Are there any games that do interesting things with AI anymore?

[Hobo Elf]

You can LOL about that, but the guards really pull off some interesting moves, like noticing missing soldiers, destroyed light sources and stuff, calling in backup, having doubts about seeing someone or not.

Obviously there are shortcomings, but the AI in that game is not LOL worthy. It is good.

It is LOL worthy and you are easily impressed. The AI is highly reactive but it is incapable of following through with its reactions in any meaningful manner that feels believable or creates challenge for the player.

 

[DosBuster]

The problem with good AI is that it often gets "too" good, the developers of FEAR found that good AI outmatched pretty much all players and that's the reason why most developers intentionally tone it down so as to make sure the player has a great experience first hand. Leave making skynet to the scientists.

 

[tormund]

This reminds me of that infamous Gametrailers SoC review where reviewer COMPLAINED about AI being too good

(yes, this is that "it's like World of Warcraft with guns" review)

 

[Carrion]

Gametrailers SoC review

Fuck this planet.

 

[B0rt]

...Games in which I'd pay good money to get better AI, since these games are otherwise near perfect:
Civilization

There are a couple of decent AI improvement mods for Civ 4 (BTS) -- only helps for vanilla but the one I remember using did have the AI civs building half-sensible doomstacks and sending them into the right (wrong) places. It gimped their cheats a bit too... can't remember specifically which one I used but it was worth the hassle. You could still get the hang of beating the AI but it usually seemed to at least a bit more *sensible* about what it was up to. For all I know the mod might have just introduced more carefully crafted AI than native, rather than more sophisticated.

Does anyone who follows Dwarf Fortress know how clever the AI ranks in that? Lots of the stories I read suggest that the wee mobs in there have relatively rich inner lives, but I've been imagining they must just be procedurally-generated clockwork microbes w/ Dungeons & Dragons decals painted on 'em. The Ultraviolent Sims.

 

[Leitz]

Playing DF is about learning all these various workarounds for the dumb AI.

Yeah that's the big problem of DF; you can't just sit there and enjoy watching your Dorfs, because they will fuck it up immediately. On the other hand out of this stupidness come all the big DF myths.

 

[Average Manatee]

Can't recall who I'm quoting but someone basically said "Good AI is one that makes the player think they are smart for winning even if the AI is guaranteed to lose", which pretty much sums up modern AI in games.

Aside from that I think most people have been burned so many times by claims of "good AI" (like in Oblivion) that its basically irrelevant as a marketing gimmick anymore. If its not a marketable feature then its dead. Its not so much that people don't want AI as it is the fact that "holy shit AI amazing !!!11111oneone" blurbs on boxes and advertising are completely ignorable.

 

[Gerrard]

Google's captcha.

P. shit game though.

 

[sexbad?]

Miasmata did cool things with one persistent enemy stalking the player across a small group of islands. After enough exposure it was more clear to see that the Beast spawned randomly nearby with increasing frequency as the game went on, but interacting with it was nuanced and fascinating.

 

[DraQ]

The problem with good AI is that it often gets "too" good, the developers of FEAR found that good AI outmatched pretty much all players and that's the reason why most developers intentionally tone it down so as to make sure the player has a great experience first hand. Leave making skynet to the scientists.

And that's why we can't have nice things.

The best we can hope for is now serviceable AI and often still only after modding.

 

[Telengard]

If you want to know if some game aspect is going to receive attention, just submit it to the 5th grader test. Put in on a screen and line it up side-by-side with a semi-interactive cutscene of things exploding. Whichever one makes them go 'ohhh, cooool!', that just got the money.

Translation: when 3d graphics were shit, AI was important. Now, it's just yet another thing thrown into the dustbin. Nowadays, the only important use for AI is making the little fishies in the simulated ocean move around in a fun way.

 

[Carrion]

Translation: when 3d graphics were shit, AI was important. Now, it's just yet another thing thrown into the dustbin.

Then again, the AI in games took some big steps in the 90's and early 2000's, even though graphics whoring and technological development were on another level compared to how it is today when next-gen is barely distinguishable from last-gen. I guess one difference is that back then you had a great deal more of high-profile PC exclusives, and the target audience for those games was probably more demanding than it is nowadays (hard to say for sure as I never owned a console, nor did I hang around with anyone who did).

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Some of what people think is great AI in games of the past is actually not AI at all. The marines in Half-Life were scripted if I recall correctly, and so were NPCs in Gothic games.

One big problem with real AI is that it doesn't really fit that well with static games which dominate the industry now. Do you really want your NPCs to think independently in the middle of a fixed storyline? The game might be about saving a princess, but the princess AI might decide to get a sex change, unite the peasantry WITH the ancient evil and march them all to attack your avatar because of some sexually insensitive jokes you made in a tavern earlier on. So real AI would belong better in emergent, procedural games, of which there aren't that many to begin with. With non-emergent games, you kind of want the AI to think a bit, but not too much, and only in certain directions, which I am sure would kill any enthusiasm for it.

