Designing Difficulty Options In Games 110
Gamasutra is running a story about how the "hard" modes in games can be designed to include difficulty, but not frustration. They give some examples of the changes made to several games as their difficulty settings are increased, and they discuss some of the simple options, such as increasing the number of required button presses, or increasing the relevant numbers by an arbitrary amount (a boss on easy may hit you for 10 damage, whereas a boss on hard may act the same but hit you for 100 damage). They also talk about maintaining the "illusion of fairness." Quoting:
"Bungie's Halo series is often praised for its excellent execution of difficult play in the form of its Legendary mode. Not surprisingly, the team took a very well-thought out approach to introducing and tuning difficult play. Halo 3 gameplay designer Francois Boucher-Genesse explains that it's not just a case of one formula fits all. 'It's not like we just cranked every enemy's health by 200% and called it Legendary,' he said. 'There was a good amount of custom changes made per mission as well. In that sense we encourage players with previous Halo experience to play at least on Heroic, since they get to see the game in its full scale.'"
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I absolutely love setting the highest difficulty as a challenge for games.
One of the most brilliant "hardest" settings was in Thief, where in the hardest setting, you were not allowed to kill anybody. Hence the whole game became a puzzle of sneaking, with no more than blackjacking someone.
Countless times I heard someone talk about how good they got with the sword in Thief, but I always wondered what the point of that was. If I wanted melee action I'd play some other game.
Accomplishments on Hardest, Never
Maybe about the curve? (Score:5, Interesting)
My biggest gripe with game difficulty that comes to mind is when I feel like it's making the whole thing hard for the sake of being hard. Guitar Hero 3 comes to mind. It's like they're assuming you've played the other Guitar Hero games, were good at them, and only bought the new one because you wanted a bigger challenge. Some of the Tony Hawk games have the same problem, so it's probably those developers.
I can understand wanting a challenge, so I don't think there's anything wrong with it. But the problem manifests itself by having the difficulty curve all wonky. You can be very good at Easy, and still not be able to complete relatively simple songs on Medium. Same with Medium->Hard, and Hard->Expert. Rock Band, on the other hand, can also be pretty challenging, but the curve is more gradual, so IMO it works better. It's clear the developers were focused more on having the game be fun for all levels of expertise, rather than making a good challenge that only hardcore fans will appreciate.
I think this applies for pretty much all games, across genres. Guitar Hero was just what came to mind. Ideally anyone should be able to play, but it should be more *fun* to play harder difficulties if your better at the game.
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I know that for Rock Band at least, each song is given it's own general difficulty rating as well as a per-instrument difficulty. For example, "Number of the Beast" is supposed to be one of the most difficult guitar pieces, but it's quite reasonable for a drummer on the same level.
That being said, it's still not a difficulty system that works for everyone, it's targeted towards the hardcore players of that particular game.
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It is more fun on expert, maybe you just aren't better enough to appreciate it.
Why would it be fun if easy > medium was just more of the same, going up in difficulty should make you have to think different and figure out different techniques.
How would being very good at easy at all prepare you for something too difficult for you? Mastering easy just stunts your skills and makes doing the wrong thing for Expert a reflex, you have to keep pushing your limits in order to improve.
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There is a practice mode to help you learn the fingering and sequences. perhaps you need to actually do some "Practice", or do you just expect that you can rock out on a harder mode because you are perfect at a simple mode?
Re:Maybe about the curve? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a practice mode to help you learn the fingering and sequences. perhaps you need to actually do some "Practice", or do you just expect that you can rock out on a harder mode because you are perfect at a simple mode?
That would be the wonky learning curve being referred to, yes. If you can get 99-100% on Freebird, Misirilou, and Psychobilly Freakout on Medium, but can't even beat "Mother" on Hard, what you have is a gap where the game rejects "difficulty" for "frustration", and if you're not "hardcore", you just don't want to play anymore.
You gotta have a carrot.
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The learning curve could be smoothed out a bit. I think there's a reason why it's like this though: multiplayer/newbies. They made it so someone who's just started playing the game can have a reasonable shot at playing the entire set list, instead of the first 10 songs or so, that way the host doesn't get completely sick of hearing guests play the same songs over and over, and the guests are more likely to find something that appeals to them (which in turn makes them more likely to go out and buy the game
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Agreed on orange. less than 10 mm distance causes such pain. By the time you've finished medium, you should have a decent grasp of HO/POs but throwing the orange at you AND ramping up the speed is a little much for the first tier or two.
