
Truly intelligent enemies could change the face of gaming - pmcpinto
https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/26/the-future-of-video-game-violence/
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CM30
Not just enemies either. Strong AI with standard NPCs could make for some
interesting game experiences too. Like say, virtual villagers or townspeople
who have their own lives seperate from the player and their actions and react
in realistic ways in regards to events going on around them.

We can already see elements of that in games now (Zelda Breath of the Wild
puts a lot of thought into giving NPCs realistic behaviours for damn near any
possible interaction), but it could get a lot better in the future.

As for enemies, there are definitely ways intelligent enemy AI could change
games there. However, you have to be careful about one thing when implementing
these systems and randomness and what not.

Games generally have to be enjoyable to the player, and making your enemies
too realistic can hinder that. They draw on this a bit in the article:

> If you're playing a game and the AI's always completely unpredictable, it
> just turns into a frustrating experience for the player because they can't
> learn a good strategy to actually succeed at the game

But it goes further than that. A smart enemy with a good battle strategy might
be overly defensive, and that itself might not be all too fun for the person
fighting against them. Look at the Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword for example.
The motion controlled combat was a big part of the game's setup, but the
enemies countering and being careful to block your attacks and what not may
have actually made the fighting less exciting for the player. They came across
as rather unaggressive as a result.

It's sometimes more exciting to have your basic enemies act like Leeroy
Jenkins esque cannon fodder.

Either way, it's an interesting area to think about.

~~~
tonmoy
I'm looking forward to the day games like Civilization will have such a good
AI that they wouldn't need to buff the AI with multipliers to make the game
challenging

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joosters
For me, the interesting problem, as mentioned in the article, is that
developers still need to make the AI opponents suck. We want FPS games where
the enemies 'feel' real, but we can't make them too clever. Most shooter games
put you in control of a lone fighter battling against countless foes. If the
enemies were clever, then you'd have absolutely no chance of surviving!

You could improve the AI so that your opponents do smarter things (flanking
you, working as a team, etc) and less dumb things (repeatedly popping up out
of cover, for instance), but then the game would be immensely harder. To
balance that out, you'd have to handicap the enemies in other ways, like make
them even worse at aiming, or giving them weaker weapons, but that might make
the game less fun.

Perhaps improved AI may lead to different gaming styles? Fewer 'you vs an
entire army' scenarios, instead more nuanced challenges with lower numbers of
bad guys...

~~~
barrkel
Generally the only way I enjoy playing FPS games is using a stealth approach,
or failing that, a plan involving mines, distractions, sniping, etc. If an
enemy spots me and starts attacking, it's a bit of a failure. If I get hit,
it's a total failure. Think base takeovers in the more recent Far Cry series
games. All time favourite was the Thief series; Dishonoured didn't quite do it
for me.

Games that require or force a Rambo situation with enemies on all sides are
just ridiculous. I like to observe, plan and execute, in that order.
Randomness can't be controlled; you're just lucky, or your enemy has been
hobbled and it's not a fair fight, otherwise.

~~~
nine_k
Deus Ex (released 18 years ago) was great in this regard. You could try to
fight an army (well, a regiment) in open combat and have a chance to survive.
You could build a tank out of yourself for that. Or you could stealth your way
through without killing anyone, or even being seen by anyone, being physically
feeble but fast and good at hacking things. The game did not force you to use
any particular approach; it just put you into a situation to tackle.

Regarding shooting. the game had the best difficulty level menu I've ever
seen:

    
    
        * Easy
        * Medium
        * Hard
        * Realistic

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codeulike
If you believe in the philosophical position known as Strong AI, then at some
point in the perhaps quite distant future, when the AI gets good enough, the
use of advanced AIs in computer games will become a civil rights issue. That
is, we might need to have limits on how accurately NPCs can be simulated.
Because at some point the simulations will be indistinguishable from reality
_including by the simulations themselves_.

~~~
problems
Bits are bits, regardless of how "advanced" they are, they're still bits.
"Killing" them (if you can call it that) is fine. If your life depends on
someone else's hardware, their rights trump yours.

Of course, no sane developer would ever use something at that level for a
game, it'd just be emulating way too much useless stuff. Clever game bots are
much simpler than that - simply picking a less than "optimal" path sometimes
and giving them the ability to cheat in some ways makes things a lot more
interesting.

~~~
nilved
> Atoms are atoms, regardless of how "advanced" they are, they're still atoms.
> "Killing" people (if you can call it that) is fine.

~~~
vectorpush
Your analogy doesn't really say much except that you endorse the idea that
bits and atoms are comparable with regard to the "realness" of what they
compose, but that assumption is the crux of the debate. One could just as
easily say "letters are letters, regardless of how advanced they are, they're
still letters. 'Killing' people (if you can call it that) is fine", yet the
analogy on it's own fails to enlighten the argument if one already rejects the
idea that people composed of text in a work of fiction are real.

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msoad
If you play FIFA you'll know how dumb computer is. Sure it's faster but it
doesn't do any "novel" tricks and it becomes super predictable after you play
against it enough times.

I'm looking forward to deep learning based FIFA opponents

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
There is a team at Carnegie Mellon who build little toaster-sized automatons
that play soccer. Their end goal is for the AI to eventually be good enough to
win the world cup.

Their site:
[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~robosoccer/small/#Overview](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~robosoccer/small/#Overview)

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terminado
...or more to the point, intelligent enemies unbound by human reaction time,
common grade school intellect, and the requisite hand-eye-coordination of
rival human opponents in multiplayer games.

~~~
zkms
> unbound by human reaction time

> requisite hand-eye-coordination of rival human opponents

it's totally possible to force an AI enemy to "play" through a harness that
simulates human reaction time, limits in human visual processing (a human
can't perfectly focus on all the screen at once -- check out eye-tracking data
taken on people who are playing an FPS!), and the latency/error that happens
when a human uses a mouse to aim in a game.

The whole point of AI enemies isn't to expose them to all the game's state and
let them input commands with zero latency -- that's not an AI opponent, that's
just a cheat engine. It's only fun if the AI has no more information from the
game than a human player would have and can control the game with no better
control authority than a human can.

~~~
CM30
Yeah, this.

We've already got opponents unbound by human reaction and with abilities far
better than normal humans. They're basically a mainstay of the fighting game
genre:

[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PerfectPlayAI](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PerfectPlayAI)

And they're not that fun to fight, because they're too 'good'.

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keithnz
future of violence is in MultiPlayer games, something about virtually killing
real people that's quite popular. from the tame'ish Dota2, to war games like
Call of Duty and Battlefield, through to open survival games like Rust which
really demonstrate how brutal people can be :)

