In regards to fighting games, the AI has never been up to snuff. Often, the strategy of any fighting game in 1P is to be continuously aggressive until you win. Certain bosses etc can bypass this with un-blockable attacks and perfect block/counters/combos, but even they can be patterned down to "rush them until you win."
Players, however, evolve significantly over time. It isn't long in a Fighting game's lifespan that you play against the same 2-5 in-game characters and must take all of their exploits to mind. Constantly ensuring you play to avoid those 100% death combos that were discovered after a couple of people learned that if they prepare a set-up just right, they'd ensure that you'd never be able to retaliate after getting launched in just the right way.
A fighting game, is a game to be fully mastered. Getting the best set-ups, follow-ups, and back-up plans that ensure the highest chance of success while playing against erratic opponents that respond to you in a split-second, altering their strategy to fit your character or play style. Unfortunately, there are no other games that are one-on-one against the world.
They're tournament games and are best appreciated as a battle of whits between one person and another like chess, checkers, or cards. Certainly you can get an AI to be great at board games with such simple rules, but unless the developer is willing to engage in a sophisticated study, the AI will always be predictable or so good that the average player will find them as frustrating as playing an overqualified genius.
Every person is a new pattern, and hence a unique AI. As such, little needs to be done to make the CPU competitive in arcade or story mode. Therefore, development can be focused on creating a more diverse roster of characters and balancing the existing mechanics to ensure that as many match-ups as possible are both interesting and fun.
Perhaps, Yahtzee, fighting games are too simple? If so, I don't see the issue of demanding that they take strategy to much further levels and add more variety to each character's repertoire at the loss of a large roster. Moves are currently very pre-set and are unfortunately too focused on arcade cabinet controls. Perhaps, as on-line connections get smoother and arcades finally become archaic, fighting games will see an evolution that'll -by contrast- turn the idea of having a squad of on-line shooters into a "Barbaric clashing of indecency and tastelessness."
EDIT: This is the era of Facebook and having multiple jobs to pay the bills. You can't always rely on someone always being there to play a video game with you when you're bored and have no time to finish a lengthy campaign. Online certainly fills those 2 hours of lethargy that are between job 1 and job 2 while the girlfriend is still working her nursing job..
EDIT 2: There are lots of non-competitive fighting games that are just there for huge rosters and stupidly balance-free console-only offline gameplay. As such, I'm particularly excited about Cyberconnect 2's Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: All-star Battle. THAT would be a funny ZP.
Players, however, evolve significantly over time. It isn't long in a Fighting game's lifespan that you play against the same 2-5 in-game characters and must take all of their exploits to mind. Constantly ensuring you play to avoid those 100% death combos that were discovered after a couple of people learned that if they prepare a set-up just right, they'd ensure that you'd never be able to retaliate after getting launched in just the right way.
A fighting game, is a game to be fully mastered. Getting the best set-ups, follow-ups, and back-up plans that ensure the highest chance of success while playing against erratic opponents that respond to you in a split-second, altering their strategy to fit your character or play style. Unfortunately, there are no other games that are one-on-one against the world.
They're tournament games and are best appreciated as a battle of whits between one person and another like chess, checkers, or cards. Certainly you can get an AI to be great at board games with such simple rules, but unless the developer is willing to engage in a sophisticated study, the AI will always be predictable or so good that the average player will find them as frustrating as playing an overqualified genius.
Every person is a new pattern, and hence a unique AI. As such, little needs to be done to make the CPU competitive in arcade or story mode. Therefore, development can be focused on creating a more diverse roster of characters and balancing the existing mechanics to ensure that as many match-ups as possible are both interesting and fun.
Perhaps, Yahtzee, fighting games are too simple? If so, I don't see the issue of demanding that they take strategy to much further levels and add more variety to each character's repertoire at the loss of a large roster. Moves are currently very pre-set and are unfortunately too focused on arcade cabinet controls. Perhaps, as on-line connections get smoother and arcades finally become archaic, fighting games will see an evolution that'll -by contrast- turn the idea of having a squad of on-line shooters into a "Barbaric clashing of indecency and tastelessness."
EDIT: This is the era of Facebook and having multiple jobs to pay the bills. You can't always rely on someone always being there to play a video game with you when you're bored and have no time to finish a lengthy campaign. Online certainly fills those 2 hours of lethargy that are between job 1 and job 2 while the girlfriend is still working her nursing job..
EDIT 2: There are lots of non-competitive fighting games that are just there for huge rosters and stupidly balance-free console-only offline gameplay. As such, I'm particularly excited about Cyberconnect 2's Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: All-star Battle. THAT would be a funny ZP.