GH 1 was bad that way too. Still remember getting 4 stars on "I love Rock and Roll" and "Mother" and feeling proud of myself. Two hours later I was still on 4 stars and gave both games to my GF on "extended loan" mostly because I never wanted to see them again. =P
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That is the problem with Guitar Hero 3 though, the 5th fret isn't what makes 'Hard' so much more difficult. What makes it difficult is that the number of notes you have to play doubles for most songs and even more than that for the later ones. This combined with very unforgiving hammer on and pull off sections that require perfect fingering, makes some songs almost impossible without la
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That's a known problem in Guitar Hero 3. The jump from the top of medium to the beginning of hard is just way too steep. That was not an issue in guitar hero I and II.
My recommendation? move to hard Bass. Bass is much easier than guitar, and you'll get used to the orange button slowly. That should make hard doable.
Or you could play rock band, which doesn't have the problem at all.
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Why would it be fun if easy > medium was just more of the same, going up in difficulty should make you have to think different and figure out different techniques. How would being very good at easy at all prepare you for something too difficult for you?
Because that's good game design. Playing the game on an easy level should train you to be better at the game, so that playing through the whole game gets you better as time goes on, and then you're better able to play on higher difficulties. This is just common sense in terms of game design, and pretty much all games do this.
And Guitar Hero 3 acknowledges that this is what a game should be in that the games get progressively more difficult as you move through the set list. If you're starting on Easy, th
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Another example of a game that goes against this principle is the Tiger Woods series. On normal anyone can be a fantastic golfer after a couple of hours. After a while you want more of a challenge so move up to the next difficulty - suddenly you can't play at all. The normal level is so dumbed down that
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It's like they're assuming you've played the other Guitar Hero games, were good at them, and only bought the new one because you wanted a bigger challenge.
I fail to recognize this. Let me first admit, though, that I have played other GH games very little. Three Aerosmith songs in my local EB, one or two songs from GH2 on easy, tier 1. My experience with GH3 is also incomplete: I've 5-starred easy (and, IIRC, medium), and completed ~10 songs on hard. A handful of FCs on easy too.
My experience is that the difficulty rises slowly within each difficulty level, with a few harder-than-normal boss fights in the mix, and then jerks upward when you go to the next
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I would say that GH3 spans a large interval of difficulty level. Thus it should be relatively simple to reach a challenge level that matches your skill.
No. That's exactly what I was saying is that I can't "match my skill". For me "Medium" is way too easy and not much fun to play, yet "Hard" is way too hard and not much fun to attempt. It's not an issue of whether it spans a large enough interval of difficulty, but that the difficulty curve isn't well developed (which is what I was saying).
Further, I think it's clear that there wasn't a lot of focus on making the easier settings *fun*. The harder settings seem to be fun for people who are really good a
Re:Maybe about the curve? (Score:5, Insightful)
it should be more *fun* to play harder difficulties if your better at the game.
I can tell you that it is indeed fun. If you can't complete the higher difficulty level then obviously you're not 'better at the game'. Being able to play through without ever failing or putting a bit of practice in is not challenging, and for me is therefor not 'fun' either. Try going through the songs more slowly in practice mode if you are finding any sections especially hard (it lets your muscle memory remember the patterns to play, and is especially good for getting used to switching between more akward chord shapes), and remember that the notes go along with the music. I think people on the lower difficulty levels try to watch when the notes pass by the bottom of the screen or something. I just look at the middle to top of the screen to see what is coming, and then play those notes or chords along to the music (though on crazy solos like in Cult of Personality there isn't really any 'music' to play along to, heh, I just try to hit as much as I can.. get around 65-85% of the crazy solos usually).
The harder difficulties are more 'natural' because they mimic the music almost exactly. I already played guitar before playing Guitar Hero so I had a bit of an advantage co-ordination wise, but I can complete a few songs on Hard even on lefty-flip. Playing lefty flip helped me to understand why some people find the co-ordination difficult (and is also the only way to make the game more challenging again now that I have completed all the set list and bonus songs apart from Through the Fire and Flames and the final battle on Expert) :p
Old NES games (Score:4, Insightful)
People forget how hard many of these games are. A perfect play through the game might be 10 minutes, but the "replay" was getting the perfect 10 minutes down by memorizing the exact way to play the game.
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I'll bet a lot of people love mario but never beat world 8-4.
They would've but by that point they were conditioned to expect the old bait-and-switch.
Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!
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They would, after judicious use of Warp zones. Same thing in SMB3 with the warp whistle, albeit that SMB3's variety is a stronger incentive to not use it (the levels in SMB1 are repetetive so you're not missing much except for palette swaps).
