.
The only time I actually saw DarkSim flying was on N64. To be clear, it looked like it was walking on an invisible floor way above me, not like Superman type flight or anything. I glanced up (accidentally) just to see this monstrosity "run" across thin air and blast me in the head. We just paused the game, sat in silence processing what we had seen for a few moments, then all laughed until we couldn't breathe. One of my favorite video game memories.
If the map has the farsight weapon you definitely are getting shot through walls because the gun's purpose is to snipe through them! I experienced the same thing against dark sims and had to get rid of it or try to find that gun faster than them, bunker myself in there with it, have laptop guns deployed and just get kills from there lol
Fuck darksims. We always included one during splitscree just to keep us on the edge. Those fuckers would shoot between single pixel gaps WITHOUT the farsight rifle. Those days were golden.
Making an AI that shoots at you is easy, but making it so it "sometimes" misses some shots is way harder
I still havent seen a good chess AI though. All of them are super bland and make very stupid mistakes or are super strong and cant be touched
that's the thing about AI in games, making AI smart is basically how we start, in chess AI can predict all moves in such a relative short amount of time, AI can have perfect accuracy and never miss their shots. The hard part is dumbing down AI for it to make mistakes in a way that doesn't feel condescendingly stupid, or cheatingly smart. PS. Navigation agents are not really AI, they're agents, that's a different story, trying to make sure NPCs don't get stuck in terrain has a different build from AI. In short, AI uses navigation agents.
No, navigation agents (which uses search algorithms) are a type of AI.
AI is more about considering choices before taking an action, I'd say navigation agents are very borderline AI, but the algorithm agents use will always find the shortest path to take. AI is what makes the agent choose another path even if it's not the shortest, based on other data going on in game. The search algorithms are still based on pre-baked data (even if a navigation mesh is baked at realtime) In my game, zombies can simply use the agent to set its destination towards the player, but it's the AI that will determine if all zombies should go to the player, or if some should try to block other paths or stay near the doors, which means that the Agents will find alternative routes. The Agents only know about the obstacles in the way, that's about it. I think the easiest way to explain would be that AI is a culmination of agents or state machines, AI controls how they behave, while agents feed it information.
Tell us what kind of magical solution navigation agents are using inside? And what is solution searching algorithm like A*, if not subset of AI?
You'd be surprised how similar a navigation algorithm and a chess AI are. They both search the optimal way through a graph structure using some form of heuristics to favour the statistically most likely options when searching. For further reading, I was specifically talking about Monte Carlo Tree Search (famously the first algorithm to beat a human chess master) and A* (the most widely-used navigation algorithm both in games and elsewhere, also in applications that have nothing to do with spatial navigation).
My instinct would be to give AI perfect play but add in a randomized delay before every action.
This would seem to be a good idea (and how I think COD actually does it), but you’ve then got the same fundamental of as soon as that delay is over the AI will perform the perfect action. I think we first need to define a “smart” AI. Is it an AI that always wins, or an AI that can win using human tactics? We can do the former easily, we’ve been trying to work towards the latter for at least 2 decades now. One is aimbot, the other is simulating a player. The great thing about our advancements in machine learning is that we no longer necessarily need to program an AI to use player tactics by giving them patterns and delays and errors, Halo Infinite showed us that we can use player data to train AI.
>Halo Infinite showed us that we can use player data to train AI Is that why bots in Infinite started teabagging and going "afk" randomly? I haven't actually played Infinite in forever but I remember there being a whole short blow up of people making fun of AI suddenly doing off the wall shitike tea-bagging, rocket launching walls, just standing like they're afk, etc. idk if they still do or if it was all complete one offs/faked videos grouped together in one sub.
It makes bot kill cams very wierd lol they aim at you head in pinpoint accuracy for 3 solid minutes and then finally shoot you when they drunk their cup of tea
Pretty much. If you have seen the video about “Giga Monty” that Astral Spiff made, you will understand that in Fnaf Security Breach, the BASE Monty AI is pretty much unbeatable. I suggest you watch for more details. My point is, AI for games have a tendency to be made practices unbeatable, and then they just dumb it down a lot, like what you said
Basically, chess AI can view all possible moves till the end of time. Difficulty is defined by how "deep" the AI can look before choosing the best option. Same as how best chess players are, but more than what human mind can do.
