Optimized AI that adjusts difficulty on the fly.....

[Arcanoix]

Every game that's been coming out for the last several years has a "new and improved" way to scale difficulty, and ever since this casual bullshit took over, I'm beginning to think that it's time for a new hobby. Sellout developers and 'kosher' publishers dominate everything and in my own personal opinion, when I pay $30-$60 for a game - I buy it to PLAY it, not to fund shitty corporations like Vivendi/ActiVision/EA/Ubisoft/Microsoft, etc.

I don't want to watch a movie, I don't want to listen to an orchestra soundtrack, and I sure as hell don't want to see any "pop culture references". That's all gaming has become these days and it's fucking sickening. Games that "adjust to the skill of the player" usually means the developer was too lazy or the budget was so fucked up that everybody decided to skip programming different levels of difficulty so they just go with one single "normal" mode and advertise it as "Radiant Difficulty". Thus leaving fail-gamers to feel that they're anything but worthless, and leaving "elite" gamers feeling like, "Hey - did this game really improve any of my skills?" when everyone just keeps becoming more and more retarded.

I'm curious, are any of you people actually skilled in anything at all when it comes to game design outside of 3DRealms/Iron Tower Studios?* If so, we should all get together, license an engine or make a fucking mod, do SOMETHING.

*Disclaimer: Face it, Age of Decadence isn't going to make it in time to save the industry. Not trolling, just pointing out facts.

 

[soggie]

Rather than having AI scale to the player's level, how about a "Reload frustration meter"?

Like... increasing the chances of critical hits parallel to the number of times the player reloaded the same save game.

That'd be so next generashun!

 

[Fritz Haber]

"Hey - did this game really improve any of my skills?"

A question I post on every developer's forum, in a shrill voice. And I demand an answer.

 

[crufty]

Don't blame the designers, not all of them anyway. Blame the audience. Blame the people who wrote Bethesda when they had half naked sprites. The people who complained "the world is too big" in Arena. People who thought NWN I was too hard.

Play Bards Tale. Where is the first dungeon? You had to first figure that out, based on a hint in the manual: a single line. If you didn't, you'd go out wandering and your level I party = TPK.

People like games they can beat in 10 hours now. "Casual" downloads are all the "rage".

But you are right: "customers" are "piggy banks" in a corporation's eyes. Their goal is to extract as much money for as little as possible from our pockets.

But if you want to try something out, get a C64 / Amiga emulator. Play some of those hard classics. Play Ultima VII. Play Dungeon Crawl - Stone Soup. Perhaps you have advanced in skill, where pretty pictures are no longe as important as game play to you. In that case, you are at the right place--welcome to the codex!

 

[soggie]

Or indie RPGs. I got slaughtered in KoTC demo. A fucking demo.

 

[Fez]

Or indie RPGs. I got slaughtered in KoTC demo. A fucking demo.

This. So refreshing too. Risen lets you wander off and get your ass handed to you, so not all recent and big budget games have gone the way of level scaling, thankfully.

The level scaling in Oblivion was the worst offender.

 

[GarfunkeL]

It was just as bad in Mass Effect. I don't know why the rage is always about Oblivion - guess it was earlier and more obvious in there. Loot and enemies are just as scaled in ME, though.

 

[denizsi]

Like... increasing the chances of critical hits parallel to the number of times the player reloaded the same save game.

This could be nice, actually, when the player is on the receiving end. When falling in a particular encounter doesn't mean death / game over and offers new routes, you can use that to discourage the player from missing it.

 

[soggie]

Like... increasing the chances of critical hits parallel to the number of times the player reloaded the same save game.

This could be nice, actually, when the player is on the receiving end. When falling in a particular encounter doesn't mean death / game over and offers new routes, you can use that to discourage the player from missing it.

This of course would only work if nobody but the developers knew of such mechanisms. If such a mechanism is known to a player, it can be easily (and often) exploited, which can potentially ruin the gameplay experience that the designers are gunning for.

What I think is that the game must always provide mechanics for the player to try other methods. When one way doesn't work, the game should encourage the player to try out others instead of forcing them to reload a previous save game.

In this sense, I remember reading a thread in this forum about failure mechanics, where the game is designed to accommodate failure. Failure in one single task wouldn't automatically fail the entire quest or encounter. It would open up other venues of opportunities which sometimes can yield better rewards than succeeding on the first try, which is an interesting design decision in my opinion.

 

[J1M]

I just finished Bioshock 2. This sort of dynamic difficulty is in there. The last 5% of your health bar is about as resilient as the first 95%, as enemies will slow their attacks and be more likely to miss you.

The game has a lot of problems, and this is one of them.

Alternative dynamic difficulty scaling: the player gets better at the game. Shocking concept!