It amazes me to ponder how they would give us some great options in
arcade mode and nothing in the A-spec career and Seasonals. The A.I. Characteristic slider from 1-10 was a great addition, and then you can choose beginner, intermediate, and professional difficulty before an arcade race. Why in the hell couldn't they put those simple options in A-spec, and base your rewards upon your chosen setting?
The contrast is eye-popping. Go set up a tough race in arcade mode and you can find yourself in an immersive, competitive battle (even though they run terrible race-lines and don't seem to know when to apply the brake and throttle for a fast run). The A.I. are fully capable of diving on you, holding a line side-by-side through a turn, and generally attempting to compete, sort of. Now go to the seasonals or any a-spec race in GT Life and watch them park the car if you get anywhere close to them. Every time. That is atrocious.
I like what previous posters have said about studying other games. I've never played Race 07, but between dirt2, GRID, and F1- it seems that the codemaster boys have their **** together when it comes to A.I. I've heard that the TOCA series also sports some strong A.I. racers.
The first order of business is to hire more than two guys to work on this CRITICAL aspect of this prestigious, multi-million dollar racing game. Check the credits of gt5. It is literally two guys.
Atsushi Hayashi and
Yutaka Ito. Seriously? 50+ people modelling the
appearance of the cars and two working on the artificial intelligence of our race competition?
Second, make them run real and
varied race lines. We can't just have the train of 15 bots running over the exact same curb at the exact same point, every lap (or hitting the wall at monaco every lap, for that matter). It surely doesn't help that they don't feel like passing each other in obvious passing zones- approach a hairpin after a long straight and they will all just stay in line, backing up traffic for 200 yards, often allowing us to blow right past 6 of them in one fell swoop.
Next we need them to apply the brakes and throttle like a RACE DRIVER. Right now they do it like a frightened old woman. Gas, brake, coast, brake, gas, brake on turn exit (!?). Wtf Kaz. You are a race driver. Is this what you want to practice with? Who green-lighted the frightened old woman A.I. in this game?
Lastly I would like to see our A.I. brethren make some mistakes. They do it in high-powered cars like the Ferrari F1 or the Red Bull X1, crashing and spinning in arcade races. But this often happens in a repetitive manner, and at the same point on a given track. We need some randomness here. A little parity in the field. The robotic hardness needs to be softened up a little bit, and it has nothing to do with the ps3's capabilities.
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