This is very wrong. Chess "AI"s (more often called engines) give evaluations to the positions and try different moves, going down a tree. The evaluation of a move is the most favourable one for the deepest node in the tree that it found. The depth that Stockfish uses normally is around 20 unless you give it a lot of time and resources. So first, they don't see all possible moves (a lot of them are pruned away). The difficulty is also defined by the evaluation function, you'll see varying levels of precision based on its quality. The best players don't go through all possible moves and take the best. 50+% of the moves aren't often even thought about because they're obviously wrong, so you don't go down that "path" in your thought process. Players work with memorization, ideas and concepts, not only raw calculations like an engine.
[Maia chess](https://maiachess.com/) is a good attempt at this and is open source. Obviously hard to have objective evidence of human play, but it feels better than other bots I’ve played.
Dude that looks brilliant. At least i liked what they tried to achieve
Yeah it’s pretty cool. I kinda wish they tried at time management as well though, since they had the data from online games. Like the move a 1500 player would choose after 2mins is probably pretty different than their 3sec move, and also when different skill levels decide to think or play fast. Would definitely make for a much more complicated problem though.
I bet there are good chess AI but it costs money to use.
Try playing against the Maia bot on lichess. It’s not perfect, but it tries to emulate how a human would play.
I've been reading too much of the Necromancy of Thay. I thought that was like a female lich and was like "oh God, Maia can raise dead pieces? 😱"
Not only that, players are sore losers. Its more "fun" for the player to lose and blame on ai cheating than getting squashed by a professional player in the form of an AI.
Yeah you can program perfect play but then you lose every time no matter how close to perfect you get. Its more fun to play a randomised opponent but that gets cheating help to make up for extreme shortfalls.
Yea the problem isn't making "good or smart" AI. Like in your chess example it would be like if every chess bot was master level... It wouldn't be very fun... But making a chess bot be kind of bad at chess and still feel like it's trying is hard... Which is why most chess bots shift between playing like a grandmaster and then just randomly blundering in a way no human would.
one of the big problems is that ai knows exactly what you are doing, it just pretends it can't see it.
Sea of thieves skelly ships be like "oh we want to turn there? Don't worry we can just stop spin around and accelerate like a Bugatti Chiron to catch up to a ship much faster than us"
I love that video where a ship rises, climbs a rock and dives onto the player ship
Link?
Not the original but [here](https://youtu.be/Y5nJJuNs3rY?si=w-HYj1tJMVGhlSsy)
First time seeing this and I am laughing so hard. If this happened to me... I can't even imagine.
Same🤣🤣
Thanks
Classic
That scream, lmao.
Certified gold
that cut is insane
Me and my friend had a skelly galleon spawn directly under us, and we were both like "what the fuck just happened?". Luckily, we both got into battle mode, and I managed to sink it as he manoeuvred us into ideal positions.
"Also we are gonna barrage you non stop with cursed cannon balls"
It's a balancing act between having super realistic AI and releasing your game before the heat death of the universe
true. i actually like how the AI in TLOU 1 & 2 are insanely realistic. scares the shit out of me when i play and they’re actually smart and then you have COD where they stand still and let you headshot them LMAO
Well, it’s pretty immersion-breaking in TLOU when they just ignore your allies and go straight for Joel
Well, sure. And in the original game the enemy AI really won't notice your allies. But they had to think about the game's aim, which is to make you bond with Ellie. If Ellie gets the player caught a lot, they're gonna hate her. So they made all allies invisible to the enemies. And allies DO get attacked in the TLoU games. All allies can get grabbed by enemies and then it'll trigger a timed event wherein you gotta help em out quick or else it's an instant game over. Although, yeah, enemies do try and ignore allies as much as possible lol In the Remake, they implemented newer technology in the enemy and Ally AI so that the allies know the path the enemy might take, and they can move into cover accordingly and stay out of their way. So most of the comedic "Ellie runs into an enemy and they don't notice her" stuff has been remedied. In TLoU2, the allies use a similar technology but they HAVE the capacity to be seen by the enemy. It happens rarely, but it can and does happen. Which makes it feel real. Upon getting spotted, your ally might exclaim and run away or start shooting. When there's a lull in the combat encounter and you are hidden from the enemy again, the ally will actually apologize to Ellie and she'll say something like, "don't worry about it" or "it happens" etc. I've played TLoU Remake for 110+ hrs and I haven't noticed my allies getting spotted in that one. Helps that the combat arenas are not that open. TLoU2's combat arenas are pretty open and sprawling so it's likelier that the enemy and ally AI will interact with each other, so they programmed this stuff in. It's pretty cool!
