Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Minor curiosity: Bioshock - is it qualitatively different on different 
> difficult levels, like Thief is, or is it just a rebalancing of hit-points 
> and damage levels?

  I think the vast majority of games with different difficulty settings use
just "fake difficulty", ie. some really cheap tricks such as giving the
enemies more HP and/or reducing the damage of your weapons (some games
simply spawn more enemies at higher difficulty levels, Doom being the most
obvious example), rather than going so far as adjusting the enemy AI.

  The most blatant fake difficulty I have seen is in Doom 3. (Or was it
in Quake 4? I always confuse the two because I have both and they are
so similar in so many ways. Well, it's not all that important.) In the
hardest difficulty level your health is always drained to half (or was
it even to one third?), even if you get it temporarily higher with health
packs. This feels like a really cheap trick.

  I suppose that the reason for this is rather simple: Adjusting the game AI
to consistently correspond to some kind of difficulty level is probably a
really hard problem, and the game developers have their hands full of work
already with everything else that needs to be done by the deadline and under
the given budget to worry about such irrelevant things.

  About the only game type where difficulty level directly correlates to AI
strength are board game programs, chess programs being the most prominent
example. (There might be other examples in some sports and strategy games.
I don't play many of those, so I really don't know.)

  Of course difficulty can sometimes be adjusted by other means, such as
in the Thief games: In harder difficulty levels you have to achieve more
(eg. collect more loot), and you are given rational limitations (eg. don't
kill anybody, which is a very logical limitation in a stealth-based game).
While these feel less like "cheating" from the part of the game designers,
it still doesn't mean it's not a cheap trick.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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