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I have a Wii and I am very fond of the difficulty of these old games. They are challenging yet very rewarding. My reflexes are not what they used to be plus I have lost most feeling in my left thumb do to an accident yet with practice I can do very well in most of the old games. Also there is randomness in many of these old games so you do need to learn techniques as well positions. A perfect game for me is SuperC. With new games it is much too easy to complete them.
Civ IV (Score:5, Insightful)
On the contrary, I hate how Civ IV does its difficulty settings.
It's normal and slightly above normal difficulty settings are far too easy. Immortal (the highest setting) is simply designed to cripple you as much as possible while giving the AI bonus cities and resources. The medium-high difficulty settings (which is what I usually play at) are usually pretty balanced between them and me, but the kicker is that the difficulty isn't precisely harder than normal, the game just gives the AI 5 times the units it would normally have. So when you have machine gunners and riflemen gunning down their knights and longbowmen (since it doesn't actually play any smarter), it just takes 5x as long to beat the game, and it just ends up feeling like an eternal slogging march, not fun at all. Personally, I think the approach is just stupid.
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I've noticed with alpha centauri, at Transcend (highest), all it does is make it so that your enemies run at like crazy speeds; third turn and they had secret projects already finished...
The other settings are designed more to have the AI use more cunning. I think at one point they start to get the Believers and Spartans (the war factions) to try and do amphibious assaults, at least against the other AIs (they did it to me once on my homeland, but two/three times against me in conquered territories, and a f
Well (Score:3, Insightful)
Every Civ game has a level where the AI is matched evenly to you. I believe it is Noble on Civ 4. Regardless, you can look it up and you'll find that at a given difficulty level, the AIs get no benefits or penalties that you don't. The AIs are also operating at full capacity that level, meaning they are using the best tactics they have available to them. Ok, so while they can (and do) make it easier by dumbing down the AIs, they can't make it harder by making them better, as they are as good as it gets. Thu
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>>Also you might try a different game. Galactic Civilizations II is reputed to have some very devious AIs at higher levels. You might give it a shot and see if it is more to your liking.
>>Finally you can always play other humans. You aren't guaranteed how hard they'll be, but there are ones waaaaay better than any computer out there.
Those two statements are contradictory. :/ I played GalCiv II and liked it quite a bit, but it has no multiplayer, which ruined most of the fun for me.
Usually I play
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Mod parent insightful, that's a pretty exhaustive reply.
Re:Civ IV (Score:5, Informative)
Give me a better option. I worked on Civ4 and the expansions. And I think that generally, the right approach to difficulty was taken.
The AI is only going to be this smart. Fact is, most players actually play at below-average difficulties. But what makes Civ hard? Your competition, the AI ultimately. We all want a better and stronger AI but there are limits to what you can do. Specifically, it's never going to be as effective in using its units as a competent human player. Therefore, the AI needs more units to be competitive against a human.
For the Beyond the Sword expansion, one of the best Civ4 players out there had a contract to work on the AI. It was improved dramatically and, interestingly, the bonuses it gets on higher difficulties were actually decreased compared to the original game. Still, despite some great programming and LOTS of playtester attention to the AI, it's obviously not as smart as human players. So yes, higher difficulties have to give the AI some bonuses to compensate. Immortal (it's the 2nd highest) and Deity are designed for a very small minority of players who just need a challenge against all odds. It's not a level meant to be fun for everyone, just like Settler is a level specifically designed for people who don't know what they're doing at all.
The only other approach would be to make the AI behaviour smarter at high levels. But if you write a smarter AI algorithm, why leave it enabled only for the higher levels? Let it be everywhere. I strongly opposed the notion of having silly AI behaviour on lower levels. It can bite you in the ass. Higher levels may be warranted in being more aggressive, but not smarter. Because if you make higher levels smarter than you're at the same time denying lower levels these smart algorithms, which is a bad thing.
As a side note, BtS has a revamped "Aggressive AI" setting which is more like "ruthless AI". It's not plain-out aggression, it just plays a more hardcore game and expects a more ruthless human opponent.
Re:Civ IV (Score:5, Interesting)
That's an interesting question. I actually sketched out a fairly detailed document on how I'd write a Civ AI and downloaded the API for it, but couldn't make enough sense of the code to start hacking on it. I do have a background in writing game AI - I wrote a bot for Quake, and have modded quite a few games (see my URL for the biggest one), but I couldn't get to the point where I grokked the code. I know it's not much of an excuse, I obviously could have spent more time on it, and spent more time digging up docs on it, but there it is.
