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[TheSpecialOne]

I wish more games had Perfect Dark's "Special Simulants". You could choose bots in multiplayer, which had different behaviours. There were most the time very strange and separated from the difficulty settings, but they made playing the multiplayer alone or with less people very fun. They pretty much become "characters", which you liked to play against. More games should have them, since not all players like playing online and they are useful to create some special challenges for single-player (similar to Perfect Dark).


Source: http://www.gamefaqs.com/xbox360/960632-perfect-dark/faqs/8452

This is actually pretty cool. Did not know this was even a thing with perfect dark. Do you know of any other games that have different types of air like this?

 

[Ferr986]

The Dissidia: Final Fantasy games are the worst about this.

The game is sort of limited in attack and movement options, so the "harder" the enemy AI gets, the more it relies on simply perfectly reading your button inputs and always making the exact right counter-attack.
Trying to finish some of the high-level single player content is like bashing your head against a wall until the CPU makes a rare mistake and dodges into a wall, or something.

And that's not even getting into the game's weird idea of equipment balance. You can be up against a same-level opponent and be wearing the best gear it's possible for you to have at the time, but the enemy will be able to do an amount of damage to you in a single attack that you can't match in several back-to-back combos. You can unload all over the enemy for a minute or two and have it all instantly reversed when they tap you once in return.

Yes, I remember Dissidia being insane with the input reads. One of the most apparent games that do this in a long time IMO.

 

[Timeaisis]

As far as I'm concerned, input-reading AI isn't AI.

But you are right, it is the worst.

 

[Jebral]

Perfect Dark also had difficulty levels you could apply to the sims. The two highest difficulty settings, perfect sim and dark sim, actively cheated. But the game told you so!

Me and my best friend vs a dark sim was nuts. Hell, 4 people vs a dark sim was nuts.

 

[ZeroCDR]

 

[LakeEarth]

Input reading could actually be abused in Street Fighter 4. Certain characters would sometimes instantly ultra after you pressed a button. Rufus and Viper were very bad for doing this. But they'd do it against jabs, so you could jab here and there in certain ranges to get them to activate their ultra but where you can block in time.

Also, the AI didn't seem to adjust depending on which ultra they picked. So sometimes they'd instantly activate something with a lot of startup, like Seth's ultra 2.

 

[cireza]

Mortal Kombat games had this kind of IA, and it took me a lot of time and experimenting to find which versions of the games were manageable and decent fun when playing alone.

In the end, I play MKII on 32X and UMK3 on Saturn. They are pretty manageable, and also pretty good ports. They do have their own problems, but they are still fine.

MK Trilogy on Saturn had such an horrible IA I eventually decided to sell the game recently. I had bought back then, when it was released. PAL version. It was a bit sad parting with this.

 

[Dr. Zoidberg]

I hate AI enemies that instinctively know where you are at all times, always focus on you instead of NPCs if you are in their sight, and also know exactly when you are aiming at them even though they are 100 yards away and can't possibly know which enemy you are targeting.

As my sights move over them they instantly duck behind cover, as soon as it passes out of a certain distance they pop back up and start firing directly at me even though there are a couple AI teammates much closer.

 

[TheSpecialOne]

I hate AI enemies that instinctively know where you are at all times, always focus on you instead of NPCs if you are in their sight, and also know exactly when you are aiming at them even though they are 100 yards away and can't possibly know which enemy you are targeting.

As my sights move over them they instantly duck behind cover, as soon as it passes out of a certain distance they pop back up and start firing directly at me even though there are a couple AI teammates much closer.

This right here is an excellent example of absolutely garbage design. Several COD games are guilty of this and it truly makes a game unfun(i know).

 

[Mr. Nice_Guy]

Not sports but SFV AI in survival does this the last few rounds. On normal difficulty I shouldn't have the CPU blocking everything I'm doing.

Or teching my throws with 100% accuracy.

 

[Melchiah]

It's annoying in Destiny, when the Taken snipers immediately activate the bubble shield when you aim them with the sniper. Enemies also often start to move and look for cover when you do that, like they magically know there's a sniper aiming on them.

 

[thelurkinghorror]

Honestly, this thread is a direct result of my frustration with sports games (yes I know). I just turned off my ps4 a few minutes ago because of this. Now I'm going to reference sports games in my examples but I'm sure it applies to other genres as well. I noticed that this issue began to rear it's ugly head in the ps360 generation and it has only gotten worse. This particular issue is going to make me stop playing games because it makes games generic.

Nba 2K and Madden have this issue to varying degrees but the two biggest offenders are ea's nhl series and the fifa series. Honestly, this kind of lazy rubbish ai makes single player modes annoying to play and it's kills the game imo. Rule number one of these two sports games is that all players play the same. There is no differentiation between players. No character specific animation sets, no character specific traits, no team specific traits, no coach specific traits. In fact, there is very little differentiation in these games at all. The ai conveniently ignores the stats in an attempt to artificially increase difficulty. Heat seeking defenders, unbelievable player reactions, and God-like mind reading abilities are traits of these games.

If my memory serves me right, back in the ps2 days, developers tried to introduce "personality" to their games. The pes franchise stands out in my mind because it was praised for its player individuality. People always praised the player differentiation. The idea that the character you were controlling felt like the real life counterpart was seen as ground breaking. The ps360 era introduced generic input reading ai and we haven't looked back since then.

A lot of time is spent developing irrelevant features that do nothing to advance the genre forward. These features don't improve the gameplay and are mostly superficial. As a result, we're left with fantastic presentation, decent visuals, poor ai and poor gameplay. There used to be a popular joke about sports games being nothing more than a roster update and now it has come to pass. Shame on EA sports for their anti competitive practices and shame on 2K sports. Both companies are solely responsible for the stagnation and regression of an entire genre.

It's time for you to play a real sport game: Rocket League