Great AI

[SymbolicFrank]

What would be your preference for great AI? To recap:

1. Meh. AI is no substitute for human players.
2. AI always loses against humans, so it has to cheat to provide a challenge.
3. An Impossible AI should be Impossible to win against!
4. The purpose of an AI is to lose gracefully.

Or, in other words: do you think an AI should scale to your level?

I think it should, and lose gracefully.


The main design error made in designing an AI is that it always takes the top-down strategem: an overall strategy is pushed down through the ranks.

While any General would want things to be like that, they're not. In real life, each and every independent actor takes their own decisions. And that's what a great AI should emulate: lots of individuals, all doing their thing.

Which is far easier than it seems like: in groups, people aren't all that different to ants. Simple.


But then again, when the AI should lose anyway, why spend money and resources on making a good one?

 

[belowmecoldhands]

YOu want an AI to lose convincingly which is what being graceful is all about.

To lose convincingly means some illusion and some genuine AI.

Let me put it this way, many AI's I play in games, I'd not be shocked if they were actually humans. Now, this is only really true because I didn't play long enough. However, the illusion worked. The AI was good enough for me. Taking into account I WANT TO BELIEVE the illusion, generally it succeeds most of the time. With RPGs or sandboxes, I do my best to believe.

But I think AI will continue to get better and better just because computer will allow for it. Right now it's all fun and good to talk about why we don't need good AI, but imagine how hard it'll be to say that when computers are 10,000 times more capable. It'd be like saying we don't need cars when the price of gas is high but then when it's low.......... *crickets*

 

[hiver]

Ohhh, this is a high intellectual thread, isnt it?

when the AI should lose anyway, why spend money and resources on making a good one?

this gets you an automatic game lead designer position in EA, Ubisoft, Zenimax and their ilk.

And Inxile too.

 

[Soph]

Last update to Dead State actually made the AI not focus down your already downed characters, since there was widespread raging about that. A human opponent would actually kill these downed characters once they got the chance, as dead is better than dealing with them again after they get healed. I like tough, challenging AI's and if I put my pawns in an unstrategic position and they get downed, I want to be punished for that accordingly, not just bliss through because hurr durr the AI will die "gracefully".

So I'll go for 5. AI's should work within the rules of the game and not cheat, every mistake a human player makes should be punished equally by the AI as another human would. I don't play to get dopamine rushes for defeating "graceful"AI's to make me feel better about myself. I like overcoming my own shortcomings by planning out good strategies to ensure my own succes, the AI should be a tough and punishing opponent.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

4. The purpose of an AI is to lose gracefully.

 

[Mustawd]

I want AI's to be more realistic/have their own motivations/random.

Sometimes games treat enemy combatants like a single disciplined unit. When in reality their own stupidity, bloodlust, etc. will sometimes take over for a more random, realist , and human approach.

So if you fight a group of petty thugs it is quite different than fighting a group of battle hardened veterans.

 

[Kruno]

The AI should be about raising skill ceilings and kicking your ass if you don't learn. Outside of that I want the AI to play perfectly in a fuzzy sense.

 

[sser]

IMO, scenario and combat design stand in the place of AI for the vast majority of RPGs. Nobody even notices the AI if you make those two things interesting.

 

[Jools]

Can we even talk about AI? In most cases it's just a bunch of scripted events that react to given conditions, with no real "adaptivity" or "evolving". I can't even recall the last game whose "AI" came even vaguely close to strike me as "half decent".

Anyway, I'd say AI's should set the bar high from the start, and always keep slightly ahead of the player, so that the player has to keep improving their own skills: there should never be the option to find out a gimmick or trick or tactic that works 100% without failure.

 

[Xathrodox86]

Challenging and surprising - that's the hallmarks of a good A.I. for me. Combat with such an opponent should be challenging and nerve wracking, not "I'll camp here and just pick them all one by one". Sadly this is the case with many games these days.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Can we even talk about AI? In most cases it's just a bunch of scripted events that react to given conditions, with no real "adaptivity" or "evolving". I can't even recall the last game whose "AI" came even vaguely close to strike me as "half decent".

