In 2006 Oblivion came out with its infamous "radiant AI", which was basically a scam that brought endless nightmares with those mudcrab discussions among other things, but it did also manage to bring a couple of welcome new things to the series, like NPCs that were capable of doing things beyond just standing in one place forever. Of course, that had already been seen years before that in games like Gothic and Outcast, but it was nonetheless a welcome step forward for the particular series (and more or less the only thing where Oblivion was in some way an improvement over its predecessors). It was such a big deal that they made it one of the biggest points in their marketing, and even though they lied to you as much as they possibly could in the process, it was nice for them to put some focus on that kind of stuff.
But then, five to ten years later, you launch a "best game of all time" like Skyrim or the newest "Fallout", and it's exactly the same thing. You initiate a fight with a person who's supposed to resemble an actual human being, and what does he do? He takes a beeline towards you and politely hits every single trap between you two without stopping, not caring that he's thirty levels below you, is wearing a tunic and is only armed with a rusty dagger while you walk around in Daedric/Power armor carrying weapons of mass destruction in each hand. Another enemy might be just willingly standing in the open while you shoot it full of arrows or bullets. There is no cooperation, there are no tactics, there is no sense of self-preservation; the "people" act exactly like any bear or deathclaw or whatever murderous beast the game world has been populated with. You go to the nearest town and grab a companion with you, and he's so suicidal that the devs had to have him godmode so that he wouldn't die five seconds after joining you. He'll run into your line of fire, get stuck in the terrain, run into holes they can't get out of, start attacking enemies while you try to sneak past them, set off every trap there is in a dungeon, and generally make sure that none of your well-thought-out plans can possibly succeed.
And this isn't just about these specific games. It applies to everything, good games and bad, and no one seems to really have a problem with it. You play the newest isometric old school RPG, and the combat is fucking shit compared to ancient stuff like Sword Coast Stratagems or JA2 1.13, one of the reasons (but not the only one, obvously) being that the AI is uncapable of doing anything interesting or clever. It is pretty much a given that the AI in a new game is shit, especially if that game happens to belong into the RPG genre (for some reason it still seems to be okay for an entire village to attack the PC and beat him to death if someone spots him stealing a carrot), and everyone seems to be fine with it.
Another example is the FPS genre, where AI was kind of a big deal around 2000 or so. With Unreal and Half-Life the AI enemies learned some new tricks and could, for example, try to flank you, fall back, play dead, set up ambushes, alert their friends or do some rather "human" things, like throwing grenades into places where they last saw you, even if you had already managed to slip away. After those games it wasn't really acceptable to have enemies just brainlessly attacking you, at least if they were human, and enemies were usually given at least some basic maneuvres they could pull off to make your life a bit more difficult, like shooting from behind cover, rolling away to dodge bullets, crouching or going prone to make themselves smaller targets, and maybe even manipulating objects in the game world, like flipping a table and then using it as a primitive cover.
In 2001 you had Operation Flashpoint, where the AI was capable of pulling off some really cool stuff seemingly on its own. You could be a part of a squad that was commanded by an AI-controlled officer, who kept giving orders to you as well as other AI soldiers, who used their artificial brain the best they could to fulfill those orders. If you happened to be the squad leader yourself, you could give the AI squad members orders like "get into that truck and drive it all the way to this town on the other side of the island", and they'd usually get it done. In the biggest missions you could have hundreds of AI-controlled units giving orders to each other, driving all sorts of vehicles and trying their best to fulfill the tasks they were given, reacting to things happening around them in a rather believeable way, at least for most of the time. Hell, you could create such a mission yourself in five minutes, and the AI could probably make it work with just some very vague instructions, with no need for elaborate scripts or anything like that.
F.E.A.R. was probably one of the last shooters where you could tell that they really put some effort into their AI, but after that the whole issue seems to have been all but forgotten. The Far Cry 2 devs were pretty enthusiastic about some of their AI stuff, for example about how the AI enemies could try to drag an injured buddy into safety, but most developers hardly even seem to mention AI in any way. Or maybe I'd just remember more examples if there were some shooters I was actually looking forward to, I don't know. Wake me up when something decent comes out.
Nowadays it just seems that all the AI does in a shooter is sitting behind a box and occasionally popping out to take a shot at you, maybe sometimes even rushing towards your position or throwing grenades at you. That's it. No flanking (to be fair, it's hard to flank someone when the world is just one long corridor), no teamwork, absolutely nothing interesting, just repeating the same simplistic pattern in every situation.
Stealth games, the rare ones we get, still suffer from the same problems we had with the very first Thief, meaning that the AI guards don't notice a fellow guard missing from its post, or manage to make even the simplest of deductions about where the player character might've gone. The Hitman series has come up with some nice ideas every now and then, but for every step forward they seem to have taken one or two steps backwards. Kudos for trying, I guess, but Absolution was a complete trainwreck in more ways than one, and the new one still seems quite unfinished in the AI department from what I can tell.
When reading developer interviews from about fifteen years ago, AI was a very common subject, almost regardless of the genre, but nowadays it seems it's hardly even talked about. A good AI is incredibly important in certain strategy games and sports games, and you can occasionally see some clear evolution in those genres, but that's about it. Of course, there's probably a lot of under-the-hood stuff that easily goes unnoticed, like with open-world games that try to simulate a functioning world, but especially combat AI seems to be as poor as ever. Like so many things from the 90's, a great AI is one of those ideas that you expected to happen sooner rather than later but which never really came to be.
tl;dr: Is the AI in games any better than it was fifteen years ago? Is that famous nostalgia clouding my judgment so that the decline is just in my head? Are there any relatively recent games that manage to do interesting things with their AI, especially when it comes to combat?