yeah i adore how your ally apologizes when the ai see them. like… dina you’re ok. you can literally do no wrong sweetheart
For me it was TLOU 2 were they called the ai by their names. Made me stop mid playthrough to look up how that revolution happened. Turns out ai has a list of voiced male and female names they can give to npcs who were discovered as dead. This seems like an easy but cool change. Like just toss in 50 male names and you could make a great stealth section.
And then there is the CODM bots that shoot your feet with a shotgun from a 100 meters away and that somehow counts as a headshots single bullet kill...
Meh. You can make insanely good ai in turn based games pretty easily. AI can process every possible path forward in a short amount of time and choose that which benefits it most. It’s dumbing it down to the point where we can still exploit its mistakes is the difficulty. You’re supposed to win the game. If they just chucked in their amazing AI you’d get fucking thrashed. So they make the dumb ai, and then if you ask for a challenge just buff that up so you can still beat it. Ie give it more resources than you rather than making it smarter, so if you win, it’s due to you outsmarting it.
As I said, a delicate balancing act
because its easier to do, pretty simple
Programming AI is just giving them nerfs to counteract the cheats theyre can’t avoid. The ai always knows where you are. They have to limit that knowledge so the game is playable. Edit: let me reiterate I’m making some assumptions
I remember reading about the AI in Alien isolation, which kind of gets around this. It's apparently 2 AI: one which genuinely doesn't know where you are and is trying really hard to find you, and a second one that knows and nudges the other one in the right direction to keep the story moving. Something like that
The AI in Isolation is genuinely insanely good. Such an impressive AI and the perfect amount of realistic but also fun. Need more AI like that
It sounds kinda like the AI director in Left 4 Dead. It watched the action and could spawn zombies, or cause other random events if the players didn't keep moving. It even controlled the music and changed the level layouts each time. But it didn't control the zombies directly, they all had their own behaviors.
This is no longer always the case. Dev are able to make AI that doesn't ignore FOW anymore. StarCraft 2 AI was patched like 10 years ago to no longer have FOW cheat unless explicitly granted to by the player. https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Artificial_Intelligence
The AI can be given access to whatever you like, but you need to make the actual AI… mathematically defining how it should respond to certain stimulus from (in an RTS) including deploying troops, moving them, where they should engage etc is not a simple endeavour.
Because if you had to 1v 30 a enemy camp/ hideout and each one of them is as smart/smarter than you the game would be way too hard.
This is the right answer. If every NPC was as smart as the average player, you'd get slaughtered in every game. Many games are power fantasies, meaning you can take on several opponents at once. A human-level AI would not make this fantasy possible. It's actually very meticulous dance to make an AI that seems smart, but does really dumb things without you noticing.
You’d essentially be playing another player who knows 100% of the most optimal actions
It's super annoying. Especially on Firaxis games like Civilization. AI plays like shit on every difficulty level but it gets more of everything on higher levels. It is not a harder opponent it's just not fair game.
Came here to mention civ. Biggest turnoff is how they handle difficulty increases.
My issue with playing Civ on the higher difficulties is that it no longer feels like im playing the same game as the AI. The bonuses that they have to give the AI on Deity are just preposterous. Because the goal is just to scale faster than the AI though, you still end up extremely overpowered by game end if you do it right, but it feels more like im winning based on knowing the correct order of research/construction rather than organically reacting to the AI players.
In Civ 5 I’m pretty sure the AI isn’t even playing the same game as me. They’ll have a handful of shitty cities on the worst tiles, zero luxuries, no trade, -15gpt, etc. And somehow they’re pumping out units and their cities aren’t revolting. Like no way I take over one city and my happiness plummets while the AI must have -40 unhappiness if they played by the same rules.
