e.g. A soldier shooting you faster on Veteran level but taking a bit to shoot you in Amateur.
In: Technology
This is a really cool question. Game designers use lots of sneaky tricks to make enemies seem smarter or better without having to do a lot of extra work.
The easiest and most common way is to just make enemies do more damage. As long as you have a chance to dodge an enemy’s attacks, making the attacks hit harder makes the enemies seem more effective. FEAR, a game often considered to have the best enemy AI of any first-person shooter, does nothing but increase damage to make hard-mode enemies seem ‘smarter’.
Another common tweak is accuracy. At low difficulty, the designers can make enemies spray a lot of shots at you, but intentionally miss, so you feel like you’re in an intense battle but stay alive. The classic shooter Goldeneye 64 makes enemy shots go really wide – sometimes to the point of being silly – at low difficulties. Call of Duty games do something similar – the easier the difficulty, the more the enemies aim for your teammates instead of you.
Many AI’s are based on finite state machines and hierarchical state machines. The AI decides between a few different ‘game plans’ and then chooses how to perform them. If the AI makes these decisions often, they’ll seem aggressive and clever; if they wait a while between decisions to ‘think’, the player will get more chances to outmaneuver them. This is used in games like Gears of War and Vanquish, where the gameplay focuses more on moving into position than accurately hitting targets.
Some game AI’s, especially for strategy and card games, use a search tree. The bot imagines making many different plays, and picks the line of play that brings it closest to winning the game. To make the AI harder, the designer can have it imagine more possible plays, and even imagine sequences of plays far into the future. To make it easier, the designer can have the AI intentionally make worse or riskier decisions once in a while.
Excellent game designers put a huge amount of thought into enemy difficulty. The objective isn’t to make easy mode easy and hard mode hard. The designer’s goal is making easy mode forgive mistakes, and hard mode punish mistakes, so easy-mode players can have a laid-back and creative experience, and hard-mode players have a reason to master the game.
When enemy difficulty is done poorly, it’s really bad. Halo 2, Uncharted 1 and 2, the Mass Effect series, and Far Cry 2 have notoriously brutal hard modes in which impossibly beefy enemies have supernatural aim and kill you in a split second. Only a few weapons are powerful enough to use, and you need to rely on cautious play and glitches to have any chance of winning.
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