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Comment by Insanity | Hacker News Reader

Former gaming-addict here.

Does the fact that people tend to spend more time on the multiplayer component of a game rather than the single player play any role in this 'not caring about AI'.

I mean, I really did not enjoy playing against AI because they are quite stupid in most cases, and the only way to make a singleplayer become harder does not seem to be to make the AI smarter, but rather have some 'modifiers' against the player.

For example in L4D, the damage you take from a hit by a common zombie on normal difficulty is 10HP (out of 100HP), but on expert the same hit is worth 20HP.

Other things to make it harder would be to spawn in more NPCs and just get the player more busy, or speed up the events in the game (like tetris).

But in all games with a decent multiplayer, it is just _way_ more fun to play against other human beings rather than shooting a bot. Because it actually poses a challenge.

EDIT: typo fix

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I second this... the only reason I jump straight into the multiplayer when I try a new game is because the single player AI, at every difficulty level, in almost every game, is dumb as rocks. Making the AI "way too fucking smart" at insane/hard difficulty and then dumbing it down seems way, way, way better than hitpoint modifiers. I don't think smart AIs are written and then scrapped... that cannot possibly be what really happens?! Horrible if true.

>the only reason I jump straight into the multiplayer when I try a new game is because the single player AI, at every difficulty level, in almost every game, is dumb as rocks.

There's more to it than that for me. No matter how good the AI is, shooting at AI feels empty and dull compared to shooting at actual people. Not only are you assured cunning, but also someone who hates your guts and lets you know in chat! I suspect many others feel that way too, deprecating singleplayer in favor of multiplayer from the get-go.

>Making the AI "way too fucking smart" at insane/hard difficulty and then dumbing it down seems way, way, way better than hitpoint modifiers.

It sure does. Have you ever played Civilization? The AI is always dumb; the only way to make the game harder is to make the game fundamentally unfairer. In this case, making the AI smarter is a much harder problem than in a shooter game though.

I usually play through the campaign first. Not because the AI is clever, but because I want to know the story, why we play certain maps, etc. FPS games are not well known for having well written stories, but I still find them entertaining, just as I find games like The Last of Us.

The new Battlefield game was probably the first were I have only played the multiplayer (and lots of it).

"There's more to it than that for me. No matter how good the AI is, shooting at AI feels empty and dull compared to shooting at actual people."

It could be true. Making them people-like might get close to that mark, though. When I did multiplayer on COD Ghosts, I thought I was playing against actual people since they were acting like players. Then, I asked my brother which company he chose for Internet. He said he didn't have Internet. That I was playing against bots. One of few times I was speechless over an AI performance.

That might say more about the average player of modern cod games than the AI to be honest..

Most pub games on cod are too easy and thus you might as well be shooting bots. I would be truely impressed if the bots could match games in clanmatches etc.

Of course, the point would be to have AI good enough for the average player. so that is pretty neat!

You also did not have to suffer from kids shouting on the voicechat and all the bad community parts :-)

"That might say more about the average player of modern cod games than the AI to be honest.."

Lmao. You got me there. I didn't consider that. It does seem more than that, though, as the bots did things like camping, soloing, revenging, or careful groups. The CoD player knockoff might be behaviors like tea bagging. It did something goofy but I cant remember if it was that or something else. Once he said it was bots, I quicky found its weaknesses to start killing them in mass.

"You also did not have to suffer from kids shouting on the voicechat and all the bad community parts :-)"

You might be semi-joking but this is a real market. Lots of people got off Live or at least its voice features because of this. We're even talking on an invite-only, low-noise forum for similar reasons. So, AI or game developers should keep that in mind when making tradeoffs in marketing.

It was more of a sadly-but-true statement than a joke, as I completely agree with you that there is a market there.

Around the same time my friends and I started having families, most of us stopped gaming online because it was hard to coordinate all of us having time to play together, and playing with random people online was (often) a bad experience as we could not play 'on their level'.

A game with an actual good AI that feels like real players (without the annoyance of them) would be something I could see myself spend some time on.

> Not only are you assured cunning, but also someone who hates your guts and lets you know in chat!

Wow, this is precisely what turns me off multiplayer. I don't want to chat with someone who hates my guts, or tells me I'm a newbie, or mocks me for not playing perfectly. I remember CounterStrike 1.6 used to be toxic like this, populated by teenagers with too much time in their hands, outplaying you at every turn, and constantly insulting you.