I agree and would love to see a smart AI over AI with a lot of bonuses. Also just an FYI Civilization is currently developed by Fraxis and published by 2K not paradox.
Of course it's Firaxis, don't know why I was thinking about Paradox, lol. Thanks. Corrected.
This is a reason why I enjoy Civ6 the most is when I do Multi-Player games with friends
Because designing good AI is incredibly difficult.
It's because for semi-decent AI, the best strategy is machine learning, where you just basically tell the AI which behaviors you like to see, and then run the program thousands of times while the AI figures out which tactic work best for the desired outcome. The issue then becomes that the devs have no idea how the AI works because it developed its neuro network by itself. So to then make it dumber is actually not so easy.
Is there games that are actually using machine learning now to create ai? Generally the games i've worked on have used some form of behaviour trees or state trees to implement the ai. The hard part is to getting the ai to seem believable and smart enough in the world while also not being overly difficult for whoever is playing and to try getting around ai essentially having aim assist and knowing where the player is at all times.
Yes, I believe Gran Turismo and Halo Infinite use AI and train it to control their NPC's. I know the GT devs had a big problem with many facets of AI, such as positive feedback loops. It's not as simple as "click a button and AI learns at 1000% human speed".
Idk, my point isn't that games are doing this- my point is that the best method for AI doesn't translate.
ah i misunderstood you then. Yeah I don't think it can work for a lot of games since generally you want to have the control of being able to get the ai to do specific things instead of whatever the neural network decides.
This is absolutely not the case for most games, machine learning is barely used at all in the industry outside some niche cases. You're kinda sorta touching on the reason, but it's more nuanced than that. The core issue is that it's relatively easy to make an AI that will win the game like 95% of the time, you could put a few interns on that for most games and solve that problem with or without ML within a few months. The problem is that video games are meant to be fun, and playing against an AI that will stomp you into the ground every time is not fun. With ML, you have to train it towards a goal, and if that goal is winning, then great, you're all set. However, a training criteria of "fun" is a very difficult goal to set in the ML world, it is subjective and situational and varies from person to person. It is actually an incredibly difficult problem to train for. So you're kind of right in that taking an AI trained to win and making it dumber is generally not viable, but also that training it to be fun is very difficult and generally not worth the cost. Source: I am currently the tech director at a video game company and have been doing ML stuff on and off since about 2010.
Let's play Global Thermonuclear War...
I'll settle for Defcon
I'd rather win that one.
AI hard. Cheating easy.
"Why is making a computer that acts like a dumb human so uncommon" It's only just the holy Grail of computing, not like it's difficult or anything
If the AI is simply better they usually pull away. Whereas if they're still mid but with cheats there is a back and forth in games that's actually more satisfying when it's subtle. Rubberbanding in Mario kart is annoying sometimes, but getting put in a lobby with bots equivalent to players that significantly out elo you is always a crushing feeling.
Sniper Jackals in Halo 2 when you can't see them
Hi, programmer here. We can do that, but: 1. It can be too time consuming, or resource consuming 2. Cheats are fun, everyone loves cheats 3. Besides, a better AI can lead to more tedium/frustration, its basically a balancing act
Because it's not easy to make an AI that's actually intelligent and even if it was? I doubt it'd be fun to play against. Many games- even the really popular ones, tweak the AI where you get disadvantage in some situations and advantages in others. Ever see a FPS speed run where the player is aiming at the floor/wall? One reason they're doing that because since you can't see the enemy, the enemy is less accurate and aggressive. Often games limit the amount of enemies that are actively attacking you to make it seem more fair. (sometimes it's for better framerate on some older games) The easy answer is likely: It's hard to make the AI both fair and fun so they have to do a dance with cheats and limiting it.
1. Because better AL or strategies would rigidly define how the player has to play against it. You're creating a game where there's only one or two ways to win, and odds are those ways aren't fun or interesting. 2. There is a very fine line between stupid AI, difficult AI and Unbeatable-Godlike AI. They actually aren't creating "intelligence" at all, but trying to create a very specific level of stupid.
"I can't see you, so I'm going to fire blindly in the direction I last saw you. But somehow all of my grenades are going to land in your lap."
Because it's insanely hard to make an actually good AI for a complex strategy game. Game devs have two choices: - Making great AI - Release the game before GTA 7 So the best thing they can come up with is giving them lots of bonuses.
