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[uncleslappy]

The current GPT models and image and video creation tools are so prolific and are leading to controversies in game development as people use these tools as "shortcuts" while cutting out human writers and artists. People in the gaming community have been using "AI" as a term for decades, but I haven't seen any drastic improvements in "enemy AI" or "companion AI" unless it's just slowly progressing quietly behind the scenes. Honestly, the last time I remember being impressed with AI was MGS2 where guards would notice wet footprints or whatever, or RE4 where the Ganados would dodge your shots or work together to take you out.

I'm not following the industry as close as I used to, so I certainly could have missed something. Lemme know.

TLDR: GPT AI is creating slop, why haven't we seen improved enemy AI or companion AI in games?

 

[keraj37]

Stalker 2 also has good AI but it is legacy AI not based on LLM.

To answer you, we still need time for it to cover more areas of our lifes before we can see LLM in games powering conversations with NPCs etc.

 

[Hollowpoint5557]

Devs are too busy worrying about the real important stuff.

 

[Guilty_AI]

TLDR: GPT AI is creating slop, why haven't we seen improved enemy AI or companion AI in games?

Because what people call "good AI" in games is different from the kind of AI these models can produce.

You don't want adaptativeness and skill on the NPCs, you want reactivity. This latter one still relies almost entirely on the developer's foresight.

 

[ScHlAuChi]

Here´s a little secret - gamers do NOT want smart AI!
Gamers want to win and have power fantasies - smart AI makes the game annoying and hard.
No one wants to play that!

 

[cwoody63]

Hesitatingly, I tried Gaming CoPilot for the first time last night on my ROG. Was playing TOW2 and needed inside of two different buildings (Generator and Broadcast Facility in Westport).

The first use was fine. Pretty much just saved switching windows to do a google search. However, when asked for a route into the broadcast facility, it told me to platform using pipes and enter through a broken window, which is not an option for the broadcast station, only the generator.

Real glad the company is turning itself upside down for AI.

 

[Loomy]

You're comparing 2 different things right now.

 

[TheUnicornGuy]

When people say they want better AI in games, what they really mean is that they want it to look better, not for it to play better. Take everyone's go to for good AI, Fear: it's great to play against because it looks cool but it's not any smarter than your average game. I'd put it down to the devs putting in the effort to animate it better than most and do decent path finding,along with giving it a good cover system.

 

[rodrigolfp]

Because even with dumb AI players still "need" lock-on, auto aim, aim assist(s), etc so imagine with smart AI...

 

[hinch7]

Baseline console don't have the capacity to handle LLM's. Once the PS6 releases it'll be interesting to see how it will be leveraged in games. I can see stuff like NPC's talking about current events in the near future, for example and way better interactivity.

I'm sure it will be used to enhance graphics quality like materials, lighting animations and stuff in the near future as well. Much like what we see with Nvidia's more recent tech demo's. And go from less uncanny-valley to something more passable as closer to real life.

 

[viveks86]

Because gaming "AI" rarely ever uses actual AI technology. They are hand coded scripts being passed off as intelligence. So they end up coding for predictability and fun factor.

GT Sophy is an example of real AI. Many chess games use them too. There are probably a few games out there but until more games actually start using neural networks, this will always be an issue.

Hopefully with all the AI acceleration hardware getting embedded in GPUs that are barely being utilized in a frame, this paradigm may change next generation

 

[Holammer]

Enemy AI is very different from LLMs.
It'd be wasteful to throw one on simple pathfinding.

Give it another 2+ years and we should get our first really good companion AIs in games. An Animal Crossing type game with a pinch more intelligent villagers capable of handling a conversation would be pretty wild.

 

[Guilty_AI]

Here´s a little secret - gamers do NOT want smart AI!
Gamers want to win and have power fantasies - smart AI makes the game annoying and hard.
No one wants to play that!

Not to mention every example of 'smart AI' that's given out usually refers to some foresight the dev had to react to a specific thing players can do. Stuff like commenting the player's clothes or items, remembering things they did before, etc. It's almost never about refined skills or strategic sense, which is what these LLMs are good at.

 

[RoboFu]

You want enemy AI to do the exact same most popular moves every time?