No, thanks. Singleplayer doesn't belittle me, and is more immersive.

I'm the same way. Maybe I'm just not as competitive as the average person, but I only play co-op games with others.

Single-player and multiplayer online co-op for me.

I completely agree! I like the "idea" of multiplayer, but, in general, the best thing about multiplayer is also the worst thing: other players.

Being punished for being new or not that good or not having as much time as the teen players (who are often the largest percentage of the game) is not my idea of fun. I remember I played an FPS a few years ago (won't say which one) and it felt like I was being punished for trying to get into the game. So I uninstalled it. As far as I can tell, the game is more or less dead now. By punishing new players, the fans killed the game. Yay for them. Instead, I moved on to some great single player games which treated me well and were much more fun for me to play.

Being punished to get into the game is annoying. I have been on both sides of it, and I actually understand the other side pretty well.

On Left4Dead(1 and 2) I was part of those people "punishing" new people in a way. There was this rule that we would kick anyone who had less than 500 hours on the game, or less than 1k if everyone of the friends we played with had more than 1k hours.

We were not insulting to the new guys in any way and usually just asked them to leave. But if they would not leave, we would kick them. But to be honest, if they would stay in the game, it would not have been fun for any of us. For us it would have made the game too easy, and for them they would just quit after a few minutes of getting dominated anyway.

When you are new to a game, I think it makes more sense to just play with friends who don't mind sticking up with you being new, or trying to find a way to play with other new people. When I got kicked from playing a game like Payday, I did not mind because I know that I am a noob and that If I end up playing against people who are far above my level, it would be fun for neither of us.

Sorry that you had that experience though, if you stick with some of the multiplayer games - through the horrible community sometimes - it actually can be quite fun. But my advice would be to find some dedicated people to play with, they really make any game more fun.

Interestingly, I did play L4D2 for a while without any problems. I also sometimes played other multiplayer games, for example league of legends (which does have some very toxic players, but for the most part wasn't too bad, although I typically played with at least one friend on my team).

I've also had games where I think the games design actually greatly influenced how much new players were being punished, for example by giving players who've played longer much better equipment. I've experienced that too and that was extremely not fun. That particular game also isn't active anymore as far as I know. So it's not just the players. My gaming time is too limited these days to play something toxic, be it players or the game itself.

But my advice would be to find some dedicated people to play with

I'd love to, but after work and other obligations, time is short and syncing up with my game-playing friends is hard. Most of them also play different games to what I enjoy so it's hard. The best I've managed is to get a friend to play dark souls 3 with me maybe one night a month... :(

> Making the AI "way too fucking smart" at insane/hard difficulty and then dumbing it down seems way, way, way better than hitpoint modifiers.

In principle, sure. However, taking a "way too fucking smart" AI and dumbing it down believably isn't necessarily that much easier than going the other way, taking a dumb AI and smarting it up.

Problem is you can't just slap a "dumbassness" dial onto a smart AI in a way that appears natural.

Possibly the simplest attempt could be to take a "way too fucking smart" AI and represent the dial as a probability that the AI takes a random action instead of the way too fucking smartest move. That gives you a very nice smooth continuous dial that will correlate monotonously with difficulty level.

But if you were to play against it (by which I mean you, cause I suck at videogaming, myself), you'll probably figure out soon enough that it's a strictly artificial handicap providing the difficulty, in a very similar manner to changing the monsters' HP or speed. Also it's not a lot of fun, if close to the hardest difficulty, you just luck out and the monster performs the most stupid move, and trips itself or something.

Such a dial doesn't represent cleverness. I suppose you could attempt something a bit less artificial, like limiting the search-tree depth for the planning algorithm or something. Question becomes how granular that dial would be (search-trees aren't that deep usually) and what settings correspond to what difficulty level, you'd need to playtest this. Also the question remains to what extent this artificial limitation will appear obvious or not.

I agree with you, a smart AI with programmed randomness of stupid errors would be noticably fake. But it's still way better than the dumb AI in most games that I can easily out-maneuver. At least with a smart AI, the hardest difficulty will actually be challenging and exciting. If it's too smart, I can artificially dumb it down by choosing an easier setting... but at least I, the gamer, am making the decision!

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