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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

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

degenerate 10y ago
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.
- shrimp_emoji 10y ago
  >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.
  - pikzel 10y ago
    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).
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    "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.
    - Insanity 10y ago
      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 :-)
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        "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.
- tripzilch 10y ago
  > 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.
  - degenerate 10y ago
    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!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

degenerate 10y ago

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.

shrimp_emoji 10y ago
>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.
- pikzel 10y ago
  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).
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  "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.
  - Insanity 10y ago
    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 :-)
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      "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.
tripzilch 10y ago
> 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.
- degenerate 10y ago
  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!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]