Comment by blattimwind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blattimwind | Hacker News Reader

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> Nobody is going to invest the resources into a real AI just for the hardest difficulty modes.

Which is really sad because "hard" difficulties in most games just mean that you have less health and NPCs do more damage or their "cheat factors" are turned to 11. They're still the same stupid NPCs as on "easy", but now they just headshot you behind cover and have zero recoil / perfect accuracy. It's technically difficult but not really fun.

One of the most obvious examples of this is GTA 5 where all NPCs are equally dumb, but "harder NPCs" just mean that they tank huge amounts of damage, while they have very little aim delay and essentially perfect accuracy. Due to various bugs in the game they'll often shoot through walls or even entire buildings: technically hard, but not fun.

The "tank huge amounts of damage" thing has annoyed me going back to the old RPG games on NES and SNES. How do we make the game harder as the player progresses? Give enemies more HP and DMG values. Ok, how does the player combat this? Have him aquire levels/skills/equipment that increases his own DMG and survivability to restore things to the same balance they were earlier in the game. Repeat ad nauseum. Some variations restrict the player enhancements to DMG so they're forced to chip away at enemies in long dull fights. Others restrict survivability, which tends to result in shorter, more random fights, while others allow near infinite enhancement, but lock it behind boring, redundant grinding.

Vanilla Skyrim is an especially annoying specimen in this category, because it has this weird "S curve". With low levels most enemies are way stronger than you (ok, that's good, a level 5 player shouldn't be able to defeat city guards, for example), then there is a "growth phase" up to ~level 40-70ish (depending on play style) where the player is on par or better than NPCs, and after that the player's abilities level off and NPCs continue to grow stronger, so a high level player has a hard time again against NPCs of a class that she could previously defeat easily.

Which makes no sense at all.

Luckily for Skyrim the game thrives on mods anyway.

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