And then of course, as already mentioned, AI is a very complex thing, and much like any other technology (like graphics, physics), it needs significat investment. The only companies that have the funds (big mainstream ones) would need to see a real incentive to do so, and right now, it's just not there. If one of them managed to do it first, they could make a killing, but these guys aren't the innovative types clearly, as seen from the derivative shit they've been making for over a decade now.

 

[DraQ]

Some of what people think is great AI in games of the past is actually not AI at all. The marines in Half-Life were scripted if I recall correctly

That strongly depends on what you mean by "scripted".
The AI certainly had hooks for running scripted behaviours, it also relied on pathnodes and similar metadata pre-placed into the maps (so did Unreal's AI and many others, duh).
It certainly wasn't scripted in any way we would associate with this word - as rigid pre-determined sequences of events that always play out the same way.
It certainly was quite effective for its time - compare HECU marines to cultists in Blood - both mean hitscanners that occasionally toss explosives and both an endless source of player grievance, but marines acted far more purposefully instead of just running around, shooting and sometimes accidentally blowing themselves up like cultists did.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Stalker titles have better than average AI. You get that pain when you must assault enemy camps with mere pistol.
IIRC Call of Chernobyl works even better in that department, since it use different ranks for different tactics.
I still remember my contact with Captain ranked enemy, he got some nice tricks. But how many of them you can encounter in previous games? Can't remember.

 

[Kontra]

Various Thief modders have fiddled around with how guards react to doused light sources, for example, and the GMDX (Ash) mod for Deus Ex also does a number of neat tricks.

In Thief 2 the guards would not only comment on doused torches but also light em back on. I remember specifically the Kidnap map where i quicksaved at a really bad moment... Ash's GMDX does alot of cool stuff. But the last one that really pushed the AI was the first Far Cry... The second one with the occasional wounded soldier, was just a gimmick.

 

[Carrion]

In Thief 2 the guards would not only comment on doused torches but also light em back on.

Was this on vanilla as well? I can't remember right now.

Some of what people think is great AI in games of the past is actually not AI at all. The marines in Half-Life were scripted if I recall correctly

That strongly depends on what you mean by "scripted".
The AI certainly had hooks for running scripted behaviours, it also relied on pathnodes and similar metadata pre-placed into the maps (so did Unreal's AI and many others, duh).
It certainly wasn't scripted in any way we would associate with this word - as rigid pre-determined sequences of events that always play out the same way.
It certainly was quite effective for its time - compare HECU marines to cultists in Blood - both mean hitscanners that occasionally toss explosives and both an endless source of player grievance, but marines acted far more purposefully instead of just running around, shooting and sometimes accidentally blowing themselves up like cultists did.

I think the black ops of HL were rather tightly scripted (meaning that they pretty much always followed the same pattern when you fought them), the marines not so much.

One example of very tightly scripted "AI" is the first Max Payne, where the enemies couldn't really do anything except follow the very rigid patterns that were set for them, which usually boiled down to running for cover when combat was initiated, perhaps even throwing a grenade at some point, and then sitting in one place until you shot them dead. I think the devs specifically mentioned the black ops of HL as the blueprint for their "AI", although I'm not sure if HL was quite as extreme about it. In any case the HL marines were a lot "smarter" and more unpredictable than that, though.

Of course, whether this kind of stuff is acceptable depends on what kind of a game we're talking about. In HL you faced the black ops rather rarely, and they appeared in areas where they had lots of room to move around, attack the player and then quickly retreat using their superior speed, which made them interesting enemies to fight (and probably very frustrating as well by modern standards), and they didn't overstay their welcome. They were just one enemy type that fought in a specific way and offered a different kind of a challenge. In Max Payne you were mostly moving from one room to another in a linear and tightly coreographed shooting gallery, and while the AI wasn't too interesting to fight (it had to use cheap tricks like superhuman reaction times, and the enemies became serious bullet sponges towards the end), such approach was somewhat understandable. It still prevented the game from having any really interesting individual combat set-pieces, as the enemies couldn't have done shit if you made them fight in an area that was bigger than one or two rooms. In many ways level design and AI go hand in hand, and we know that modern shooters don't exactly shine in the former department either.

 

[Kontra]

Was this on vanilla as well? I can't remember right now.

I played it recently with patches only, no mods, and it was there... They say something like "those damn torches" and relight them again. Maybe it wasnt on all the maps but im 100% sure it was on Kidnap at least.

It certainly wasn't scripted in any way we would associate with this word - as rigid pre-determined sequences of events that always play out the same way.

