Indeed. Most “AI difficulty” settings in games involve either crippling the player or giving the computer player extra bonuses/abilities. They are “how much should the computer cheat” sliders. (I’m looking at you, Civilization) It would be great if the norm in game AI was to allow the computer player equal game resources/rules to the human player.
It's probably gotten harder and harder to dedicate dev resources to building a robust bot player for your game, given that the top tier of players are just going to play online anyway.
It's not only dedicating the time, it's also hiring/maintaining a strong game-AI team able to consistently pump out effective models at the same pace as games are released. You can't just take a regular ol game developer and expect them to make a really competitive game AI without cheating.
Even though the work is interesting I doubt you're going to be able to build a full team of reinforcement learning experts for cheap. I would guess that maintaining a 5 person team would cost about $2-3m/year.
It might be easier "tomorrow", something like universal AI, where you plug your game objects with some kind API, provide some hardware to simulate games and it learns automatically. Something like Google does now, but more universal and easier to use. Might be a good idea for startup :)
Depends on the game. Quick-paced, short-lived games like arena fps and rts games naturally develop large enough communities (or die trying) that AI-development can be brushed off in favor of letting the players deal with it.
But for games like grand strategies (eg civ), the player population doesn't typically run high enough to support only humans each match (at least partially because the games run too long), and so its more important to develop a decently sane AI.
>It's probably gotten harder and harder to dedicate dev resources to building a robust bot player for your game
I don't think so. Years ago gaming programming books were all about how many CPU cycles can you spare for AI. Literally omg the graphics are too slow we have to make the AI stupider.
These days you can throw spades of power at it (comparatively).
He was talking about justifying the business expense and time required for a dedicated team to handle AI and only AI. And then add that this generation's consoles are the lowest common denominator and their CPUs simply don't have any spare cycles for intricate AI.
For a lot of FPS and Third Person shooters the AI is normally rock dumb, which is a shame. Compare the original FEAR's AI with many of today's shooter can't see to emulate. This guy done a good run down of how it is relatively simple but the emergent behaviour makes it more challenging.
This game was made 15 years ago and every time you play the game (just like the guy says) the encounters are different. There are ways to cheese the game still but it isn't easy to do it and tbh it almost not worth doing.
I think the problem is that a lot of games have been constrained by two things consoles being quite limited compared to PCs and the industry trying to constantly sell graphics and celebrity voice acting over gameplay.
Most of the open world games except for GTA are essentially pretty stale.
I always thought this was an intentional design decision. Players react badly to being "outsmarted" by an AI, so to keep the game fun they made the AIs predictable.
No nothing about this is intentional. Designers are constrained by ability - nobody is fielding intentionally stupid AIs. Intentionally easy maybe - very different concept.
For a FPS like doom its trivial to make a "perfect" AI that never misses.
Much of the focus is on RTS though. (Real time strategy - like starcraft)
It's a little difficult to describe but practically the "quality" of a AI is very obvious to seasoned players. i.e. You feel this & there is no masking the truth easily.
e.g. AI opponent nukes my bases where maximum damage is inflicted. Meanwhile I know the AIs scouts didn't have visibility of that area. There is no way the AI could have legitimate know that's where to place the nuke for max effect.
The AI won. It didn't outsmart me. It cheated via being omniscient and having full sight of map while I'm constrained by "fog of war".
Excellent AI - killed me. Yay.
Bad game. Bad experience. Unhappy user.
Shoutout to the Queller AI mod on planetary annihilation with titans.
Not just from a AI perspective but also gaming. Gaming AIs are on a consumer level still pretty rubbish.