Modelling Player Combat Behaviour for Dynamic Difficulty Scaling in First Person Shooter Games

Non-Player Character (NPC) are a core aspect of a modern video game, they fulfil a wide range of roles and feature in most genres. How they are perceived can have an impact on the overall enjoyment of the game, and when the NPCs are poorly modelled, the experience can be negative. This paper explores modelling human player behaviour to develop a combat model for NPCs, which will provide a dynamic solution for skill scaling. Game difficulty is a subjective notion and when games have predefined classification, being able to satisfy all players is not realistic. This paper investigates if the combat model can therefore be used to scale the difficulty of the NPC during in real-time, by dynamically adjusting a skill attribute, which is used by several key combat behaviours.