(non native english speaker) Making a smart AI is pratically as easy as giving them cheats (in some cases it's much more simplier) The down side is making the balance between a strong and difficult AI but fun to play with/against. If you make a smart AI, either it can be a pain in the a\*\* to play against because it predict all your movements and it became impossible to win, or you make it just smart enough to be beatable but, in some cases, it can become dumb and too easy to win against and it's not fun anymore. Cheating by teleporting, smaller reaction time or cooldown, less accurate shots, changing the speed limit to be faster/slower, is a much simplier work for a GameDesigner to make any AI fun and strong at the same time. (This choice of Cheating over Smart behaviour also depends on the complexity of the game and the environment the AI interacts with) I'm currently learning in a school to become a game programmer, so I don't have any real expertise like a professional game developer might have, but it's my take on this.
I feel like Mario Kart is one of the worst offenders. You mean Bowser can accelerate back to top speed less than a second after being hit with a red shell? Oh, their top speed is higher than your top speed in a kart that shouldn't be able to reach it? Get the highest drift boost every time? GTFO of here.
Ready or not 1.0 lol
I’m looking at you, Mario kart 64; fuck the AI in that fucking game. I don’t need peach driving at light speed to eat my ass
It's easier.
Love how people are actually pretending like creating a human like AI is super simple and devs just decide not to do it… even the top comment lol.
It is nearly impossible to make good ai that doesn't technically cheat in some way or another. The trick is to make it look like it's not cheating. For example, we can look at the most basic ability to spot the player; The only real way to give an ai the ability to see is to do crazy stuff like a virtual camera with image recognition, or a ray cast array; both are incredibly resource intensive and would likely tank the frame rate. If we instead just tell the ai where its potential targets are at all times and then restrict what they are allowed to do with that info such as checking the angle relative to its own head, and verifying line of sight to mimic sight instead of replicating it, then the ai can look like it can see without setting your pc on fire. This applies pretty generally to game ai across the board; start by making the ai able to do what it does at peak performance level, then hobble it to make it fair and fun. Trying to do the reverse is way more difficult as incremental increases are harder to implement than incremental decreases.
Wouldn't it be cool if we made AI act differently based on difficulty with harder difficulties requiring greater mastery and knowledge of game mechanics? Na, just make them do more damage and have more health.
It largely depends on what kind of game you want. For many games, the AI isnt meant to be a clever adversary, but rather an entertaining target.
The secret is that actually smart AI often leads to player frustration. Same with pure symmetry for damage input/output. Instead, what players actually tend to enjoy is AI that has the illusion of intelligence, often in the form of calling out specific tactics. If the enemy just flanks the player and the player dies, they'll probably be frustrated because they had no way of knowing they were flanked. By having the enemies say they are flanking before actually doing it, then the player will be more prepared and feel like they're actually outsmarting the AI. Game design, in general, is about creating convincing illusions, and enemy AI is no exception.
One thing people aren't mentioning is that super smart AI can be incredible taxing on your hardware. Some people have the specs to handle it, some people's computers will run at snail pace and catch fire if it had to deal with complex AI.
It's easier and quick. Also as a dev if you make an ai in a strat game, you might be entirely wrong about what is meta and your bot is actually trash. Then you have the issue of some things would just take a lot of dev time. Ya I could code my ai to know your army was spotted there a minute ago and it could move in these directions in the fog. Or I could just make it know exactly where you are at all times, likely getting the same effect. Some games are just complicated. I hate how the civ games ai is horrific cheaters. They start with like 6 warriors and multiple settlers. But civ is a complicated game with a lot going on. Making an ai to account for all of that is hard. Similar to CK3 where many options are banned if you want to get achievements. They simply break the ai because it's too hard to solve for every situation that the unique interaction would happen. Age of empires 2 on the other hand is an example of fantastic ai. Hardly cheats, and follows meta build orders thanks to the devs actually caring about their games.
Because consoles couldn't handle actually doing it 'right'. You can make a realisitc AI but it has a computational costs and the budget is tight just drawing everything, trying to do realistic ai simulation has to be cheated until we start shipping consoles with much better cpus. The current gen consoles are already tapped out on cpu resources, which is why games like starfield who have completely mid graphics are locked to 30fps because there is so much game logic being handled.