Essentially, the problems I see with the Civ 4 AI are this (in no particular order):
1) Too easy on noble (and lower). As in, without doing anything particularly interesting, you end up outteching the AI by progressively larger margins, and they don't have much of an army to stop you. At some point, you can just roll in with a small stack of gunpowder units and wipe out all the enemy civs.
2) Surrendering to Switzerland. A number of times I've been beating the snot out of a civ, and offered it vassalage, which it would refuse. I'd beat on it some more, then it would surrender to a random third party that neither of us are at war with.
3) On Monarch and higher, the game makes these obscene superstacks of units for the AI. As in, there'll be 30 or 40 tanks or knights or whatever on one city, and 10 to 20 units on all the other cities. If a human is at the point where it can kill such a stack, he's going to win eventually, but it requires an amazingly tedious amount of time to do so, and the AI appears to be able to pull massive amounts of military units out of its ass, and apparently without paying upkeep. Or if it is paying upkeep, then it's certainly a bug, since it'll get even more out-teched since it can't afford research.
4) The AI's lacking in basic tactics sometimes. It'll suicide entire stacks of 20 units against a trio of fortified machine gunners, won't use terrain intelligently (well, some of the time it will), doesn't use spies to take out critical resources (like a lone copper or horse resource, instead attacking horses in the tank era or a resource that I already have 3 of).
5) It's careless with its workers, allowing them to get captured easily. I know this was patched in the latest version, but the last game I played I captured a lot of enemy workers just tooling around. They're especially trusting before war breaks out.
6) It's general method of moving troops and ships around is just odd sometimes. I've seen enemy units get stuck in a mountain, trying to pathfind across it, or individual units approaching my stack when I'm at war with them.
7) The AI, in general, is completely reactive. If I set my spy rate up higher, the AI will set its spy rate up higher. If I turn up my culture rate, he turns up his culture rate.
8) Too trusting. If I'm at peace with an AI, but building up a large force along the border, it will mostly ignore it until I invade. I'd like to see it take up defensive positions with spare units and build forts in border tiles (especially in chokepoints) instead of being constantly surprised every time someone declares war on them. Likewise, a lot of time they'll declare war without their armies being in position for it.
What I'd like to see is this:
1) High level AI tasks. Have AIs decide perhaps 30 turns in advance that they're going to betray a peace treaty and start cranking out units and positioning them on a border, ready to invade. If relations haven't improved on the target date, rush in with everything. Alternatively, have it decide to make a solid effort to take over the new world, instead of the piecemeal way that it expands to new continents now. The different AI types (techers, expansionists, militarists) would have different likelihoods for the various tasks. Essentially this would make them appear to be more human, and more interesting to work with.
2) Set them up to beeline different techs and wonders to match a specific objective chosen at the beginning of the game. For example, an AI could go with
Re:Civ IV (Score:4, Insightful)
Very fair post, I'll go over some of your complaints briefly.
1) Too easy on noble (and lower). As in, without doing anything particularly interesting, you end up outteching the AI by progressively larger margins, and they don't have much of an army to stop you. At some point, you can just roll in with a small stack of gunpowder units and wipe out all the enemy civs.
First of all, levels below Noble are supposed to be easy. So that's fine. Now, you'd be surprised as to how many players are the really casual type - most seem to dabble at a level below Noble for quite a while, even after figuring the basics out. But Noble also isn't the level for hardcore players, yeah, it's quite forgiving. I'd guess from your post that you know a thing or two about games, so Nobble should get easy for someone as you quickly. You may think you're not doing much but if you're outteching the AI on Noble, it's a guarantee that you're using many game systems right.
2) Surrendering to Switzerland. A number of times I've been beating the snot out of a civ, and offered it vassalage, which it would refuse. I'd beat on it some more, then it would surrender to a random third party that neither of us are at war with.
This is in fact more of a design issue than an AI issue. The vassalage system is designed in pretty odd ways that can seem counterintuitive. If your enemy surrenders to a 3rd party, he's either at war with it (and the 3rd party has done enough damage) or that 3rd party likes the victim and doesn't like you much. It's supposed to be a big guy taking a small guy into his protection. But no, I don't like the particulars of the vassal system too much myself.
3) On Monarch and higher, the game makes these obscene superstacks of units for the AI. As in, there'll be 30 or 40 tanks or knights or whatever on one city, and 10 to 20 units on all the other cities. If a human is at the point where it can kill such a stack, he's going to win eventually, but it requires an amazingly tedious amount of time to do so, and the AI appears to be able to pull massive amounts of military units out of its ass, and apparently without paying upkeep. Or if it is paying upkeep, then it's certainly a bug, since it'll get even more out-teched since it can't afford research.
