Campaign Difficulty Oddities?

[Dario D.]

This is kinda' strange...

Every night, I unwind by working on the the campaign on Hard difficulty, but am now officially stuck on DM-Sanctuary, because I just... can't... beat the match (and I'm trying to avoid turning the difficulty down, because "Normal" is far too easy).

I've been chipping away at Sanctuary for over a week (quite enjoying the challenge of trying to adapt new tactics to get over the blue team in this one) but now, about 30 matches later, I just have to give up...

The issue is strange, and possibly something that may need patching: my team can very frequently get a good lead at the BEGINNING of a match, but then Blue Team invariably and always pulls this magic surge of frags that closes the gap incredibly quickly, and leaves us in the dust from then on, no matter what (they almost always win by at least 10 frags. It's not even funny how predictable it is).

The funny thing? I usually have more than twice the frags of my teammates... not because I'm good, but because their scores are WAY lower than the Blue Team bots.

Aside from the obviously strange nature of what's happening here (red team bots underperforming, and Blue Team getting a surge of skill designed to bury you without ever letting up) does anyone know if there's some detailed way to tinker with difficulty in INI's or something? I'm trying to avoid playing on Normal, or it's just going to be a cakewalk (no fun).

If Epic were to patch this, I don't necessarily think having the oldschool list of difficulties is better (I like this simple approach), I just think there's something weird going on with the bot skill here (at least in TDM (?)) that is making the campaign probably more difficult than it should be. (ie, your team sucking, and the other team getting an unending skill surge)

[Bebo]

uh...just get better at the game. It's nothing that needs patching.

[MikeHunt]

i know exactly what you are saying dario as i had the same problem on that map (and some others in a similar way).
yeah my team sucked badly and the scores were more even across the opposing team. yeah we got the lead but towards the end of the match they just became super accurate.
really annoying.
i think what happens is your bots skill is based on you and as a team, so if you are doing well they will compensate on balancing the teams and become a little more ****.
at least in general that is but on sanctuary its different.
it took some doing but i did get past it, you have to trya and be aware of the opponents paths and playing as it can be predictable (to a point) and be accurate your self.
i found it helped playing some hard DM online before playing the bots in campaign as it got my speed and reactions up.
keep at it its not impossible.

[Xyx]

It's tradition!

Tradition demands that blue team bots get a boost. In UT2004 the boost was scripted to vary per gametype, with Assault giving them a whole +2 levels.

Tradition also demands that Malcolm goes Godlike on your *** after you frag him a couple of times (the cheesy solution being to frag him once and then hide and wait for the match to time out).

Tradition goes on to demand that the difficulty you initially select is raised as you progress through the campaign (or ladder, in the previous games). That means that even if you select Novice, you will nevertheless eventually face opponents of Adept skill or better. It would appear that some key points in the campaign/ladder provide a more noticeable boost to the overall difficulty level than others. Sanctuary being a prime example.

Finally, tradition demands that you do most of the real work yourself, be it capturing flags, holding the enemy prime node and/or attacking the core (bit of a conundrum there) or fragging the blue team more than they frag your teammates. This is probably not explicitly scripted but simply a result of the above two traditions.

These traditions seem to be conscious game design decisions for the most part. Some people like to defend this approach by stating that it is "epic" to force the player to near-singlehandedly carry the match. I just think it's poor single player game design.

[iron12]

I hate relying on bots to win a game. I gave up. Especially when they grab the orb and get stuck somewhere.