Jaxon

IT'S GN PARTICLES THE CHAOS EMERALDS, I DON'T HAVE TO EXPLAIN SHIT.

Mal

That is an excellent question.

Jaxon

The way I see it, it's a remnant from the fascist old days when it was designed to stop people spamming caps everywhere.

I hardly think it's relevant now.

Shrike

Yeah. That shit ruined a lot of my posts.

Trey

You're supplementing my point. The reason those games were "difficult" relative to today's games was because they did not have a save system. If you ran out of your limited number of lives, you had to start from the very beginning. So you either learned the solution quick or you had to grind your way back to that point to try again. Today, you can camp out at the point of contest and reload/restart as much as you wish.

Sorry to reply like three days later. I fade in and out of this place rather irregularly.

Mal

I think we're viewing game difficulty in different ways. I don't consider die>restart difficulty of the game itself. It was not intentionally done, it was just a result of poor design which was initially solved by level codes and then game saves. The gameplay itself (which is what I was talking about) is no more or less difficult, but the game as a whole could be considered more difficult (which I'm guessing is what you were talking about). In that case we agree.

Trey

Yeah, I had difficult in quotations because from a gameplay perspective it wasn't actually more difficult, but I was talking in terms of people's perception so I thought it would fly that way.

manta

There are so many types of difficulty, I guess its all relative to the playing style and time of the player. There's the die/time=game ending(way of the samurai, heavy rain), there's AI difficulty, limited continues, game/level design, puzzles, stealth, ultimate trophy achievement(MGS series), full on hacked bots (ArmA 2, OFP). For me I judge a difficult game by AI difficulty and game design. IMO Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is up there in best AI. L4D2 comes to mind in both AI and game design, Contra games by level design.

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OG

i dont agree on l4d2 and ive played my share of that game lol bots are so dumb in that game. ive had bots who just stood there watching me get smoked or hunted or somethinh.

the settings of the game has become far too easy, howeverrrr playing vs on modded servers where a boomer[controlled by a player] can strategically bitchslap u to your death or where a charger can karma charge u off the hospital rooftop, then it becomes interesting and chaotic and loads of fun, and a challenge

has anyone here tried the game Hard Reset? thats a pretty challenging game imo, ive only tried the first few lvs and have died many times lol XD but its a lot of fun.

manta

Well on that stance the SP bot teammates are pretty stupid but when you play full on co-op with your mates on the hardest difficulty the AI does some crazy shit to kill you or slow you down. The only weak spot about it is rushing the whole level quick so the AI won't have time to plot the way for you. Which is no fun.

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Mal

Playing Crysis 2 yesterday reminded me that Crysis should be on my list. They're both fantastic games, with pretty good AI in my experience.

Demi-God

FEAR had some good AI, aside from the one who jumped through the window, ran around and entered the room just to jump through the window again.

Jaxon

I was thinking about L4D the other day. There's no intelligence to it - it's the 3D equivalent of a twin-stick shooter like Smash TV or Geometry Wars. It's just programmed to bombard you with more or less enemies depending on the maps' chokepoints, and the state of the game as determined by The Director.

manta

Wouldn't the director be the AI of the game? I thought it was, that's what I was judging on, my bad.

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Jaxon

It's a form of AI. It judges when to send infected after you, how many, and what types. The actual AI of the enemies is fairly basic, from what I've seen.