You think that's big? I've seen AI stacks of up to 100 units ;) But here you are talking about one of the fundamental problems in Civ. It's not even an AI problem alone, it's a problem with how the game works. In war, there's a certain point where you break the enemy's main force (or take a crucial city) and it really gets much easier from there. At the same time, overcoming an enemy can become tedious. All I can say is, I hope a future iteration works around this someday. As for the Civ4 AI specifically, it follows the logic that at least its huge-ass stack might give you enough punishment. Huge-ass stacks have proven repeatedly to be the best combat tactic, it's just more effective. A good human will always have such a stack, and here spreading out would actually be weaker because the only thing that counters such a stack is a bigger stack. Yes, you can see the deficiencies of the combat system here.
The AI is paying upkeep, though, and it never gets free units (except at high levels at the start of the game). However, upkeep is reduced at higher difficulty levels and also note that upkeep is pretty low as long as units stay in territory, so the defending force never spends too much in upkeep costs.
4) The AI's lacking in basic tactics sometimes. It'll suicide entire stacks of 20 units against a trio of fortified machine gunners, won't use terrain intelligently (well, some of the time it will), doesn't use spies to take out critical resources (like a lone copper or horse resource, instead attacking horses in the tank era or a resource that I already have 3 of).
Some of that still happens sadly. But such extreme
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Careful what you ask for, make a game where the computer can beat you on AI alone may just as well mean that the options are limited and the computer can be a more persistent micromanager than you are. You want a wide variety of units, buildings, tactics, economy and so on that gives you many fairly even options to choose from, which means no matter how smart the AI is you'll find a way it plays poorly and exploit it. The alternative would be one dominant strategy that it'd always stick to which would get b
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>>The alternative would be one dominant strategy that it'd always stick to which would get boring really, really fast.
The whole, "have the AI cheat and build 10x as many units as it should have" also gets boring really, really fast. Actually, no, it doesn't. It takes about 8 hours to mop up an AI in games like that. It gets boring very slowly. =)
What would be better? Have it cheat on tech instead of unit building when its falling too far behind, maybe? Or have it understand combat odds so it does more
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Previous experience required... (Score:2)
Unless you have beaten the computer in Civ IV on Deity difficultly your opinion here is irrelevant!
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Does Civ II, Deity, only one city count?
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Well at least the gaming is a lot faster in the higher settings, you seem to research things very quickly. Very entertaining even if you do end up getting beaten.
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So in order to be "eligible" to comment on how a good intelligent AI should be designed one must first succeed at beating a so-so AI that's been given an enormous game mechanics advantage?
I've worked on games before (although not directly on AI) and i've played my fair share of games, and i know that designing an AI capable of taking on a human in a fair fight is impossible for a TBS (the "so-so" comment
Spilt cpu intelligent and cpu handy cap / cheating (Score:5, Interesting)
Spilt cpu intelligent and cpu handy cap / cheating in to there own settings. Do not put them under the same setting. Heroes of might and magic 1 had that.
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EXACTLY what I came here to say.
Especially in historical or war simulation RTS or turn-based games, I want the AI to be smart as hell but not to have any "fake" advantages. The Total War series is especially annoying in this regard; the AI is notoriously stupid in battle, and turning up the difficulty just gives their units better stats. I don't want the AI to "cheat". I want it to play smart. Ambush me, try something a little wild once in a while, attempt some real strategy but be ready to fall back on
Using metrics from gameplay to tweak difficulty (Score:5, Interesting)
I wrote a paper in college about how video games could evaluate and adjust difficulty based on metrics while the gamer is playing. I think a game's difficulty that is based off input from the controller and game statistics would help people have a more enjoyable gaming experience.
If the game can receive input from the gamepad/joystick they can measure heat, motion, button hitting frequencies, and things of that nature.
Software inputs can be used too. Time measured in zones, level completion times, and time to defeat creatures can be measured to add as heuristics. Death counts and locations can be used to determine what areas need work.
These inputs have been associated with stress levels in gaming and can be used to adjust creature abilities, time limits, weapon power, and directional support for the gamer. If the gamer is playing well the difficulty will become more difficult over time and if the player is having trouble then the difficulty can be toned down slowly and selectively. Directional help can also be used if the game thinks the gamer is lost.
These could help create a more dynamic game that fits to the gamer.
Re:Using metrics from gameplay to tweak difficulty (Score:4, Interesting)
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There's no sense of accomplishment if the game punishes you for doing well.
I think the idea is that the game would play at *just below* your measured level (versus punishing you by adjusting up to maintaining always being better than you). Then you could feel good about it letting you win! ;-)
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On one hand, I'd hate to think the computer was letting me win, but on the other, that's how I usually want to be treated. My dad used to play Global War (a Risk clone), and he commented that to really have fun, you need to win something like 80% of the time.
In an evenly matched multiplayer game, your wins are going to be around 50% (thinking first-person shooters here). But that's compensated in part by the satisfaction that you just fragged a real human. Food for thought: are multiplayer games more fun if
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My dad used to play Global War (a Risk clone), and he commented that to really have fun, you need to win something like 80% of the time.
It's different for different people. I played a Risk clone called Strategic Conquest in college, and after getting beyond the newbie stage I cranked it to the upper levels and then started backing it down until I was winning about half the time. That's just the threshold that I preferred. If I knew I won about 80% of the time, then in any given game I would go in thinking t
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One small problem with all this dynamism people are entertaining is that it makes comparisons between individuals mostly meaningless. I can tell my friend that I beat game X at level No Mercy, but if it plays different with different people, or even with the same person on different days, it deflates somewhat your bragging rights. Not a huge deal, tho.
Well, scores and/or ranks (which bias towards maintaining a high difficulty) would help mitigate this issue.
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> In an evenly matched multiplayer game, your wins are going to be around 50% (thinking first-person shooters here). But that's compensated in part by the satisfaction that you just fragged a real human. Food for thought: are multiplayer games more fun if there are more ways to win than to lose (so everyone can get their wins up to 80%)?
I find that when one team is outnumbered 4 to 1, people win 80% of the time on average. Seriously though, you said it yourself: fragging in multiplayer is nice because yo
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It may be applicable to other games without a time limit, but it would have to be done in such a way to give the player feedback on their progress (like a rank you can see at all times, independent of your levels etc), reward the player for playing well (if you complete X part of the game with rank at Y or higher, you get Z reward), the opti
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Was it the first Real FPS game (forget what it's called) that had a dynamic AI? It would literally learn your techniques (such as you jump out from a corner, shoot, and leap back behind it, repeat.
Well, a few times of that, and the bad guy would shoot a second time, perfectly timed for when you re-leapt out to hit you.
So one minute, you're leaping out, back, out, back, out, monster dead.
The next you leap out, back, out, bam, you're dead.
Brilliant.
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Doesn't work... I quit playing Oblivion when I realized that you can beat it as a level 2-3 character FAR easier than if you fully develop your character.
Also, what do you do about situations where a player has played a game to certain spot and starts over... the game would assume that this player is far more advanced that he really is as he didn't make a single wrong move up to that point... then he can't seem to get past that spot on any subsequent plays.
User selectable skill levels where the levels incre
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Also, what do you do about situations where a player has played a game to certain spot and starts over... the game would assume that this player is far more advanced that he really is as he didn't make a single wrong move up to that point
Randomize the game world slightly for each campaign, causing the player to have to make the mistakes inherent in exploration. Animal Crossing does this. Diablo does this.
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I've seen games do this before. I think City of Heroes missions are like this.
It won't rescue you from being pounded over and over in a mission that's way over your head, but if you're "almost there", a subsequent attempt can be easier.
For example, typical missions may have spawns of 1 minion and 1 lieutenant, while later retries might use 3 minions and 0 lieutenants, which is mildly easier. Of course, this may also just be a fallout of them treating the two spawn types as roughly equivalent in difficulty
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In quake3, I want the bots to play better if I start scoring higher than them. I.e. the lowest scoring bots try harder, the highest scoring bots ease up. That way, all the bots play at *my* level, regardless of what kind of a day I'm having.
The alternative is to quit the level and restart it with different settings.
Needs funny option names!! (Score:1)
Instead of Easy/Normal/Hard, there should be more amusing titles for them.
For example, the system in Wolfenstein 3D. And I'm sure there are other examples too, outside of id developed games.
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Instead of Easy/Normal/Hard, there should be more amusing titles for them.
For example, the system in Wolfenstein 3D. And I'm sure there are other examples too, outside of id developed games.
Rise of the Triad... *wave of nostalgia*
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"Don't hurt me daddy!" setting, with a bonnet and a pacifier in his mouth. Good times...
Once you completed Serious Sam on Serious (which I did, solo), it unlocked "You are not serious" difficulty, which seemed to be about the same except the monsters faded in and out of visibility over a few second cycle.
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Big problem in strategy games (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a fan of turn-based strategy games such as Civilization, and yet I usually stop playing most of them after a while because I get angry at the way hard difficulty levels are implemented.
