Daytime. The Capital Wasteland. 2277. A man and a dog walk toward a derelict hotel near old D.C. The man looks nothing like other men. He is clad completely in steel; none of his human skin is visible but his steel skin crackles with energy as he walks. He is carrying a strange weapon in pristine condition, also pulsing with weird green energies. He walks unafraid as he ignores his surroundings to study the computer on his wrist.

Two men approach wearing simple leather armor. One carries a pistol and the other carries a sledge hammer. For some reason they decide the following:

"Let's attack that guy and kill him and steal all his shit. That plasma rifle he's carrying is probably fake and that armor is probably made out of old drywall. This is just some asshole who found a spraypaint factory."



And this happens over and over and over.

It's inevitable in any stat-building game that at some point you become godlike with no reason to fear even the end boss. Regardless, the instinct of self-preservation is not something that developers routinely program into enemy A.I. Sure, they'll sometimes have an A.I. trigger that makes them run away if you start really kicking their ass but the trigger has nothing to do with "you should have just run away when you saw me approach."

I know games would be pointless without enemies and they would be equally pointless if the enemies just ran away when they saw you coming. After all, half the point of putting work into your character is so you can achieve the title "Uber" and be fearless. For me though it's a mixed bag. Not fearing any of the game's enemies really bumps the immersion level down a few pegs. In Final Fantasy Tactics, for example, I've sat through the last boss' stock standard "you are all doomed" speech half a dozen times while thinking "as soon as he's done talking I'm going to make him my bitch without breaking a sweat." That notion makes the speech meaningless.

Adaptive difficulty makes up for this to an extent but it inevitably tails off into a slaughter as the player's stats and resources become inflated.

So what's the point? You become a bad-ass and a destroyer of fucking worlds. So what; that's just the way it works. Like I said, there's a certain amount of fun involved in reaching that point. I don't think there's a RE4 player out there that didn't enjoy the hell out of playing the game with the Chicago Typewriter. The challenge, I think, is to maintain the illusion that the player is threatened.

The Pitt expansion for Fallout 3 managed this relatively well but fails in a BIG way when it allows you to reclaim your items. What they should have done was left you without the items until the very end; forcing you to use workbenches to cobble together makeshift weapons to supplement the ones you find in the steelyard. Instead I reverted to uber-badass status and proceeded to wipe out every slaver on the map (I only left the baby and her mother alive.) Before that point I actually felt threatened even though I'm maxed out at level 20 with all bobbleheads and the covert ops perk. Close but no cigar but fun nonetheless.