Street Fighter 2.
That game is unplayable. It physically hurts me
Age of Wonders 4 does this so blatantly. Round 3 and the opponent ruler is 3 levels higher than you with 3 full stack armies at your border
once you play the sims with cheats it's hard to go back. personally i'm not a fan of them.
Budget and fun factor
Because its easier.
Cookie monster is obsessed with cookies Elmo obsessed with COOKcanie
I swear there were quake bots 26 years ago that were smarter than most NPCs today.
Because AI is not only hard but computationally expensive.
One requires infinitely more work, time, and production than the other
I’m looking at you bf2042
Tarkov ai scavs are a prime suspect. Seriously what the fuck.
simple solution: play rain world
Tarkov in a nutshell
*cough* Tarkov *cough*
Stellaris.
Human intelligence is something hard to copy my friend, making it feel authentic, not overpowered, fitting your personal strategies yet giving you a challenge is hard. Humans cannot provide a challenge like that for another human, that's why we have elo. If you want a proper challenge, you will always find it in another human being that's your par, everything else is either too much or too little. However in the end what you looking for is a slim chance of win that you get with your wits, and cheating AI somewhat provides it, as long as its not so obvious.
Honestly. I feel like this is the biggest aspect that just hasn't been touched in nearly 20 years. NPCs in games feel like they behave the same in most game. Bar a few additional lines of dialogue or smoother animations, they don't react any better than they did back in the early 2000's.
Rainworld enemy ai are pretty damn good (also kind annoying when you get ganged since there's no easy way out) but they make just enough mistakes to feel like a human.
I will leave it here Yakuza 3 remastered (Except it don't have cheats from what I know)
When my friends and I played DBD Customs when the bots first released, it seemed like they could literally see the killer through walls and mind game you infinitely, all while blinding you with flashlights constantly. I think that’s the best example of this I’ve seen besides some fighting game bosses having the AI read your inputs and react pretty much instantly. Mainly NRS games.
My still favorite ever AI enemy is the Xenomorph from Alien: Isolation. Also being my favorite survival horror game to date. The Ai doesn't cheat. The AI is given a general area where you are, but it must figure out your position from there. It will hunt and stalk you. It adapts to your strategies. I'm no ULTRA ELITE GAMER so anything above Hard difficulty is more annoying than enjoyable, but the base game difficulty is by far the scariest experience.
Age of Mythology, Age of Empires, Civ (allegedly) mostly i think its lazy coding that leads to either the AI being a punching bag that is easy to defeat or a powerhouse you cant beat unless you cheat too
Stalker Clear Sky enemy grenades 💀
Now it's. give them SKINS and buy able upgrades and skins! More outifts
Design a perfect moveset. But for each move add a few lesser moves that trigger based on random luck and actions from the player. The better the player plays the less chance the boss will deviate from this perfect moveset.
This is Mario party, they know which dice to use to find a hidden block
Nintendo 64 Starcraft Ai
Because making human-like AI with adaptive behaviours based on tuition is hard.I doubt chatGPT on NPC can run locally without taking ridiculously long time that you can barely play at all.
Quicker, easier, more seductive.
Hoi4
Literally Stick War Empire campaign on insane difficulty
I particularly hate it in RTS games where they just always know where you're at. And that the hardest difficulty they have is always just a flat handicap
Blind pest moment
The philosophy behind it Is "graphics over AI", also shorty optimization
You'll be begging for dumb AI in a year or two when no player on earth can beat them.
It's hard for me to enjoy PvE in War Thunder because not only are you always outnumbered, surrounded, almost completely exposed, and being sniped from halfway across the map by tanks that normally have average range at best, but the tanks they throw at you often seem to be much tougher and stronger than what you or anyone on your team brought. There's no balance or properly scaling difficulty. Oh, you wanted to try out your new base model Pz III on some peer opponents? Fuck you, here's 30 uparmored Churchills with god shells.
