The Quest to Improve Video Game AI

- Joel Hruska

One of the most common user complaints about gaming is the AI. It’s been this way for decades, which doesn’t seem to make sense—computers today are vastly more powerful than systems built 30 years ago. We recently sat down with Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock and the author of the AI in Galactic Civilizations II, about this problem—and how DirectX 12 (DX12) and improved multithreading support offer hope of improvement.

SCALE, COST, AND COMPLEXITY

The first problem, Wardell explained, is that good AI doesn’t really sell games. Gamers may value it, but it’s not the determining factor in whether people buy a title. At the same time, AI is now tightly coupled to graphics and must be communicated visually. It’s no longer enough to tell the player that “the shopkeeper looks frightened”—players want to see the shopkeeper’s terror.

Virtually all of what we call AI in games relies on scripted sequences, either handwritten or procedurally generated. Bethesda’s Radiant AI, for example, uses procedurally generated scripts to create goals and tasks for NPCs, then lets them determine how best to fulfill their needs. The company famously had to tone down how the system functioned in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion after it became clear its original approach produced unintended consequences. In one case, NPCs addicted to a drug called skooma would buy the drug until they ran out of money, then kill the dealer and steal his supply. Players would arrive to talk to the dealer as part of a quest chain and find he was already dead.

MULTITHREADING AND THE AI-VERSUS-GRAPHICS TUG-OF-WAR