Inspired by the unfair ai thread, which games have the “best” ai? Most balanced, most human like? Maybe best to learn the game from?
My vote immediately goes to Virtua Fighter 5. I don’t have much experience with 4, but 5’s arcade simulator mode is fun as hell, especially thanks to the awesome, increasingly difficult ai. Various ai entities really felt like they had personality, and it’s the only fg I think can take you far in its single player alone. VF4 had a great tutorial, but I’m not considering that ai.
i never played v5 but i read the developers had top virtua fighter players come in and battle the cpu, and the devlopers somehow were able to copy or transmit their combos into the cpu’s intelligence. i think tekken 5 had like cpu cards that did the same thing? but only in japan i think, idk.
uh, i’ll throw out the cpu from DBZ budokai3.
extremely impressive cpu.
played at a really high level, pretty smart, rarely made mistakes…but the cpu never ever read your inputs…like in 2D sprite games…or tekken and soul calibur games. in tekken you could never throw your opponent when diff was at max…always blocked your throws. SC the cpu did way too many block parrys.
DBZbud3 did an awesome job.
Naruto un 5 gets a nod.
but 2D sprite fighters just do way too many reads of your input commands. plus the cpus always do some stupid retarded shit like…never blocks low…meanwhile,…the same cpu will do some crazy, parry your super and link that parry into counter into combo into super into finisher type nonsense.
me, i’ve always blamed the terrible AIs in 2D sprite fighters to the fact that sprite fighters have much lower frames of animation than 3D polygon based fighters,…and that the cpu “cheats” more in spriters due to the fact that with such low animation frames, that it basically can cheat due to those low count of animation frames.
thats what i’ve always assumed.
may someone more educated enlighten me if i’m wrong in my assumption.
late edit:
oh, i forgot to mention the 2D sprite game with the smartest yet least cheap AI that i’ve ever experienced…marvel vs capcom 2.
it does read your inputs at times…but it can be pretty ingenious in creating team combos with random teams.
SSBB AI, I’m dead serious. Not only does the computer search for and regularly employ counters to moves when it discovers them, but it also picks up on the players play styles and gets progressively difficult the more you play with it. You can find videos of lvl 9 cpu’s learning approaches, advanced techs like the mortar slide glitch Snake does, even teabagging after kills.
Probably the only thing worth praising about the game is also the most underrated by those who like Smash.
Well, I don’t know how much of that is based on the “frame count,” but not all 2-d fighters are subject to that statement. Don’t forget most arcade games were designed to eat coins.
SNK is notorious for having poorly-coded A.I. opponents, though. Take RBFF2 for example, if I were to pick Joe, all I need to do is land one slash kick - after that, I can continue doing it in rapid succession and it will hit every time. You can do this all the way through and even beat Krauser that way and never take a hit. There are so many exploits like this, but trying to play the game fairly results in abuse and instant counters.
I still lol at this in MOTW, for the first stage, the A.I. mostly stands in place and does nothing. As soon as you jump in with an attack, they’ll anti-air instantly (Rock will do his rising tackle without charging). It’s not about the frame count, but how rigidly they’re designed, they only look for one condition and counter it the same way every time. A lot of SNK’s fuckery was due to laziness, otherwise the A.I. wouldn’t be doing impossible shit like walking charge moves.
A lot of game companies just underinvested in their A.I., as story mode has never been a big component of early fighting games. I don’t know if they’re any better at it now, but I’d never give my vote to them. Any good A.I. is essentially a learning one.
VF4:evolution is the only fighting game I’ve played where different AIs had different reaction speeds and different abilities to learn. I’d say it is far and away the best fighting game AI I’ve ever seen. VF5 has OK AI but it slips into patterns pretty often and seems more robotic than vf4:evo’s.
T5 ghosts are trash, t6 ghosts are trash - though it was nice to finally see an ai do combos in tekken.
Capcom’s AIs have always been atrocious. I swear the ai in SNES hyper fighting is the EXACT same code as SSF4’s.
But yeah, I have to concur about SNK AI being atrocious. The only SNK game in history that doesn’t have dumb-as-rocks AI or cheap-as-Kmart AI is KOF XI actually (but only on the highest level, and not for the bosses)