Right up until the early 2000's game developers had to work a lot harder for their money than they do now
Instead of relying onf click n drag scripts or other players, over a servever, to give life to an enemy opponent; develoopers had to write coding for artificial intelligence.

And yes: good coding is easily distinguishable from what we have nowadays in most indie and even big studio games.

So after a fifteen year death to game developers whom also happen to be fluent in C++
Dark Souls comes along and everyone treats it like a break-through in gaming
when all DS did was employ a coder to back the enemies in the game.

Now, any time an enemy in a game is slightly smarter than most enemies in most games the title is assumed to be continuing a trend established by Dark Souls.

It would be interesting to see what qualifications and game tools most game devs have now compared to 10 or 20 years ago.

Are they even coding A.I now when they can copy players and use some algorithms to implement them. A lot of people don't know any better.

Reminds me of F.E.A.R, everyone hailed it for it's "revolutionary AI" when all it did was make it so enemies would hold their ground and couldn't be kited around corners where they could be easiely sniped. What's really amazing is that it took so long for a game to do this.

A lot of people still hail it as revolutionary, I guess because there's a simple constraint solver built in and the enemy actually announces what they're doing (kind of..) which is enough to give people the impression that they really think :P

But this shows that even simple AI can lead to somewhat dynamic and emergent gameplay, and yet most games don't even try to cross that low bar. Most AI I see today is just not worth calling AI.

I guess AI is one of these things that simply isn't cool enough for marketing.

The other thing that seems to have died is positional 3D audio. Late 90s, early 2000s, there was some hype around that and products that create a sense of space plus direction with HRTF, audio path tracing, etc. Most you find in games today is pretty simplistic. Sure there are fancy effects and filters, but they're just effects, nothing that tries to simulate the acoustic space of the game in real time and provide actual directional clues. Slapping on a "reverberant tunnel" effect just isn't the same as actually bouncing waves through the geometry of the level. It's kinda like how mid-late 2000s just slapped a bunch of cheap post processing filters on graphics.

With better physics and raytracing tech shouldn't this be be done in games already. I remember something like it being talked about at least 10 years ago.

I am confused by this thread. So many questions!

Does anyone mistake coded AI as a new genre?

Does Dark Souls really have all that amazing AI? From what I remember of it, it is basically just each enemy having a small set of moves that they either repeat ad nauseum, or choose to employ depending on what the player does.
Most games do that.

What has knowing C++ got to do with AI or game genres?

What makes you think that AI in games isn't more complex now than it has ever been?

What makes you think that loads of game developers don't know C++? It's used by what is arguably the second most popular Game Engine out there.

PS: Out of the box tools already exist for 3D audio in games. Either you don't notice it, or most devs just don't feel like using them.

Ditto on all of those. Dark souls' biggest difficulty us built out of longer unbreakable character animations. Timing needed to be just right. Certainly not the AI, which at times is just as laughable as many other games.