Does it exist?
Drop 50 players onto a map, no PVP, only survival vs the hazards of the map.
Have the world difficulty scale with player rank.
Does it exist?
Drop 50 players onto a map, no PVP, only survival vs the hazards of the map.
Have the world difficulty scale with player rank.
Enemy AI isn't nearly good enough to make this work it seems like. I'm sure someone's done it in a cheap "give the enemy more health and speed" sort of way though. Reminds me that it would be super cool to have enemies that use "generative adversarial networks" machine learning to fight players better.
Minecraft Hunger Games is PVP but it kinda has this PVE vibe. On some versions of it, you can pretty easily die to monsters (mainly skeletons or creepers) at night, or starve, or rarely get killed by a booby trap. You can spend a lot of time completely by yourself.
Game designers talk about this a lot, but you don't want effective AI, you want convincingly shit AI. It's really easy to make AI that always know where the players are and shoot them perfectly every time, but it's pretty hard to make AI that convincingly miss and bumble around like real people do in a firefight.
As far as I know some of the most well regarded AI just runs through a loop of "Am I in cover? If not, I should get to cover!" "I'm in cover, so I should shoot at the player!" "I can't see the player, I should move right towards another piece of cover!" and that's enough to defeat most people.
The real technical problem is making an AI that is working with limited information and trying to outsmart the player in a way that looks convincing, and that's mostly a strategy game problem. It's trivial to make deadly AI in an FPS because that's just a matter of tuning their aim cones and reaction times, and even basic squad tactics can be faked convincingly by just having them rotate out between "firing from cover" and "running to cover that's closer to the player or off to the side" in a staggered way so that half are shooting and half are advancing at any given time.
Strategy games are trickier and historically just cheat with perfect knowledge of the gamestate and tons of free resources, and they still get dunked on by skilled players. That is the genre that could benefit the most from machine learning on the task of inferring the gamestate through limited information and setting plans in reaction to known or guessed information. That's also been done by research teams, mind, but is probably out of reach of end-user facing systems for a few more years at least. Probably not until the next console gen at the earliest, if we're being honest. Not because the hardware required to run it locally is prohibitively expensive, but just because it's niche and probably more expensive than a majority of would-be consumers would be willing to shell out for.
Also GIVE TURN BASED STRATEGY A MULTIPLAYER! I wanna play competitive Fire Emblem.
they did it for starcraft 2, not sure if the bots are still playing on the ladder though, probably not.
training shooter enemies on... bad players who are trying to win would be kinda cool but you can already simulate a lot of bad habits close enough, like a lock-on timer is functionally equivalent to not looking directly where they want to scope-aim.
if i find another pvp game i want to play over a thousand hours of it would be cool to use myself as the training data and play against it.
Tarkov has the ‘shit AI’ problem - the scavs feel super inconsistent, sometimes they’ll miss and other times they’re terminators
I think there's still a middle ground of realistically difficult AI that, like KobaCumTribute mentions, operates on limited information, and operates with lifelike reaction speed. You can easily make enemies have perfect aim, or more health, or whatever. But it's difficult to make them do that if you put human constraints on them. Like giving them slower reaction speed, or making them have imperfect "sight", like games usually do.
But I suppose that's not something you need machine learning for. Machine learning is only useful if it's used for actually learning how a player acts, or how players in general act. Because you can easily find the weak spot in the enemy AI and enemies become boring.
Game AI probably just needs more investment. I don't know if any game studios actually invest much in that stuff beyond re-implementing existing techniques. But good AI behavior can really make or break a lot of games.
The AI doesn't need to be super intelligent really, there just needs to enough variables to provide the player a challenge so only one strategy won't allow you to win.
Did you ever play Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor/War? The Orcs operate under what they call the Nemesis System where every powerful, named Orc will be mostly unique and have a combination of classes, status effects, and abilities so there's not simply one way to easily kill all of them. And if you allow them to complete their missions or kill you, their levels will increase and they will get incrementally more powerful and learn annoying abilities like health regen and become more and more immune to your bullshit stealth and ranged abilities that decimate weaker Orcs
The problem with the Nemesis system is that Warner Bros own the rights to it and will most likely sue any game dev that tries to build a similar system.
Yeah. Fuck the patent system. The Nemesis system was one of the coolest things to happen in gaming in a long time, especially the fleshed out version in Shadow of War, and we'll likely never see it again because some fucking suit "owns" the rights to it.