Cant remember about HL original, but in the recent Black Mesa remake thats exactly what happens- at least it did for me. If you quicksave in the middle of a fight you can see the marines repeating the exact same pattern over and over again. I dont wanna shit on the game undeservedly as i havent finished it, but thats how it looked like cause every time i reloaded theyd kill me using the exact same tactics... Maybe it was the most optimal way to kill me or something but still it was pretty jarring.

 

[Mr. Pink]

I'm not even sure what AI is. Always thought it was a marketing buzzword. Video games have as much AI as a chess machine does.

Making a bot that can stand up to an expert human in a fair challenge is a extremely difficult task. StarCraft 2 might approach that level when that deep learning alphago bot takes it on.

anyways, in order for AI in shooters to feel intelligent, they need to be written by people who are intelligent and imaginative. Boring people make boring AI.

 

[Siobhan]

I'm not even sure what AI is

Nice bon-mot by Dijkstra on AI: the question whether machines can think [is] as relevant as the question whether submarines can swim

Current gaming AIs are indeed just very elaborate bundles of hand-written scripts, but I wonder if we'll see data-driven AI any time soon. Games would ship with some recording functionality that sends information to the company's gaming servers where they are compiled into giant game corpora, which then provide the basis for training AIs using deep learning. You can then ship that upgraded AI with a patch, or incorporate it into the next game. For example, the combined amount of hours that people have sunk into Civ 5 by now must be approaching billions. If all of that data were accessible, machine learning would be fairly trivial, modulo the sheer number crunching that's required initially.

The real challenge would then be two-fold: dumbing down that super-smart AI in a way that doesn't make it act freakishly bizarre at lower difficulty levels, and making the AI portable from one game to the next (e.g. Civ 5 to 6) despite gameplay changes. Since deep learning models are still pretty much blackboxes, neither would be trivial, but gaming is restricted enough a problem that it should be feasible. Oh, and it wouldn't help much with asymmetric gameplay where player and AI have access to vastly different maneuvers (sneaking VS lighting fires in Thief). So it would work for 4X, arena shooters, and fighting games, basically anything where the AI should feel exactly like a human opponent. Everything else would still have to be mostly hand-crafted, including NPC schedules (unless you can bootstrap that from an Ultima Online-style MMO).

 

[Beowulf]

Apparently they are doing that for Twilight Struggle:
http://www.pockettactics.com/news/twilight-struggle-gains-intelligence-saturday-surprise/

"... Several of the methods we’re looking at to help guide the AI evaluation is feeding in results from games between two human players, but we need a large volumes of completed games to do that. We don’t have enough data for this from play during the beta, but we believe that a release to a wider audience will provide the results we’re looking for. We are interested in your feedback on the AI, but there are still work we want to get to before we’re ready for criticism, so please temper your expectations... "

 

[DwarvenFood]

Interesting discussion. We also shouldn't forget the difference between cheating AI and non-cheating AI, ie. enemies that will always know where the player is regardless of line-of-sight, and similar stuff. Cheating might make the AI seem smarter than it actually is.

I'm playing Binary Domain currently, and I like how non-damaged robots stay in the back and try to use cover, while when they are damaged they tend to go full frontal assault. (Crippled crawling robot coming at you with a sense of, I'm done for, this is the only way to do some relevant damage)

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

... and making the AI portable from one game to the next (e.g. Civ 5 to 6) despite gameplay changes

This is probably the biggest obstacle right now. With technologies like neural networks and IBM's Watson that analyze a lot of data and come up with behavior based on existing patterns, theoretically, a gaming AI along those lines should be possible. But those technologies probably typically work with relatively fixed rules, whereas with games, all of a game's data might become useless once its sequel makes significant gameplay changes.

And again, something like this would require a significant investment, I doubt EA or Activision or Ubisoft will fund it anytime soon, more likely they will all wait until these technologies are almost fully developed in other industries/academia before trying them.

 

[No Great Name]

Stalker titles have better than average AI. You get that pain when you must assault enemy camps with mere pistol.
IIRC Call of Chernobyl works even better in that department, since it use different ranks for different tactics.
I still remember my contact with Captain ranked enemy, he got some nice tricks. But how many of them you can encounter in previous games? Can't remember.

 

[DosBuster]

It'd be interesting to see Oblivion's early Radiant AI. From what I understand they would often run into issues where you would have a quest that would involve taking to a prisoner but when the player got to the prisoner they were randomly dead because the guard had run out of food and gotten hungry so he decided to kill the prisoner for food.

Another example is that there were two npcs set up to sweep different areas of a city, one somehow lost their broom so they killed the other npc and took their broom. You'd also have funny problems like a rich npc buying all the Armour in a city because they had the gold and they wanted to constantly improve their armor rating.