I found FEAR's AI not as impressive as people made out (and still do).
I felt like the tactics used by every enemy in the game basically involved flanking the player from two sides, and never approaching directly unless there were no other ways around (which was rare, as the levels were basically one combat arena connected to another in linear fashion).
It was pretty easy to exploit this by basically charging the enemy and aiming for the head as if you were playing an old-school strafe shooter, which didn't give them enough time to formulate their flanking plan.
I found by doing this the game became trivially easy, even without using the bullet-time thing.
I play on hard or harder if possible, and yet F.E.A.R. still wasn't that challenging.
I found the enemies to be less dumb than your usual cannon fodder, but you'd mulch through them pretty fast if that was your goal. They did try a lot harder than those in other games, which was nice, but they weren't that much of an obstacle. Their patterns are somewhat predictable, so you can often anticipate where they're going to go, or what they're going to do.
The problem with the F.E.A.R. AI is they don't necessarily adapt to the player like real people will. You can do the same thing a hundred times and they'll fall for the same trick.
Getting ambushed? Well, poke out, draw their attention, and fall back to a more advantageous position. Human players would just wait it out, they know you have to go through there, but the AI, ironically, gets impatient. Their goal is to kill you, not to defend things.
I'd like an AI that gets wise to my tricks, that starts to react differently. If you're using grenades frequently they might field more heavily armored troops. If you're sniping they might snipe back. That'd force you to adapt, to switch it up, to avoid becoming predictable.
The problem is that requires a pretty robust AI to manage troops and a deeper objective than "kill player".
I think AI, in this case, is overkill. Create ~10 common enemy class and spawn them based on your strategy history, equipment and game pace. Each and every enemy would act differently like if you were more on sniping side, you would get snipers and fast units spawned. With mediocre AI this would make the game appear as having very good AI to regular player.
A large part of the predictability is how the units come in at pre-defined locations and/or based on pre-defined triggers. There's very little randomness in this department.
If that was more unpredictable, if each death switched things up slightly, you'd have a far harder time gaming the system.
Like you observe, that might also make the AI appear smarter since the flaws are less obvious.
Bummer dude. I'm having that problem in Fallout 4 lately. It just... isn't.. hard... :/ I try multiplayer games to get that fix but they're all so arbitrary. BF4 I get rammed by a jet halfway through my 20 minute run to a point. CSGO I get blown to pieces by fifteen Russian hackers on a 5v5 server. Overwatch has been pretty good about scratching the itch, though.
I've always loved BF games but with BF1 I've just kind of lost interest after about 12 hours of total play time. Not sure why but I just can't get motivated to actually play it.
It was one of the few online games I played these days, I've been sticking mostly to single-player RPG's and grand strategies.
Clearly I should have clarified that I played the game on the hardest difficulty, as I typically do with shooters. I didn't think to mention it because everyone I know that plays FPS games does that too.
I felt like the tactics used by every enemy in the game basically involved flanking the player from two sides, and never approaching directly unless there were no other ways around (which was rare, as the levels were basically one combat arena connected to another in linear fashion).
It was pretty easy to exploit this by basically charging the enemy and aiming for the head as if you were playing an old-school strafe shooter, which didn't give them enough time to formulate their flanking plan.
I found by doing this the game became trivially easy, even without using the bullet-time thing.