Game Difficulty Needs to Change With AI!

[ZyroXZ2]

sundin13 said:

ZyroXZ2 said:

I mean, you're proving the problem exists, and I applaud Supergiant for simply giving you, the player, control over the metadata adjustment.  It's like they realized, "welp, we can't actually make the game more difficult, we can simply adjust the metadata, but we won't know what the player actually wants in their comfort zone, SO HERE YOU GO DO IT YOURSELF" lol

I'm not really sure why it is a problem though. I agree that it can be a problem if done poorly. If enemies start feeling like sponges and it subtracts from the experience, that is a problem. But, if a game is tuned to be enjoyable at every level on the scale (and even better, if that game gives you control over how the difficulty scales), I see no issue with that.

Also, I wanted to bring up another game that had some "interesting" difficulty scaling: Vermintide (and specifically Vermintide 2). With increased difficulty, different elite enemies and boss enemies spawn more frequently, and there are also more grunts, but I found it interesting at how once you reach a certain difficulty level, friendly fire turns on. Personally, I wish that this worked like a Supergiant game where you could tweak each of these settings individually, but I like the idea of "friendly fire" being considered a healthy way to increase difficulty without destroying the game's balance.

That's because there is no way to tune difficulty to be enjoyable at every level since people are of varying skill levels.  Most of the industry will take the path of least resistance (low cost, easy), and that's simply dialing up the metadata on enemies and spawning more of them.  This is moreso why I believe in using AI so that it's dynamically adjustable in a way that's sensible, and not just the sponges we've come to know if we turn up the difficulty meter lol

That's an interesting thing in Vermintide about the friendly fire (the increase in enemies is pretty boilerplate difficulty metadata stuff), and it does seem that devs do understand the difference between "difficulty" and "administrative".  Turning on friendly fire is a more thoughtful method of increasing difficulty, and why some people prefer that in their FPS games ("hardcore" mode, etc.), yes.  I think the truth is that there's no focus on proper game AI and difficulty right now because there's an arms race for graphics going on, but my hope is that this topic itself will become revisited as graphics hit that "plateau" of decreasing gains.

I'm still miffed I didn't think about the Smash amiibo CPU fighters, though. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU---