What changes when you adjust the difficulty level on Street Fighter 2?

[acidbearboy]

I was playing the original SF2 in Capcom Arcade Cabinet last night. The standard difficulty level (3) was really rough to beat, so I dropped it down to the lowest level (0) and after a couple of fights, I was still finding it tough. Admittedly I’m not the best SF2 player around but it got me wondering what changes inside the game when you increase or decrease the difficulty level? I did a quick Google but I couldn’t find an answer. Does anybody know?

[Qazimod]

I had a quick look on the 30th Anniversary collection - which supposedly has arcade-perfect versions. The short version is that the damage seems around the same, but the higher difficulty is a lot more reactive - not quite input-reading, but still stuffs you with anti-airs, evades your projectiles and finds the perfect spacing for its own attacks - and the lowest difficulty is more passive and stands around eating hits. So it must be something in the opponent's "logic" under certain circumstances?

 

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1624943706 (excuse the Fisher Price presentation!)

 

E: googling around it sounds like the difficulty modifies things like how many player attacks the AI will "let through", which correlates with my "stand around doing nothing, or react to everything" findings. SF2Platinum: 

 

Quote

The AI engine has three main modes of operation:

Waiting for an attack. Simple scripts are chosen at random which consist mainly of walking backwards/forwards small amounts.

Actively attacking. Scripts such as the one above are selected.

Reacting to an attack. Scripts suitable for countering the attack are selected. Sometimes. Depending on the AI difficulty setting the computer lets plenty of attacks through unguarded, of course.

 

[Goemon]

I’ve been very tempted to start a whole thread on the general topic of fighting game AI. 

 

The main reason being @acidbearboy’s comment “admittedly I’m not the best SF2 player around” and the countless other similar comments from people saying they’re not great at the game.

 

What people need to know is - the AI cheats, plain and simple.

 

What I find disheartening about this is the fact that people likely don’t play fighting games as much as they possibly should down to the simple fact that the AI is BS.

[Gabe]

Cheating AI is hardly the preserve of fighting games though, all games do it to varying degrees.

[acidbearboy]

1 hour ago, Goemon said:

I’ve been very tempted to start a whole thread on the general topic of fighting game AI. 

 

The main reason being @acidbearboy’s comment “admittedly I’m not the best SF2 player around” and the countless other similar comments from people saying they’re not great at the game.

 

What people need to know is - the AI cheats, plain and simple.

 

What I find disheartening about this is the fact that people likely don’t play fighting games as much as they possibly should down to the simple fact that the AI is BS.

It's not just the AI that causes me to say that - I'm mid tier at best amongst my circle of friends who all grew up with SF2.

[Anne Summers]

SF2 is far from alone in being rather undocumented in this area. I made a thread a while back about how there is basically very little info "out there" about how the difficulty dip switches in classic arcade games affect gameplay. 

[Superfamifreak]

If you think SF2 is hard, try Art of Fighting 2. It may have taken me 28 years, but at least now I can 1cc it. 

[Goemon]

On 15/10/2022 at 18:12, Gabe said:

Cheating AI is hardly the preserve of fighting games though, all games do it to varying degrees.

It depends what is considered cheating. A lot of games will do a bit of input reading but ultimately they are following a set of decisions within the rules of the game. I’m not an expert in the likes of sports games, so I’m not sure what they get up to but I do know that SF2 (and other fighting games) literally play by their own rules that fall outside of the game.

 

I’m not even talking about the obvious stuff like not charging moves that require it or reading inputs, it’s the more sinister stuff like making the AI invincible when it shouldn’t be, or stopping you from blocking to make you take a hit. This stuff is really cheap and can cause you to lose the game when it’s not your fault.

 

 

On 15/10/2022 at 18:19, acidbearboy said:

It's not just the AI that causes me to say that - I'm mid tier at best amongst my circle of friends who all grew up with SF2.

This is fair enough. What I’m getting at is the people that say they’re ‘no good at fighting games’ when all they had to play was cheating AI, which has basically gave them a warped, unrealistic view of the genre.

 

Fighting games are like a chess match of decisions, reads and reactions and when you can get into them, they’re amazing and have no limit of playability.

 

This was the crux of my potential thread, which basically led to the controversial opinion ‘fighting games, 1 player, are unplayable nonsense.’

[Goemon]

9 hours ago, Superfamifreak said:

If you think SF2 is hard, try Art of Fighting 2. It may have taken me 28 years, but at least now I can 1cc it. 

Neo Geo fighting games are the worst! LOL!

 

Relentless input reading.

 

I’ve played fighting games for 35 years, played online for 20 of those….and I can’t beat the first character in the likes of AoF2 or FFSpecial because the AI is so bollox.

[Superfamifreak]

11 hours ago, Goemon said:

Neo Geo fighting games are the worst! LOL!

 

Relentless input reading.

 

I’ve played fighting games for 35 years, played online for 20 of those….and I can’t beat the first character in the likes of AoF2 or FFSpecial because the AI is so bollox.

 

Art of Fighting 2 is all about patterns and prompting the AI. For example if you play as Robert, Temjin and Mickey can be beaten by jumping straight up and using hard kicks. Let Yuri pin you in the corner and she'll sweep followed by a special move. Sweep and follow with a fireball as she gets up. If you do a standing roundhouse against John Crawley, he'll jump at you so roundhouse followed by a fireball.

 

Some characters like Eiji and Lee can be difficult, but once you learn their patterns, it's easy.

 

But of course IF you complete the game without losing a round, everything goes out of the window when you face up against Geese Howard.

[disperse and recoagulate]

The only fighting game I’ve ever enjoyed is Pit Fighter.

[Dig Dug]

The thing with AI is eventually it cheats so much that you can manipulate it. The classic mortal kombat games have an entire speedrun scene because of how easily you can manipulate the AI.

[Nick R]

A few years ago, combo expert Desk did a video illustrating some of the things that CPU opponents do to cheat, in ways that it's impossible for real players to match. Extra invincible frames, rapid dizzy recovery, instant charge moves, etc.

 

It doesn't cover how the challenge varies with chosen difficulty setting, but I think it's relevant to this thread:

 

 

 

[Nobuo's Organ]

1 hour ago, Dig Dug said:

The thing with AI is eventually it cheats so much that you can manipulate it. The classic mortal kombat games have an entire speedrun scene because of how easily you can manipulate the AI.

 

I remember having the official strategy guide book for SNES SFII: Turbo which just went ahead and told you how to exploit every AI on the highest difficulty. Doesn't matter if Guile's a cheating, insta-charging fucker if you can bait a Flash Kick to nowhere out of him every time

[Goemon]

4 hours ago, Dig Dug said:

The thing with AI is eventually it cheats so much that you can manipulate it. The classic mortal kombat games have an entire speedrun scene because of how easily you can manipulate the AI.

This is ultimately what it comes to. Manipulating the AI to win, which in some cases can be a simple as (as @Superfamifreak mentions) neutral jumping and pressing hard kick. 
 

But is this fun?

Do people feel accomplished by doing this?

What are people learning by being forced to fight in this way?

 

I feel like the answers to all these questions are reasons NOT to play the game any more.

 

I’m probably asking too much as the people who made these old games didn’t have the knowledge that is known now for how a fight should play out. Still, I feel if fighting game AI he been made fairer/better it might have led to more people getting into fighting games.

[megamixer]

Yeah, loads of 1v1 fighters read inputs and "cheat". On the flipside, many difficult bosses from the old days can be beaten by abusing really basic things like sweep kicks.

 

One that always bugged me was Final Bison in SFA3 who could seem to read the moment just as you let up on the guard direction and unleash a Mega Psycho Crusher. Of course, you can also use the AI against itself to bait out the move, block it, and have some time to fight against Bison with him having no meter while it charges...

 

As has already been said, SNK bosses were the absolute worst back in the day, with input reading bolstered by ridiculously cheap specials (Goenitz's tornados for example), outrageous super moves, and massive damage output. For me it was at it's worst when SNK was going bust and transitioning into Playmore. The likes of Igniz (KOF2001), Magaki (KOF XI), and Orochi (Neo Geo Battle Coliseum) are some of the most hateful bastards I have ever experienced in all of fighting games.

 

Must also mention Zeus from World Heroes 2 who is one of the cheapest fuckers ever - stupid high damage output, blocks everything, and reads your inputs so that you crash into his reflector/shield move.

[Anne Summers]

I notice that none of the replies to this thread apart from the first one have addressed the question in the OP...

 

I stand by my previous musing that there seems to be some variant of the Somebody Else's Problem Field around this question that makes no one want to investigate or work out the answer to it.