Is there any substantial difference in enemy behaviour in CP2007?

[centurion_08]

It will be my first hands-on with the game. Got the full package with the DLC.

To give you short context. I'm 36 year old, played and finished literall hundreds of story driven fps games.
Since i remember i coudn't see lower difficulty than very hard or whatever the highest was.
But one day, it came to me. It's all fucking the same. There's no real challenge in any of those games, it always boils down to fucking bullet sponges and making your char a strawman.
Please tell me there is some advance A.I algorithm behind hard or very hard enemies. Do they evolve in any way, adapt, anything.
Or is it about getting to certain level and steamrolling bitches left and right.
I'm tired of these lazy stupid enemies which take 3 clips to the head in almost every fps.
Instead of question it turned into a rant. Apologies.

 

[venomtail]

2.0 Enemies are dignificantly better than vanilla and far less bullet spongy than they used to be, that was a trademark CDPR design direction. But let's look at the scale, there's no way they can make tailor made AI at such a large scale, working in any part of the world without breaking. They won't come close to tailor made small environment enemy encounters like the ones you can expect in linear games like Plagues tale or Last of Us. Plagues tale had a nice mechanic as listening to noises made by creaking floors and not really forget being disturbed, they'd even walk around alerting other soldiers of something being off and then this alert state spreading out slowly to everyone. If they lost you in tall grass they'd burn it to be safe you're no longer there or walk through it. Haven't played Last of Us but I had to do a writeup for their tech demo, implies enemies get emotional if you hurt or kill their friends, which can change how they in turn attack you.

 

If there is a TLDR I enjoy enemies trying to flank me and throw nades if I am camping, which is a step above the average game these days I think but they are hesitant to be more daring, anything that would require coordination and timing, such as all rushing me or peeking me from two opposite angles at the same time is beyond their ability.

 

Good enough to not break the immersion cause AI is stupid and stands in the open constantly but nothing too memorable either or equivalent to PvP creativity. B tier.

[YoungBlade]

I didn't code Cyberpunk, and I haven't played it, but I can give you some general insights into how game difficulty tends to work as someone who has been doing amateur game dev for almost a decade.

 

Generally, enemy difficulty in games is increased by giving the enemies more HP/armor, making their weapons do more damage, making them faster - either shooting faster or moving faster or both, adding more enemies to fight at once, or increasing the number of powerful "mini-boss" type enemies over regular grunts. This has been the way since the very earliest games that had difficulty modes.

 

If there are behavioral differences that make the enemy "smarter" it typically comes in two forms: removing or reducing action cooldowns (enemies in a game are supposed to simulate a real being, one with reaction time, so they first target lock your character and then wait a bit before shooting - some harder game modes completely eliminate this target lock timer, and so enemies will instantly target and shoot at you as soon as they get LOS) and giving the AI "clairvoyance" (in many games today, enemies can't see through walls and, if there is a fog mechanic, can't see through fog - at harder game modes, they may remove those limits from the AI, making them basically psychic, always knowing your exact position no matter what you do).

 

These have become more common today, not because old games were easier, but because these behaviors were the default for older games - this is part of why old games can be harder. Doom was one of the first games to actually use these methods to increase difficulty (such as Fast Monsters) because on lower difficulty modes, they limited how much the enemies could do to make the game easier and for enemies to seem more realistic.

 

As far as I know, true AI enemies that learn from player behavior to become more difficult don't exist outside of tech demos. It is something that I'm sure will come eventually, but probably not for a while. In the meantime, you'll have to settle for hand-crafted AI systems that, at best, know how to use cover and have rudimentary ideas of strategy in combat.

[Mark Kaine]

yeah, "story driven fps" is the biggest oxymoron conceivable... and the most boring genre ever... i rather play tetris 24/7... 

 

idk maybe try some actually challenging games?

 

sp: metal gear solid,  devil may cry  nier, fatal frame, dino crisis...etc.

 

mixed: resident evil, monster hunter... etc.

 

 

multi: overwatch,  naraka, tekken, streetfighter... etc.

 

all games you can actually improve on, that don't necessarily are story driven, although some are, but emphasis is actually on skill and taking on challenges..

that are actually *challenging*...

 

i mean its you who's been choosing to play these awful and always samey games, im sorry for your experience though,  and hope you can overcome the difficulties you're facing...

 

 

tldr: start playing more diverse games

[Mark Kaine]

On 11/24/2023 at 11:46 PM, YoungBlade said:

As far as I know, true AI enemies that learn from player behavior to become more difficult don't exist outside of tech demos

probably true, but there are tons of games that basically emulate that experience by being cleverly designed,  the enemies don't just become more difficult but also change their behaviors and require the player to change their approach...

 

fatal frame 5 is actually incredible at that for example,  it just keeps surprising you, and you often have to actually outsmart your enemies,  especially the final stage... you need to rethink *everything* and hope you actually learned the mechanics at this point....

[Mark Kaine]

On 11/24/2023 at 11:46 PM, YoungBlade said:

Generally, enemy difficulty in games is increased by giving the enemies more HP/armor, making their weapons do more damage, making them faster - either shooting faster or moving faster or both, adding more enemies to fight [...]

basically that's "press x to win" design,  corridor shooters, etc, typically what the "big guys" like EA, crystal dynamics, etc put out...  i absolutely despise this genre, no challenge at all, just braindead... 

[YoungBlade]

2 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

probably true, but there are tons of games that basically emulate that experience by being cleverly designed,  the enemies don't just become more difficult but also change their behaviors and require the player to change their approach...

 

fatal frame 5 is actually incredible at that for example,  it just keeps surprising you, and you often have to actually outsmart your enemies,  especially the final stage... you need to rethink *everything* and hope you actually learned the mechanics at this point....

Is this with a difficulty setting or just something that changes as the game progresses? I was referring to difficulty settings in games. It's rather unusual to code multiple AI versions for difficulty, as coding even one AI per enemy type is already very time consuming, let alone coding multiple different AI versions for each enemy type and difficulty.

 

At least if it's changing as the game progresses, then it's content for all players, whereas most likely will only play with a single difficulty mode.

[Mark Kaine]

23 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

Is this with a difficulty setting or just something that changes as the game progresses? I was referring to difficulty settings in games.

ah, yeah, no i was meaning this how the difficulty progresses during the game, there's also another aspect to "difficulty"... in many games the player can additionally change this freely to their liking, for example you could beat DMC without ever upgrading anything, or just a few essential things, or beat Resident Evil on hardest difficulty with knife only, that's significantly harder than playing it with the other weapons, the point is these things require thinking and strategy,  not just "pressing x to win"...

 

another example is indeed fatal frame, you get different films and upgrades that make your camera stronger or give you overall better effects... but the thing is almost everyone uses the weakest film because its endless,  so you keep the stronger films for endbosses etc, and the game actually rewards you for using the weaker film because you get faster charge for an "ultimate" like attack... plus you'll easily have enough stronger films for the endbosses (even then I'd usually just keep using the weakest film lol)

 

aka, strategy,  actually planning ahead,  fast reactions etc actually get rewarded... that's what i want from a game not a preset set of rules that you have follow with barely any deviations...