Anyway, I'd say AI's should set the bar high from the start, and always keep slightly ahead of the player, so that the player has to keep improving their own skills: there should never be the option to find out a gimmick or trick or tactic that works 100% without failure.

So your bar for AI is to be higher than that of actual fucking humans? Because you can just spam fireballs in most fighting games and it will fucking baffle a lot of players.

 

[Jools]

Can we even talk about AI? In most cases it's just a bunch of scripted events that react to given conditions, with no real "adaptivity" or "evolving". I can't even recall the last game whose "AI" came even vaguely close to strike me as "half decent".

Anyway, I'd say AI's should set the bar high from the start, and always keep slightly ahead of the player, so that the player has to keep improving their own skills: there should never be the option to find out a gimmick or trick or tactic that works 100% without failure.

So your bar for AI is to be higher than that of actual fucking humans? Because you can just spam fireballs in most fighting games and it will fucking baffle a lot of players.

I merely said it should keep ahead of the player, so that the player feels like "catching up". The moment the player "breaks" the AI (via trick/gimmick, or uberskillz, or whatever), the game usually becomes trivial and its AI-governed aspects become utterly uninsteresting.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

Well, as an example, Blizzard made a really good AI for WoW a few years ago.

The encounters would feature scaled-back enemies, with less hitpoints, less godly powers and such, equal to the PC's. They would just play it smart.

For starters, they would ignore the fighters and taunts completely, and pile upon the healers first. Kill those ASAP, no matter friendly fire or any other considerations. After that, take out the damage dealers one at a time. Then pull back, heal up and take out the tanks at leisure, from a distance if possible.

The alpha testers loathed it. They refused to play like that.


It's not as if it's all that hard to make a non-cheating AI that wins all the time for most games. A lot of work, yes, challenging, perhaps, but certainly not impossible. I could do that, for 95% of all games I played.

It's harder to make an AI that acts human and personal. But that's mostly because you have to take the bottom-up approach for that.


EDIT: Remember, an AI will never forget anything or make mistakes. It can also do all those things in the least amount of time possible. And it doesn't need omniscience for that.

 

[Khorne]

The alpha testers loathed it. They refused to play like that.

It's harder to make an AI that acts human and personal. But that's mostly because you have to take the bottom-up approach for that.

That's because a good AI doesn't make mistakes. And it is a part of human nature to make mistakes and then learn from them.
If a good AI is allowed to make mistakes, it will conflict with 'Three Laws of Robotics' and at one point it will cause more harm than good (by mistake)
So the AI is reduced to the very basics instead, without the ability to learn and adapt. It is a 'bad AI' only because of lowest common denominator.
It is made intentionally primitive because otherwise the large majority of users would have a hard time dealing with it.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

Well, it's more because there's a single AI program that treats all the NPC's and enemies as puppets.

What you want is that each entity has it's own AI program. Coordination works like radio communication. The general gives orders, the soldiers all look around and do as they see fit. Fill in sergeants and logistics as appropriate.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

Btw, I'm pretty sure that the PoE combat evolved around Josh considering the above example the intelligent way to play such a game. And I agree, as that is more or less how I do it as well.

Then again, I know many people consider intelligent gameplay "cheese tactics". It was a banning offense in Everquest, for example.

 

[Cadmus]

you gotta differentiate between AIs and account for their respective genres. For me, the best AI mimics a human player, which is why I hate playing RTS against hard AI, they are simply omnipotent, lightning fast and can do 30 things at once and always know where you are, it's annoying as shit.

The more abilities the player can use, the harder it is to make the AI convincing, see any RPG with tons of spells and skills. The best AIs I usually find in FPS games where the programmer has a good control over the way the game is played and can simply increase the accuracy and awareness of the AI to increase the difficulty and it can still look good. I don't remember many examples of a good AI but I liked the AI in Max Payne 3 and in Flashpoint for example, but in that game the AI benefited from the nature of the game and would be pretty dumb at close range.

There are some traits I really hate, like the AI always knowing where you are even if it has no way of knowing, lightning fast reflexes (but I guess the real PRO players just laugh at that and don't care) and being able to perfectly execute strategies that require 7 hands.

 

[naossano]

That sad that those mean son of a bitch from Dead State and WoW were removed. It would sure have made those games more successfull.