 

[analog_future]

Devs are too busy worrying about the real important stuff.

 

[Felessan]

TLDR: GPT AI is creating slop, why haven't we seen improved enemy AI or companion AI in games?

AI as a players are unstable and hard to tune for certain difficulty - it'll be basically PvP match in PvE environment where it can be easy or very hard based on some randomness. Not something people look for in SP games.

Baseline console don't have the capacity to handle LLM's. Once the PS6 releases it'll be interesting to see how it will be leveraged in games. I can see stuff like NPC's talking about current events in the near future, for example.

There are already WWM and Sword of Justice and it's get boring to chat about weather with NPC after 20 mins of play. It's a huge drag to actually try persuade every fucking NPC over 10 sentence discussion instead of several choice of three you can fast click through.

 

[T4keD0wN]

Here´s a little secret - gamers do NOT want smart AI!
Gamers want to win and have power fantasies - smart AI makes the game annoying and hard.
No one wants to play that!

I dont see how AI that is easy to telegraph, easy to manipulate/defeat, aka a smart/well made AI that can walk around a fence instead of getting stuck running into it head first for 10 minutes is hard or annoying relative to AI that gets stuck executing random functions that are impossible to predict and dont interact with other functions in any way.

Its the bad, broken, dumb AI that can get stuck, blocking progress that makes games hard or annoying. Smart AI should always be easier to defeat than dumb AI. Difficulty, which is often just a matter of multipliers is a separate thing from AI/scripting. Smart (advanced) AI can be difficult or easy to beat as much as you design it because itll have many functions, functions you can use, exploit, but dumb AI will always be bad because it wont have any of that.

Lets say there are 20 enemies in CoD, dumb ai will "magically" know you location, run straight towards you and attack you with infinite ammo (devs didnt add reloading/ammo because theyve wanted a dumb ai) while doing nothing else because it doesnt have any other functions programmed in, zero chance of player winning. Smart AI will make NPCs take cover, hide, reload, reposition, all those extra smart functions will give the player opportunities to exploit and win.

 

[IAmRei]

reminds me to roguelite vs properly designed gameplay, sometimes too much random won't make gameplay dynamic, but annoying.

 

[Zacfoldor]

Hey OP here is the answer.

We as consumers are getting the latest tech immediately because there is a race to see who will "Win" AI. So we get it all as soon as it is ready, ie Gemini-3.

So the game devs get this at the same time we do.

They have not had time to incorporate good models into games yet. Game lead time takes years. You seem to assume that the AI that is coming out today was available to game devs years ago.

Edit: I just read the OP, the AI they developed with algorithms for NPC behavior is not the same technology used when referencing modern AI(or rather the npc algorithm model is much less advanced). One is not based on the other. These are not iterative technologies but separate technologies which is why gaming NPC "AI" hasn't evolved along with LLMs and the like but is likely to be replaced by them eventually.

 

[ElFenomeno]

Why put in the effort when the masses don't care and will buy any shit? See the AI in Ghost of Yotei , AC Shadows etc.

 

[Zacfoldor]

Why put in the effort when the masses don't care and will buy any shit? See the AI in Ghost of Yotei , AC Shadows etc.

Though you could control the "aggressiveness" of AI in Yotei, I know what you mean. Aggressiveness itself is a poor knob to turn when determining NPC behavior, it's just all they had. If they did have a real AI model controlling the NPCs it could be much more interesting.

I want a NPC to slowly hunt me over the course of an entire game, for example. A simple up and down on "aggressiveness" is pretty pathetic when it comes to NPC "AI".

 

[Themacabre]

TLDR: GPT AI is creating slop, why haven't we seen improved enemy AI or companion AI in games?

Current "AI" tools like ChatGPT have nearly nothing to do with NPC AI programming in games. They use the same acronym, but aren't related or created in the same way at all. Perhaps a game with an NPC that you could talk to like a chat bot, but that could have existed for decades and hasn't as it's really not very fun or compelling while playing a video game. An LLM being able to replace NPC AI logic in games is a long ways off and will need to use another technique as completing the next likely word in a sentence isn't enough, and if it was, isn't better than the NPC AI that we have already. Actual AI could of course, but what we have now is a worse version of Akinator.

 

[diffusionx]

What happens the first time a game built around LLM based NPCs comes out and someone gets it to say a gamer word?

Devs aren't going to do it.

 

[PeteBull]

TLDR: GPT AI is creating slop, why haven't we seen improved enemy AI or companion AI in games?

Games always gotta target hardware they are gonna be running on, current gen consoles got downclocked zen2 archi cpu's and devs are almost required to at least make performance mode aka 60fps targed/semi stable mode.

Wait for next gen, or even better, end of crossgen between current gen and next gen so 2030-2032 or so, then baseline will be ps6 which will have at the minimum zen5 archi cpu which means over 2x faster performance, and ofc midrange or even lowrange pc gaming cpu in 2030-2032 will be quite strong- by then devs will target that hardware which means better enemy AI will finally be within our grasp.

TLDR: Be bit more patient, its coming soon

 

[Donald mac Ronald]

Pretty sure they made an AI that could easily beat pros 1v1 in dota2 .
I think Devs can make really hard AI they just chose not too.

 

[mclaren777]

Sophy in GT7 is a revelation for racing AI.

Nothing like this has ever been attempted before, partly because the technology didn't exist and partly because training these behavioral models is so expensive.

 

[Radical_3d]

TLDR: GPT AI is creating slop, why haven't we seen improved enemy AI or companion AI in games?

It's incredible that we have to answer this on a tech savvy forum but I'll bite. GPT thinks for a second before answering you, all that with the budget of all the money in the world put into hardware. Your 350€ console must think in less than 16 ms, most of the time less than 5ms since other teams are asking for ms budget.

So, basically 2000 ms budget on god-tier hardware that is making your next RAM update prohibitive vs 3ms on Pop's & Mom's Ye Olde CPU.

 

[MrAlwaysRight]

LLM's are nothing like the AI systems you have in a game, LLM's aren't even AI really, just next word or next token generators.

 

[StereoVsn]

AI as a players are unstable and hard to tune for certain difficulty - it'll be basically PvP match in PvE environment where it can be easy or very hard based on some randomness. Not something people look for in SP games.


There are already WWM and Sword of Justice and it's get boring to chat about weather with NPC after 20 mins of play. It's a huge drag to actually try persuade every fucking NPC over 10 sentence discussion instead of several choice of three you can fast click through.

Isn't there a trick for WWM where you can just bypass the NPC persuasion by simple jailbreak?

But generally I agree. Good AI for NPCs "seems" like a great idea but would bog the crap down out of most games.

 

[StereoVsn]

It's incredible that we have to answer this on a tech savvy forum but I'll bite. GPT thinks for a second before answering you, all that with the budget of all the money in the world put into hardware. Your 350€ console must think in less than 16 ms, most of the time less than 5ms since other teams are asking for ms budget.

So, basically 2000 ms budget on god-tier hardware that is making your next RAM update prohibitive vs 3ms on Pop's & Mom's Ye Olde CPU.

I mean you can get around some of this by putting in guardrails around the questions, query/prompt caching, etc… but yeah, you are going to be making a cloud call to a data center as a complex AI isn't going to run on even a PS6.

 

[uncleslappy]

This is interesting, thanks for the clarification between the LLM and the coded "AI", but couldn't you "train" bots or enemies to react based on player inputs using that same idea? Instead of language it's player inputs or location data within the game. I'm not the most technical person, so the explanations are helpful.

 

[Raven77]

We aren't getting it in games because every time a developer or publisher or anyone related to the development of a game mentions AI the low IQ anti AI crowd comes out screaming to boycott the game.

We are living through an age right now similar to when Photoshop was released. There are actually some pretty hilariously embarrassing articles from back then talking about how no series artist or photographer would use Photoshop...

But someday soon the ai dam will break in video games. Someone somewhere is going to release a game with breakthrough features using AI and people are going to want it in every game going forward.

Thinking an RPG with a complex conversation system where you use the mic to have "real" dialogue. And, no more programming NPCs to have a daily routine. They simply do what they should do based on the AI coding. A farmer would get up early work his fields sell his crops tend to his land, etc. all animation is driven by the AI as well.

 

[Horatius]

NPC AI is very costly to get right because making it good isn't the problem. making it really good, way better than a human can deal with, is actually easy. the problem is this is completely non-functional for a video game that's meant to entertain someone. what it needs to hit is the sweet spot where it isn't braindead compared to a human, but isn't astronomically better than us either. that takes a shitload of work, and most people don't have the budget room to waste on a feature that will marginally improve the experience.

 

[The_hunter]

I think were winds meet has ai LLM text trees for quest givers were you can type to them.

People were able to gaslight them to give the rewards without doing the quests.

 

[baphomet]

This is interesting, thanks for the clarification between the LLM and the coded "AI", but couldn't you "train" bots or enemies to react based on player inputs using that same idea? Instead of language it's player inputs or location data within the game. I'm not the most technical person, so the explanations are helpful.

CPU basing decisions off reading controller inputs is nothing new.

What's your goal? An unbeatable CPU?

 

[ScHlAuChi]

I dont see how AI that is easy to telegraph, easy to manipulate/defeat, aka a smart/well made AI that can walk around a fence instead of getting stuck running into it head first for 10 minutes is hard or annoying relative to AI that gets stuck executing random functions that are impossible to predict and dont interact with other functions in any way.

Its the bad, broken, dumb AI that can get stuck, blocking progress that makes games hard or annoying. Smart AI should always be easier to defeat than dumb AI. Difficulty, which is often just a matter of multipliers is a separate thing from AI/scripting. Smart (advanced) AI can be difficult or easy to beat as much as you design it because itll have many functions, functions you can use, exploit, but dumb AI will always be bad because it wont have any of that.

Lets say there are 20 enemies in CoD, dumb ai will "magically" know you location, run straight towards you and attack you with infinite ammo (devs didnt add reloading/ammo because theyve wanted a dumb ai) while doing nothing else because it doesnt have any other functions programmed in, zero chance of player winning. Smart AI will make NPCs take cover, hide, reload, reposition, all those extra smart functions will give the player opportunities to exploit and win.

Pathfinding is not the same thing as a smart AI.
A smart AI wouldnt ever pop up behind cover to get shot.
All the things you called smart are basically standard AI functions that every game AI has.

 

[Sethbacca]

Devs are too busy worrying about the real important stuff.

There probably isn't much overlap between environmental artists and AI engineering if I had to guess. But you can continue to invent shit to get mad at if you want.

 

[Mengy]

The NPC enemies in Arc Raiders is one of the best examples I can think of with modern trained AI implemented beautifully in video games. They trained AI to control how the Arc's move, walk, and fight, and the results were incredible.

I'd like to see more games with AI as dynamic and skilled as Arc Raiders has.

 

[T4keD0wN]

Pathfinding is not the same thing as a smart AI.

Pathfinding/positioning and interacting with the world is absolutely a part of game AI. If you climb a ladder in a game with melee combat and the NPCs dont have the function to climb the ladder too and just stand in place, now that would be a pretty "dumb AI" dont you think?

A smart AI wouldnt ever pop up behind cover to get shot.

I assume you mean pop up from behind the cover? If it didnt itd be a poorly designed ai. It should pop up or reposition at some point to either allow the player to defeat it or to at least give the illusion that makes it seem like its attempting to defeat the player.

All the things you called smart are basically standard AI functions that every game AI has.

Exactly, having a lot of functions for a lot of situations is pretty much what smart AI is supposed to be. The more things it does the smarter it is, this includes things you might consider built-in "weakness" that are there just for the player to take advantage of too. Great example of smart AI is the one in TLOU pt2, regardless of difficulty, it has far more functions than NPC AI in most games.

You can make NPC AI unbeatable, but thats not smart AI, thats bad AI. Smart AI is just the one that has the most systems.

 

[JimmyRustler]

Didn't Todd Howard once say that they basically could make AI in games much better but choose not to because it makes the games less fun?

 

[Plague Doctor]

Devs are too busy worrying about the real important stuff.

Well, how else are the devs going to let you know they are morally superior than the rest of us?

