They gave a couple examples of the kind of AIs that don’t make games fun. One was some game (real or hypothetical) where you fight a small drone that’s very smart and fast, so it’s hard to shoot at. Another was where the enemy goes off and concocts a sophisticated plan to beat you.
They described how the player wants to feel like the game play is about themselves, not about some ultra smart enemy. So big and dumb enemies tend to work best, even though they don’t use sophisticated AI by today’s standards.
It was like the the Jurassic Park meme: just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
(Also very strong agree on monster infighting, it added so much depth, as a kid I didn’t even know monsters could infight until the level with cyberdemon and arachnotron in the same room)
Or the Deus Ex “ai” which people praised as feeling very intelligent- but was just programmed scripted sequences based on what the player most likely would do.
Yeah, in the end it's all if-this-happens-do-that under the hood. And that's important because game AI must be deterministic. Otherwise reproducing bugs would be impossible.
Some games are so complex that AI on the higher difficulty levels resorts to cheating. I understand the rationale behind it, but it has always rubbed me the wrong way.
Off the top of my head, several roguelikes (e.g. ADOM, Caves of Qud, ToME) and several entries in the TES series (e.g. Daggerfall, Skyrim) support it.
I also remember at some point playing an RPG where you found an ongoing even fight between two armies and you could join one to make the fight go your way, but I don't remember what it was.
Oh, that was so much fun. The best was to get a strong creature in Quake pissed off at the zombies who basically never died, and they would fight forever until the zombie prevailed.
I think I managed to get a Shambler pissed off at some zombies once, there was much shredding.. but the zombies always won in the end while I hid and watched.
Monster Hunter has it, it's pretty epic seeing massive creatures fight each other and you, a tiny human with an oversized weapon, running for your life and / or awaiting your opportunity to kill them and use their corpses to make new weapons/armor.
What other games even use it apart from Doom, Quake and Half Life? (HL 1 had some impressive AI)