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by jjmarr·6mo ago·view on hn ↗
The revealed preference of players is for terrible AI so games are easier. That's why AI has been going downhill.

Payday 2 is my favourite example since they've had a bug since Day 1 that lobotomizes the AI subsystem.

Specifically, there's a global cap of 1 action for all enemies per game tick, so when there's too many enemies the reaction time is 5 seconds.

The mod Full Speed Swarm fixes this bug and the game is unplayable without collaboration and a lot of skill.

It's also unnoticeable until you die or if you do a ton of research on the AI. I used to host pubs with the mod to troll other players who suddenly found the game impossible to play at lower difficulties.

I think it's possible we get an AI driven RTS but the demand is too small right now unless its a recruitment vehicle for the military.

2 comments
Whether better AI is fun or not depends on (A) the sorts of advantages/disadvantages it is given and (B) its skill level compared to the player.

When people say they want better AI, they mean they want smarter + human-like AI without "cheating" (more resources, perfect aim, rubber banding, perfect knowledge, etc).

And even if you build a human-like AI, it's not going to be fun for players if it's too good, just like how humans have the most fun playing against other players at their level, not against the top-ranked players in the world.

So to keep AI fun, there is always going to be artificial limitations, and "people want terrible AI" doesn't really capture that.

One example might be games where you can hear footsteps or a branch snap. With stereo audio, you could technically derive exactly where someone is, possibly even which room they are in. When that raw signal is provided directly to a machine, it might accidentally be too good, know which bush you crawled into, and shoot into it.

Yet humans would only be able to go "I think I heard a branch snap" or "someone must be creeping up on me" even though they are given the same signal as the AI.

I don't know about this... I think that the "expert" AIs on RTS games just get more resources (not compute resources, but in-game resources) so they can create more units. I'd love to play against an AI component that has the same resource collection speed as the human player.
I still remember the mod scene in original StarCraft (+ Brood War) - it got to the point of supplying alternative AI algorithms, and there were plenty of non-cheating ones that were a noticeable step up in difficulty. At that point I already played competitively with friends and on-line, so they were only very challenging to me; for a new player, or someone casually doing the single player campaign, or just me a year earlier, they'd be impossible to beat.
I wonder how strong such an agent would be today if years ago AlphaStar was on par with pros. All those fun projects (the one with Dota 2) died out when LLMs took the scene and RL died out.
Yeah, cheating with resources or vision is disappointingly common. I remember the Green Tea AI for Starcraft 2 being pretty hard, but it looks like above "medium" it cheats (but the TL wiki does say "very easy", which will give you 10 minutes to set up, is equivalent to Blizzard's "harder").