The only issue with current systems is that the “AI” is tweaked to the specific game mechanics. You can easily enough build multiple algorithms for varying play styles and then have it adapt to counter the play style of the player. The problems is that the current way that many games are monetized is through expansions, gameplay tweaks, etc., as well as those being necessary when a game mechanic turns out to be really poorly implemented or just unpopular and the mechanics change. If the “AI” isn’t modified at the same time to rake advantage of the changes, then it becomes easy to beat. The other issue is that eventually a human can learn all of the play style algorithms and learn to counter them and then it becomes boring.
Unfortunately, generative “AI” is not a true learning model and thus not truly intelligent in any sense of the word. It requires that it is only “taught” with good information. So if it gets any data that includes even slight mistakes, it can end up making lots of those mistakes repeatedly. And if those mistakes aren’t corrected by a human, it doesn’t understand which things were mistakes and how they contributed to winning or losing. It can’t learn that they were mistakes or to not do them. It doesn’t truly understand how to decide something is wrong on its own, only that things are related and how often it should use those relationships over others. Which means manual training is required, which due to the sheer volume of information required to train a generative “AI”, is not possible in a complex game where the player has thousand of possible moves that each branch to thousands of possible combinations of moves, etc.
For most games, it's not difficult to make AI that can absolutely destroy humans. But it turns out to be very difficult to make AI that feels like a fun and engaging challenge to a human. Hardest of all is making AI that realistically plays like a human does.
I don’t know what it’s using specifically under the hood, but in Street Fighter 6 Capcom recently added a new AI opponent you can fight that they say is trained on actual player ranked matches and fights more like a human opponent. You can even have it try to mimic your own playstyle if you’ve played enough.
It can do some odd things and its mimicry isn’t perfect. But it definitely doesn’t feel like the typical high difficulty CPU opponent which uses things like input reading to react faster than a real player ever could.
You can train it in mirror matches, but the V Rivals that you can fight other than your own mirror are an amalgamation of a particular rank. There’s a whole lot of skill variance in Master rank alone, so it might be good for training me against Dhalsim, because hardly anyone plays Dhalsim, so no one knows the matchup, but it won’t help me learn how to beat Punk, specifically.
Yeah, there are some disappointing limitations for sure, but it definitely is interesting, and does at least feel more like a human player than the normal CPU opponents.
Dunno how much you played of the franchise, but if you got stuck early on (e.g. the dreaded Marble Zone in the punishing first game), maybe you could abuse save states? The franchise got several emulated releases, and I imagine it’s not uncommon for them to allow such a function natively. And at least to me, Sonic 2 plays much better and I remember kid me finding Sonic 3 even sharper.
Iirc there are also cheat codes. I definitely remember reading about them in a magazine back then and having the best time flying around this zone as super sonic.
I remember planting so, so many rings in a single place with debug mode enabled in Sonic 2 just so I could play through each stage as Super Sonic without effort- aside from the super slippery controls.
I’ve spent about an hour with “Drova - Forsaken Kin”. The best way to describe it (and I’m not the first person to do this) would be “2D Gothic”. It’s quite neat. Exploration is a bit labyrinthian, but it’s appropriately punishing and bleak, has meaty combat that becomes satisfying once it finally clicks with you. Just like in Gothic, you start out as someone who can barely swing a club and just like in Gothic again, you need trainers to level up your skills. Controls can take a bit of getting used to and I have no idea where the story will take me, but so far, I’m enjoying my time with it. Really the worst thing I can say about it so far is that the music is rather monotonous.
Drova is available on gog without DRM, supporting Linux and MacOS in addition to Windows (also on Steam and every current and last-gen console):
Still playing Metaphor, I’m really enjoying it. I think I’m around halfway through. The story is going in an interesting direction, and the gameplay is still fun, altho I’m always feeling a bit underleveled.
Technically finished out the season journey and "campaign" rewards for Diablo 4: Season 6, now I'm just going for 100% completion and the rest of the battle pass rewards. I'm thinking it might take me a while, since for whatever reason ancestral items don't drop that often for me, and the last thing I have to do is salvage 100 of them. It might have to do with the Torment level I'm on, but since the season doesn't end until the end of January, I'm not too worried.
Speaking of Diablo, I was going to complete Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred with my OG campaign Necromancer, but I was having so much fun with my seasonal Rogue that I started working on and finished the DLC with her instead. Not sure how I feel about the ending of the expansion, since leaves a very big opening for more expansions (or d5?) and doesn't really feel finished as far as the story goes.
spoilersWe don't even get to fight fight Mephisto! Just like a concept of him or whatever. wtf is up with that? And where tf is Diablo? He's the one I'm here for.
Since The Lake House DLC came out this past week for Alan Wake 2, I've decided to replay (most) things Remedy, starting with Alan Wake, of course. I'm playing the remaster, which looks a lot better than I remember playing it for the first time. And while replaying it after having played AW2, I didn't realize there were SO MANY references they stuck in referring to the sequel. Hell, even the QR codes that were just fun little things in the pc port have been turned into straight up references. It's been so fun to replay.
since for whatever reason ancestral items don’t drop that often for me, and the last thing I have to do is salvage 100 of them. It might have to do with the Torment level I’m on
I’m on Torment 4 and yeah, they don’t drop a lot. If you’re on a high enough difficulty, Ancestral Uniques probably drop more, since you can farm the Uber bosses, who basically only drop uniques. I think that objective was the second to last one I finished for the journey (the last are the 5 Helltide Commanders, which I don’t probably won’t do).