But then, five to ten years later, you launch a "best game of all time" like Skyrim or the newest "Fallout", and it's exactly the same thing. You initiate a fight with a person who's supposed to resemble an actual human being, and what does he do? He takes a beeline towards you and politely hits every single trap between you two without stopping, not caring that he's thirty levels below you, is wearing a tunic and is only armed with a rusty dagger while you walk around in Daedric/Power armor carrying weapons of mass destruction in each hand. Another enemy might be just willingly standing in the open while you shoot it full of arrows or bullets. There is no cooperation, there are no tactics, there is no sense of self-preservation; the "people" act exactly like any bear or deathclaw or whatever murderous beast the game world has been populated with. You go to the nearest town and grab a companion with you, and he's so suicidal that the devs had to have him godmode so that he wouldn't die five seconds after joining you. He'll run into your line of fire, get stuck in the terrain, run into holes they can't get out of, start attacking enemies while you try to sneak past them, set off every trap there is in a dungeon, and generally make sure that none of your well-thought-out plans can possibly succeed.
And this isn't just about these specific games. It applies to everything, good games and bad, and no one seems to really have a problem with it. You play the newest isometric old school RPG, and the combat is fucking shit compared to ancient stuff like Sword Coast Stratagems or JA2 1.13, one of the reasons (but not the only one, obvously) being that the AI is uncapable of doing anything interesting or clever. It is pretty much a given that the AI in a new game is shit, especially if that game happens to belong into the RPG genre (for some reason it still seems to be okay for an entire village to attack the PC and beat him to death if someone spots him stealing a carrot), and everyone seems to be fine with it.
Another example is the FPS genre, where AI was kind of a big deal around 2000 or so. With Unreal and Half-Life the AI enemies learned some new tricks and could, for example, try to flank you, fall back, play dead, set up ambushes, alert their friends or do some rather "human" things, like throwing grenades into places where they last saw you, even if you had already managed to slip away. After those games it wasn't really acceptable to have enemies just brainlessly attacking you, at least if they were human, and enemies were usually given at least some basic maneuvres they could pull off to make your life a bit more difficult, like shooting from behind cover, rolling away to dodge bullets, crouching or going prone to make themselves smaller targets, and maybe even manipulating objects in the game world, like flipping a table and then using it as a primitive cover.
In 2001 you had Operation Flashpoint, where the AI was capable of pulling off some really cool stuff seemingly on its own. You could be a part of a squad that was commanded by an AI-controlled officer, who kept giving orders to you as well as other AI soldiers, who used their artificial brain the best they could to fulfill those orders. If you happened to be the squad leader yourself, you could give the AI squad members orders like "get into that truck and drive it all the way to this town on the other side of the island", and they'd usually get it done. In the biggest missions you could have hundreds of AI-controlled units giving orders to each other, driving all sorts of vehicles and trying their best to fulfill the tasks they were given, reacting to things happening around them in a rather believeable way, at least for most of the time. Hell, you could create such a mission yourself in five minutes, and the AI could probably make it work with just some very vague instructions, with no need for elaborate scripts or anything like that.
F.E.A.R. was probably one of the last shooters where you could tell that they really put some effort into their AI, but after that the whole issue seems to have been all but forgotten. The Far Cry 2 devs were pretty enthusiastic about some of their AI stuff, for example about how the AI enemies could try to drag an injured buddy into safety, but most developers hardly even seem to mention AI in any way. Or maybe I'd just remember more examples if there were some shooters I was actually looking forward to, I don't know. Wake me up when something decent comes out.
Nowadays it just seems that all the AI does in a shooter is sitting behind a box and occasionally popping out to take a shot at you, maybe sometimes even rushing towards your position or throwing grenades at you. That's it. No flanking (to be fair, it's hard to flank someone when the world is just one long corridor), no teamwork, absolutely nothing interesting, just repeating the same simplistic pattern in every situation.
Stealth games, the rare ones we get, still suffer from the same problems we had with the very first Thief, meaning that the AI guards don't notice a fellow guard missing from its post, or manage to make even the simplest of deductions about where the player character might've gone. The Hitman series has come up with some nice ideas every now and then, but for every step forward they seem to have taken one or two steps backwards. Kudos for trying, I guess, but Absolution was a complete trainwreck in more ways than one, and the new one still seems quite unfinished in the AI department from what I can tell.
When reading developer interviews from about fifteen years ago, AI was a very common subject, almost regardless of the genre, but nowadays it seems it's hardly even talked about. A good AI is incredibly important in certain strategy games and sports games, and you can occasionally see some clear evolution in those genres, but that's about it. Of course, there's probably a lot of under-the-hood stuff that easily goes unnoticed, like with open-world games that try to simulate a functioning world, but especially combat AI seems to be as poor as ever. Like so many things from the 90's, a great AI is one of those ideas that you expected to happen sooner rather than later but which never really came to be.
tl;dr: Is the AI in games any better than it was fifteen years ago? Is that famous nostalgia clouding my judgment so that the decline is just in my head? Are there any relatively recent games that manage to do interesting things with their AI, especially when it comes to combat?