 

[ScHlAuChi]

Pathfinding/positioning and interacting with the world is absolutely a part of game AI. If you climb a ladder in a game with melee combat and the NPCs dont have the function to climb the ladder too and just stand in place, now that would be a pretty "dumb AI" dont you think?

That depends on the game, maybe the designers did that on purpose to give the player an option to escape.
For example in a game like GTA, a smart AI would just leave your Wanted rating at 5 stars all the time and not stop until you are dead.
They would lock down the area you are in and not let you escape to other areas.
But if you did that, you wouldnt be ever able to escape and thats just not fun.

I assume you mean pop up from behind the cover? If it didnt itd be a poorly designed ai. It should pop up or reposition at some point to either allow the player to defeat it or to make it seem like its attempting to defeat the player.

But then it isnt smart, as a smart AI wouldnt want to get defeated and pop their head out. The AI is kept artificially dumb to keep it fun for the player.
Like take chess for example - is it fun to play against the much smarter AI? Or is it more fun to play against a human who is on your level?
If you know you cant win, would you even want to play?

Exactly, having a lot of functions for a lot of situations is pretty much what smart AI is supposed to be. The more things it does the smarter it is, this includes things you might consider built-in "weakness" that are there just for the player to take advantage of too.

The AI having lot´s of options has nothing to do with it being smart. That is just basic gamedesign.
Built-in weaknesses are the opposite of being smart.
But those built in weaknesses exist so you have fun.

I think you are mixing up good game design and smart AI

 

[T4keD0wN]

I think you are mixing up good game design and smart AI

I think you're mixing difficulty and AI.

 

[Brakum]

Because no one wants actual AI as enemies in games. You would just always lose unless the AI is programmed to play dumb, and then it's no different than what we have now. And in fcat even now, in many games, you only win because the AI is programmed to let you win if you perform at a certain level. Take fps games for example. A computer does not miss, ever, every time an enemy misses you in an fps game it's because it was programmed to do it. It could just as well be programmed to hit you every aingle time the very milisecond you get out of cover.

 

[ScHlAuChi]

I think you're mixing difficulty and AI.

No I´m not, ive been designing games professionally for 20+ years and worked with various AI systems like AI Implant.
There simply isnt any "smart" AI in any games, it is always heavily scripted and is mostly smoke and mirrors.
This is done so that the player can read the AI and knows how to react.

When I worked at Ubi they always invited random ppl off the street to test games like Splinter Cell.
Originally they made the enemies way too smart and the players just hated it as they got caught constantly.
The players felt the AI was too good and was cheating, eventho that wasnt the case!
The problem was that players played too sloppy and the AI noticed those mistakes.
So ultimately they had to make the AI dumb and overlook the players mistakes to keep it fun!
Players just dont like to feel dumb or being outsmarted!

 

[SJRB]

Please keep in mind that no matter which game you're playing, the "AI" knows where you are and can read all your moves at the input level so it is by default 100000000 times better than you.

the real struggle is dumbing down the AI to a level that it feels challenging and rewarding to beat it, without it either being too brutal or too lenient. Proper AI programming is brutally difficult which is why so many games fail at it.

 

[Sethbacca]

Please keep in mind that no matter which game you're playing, the "AI" knows where you are and can read all your moves at the input level so it is by default 100000000 times better than you.

the real struggle is dumbing down the AI to a level that it feels challenging and rewarding to beat it, without it either being too brutal or too lenient. Proper AI programming is brutally difficult which is why so many games fail at it.

I'd think that the end goal should be getting away from reading the inputs and have each AI base their responses on visual input and work on the fly using cooperative teamwork with other ai characters so that it feels more organic like there's an actual person on the other side of the character.

 

[Walliwallipaloo]

Because
one of these things is not like the other

What you and everyone else calls "ayy eye" is not, in fact, "artificial intelligence."

The more you know.

 

[ScHlAuChi]

I'd think that the end goal should be getting away from reading the inputs and have each AI base their responses on visual input and work on the fly using cooperative teamwork with other ai characters so that it feels more organic like there's an actual person on the other side of the character.

Do you think that has never been tried before?
It just doesnt work!

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Where Winds Meet has AI NPC's and it can be hilarious when you know how to manipulate them to get what you want