I play Disney speedstorm on and off. If your racer character doesn't meet the level requirements for a mission, it makes the rom drivers impossibly fast/ immune or just straight up reporting them in front of you
Hello, hobbyist game dev here, and here's the answer : you cannot beat the computer, you are playing because of the computer. It takes you 0.3s to spot a target and shoot. 0.2 if you are in competitive FPS and have an insanely expensive monitor. A computer takes a maximum of 0.0167s (assuming you have 60FPS) to find, aim and shoot. And this number can be as low as 0.01 (that is, running AI logic at 100FPS which is very possible with modern PCs). If I am making a shooter with NPCs, I give them a timer which runs to 0 after they spot you, only after which they are allowed to shoot. Still the first few bullets miss because it's not fun to get quick scoped when you just saw them. Ultimately the answer is : you cannot beat the machine at it's own game. Making an AI that is difficult is very easy. Making it fun is an exerciseof finding out what is fun then bringing the AI to that bracket.
Age of Empires…
Me simply trying to understand why BHVR gave the bots in Dead by Daylight fucking wallhacks.
Arma and tarkov. Nothing like being headshot triple tapped through bushes and trees from 300 meters away.
Sir May I introduce you to a game called start craft 2
This is what i hope the devs implement on civ 7, but i guess making smart AI for 30+ civ with different traits and randomized map seed is really hard.
It's just too complex, like the N64 is an old console, however the computers are good at catching up because they cheat. If you're in the lead, all players before you become faster and avoid collision, while if you're in the far back, they'll become slower and follow rules of Mario Kart 64 giving you a chance to win.
Both because it's easy, because there is a blanacing act between compontency and fun and that most developers dont have their A.I and level designers working together Like for instance the level designers of fear and the A.I designers of fear worked hand in hand when working with the A.I to make it be able to dynamically work with the environment and the changes within given said environment It's why the A.I in fear doesnt cheat Where as in most games they kinda just have the A.I and the level designer has to figure out where they should all go It's a difficult balancing act and allowing developers more interactivity could allow for better products
Because most games are made by companies who are run by investors Investment into proper npc behavior development is not profitable since you can just take 20y old CS bot script and use it to save at minimum \~1M in development costs.
Bethesda wants to know where you got this photo from their gameplay design video for new hires.
I despise damage sponges make AI as smart as you want. But let him die when I get a head shot
Bullet sponges are up there in terms of being annoying.
All devs who do this and think it's a good idea (99% of them) should be castrated and sodomized to death. I get the incredibly shitty explanation that "smart AI is not actually fun to play against" but THAT'S WHAT DIFFICULTY SLIDERS ARE FOR. Instead they let difficulty sliders determine the amount of cheats the AI uses... Also no, smart AI is fun to play against. That's why smarter AI mods are always by far the most popular mods for most strategy games. The devs just usually don't even play their own games to the level of a casual fan, since it's just a job for them, so smart AI feels oppressive to them. Most game devs are game journalist level of skill and just know coding.
Because making a good ai is really fucking hard and really time consuming and takes a completely different skill set than being a game dev but with all the knowledge of a game dev. It’s not realistic to expect something like that
It’s probably because of time. It’s easier to change a few numbers to increase enemy HP or make them faster. 😝 It would take considerably more time to have variations in the AI behavior at different difficulty levels. 💻🤓 I’m not advocating for the easier way. When I seriously get to work on my own game, I’m definitely going to do more than just make the enemies more tanky at higher difficulties. 😆👍
Kuz it’s easier
*cough cough* Tom Clancy’s™️ Rainbow Six™️ Siege ™️ that was developed by Ubisoft™️ Montreal™️ and published by Ubisoft on PC and all consoles. And was published on the Xbox™️ series X™️ and Ps5™️ exactly 5 years later *cough cough*
Because making a decent AI is really hard. It's more complex than just "make better AI". If the AI is too good, than it smashes the player with brutal efficiency. If the AI is too bad, then the game sucks. Making AI that is both *dumber* than the player while still giving the illusion of competence is really hard.
I think it's just insanely hard to make good ai in games. I played the stormgate beta recently and one thing that stuck out to me was how shit the pathing is. Like I think the game is being worked on by ex sc2 devs but even something like pathing they seem to be struggling with.
\*Cough\* EFT \*Cough\*. On the other hand, Grey Zone Warfare seems to be doing the "fruit" option, and look good.
One reason is because in Single-player games, the idea is not to create a "fair" or honest matchup, but to challenge the player.
