This video got me to thinking:
A huge criticism that lurks in my brain is the games of Naughty Dog. Specifically, the Uncharted series and the Last of Us. These games stand out as examples of enemy AI made to give the "illusion of competence" to a level that Valve never reached.
- Enemies with ranged weapons who break cover and run directly towards the player with no attempt at evasion. (Conspicuously, the Fireflies of Last of Us are defending a location against the player-avatar Joel; the Fireflies have rifles, weapons with better range than Joel's pistol ... and still they break cover and run towards him.)
- Enemies that blunder into obvious traps in the environment. (Usually as a signal to communicate to the player, "This environment is unsafe", even though in some cases it's the enemies themselves who set the traps.)
- Extensive effort to portray the enemies as vile and deserving of suffering caused by players. (Many enemies shout epithets as they move, which signals their position. A talking point in advertising for Last of Us 2 were the many vocalizations enemies would say as they bleed out helplessly.)
Naughty Dog games consistently earn praise for narrative, which in turn reinforces that these choices in AI behavior are considered desirable. They do reinforce the idea of player competence... to the point of making the enemies demonstrably incompetent. Whether this stylization is racist or not (in the Uncharted games, where the player kills dozens of foreigners within minutes) could be debated.
This sort of enemy behavior may be excused, or even demanded, by the player base. After all, enemies are "bad people". "Bad" has a dual meaning: the bad guys are evil and thus deserving of punishment; and bad workers are incompetent at their jobs and thus their failure is clearly inevitable. In terms of narrative, Naughty Dog games spend a lot more of their heavy lifting on our protagonists, who are good and likeable people, humanized and relatable. Thus bad people should be bad.
And few people like to play a game to be made to feel dumb, especially when the game has high levels of narrative content such as Last of Us. Is a game supposed to be difficult or is it supposed to be experienced?
Naughty Dog puts a lot of effort in their games to make these enemies behave this poorly. And it's certainly paid off with critical and commercial success. Was Valve anticipating this style of implementation? Game development has strayed very far from the "realistic and deadly" bots of Quake 3 Arena and Unreal 1.
Efforts to make enemies behave more realistically may actively interfere with player enjoyment. No one likes to get stuck doing the same level over and over, especially in a "death spiral" with limited resources. Many players dislike treating enemies in a game as willful actors - if an enemy retreats or runs away from violence, many players will pursue to finish them off, even if that's not important to play. Players still complain about "escort missions" and "stealth sequences" despite decades of development; and yet today you'll still find enemies coded to stare at blank walls, for no reason other than players can't make sense of vision cones.
I agree with Joe Wintergreen that it would be more challenging to make enemies that behave more like willful actors, with senses of self preservation and competence. But one look at the audience, and apparently a foundation of good, marketable design is a lot of effort for an illusion of competence.