I had great fun in Far Cry 2 for about 30 mins. Then I realised everything respawned as soon as I turned my back, then I got run over by a jeep that spawned out of thin air.
Just reading your comment I thought: hmm I wonder if you could have the AI match the player, so whatever your own accuracy is, then the AI accuracy matches ... then thought, no you'd have to have the AI lag ... then thought, well there most be thousands of algorithms used to provide challenging AIs that adjust to players?
So anyone link me a blogpost on popular AI skill adjustment tactics when programming games?
I read about this sort of thing years ago, and I seem to remember the consensus being that while it's entirely possible to build skill-adaptive AI, it tends to frustrate players no end. I don't know if there's been any movement on that, and whether anyone has made it work well.
The issue you raise is however entirely orthogonal to the respawning outposts in FC2. If you crank the difficulty up, the confrontations get very difficult very quickly - when you're on near equal footing with each AI NPC, being outnumbered is very, very dangerous. I think the outpost behaviour is just an obvious flaw they couldn't fix before shipping.[1]
Personally, I could live with it - you just avoid the outposts altogether and get on with things. You're supposed to be engaging in guerrilla warfare, right? Don't waltz into an outpost. Certainly, neither they nor the various other rough edges in the game ruined the experience for me. It's one of my top games of all time - I recently replayed the first part of it on the highest "Infamous" difficulty.
And no, it's for the most part not fun, in the same way that a thriller isn't fun but you can still feel positively about the experience - as the article tries to explain; I'm not sure the morality aspect is the full explanation though. Personally, the immersion itself seems to be a large part of the appeal. The simulated world is just so incredibly well done. Beautiful and haunting and terrifying.
[1] On the one hand, I'd love to see a "definitive edition" of the game where this sort of stuff is fixed and replaced with mechanics the designers originally had in mind. A (to me) obvious solution would have been to play up the 2 factions in this regard, in that each outpost is owned by either the UFLL or the APR at any given time, and that the player taking an outpost eventually causes shifts in the occupation map. On the other hand, there's a pretty good chance the game could be ruined by making it too much like a game with mechanics and goals like that.
The less disruptive fix would be for the ever-present patrol vehicles to simply re-populate the outpost when they find it empty, and radio in for further reinforcements. (Outposts typically have 4 NPCs defending, the patrols are 1 or 2 NPCs.)
And then I never played it again.