Oh, that's good to know that the drop rate isn't just me then, haha. I'm on Torment 2, and thought about moving up, but if the drop rate isn't any better, I'll just stay where I am for now.
You probably know this already, but if you don’t get slowed down that much on T3, definitely move up, but if you’re just getting killed too much or don’t kill stuff fast enough, stay on T2. I farmed T3 for a while, even though I had unlocked T4, because I would just get one-shot too much. After some more upgrades and a Mythic Unique, I was finally able to do T4 efficiently.
That's kind of where I am now: I have T3 unlocked, but I'm not happy with the rate at which I'm killing stuff at that level in the Pit, so I'm upgrading what I can until I'm more comfortable there.
This has been discussed a lot over the decades (with some VERY good articles written by assholes we try to pretend don’t exist))
The gist of it is: AI cheats because the alternative isn’t “fun” and rapidly outpaces humans.
Because in an RTS? After you get a build order down, the big decider is Actions Per Minute (APM). From a build standpoint, it is the idea of triggering the appropriate research the absolute second you have enough minerals. From a combat standpoint, it is rapidly issuing move and attack orders so that you always win the combat triangle. The former isn’t significantly different than just having cheaper research or faster build times. The latter is actively demoralizing in the same way that we all died inside when we first got permission to go online in Starcraft. Except at a level that even the good players realize they ain’t shit.
For grand strategy games (barring real-ish time ones like Stellaris) you basically have two real approaches. The first is the games with research options (… like Stellaris. Look, I have been playing a lot of Stellaris lately). We try not to acknowledge it but RNG has a massive impact on that when you really want to get torpedoes but no options are popping so you are just doing the fastest research choices you can to get a new pool. And the difficulty option there is… a known order.
The other are the very elaborate fixed tech trees. Obviously this gets back to build order. And the reality is… the benefit gained from rapidly updating the hard mode AI to use the current meta just isn’t worth it. That IS somewhere that an optimizing function can be applied to (and… semi-off-the-record but that has been a thing for over a decade and is why devs aren’t THAT surprised when a “new” meta takes over in a strategy game) but it becomes a question of how much it is worth it.
All that said, we are seeing a lot more effort put into “learning” AI in racing games (driveatars) and fighting games because those tend to be cases where even the best AI is still expected to be “human” and we aren’t TOO demoralized when we realize we are in a pub with Daigo. That said… there is a reason that modern SNK Bosses tend to have super armor rather than frame perfect inputs. Because the former is “bullshit” but the latter is just mean.
APM actually does jack shit. You can spam a button fast and you’ll get 400 APM and get rolled by someone who does 40. EAPM is where it is at. Which is effective APM. How many actions you can do that move you closer to victory. Instead of just spamming two buttons on repeat (which is what a lot of Starcraft players do)
There used to be AI’s integrated into Starcraft 2 and later actually playing the game (like a player would) online. You can put restrictions on eAPM for these bots. You can force them to make human mistakes - delaying upgrades. They can get pretty well aproximated to human skill. The main issue with it is they suck at context. They can’t really “remember” stuff happening. Picked up a dropship and it flew away from my FOV? It’s gone. Oh shit a dropship came from the exact same spot! Oh good it flew away, which means it can’t hurt me no more.
There are also tournaments in SC2 for unlimited AIs - where they play the game without any caps. The only thing that matters is who wrote a more efficient bot. Machine learning isn’t reallly used there, more likely a decision tree. Those do exactly what you are describing. Playing against those as a human is pointless and would get someone who introduced them as a difficulty instantly fired.
Yeah, but it’s not like an LLM or nueralnet thing. The kind of AI used for video games doesn’t need all that to feel smarter/harder.
Making a bot harder is actually easier than making it easier. It’s super straightforward to make one that always wins and is perfect. It’s more involved making a bot that doesn’t always take the best path or the most efficient way of completing the thing. I, personally, could make a Rocket League bot that plays the game better than any human since it’s all just math, and the computer is a calculator. I don’t think I would be able to make one a human player could actually beat though.
L4D has a mechanic like what the OP wants. It’s just not very good (IMO it overcorrects way too hard in both directions). Every time you win or lose or this happens too much, and this happens too little, it keeps track of that and then just adjusts things to change it up. Like if you sprint through one stage without resistance, the next stage will have more infected to deal with. They even gave it a name: the AI Director.
The alien in Alien Isolation is like that; but it is better done.
I played the original back in the day, although not as far as the remake. It’s incredibly faithful to it, almost beat-to-beat, but carefully polished and improved in all the right places, e.g. by improving pacing, creating a more interconnected game world and subtle balancing changes. The nostalgia is still there, but it feels modern nonetheless, not just because of its outstanding presentation.
I actually don’t like horror and jump scare games. The fact that this game managed to draw me in and keep me playing is quite the achievement. This is one of those games that is so good, it’s enjoyable even if you don’t like the genre.
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