You see, the developers of these games apparently find it too difficult to implement an AI that plays by the same rules as human players and yet provides a good challenge. So AIs cheat. Cheats come in two flavours: information cheats (e.g. send an unprotected valuable unit and you'll see an enemy fighter, who in theory has no way of knowing about your unit, beeline for it) and stats cheats (e.g. the AI produces units 40% faster than you).
I call those special rules "cheats" because they are typically not documented or consistent with the game story. So you end up making blind guesses about what rules the AI is playing by in a very atmosphere-shattering way and trying to adapt to them. It really feels like cheating and drains my interest in otherwise excellent games pretty fast.
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Another great RTS would be the Galactic Civilizations II games. Where if you played on an easy level, the computer actually told you it knew what you were doing - but was set too low to react (like putting tons of units on its borders before going hostile), to help you realize that it had the potential to counter-attack, and if you wanted a more fair challen
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I remember playing the original Warcraft. I surrounded the enemy's home base with archers having them hold their ground. So the computer would spit out a peon and it would instantly get killed. So I let it run for a day or so, yet the computer kept spitting out peons, proving it had infinite money. That rather annoyed me at the time to find that out. Of course the game was pretty easy with the correct strategy nonetheless, but it always made me wonder what other ways game AIs cheat.
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> Things like this can really piss off a gamer, but thankfully are mostly disappearing from
> today's games, as AI programming has advanced enough to not require the use of such.
Oh, you know what I hate? It's what I call "Sim Ant Syndrome"
In Sim Ant, you simulated an entire ant colony, though you could take charge of any ant you wanted in order to move it somewhere, usually to leave a chemical trail to food or a battle.
So far so good. But the enemy ant colony always made a bee line (so to speak) for
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To implement this scenario, wouldn't developers need game testers who are able to play on that very difficulty setting and monitor their movements, calculations and strategies and then bundle them into an AI? This would be quite a cost (if it's a good game should pay for itself).
Testers may need time to get really good at the difficulty setting, the release date would be pushed out and more money would be spent.
I guess there are a whole lot of factors to consider in making the AIs in games. But definitely I
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Have you tried Galactic Civilizations? They specifically don't "cheat" with their AI, although turning that on is an option if you still need a challenge.
Halo is a terrible example (Score:2)
After removing the permanent damage (a.k.a health point) it just became a case of throwing more stuff at you all at once.
FPS AI (Score:5, Interesting)
Has there ever been a first person shooter for where the difficulty level isn't simply an indication of how close you want your enemies to aimbots?
I can easily think of the negative extremes, such as Soldier of Fortune 2, with the infamous jungle level, and my own personal experiences with being shot through thick jungle, repeatedly having grenades land perfectly at my feet from enemies that haven't even seen me yet, and training a sniper scope onto the back of an enemies head at maximum range, only to have him suddenly turn around and go sneaking towards me. And Call of Duty, where increased difficulty was just the games way of asking exactly what percentage of the entire opposition army you wanted to face at once.
I appreciate that Halo tends to take a beating every time it's put forward as a paragon of game design and gaming in general and that the Halo fanboys with mod points will destroy me, but seriously, one of the gripes is with the claim that Halo's AI is somehow fitting of the Legendary title on it's hardest difficulty, when anyone playing the game sans rose-colored glasses has trouble not noticing that the enemies now simply fire faster, harder and lead perfectly.
"It's not like we just cranked every enemy's health by 200% and called it Legendary," he said. "There was a good amount of custom changes made per mission as well ...[snip]... What did make a difference was the time spent tweaking and fixing issues to make the game fun on every difficulty level. All titles had more bad guys, stronger and more accurate enemies with faster projectiles. And they used similar numbers for each of these parameters."
So in other words they made the enemies fire faster, harder and lead better. Thanks for clearing that up.
On the plus side, Far Cry's AI was reasonable, but had noticable holes, such as when it somehow thought it was hidden yet you could clearly see it sneaking towards you down an open dirt track, seemingly with an "If I can't see him then he can't see me" attitude. And if I remember correctly it improved further in Crysis. Although the thing that seems to happen with games like that is as soon as you claim that the AI is brilliant any single example of the AI not working flawlessly has people uploading videos to youtube showing that the AI is completely garbage because of this one time it got stuck on that shark outside the hut or something.
Are there any really decent examples of FPS AI or do we have to still be happy with running the Reaper Bot in Quake?
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The solution, then, is to ensure that AI can jump, right? :)
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I knew there was another game that had good AI and I couldn't think of the damn name. I don't even think FEAR had any of those dodgy Far Cry holes in the AI that were easily exploited, at least not as far as I can remember.
Also, it's interesting to note that my OP score is steadily moving down again after reaching (as far as I saw) 4 before the Halo fanboys with mod points got a hold of it. As expected.
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FEAR's AI was simply a trick - really great motion capture disguising an AI which really just had 3 options: charge, take cover, or scripted flank.
There were also a few other scripted moments, like throw grenade, jump out of truck, or knock over bookcase for cover. If you played the game on hard, you could really tell that the only difference was that it did more damage. Same animations, in the same places; I could often blindfire grenades around corners simply by remembering where enemies were last time
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I was actually under the impression that everyone disliked the way that Sin Episodes implemented this because the game did degenerate into quickload fest because the enemies got so hard if you went really well in the beginning. I'm certain there was a lot of gnashing of teeth etc at the fact that the game would present you with a brick wall diffculty wise if you went too well early on.
I know that I personally found this to be the case; playing it on Hard I got to the point where I had to save after every co
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Not exactly a FPS, but I was talking with someone about Thief recently, so it comes to mind. IIRC the difficulty levels added extra objectives to your missions. The enemy AI wasn't really much smarter (they may have made them a little stronger or something), but the real challenge is they might change the patrol, put someone right near the door you have to get through, and then add the requirement that you couldn't be detected or kill anyone. So it didn't really matter whether the guard was harder to kil
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Aside from Loque, who had perfect aim in UT99. The cool thing was each bot had different variables and you could adjust all of them, including how perfect their aim was.
Let the player make the game as hard as they want. (Score:2)
As I've grown older, I've started to play games for the story, not just the action. While I have nothing against a hard game (and I'm amazed by the things I thought were hard when I was a kid), if I start at too hard of a difficulty level and have to reload my game constantly the immersion really suffers. Unless a game has a means of properly regulating difficulty, I just put it on "normal" and usually yawn my way through combat.
I'm not generally a fan of rubber-band AI, since it's usually poorly implemen
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I have to agree. Having played video games from Pong all the way until today, I now play many games for the world experience, rather than the body count or difficulty. I mainly play FPS's, but after umpteem Quake and Doom clones, the whole difficulty thing wears thin. In most games, this is simply a matter of shooting a little better, or twitching a bit more, to take down more enemies. It gets old after a while.
Now, lately I've gone back and replayed or collected all the classics I've missed over the ye
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if you gain a new weapon, level, or ability, you want to feel supremely powerful for a little while
Hehe - when I'm playing an engaging FPS and I come across a new weapon, I tend to get scared.
How about removing difficulty modes in FPS? (Score:2, Insightful)
I usually found difficulty modes in these types of games to be a charade anyway. In Id software's older games, they simply tweaked the damage points both for the player and the opponent. An Imp in easy mode has twenty health, thirty on normal and fifty on hard. His projectiles do 20% damage on easy, but 50% on hard. There are ten Imps in hard mode where there were five in easy mode, etc.
Some newer games have the right idea in allowing the player
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Perhaps a learning curve mode, the computer detects how good you actually are, lists statistics at the end of the level and throws harder things at you as you progress through the game?
Game AI (Score:1)
Varaible difficulty for each aspect of gameplay (Score:1)
The problem with difficulty options (Score:2)
I couldn't read TFA because its filtered here for some reason, but I have several problems with difficulty options and AI (which, obviously, go hand-to-hand in most games).
First, a lot of games program an absolutely brilliant AI to the best of their abilities, and then make it randomly "make mistakes" or be artificially and severely limited in its range of abilities. The classic example is snooker/pool games. The AI can do ANY shot absolutely perfectly, given a few seconds to calculate the physics. I kno
Difficulty is not complexity (Score:2)
In a lot of modern games, the difficulty level is basically just more + faster. If you know what you have to do but just physically can't do it, that's not really a "difficulty" setting in the same way as adjusting the complexity or length of the puzzles to be solved. If "hard" required more brainpower and ingenuity instead of faster button-mashing, i'd be much more inclined to call that a good difficulty setting.
Force Unleashed (Score:2)
This game brought forth some ideas on difficulty. Perhaps they have it implemented and I've yet to explore.
FU has some puzzles strewn about the world. Most keys are highlighted to where you just need to find out how to interact. 90% of the answers are given. You just need to find the right combo.
It makes me think, that for RPG, or adventure games, where you need to find certain items, or interact in the world, that in "easy" mode, the answers are all highlighted in some way. turning up the difficulty, makes
Anyone else remember Goldeneye for N64? (Score:2)