On the subject of gaming difficulty, I've played a number of games that have tackled this in different and interesting ways: the Sly Cooper series had dynamic difficulty, where the game got gradually just a bit easier if you continued to die in particular parts of the game. In Sly Cooper 1, the game would start giving you up to 2 magic horseshoes so you could get hit up to 2 times without dying if you kept dying at one section of the game. In Slys 2 and 3, the game would gradually decrease the damage enemies did to you while gradually increasing the damage you did to them until you cleared the checkpoint. At no point was the overall difficulty of these games compromised (with its 1-hit-kills, Sly 1 is actually a pretty hard game), just that for that moment in the game the game would adjust itself to allow you to clear it and move on.
Then you have a more modern example with Prince of Persia, where it is impossible to lose and your penalty for screwing up is to have to repeat a section of platforming or combat until you get it right. That was fine by me, and watching my best friend play the game now I can say it was exactly the right move for them to make. He still dies quite often, but the penalty for failure isn't especially large so you can just enjoy the game and get into the flow.
When it comes to games with difficulty levels, my favorites are those where the higher difficulties (as mentioned in the podcast) force the player to adapt to new techniques and strategies they never even considered before. Take for example Bioshock, a game which on normal difficulty is impossible to lose. Anyone can pick up the game and eventually beat it, even if they have to continually die and respawn at the Vita-Chambers. But for those who want a bigger challenge (or are trophy hunters like me), you can increase the difficulty 2 more levels and turn the Vita-Chambers off. This radically changes how you play the game. For example, on Normal Difficulty Big Daddies are more of a major nuisance since you can just respawn nearby until you kill them off. But on Survivor Difficulty with the Vita-Chambers off, those things can easily kill you in one hit. So I had to think more about the level design and using the environment to my advantage: setting traps, hacking turrets, using weapons I wouldn't ordinarily use (like the Electric Buckshot in the Shotgun), and just improvising in general. It was truly a fight for survival, it was thrilling, and it gave me a much greater appreciation for the options the game gives you.
I agree. Some of my favorite games are the ones where the higher difficulties change how you play the game. Tyrant Mode in Little King's Story is my most recent example, where you learn the enemies' patterns in more depth, and your own army's abilities and limitations, because you have to just to advance in the game. It's seemingly a minor change, but one that results in a very different play experience.
But for my money, I have to nominate F-Zero GX as a game where the difficulty was very high, but very fair, which made you learn the game more and more as you moved on. The only reason I ever got to be as skilled in it as I am is because the game's difficulty forced me to. The thing is, few games have that magic quality that makes you want to keep butting your head against that wall;if most games had that level of difficulty, I wouldn't play as many games.
So yes, difficulty can increase my enjoyment of games, but only if I feel that the game itself is fun enough to be worth mastering it. As someone who's been gaming for two decades now, and cares enough about the hobby to post on an internet forum, I have to say that those games are few and far between: I can only imagine that the vast majority of the population will never be interested enough in games to humor the difficult games. Simply put, they've got better things to do, which is why I'm A-OK with easy difficulty settings in games, and even with in-built systems that help the gamer get further.
I was disappointed though that no one brought up how the superior processing power of the HD systems in particular are rarely being utilized to beef up the AI. Or did I just miss that part? It's true that some games have better (not necessarily "harder") difficulty due to improvements in AI, but it saddens me that the leap in, say FPS AI since Goldeneye has been a mere hop compared to the Olympic-class triple-jump made in graphics. I wish more developers took a cue from Civilization IV, and focused on making the game more fun by making a better AI system.
One game that has been praised for its excellent AI is Killzone 2. I can vouch for this; its bot AI is noticeably better than virtually any FPS I've ever played (especially on the hardest difficulty setting, geez). Heck, the fact that it even has bots says something. But you're right on the money when you say that AI hasn't progressed much. I honestly think that there just aren't that many good AI programmers out there. It's still a new frontier in programming, really.
With the rise in multiplayer online gaming, you also have to think that many companies don't want to spend money on good in-game AI, since the majority of players will wind up playing other people online anyways. Take CoD4 for instance; you play through the single-player maybe once or twice, and then spend months and months playing online multiplayer exclusively. It's just not worth the effort to have killer AI, because it'll go unappreciated for the most part.
Yeah, I remember you mentioning Killzone 2 a few times for this purpose. I haven't played it myself yet, but when I get a PS3 I'll give it a go (sometime after Valkyria, Demon's Soul, and Infamous, anyways).
I think you're right that online gaming retarded the growth of AI in many ways. And for the RTS and FPS genre, I'm willing to accept that, since no AI can be as fun to play as a human. My problem is that this attitude has bled into other, more single-player genres and games as well. The example that comes to mind is Empire: Total War (which is technically an RTS, but a mostly-single player one). I haven't bought it, and won't until it hits $20, despite sinking hundreds of hours into the Total War games, and despite my fondness for the time period.
The AI in Medieval II was so terrible that it made the whole game un-fun, and from the sounds of it, Empire's little better. I remember people asking at the TWCenter forums if Empire would have a passable AI system. Someone from Creative Assembly tried to assure everyone that it would: they now had two whole people devoted the game's AI, which has to handle three completely different sets of extremely complex systems in real-time. Awesome! Of course, they likely assigned more folks to create the art assets for just the lowly peasant militia unit...
What annoys me is that it doesn't have to be this way. I remember being blown away by the AI for the marines in Half-Life (and in more ways than one!). Taking cover, flanking, covering fire, throwing grenades... that made for a fantastic experience at the time. But for the most part we haven't moved much in the past ten years. Why have so few games taken things to the next level? Why, for instance, is the AI in The Conduit so atrociously bad that I dropped the single-player mode four missions in? Aren't we better than that by now?
Argh, I'm rambling now. It just frustrates me that such an important element of gameplay is so ignored by most developers. Still, I'll give Killzone 2 a look. It had better be good!
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