Why isn't enemy AI more realistic?

[DonFerrari]

SvennoJ said:

Hiku said:

Good A.I. shouldn't get in the way of having fun.
Which it can do if developers focus more on realism than what they actually want the players to experience.

In Ghost of Tsushima for example, if you get spotted, you can lose the enemies detection quickly by hiding somewhere.
This allows you to quickly get back into the stealth action.

The more realistic alternative could require you to evade enemies for several minutes before getting back to stealthy action again.
And the devs have to ask themselves which route most of their players would prefer.

Talking about Ghost of Tsushima, if you attack a group they will politely wait their turn to attack you like in most melee based games. None seem to care that you're dispatching them one by one and will gladly add to the pile of corpses right in front of their nose when luring them into your trap. Dumb AI is for the player.

First you need to vastly reduce the number of enemies before you can make them smarter. Yet gamers find it more fun to mow through entire crowds instead of having long tactical fights against a few smart enemies. Thus the enemies need to be dumb as rocks, and the higher the kill count, the dumber they have to be. Every game is a wave shooter nowadays.

In Half life and Fear you were worried when getting set up against 3 enemies. (Oh crap, where did number 3 go, is he behind me...)
Nowadays you kill a dozen or more in 30 seconds.

Heck, Tlou2 even has an option to turn off enemy flanking or enemies grabbing your allies to make combat easier. It's for accessibility so I guess its all right.

What I miss currently in Halo Infinite is that they don't bother anymore to shoot where you will be when strafing, jumping, grappling. I'm pretty sure they did in previous Halos or maybe it was a different game series. If you didn't randomize your strafing you would get hit every time, strafe or jump right into a grenade toss or hail of bullets. But that would take the 'fun' out of it.

AI is reversely tied to enemy count. Yet even when you get a one on one fight with a boss, they still can't be smart. They need to be predictable, doing the same patterns over and over again while absorbing a ton of hits. I guess it's not fun to have a boss that anticipates your moves, hides and keeps dodging your attacks. You feel better at yourself when you can shout at the screen, look at this bullet sponge, still can't stop me!

If the AI was smart, you would be dying as often as in multiplayer online. Or rather a lot more often since it will be all against you. Imagine how fun it is when everyone on the multiplayer server works together to kill one person, over and over and over.

From what I remember GoT only have the lined up 1 on 1 for duels, and well code of honor and all that wouldn't make sense to make it different.