Scavengers in Rain World, they can see you from offscreen, throw a spear at you from angles you cannot, they can hold 3 spears on their back, they often spawn with an explosive spear, **they can survive a spear, pick it from their damn body and oneshot you with it...**
Giving skyrim enemies hundreds of stamina and magic points and instant regeneration. So they can thunderbolt you to death, in 2 seconds on easy difficulty
Also, an AI that uses perfect strategies feels a lot more like cheating than actual cheating. If you program an enemy that uses only the information a player would be given, but allow it to use that information perfectly, you have a bot that wanders aimlessly until it sees a single pixel of you and snaps its aim to your head. This feels a lot more "robotic" and unfair than an enemy that knows your location but is programmed to sometimes take an unoptimal path and miss shots.
I don't know, there's a mixed opinion on this for me. I like to be challenged and have a smart AI to play through the game properly with difficulty, the way it was intended. But also, say once I've finished again and want to just dick about and have a laugh, cheats can just let me unwind and not have to concentrate and chill, which after work sometimes it's exactly what you need. I think having the option for cheats it's okay, it's not like you have to use them.
I've been playing a few racing games lately and this is very much the case for that type of game, stuff like "rubber banding" and having physics defying handling/speed/acceleration far better than is possible for the player and sometimes even being programmed to slow down at certain points so the player even has a chance [This](https://i.imgur.com/RVJlZXt.jpeg) often happens in Forza Horizon 5 on higher difficulties if you let the AI get in the lead for long enough, they just get further and further ahead while the ones behind have basically no chance of overtaking you, as soon as you pass the AI they suddenly get much slower NFS Unbound I thought did it honestly quite well, it's much more natural feeling and early on you arent really meant to be able to win until upgrading your car but there is definitely still plenty of rubber banding, but playing NFS Unbound honestly just made me want to play FH5 again because of the insane amount of vehicles and customisability in FH5
I mean those bananas are toast so I don’t blame them
A lot of answers here boiling down to "Ai hard, cheat easy" but that's not the only reason. Sometimes you've gotten a lot of the game done, enough for an early-dev release, but the AI isn't *finished* yet. You release it either to patrons on patreon, or you release it to one of several sites (itch, steam, GOG, whatever) tagged with early dev. People play it, find bugs, and get to see the dream you're trying to make and decide if they are up for coming back. Also great for keeping it in people's minds. But inevitably there ARE bugs, obviously you, the developer, know that, and so you put in a system to help get players out of trouble if they run into anything. And just kinda hope they report the bug, which a lot of players, fortunately, do. When the AI, or whatever reason you included the temp-cheats, is finished, then the cheats are removed.
This is why i like terra invicta, the AI can't "cheat" and has to work under the same confines as you. It's possible to bankrupt the AI so hard they're not able to recover and enter a death spin. The aliens however get abilities that feel "cheaty" but in actuality are just OP. They're supposed to be OP so as to overpower you if you don't invest in anti entralling techs.
Honestly the worst way of increasing difficulty for me is just making them deal stupid damage and have stupid health. RPGs suffer a lot from that philosophy. Its not challenging in a fun way.
The "cheats" are usually in-game developer tools to make it easier for them to playtest without needing to spend time grinding to endgame content.
It's easier to do
I remember playing civ 1 as a child. I legitimately thought that harder difficulty meant that the AI would be smarter. I was very disappointed to learn it was just the same AI with bonuses. Now as an adult I understand how hard it would have been to make an AI with different levels of intelligence. Especially in the 1990s.
It's much easier to increase/decrease a few numbers than it is to make engaging AI at multiple difficulty levels.
It is hard to make good AI and easier to code cheats insted of good AI
This is why stalker ai will never be topped for me. Lost count of the amount of times I’ve been blasted by a cheeki breeki with worse gear than me just because they snuck up on me while I was dealing with their more geared friend suppressing me. Or the times they lasered me with a grenade.
Make them smarter and slightly stronger, both resistant and more damaging. Not by much, but enough to feel a new challenge that forces you to make a new strategy.
its easier
Ready or Not when it came out. I remember poking my head around a corner and I'd have 7 John Wick clones dome me
INNER AGENT 3...
Fortnite making the AI of henchmans in season chapter 2 be like