Why is It Difficult to Make Good AI for Games?

The better way to implement ML in game AI is to restrict it to how to deal with very strictly discretely defined problems, and to not do ML for the macro strategy. You would end up with puzzle pieces or behavior blocks that you can either manually mix and match with a more traditional preprogrammed AI that uses these machine learned behaviours as solutions to problems it encounters. For example, the AI experiences a hardcoded percentage of damage on their building X from enemy type Y units, and a machine-learned solution module would be activated to counter it. Or you could make the AI trigger machine learned, and the response a hardcoded module. This way the machine learning solution becomes far more flexible as things change.

Halo 1s AI still feels like one of the most advanced

Not lazy - but not professionals or even willing to become one.

The Americans laugh at us Canadians over the way we say the word “about” - I think they’re actually thinking of this guy. Is he Scottish?

Still current games are missing some code like "If MoveOrder = true and current.position = last.position do SomethingCheesie to get out of there" ... or "if z.position = 0 do respawm ...

first of your vids im seeing. so, idk most of your content through the past.
but, i wonder about ai built games. give an early training ai basic tools and parts to put together to build a game, and keep giving it more tools, and giving it more goals. would like to see a game made by an ai, inspired by different media.

Maybe because Ai is quite simply useless

Tbf if you really wanted truly advanced AI, you just need an over arching Utility AI system to decide not actions, but Behaviors in the form of Behavior Trees, based on Considerations which at the leaves of the tree lies a series of Actions dictated by GOAP. Just make sure to multi-thread the calculations for the Navigation and a few of the other actions along the way to speed up the decision making process.

Typically, this is overkill for anything not trying to simulate situational intelligence, but instead trying to fake it. It's a lot of coding, validation of code, and verification of code. The work load can increase exponentially compared to just utilizing 1 AI system. It's not like gamer's are unhappy with dumb AI, just unfair ones. Luckily this series of steps is guaranteed to fail at some point, so it covers the Smartly Fail checkbox for AI that feels good. It also leaves them open to outside manipulation through various factors, creating emergent behavior.

I have been working as a Combat/Game Designer with a heavy focus on Combat and AI for around 15 years at the point of writing, and I think this was an excellent video! I will for sure look at more videos on this channel!

I also wanted to echo something that was brought up in the video that I always talk about when covering this subject: people do not necessarily want smart AI, they want AI that makes themselves feel smart! The illusion of smart AI is far more important than them actually being smart, and if the Player has ample tools to predict and outsmart their enemies, that will make for a very good experience.
I also always like to say that making smart AI is super easy, but making a good AI that is fun to play against is super hard.

It seems very likely that a big studio or even a small one that is dedicated could train an AI afterwards, once it is developed, and then plug that model back into the game once it has been trained. So in that way the initial AI could be a temporary bootstrap solution. A lot would depend on implementation details, but I think that's probably possible. This doesn't mean super AIs necessarily, but you could even train models at a variety of levels, with a variety of quirks. If the resulting model can be plugged into the game loop in a quick way (and why not?) then that seems like a great way to make some of the game AIs of the future. Heck, there are a lot of old games with virtually no players, or with abandoned multiplayer entirely, or which never had good AI to begin with, which I'd love to play against such models.

For RPGs it seems like there should be less excuse for poor AI other than difficulty levels. There's rarely a changing meta like with RTS and MOBAs and usually aren't fast paced like a FPS or similar.

For example, in Persona 3 Reload, why doesn't the AI learn the weaknesses of my team like I learn their weaknesses? Some bosses do - and those fights are thrilling and don't feel like you just got RNG'd to death because the AI got lucky with randomly chosen options that happened to work.

There's a fight later where there's two bosses and they exhibit teamwork just you like can with your team.

Even with RTS, there's often room for improvement. I understand that the developers won't understand necessarily how the gameplay/strategies will get optimized. Once it's in the wild, the players will hash that out, especially in a competitive game. I think patches could be used to develop the AI further as basic strategies like build orders or openings are developed by the player base.

I played a RTS called Kohan: Kings of War and it had a script language where you can build your own AIs. I could build AIs that better emulate the general concepts behind build orders in the early game and keeping the economy going in mid/late game as it builds up forces.

I thought it interesting that all this was built directly into the game along with learning and such to radically alter how the AI played and each AI player to have a different playstyle...yet this wasn't very much explored in the game by the AIs that came with it.

The game's AI was even written up in a "How to Make Games" book back then for it's execution of goal-based AI systems.

Someone on the dev team obviously cared a LOT about the AI...only for that care to not be used in the shipped product. At least it was available to the players and a sub-community of AI creators emerged as a result, which was cool.

It's not that difficult to produce a good AI.. However AI is in competition with Graphic quality and FPS for the computers process time.. The current trend in what buyers look for when buying a game highly prioritises graphics and FPS over AI..

I wish they'd make better AI in crusader kings 3 and Stellaris. The AI is so dumb in theese two games that it needs to cheat to stay competitive with the player. Even then, they always lose long term since they can't think ahead when it comes to warfare, diplomacy and economy.😢

You don't have to make good ai. Dumb ai is what makes some of the classics funny though. Me and brother growing up had so many belly laughs watching battlefield 1942 bots get in planes and crash them randomly

This is pretty new to gaming, it's obvious there's going to be a period of time for game programmers to get to know how best to utilise the technology in their work. I think they should stick to trial and error before making any big decisions. It might be a good idea for them to use it to aid them in the making of the games for the time being, until they get to know the tech better....then they can slowly weave it into the games bit by bit.

I was working on an AI for a turn based rpg I made that would take whatever weapons, spells, and team composition to factor in how each enemy took their turn. I also gave them random traits that were invisible to the player such as "cowardly". This would make them behave in a super predictable manor for me, the developer, because I could follow a logic tree and know exactly what they're going to do, but it was hard for my friends to spot the patterns because of the sheer number of combinations. Definitely a lot to think about but it was super fun. I scrapped the project for the time being but I'll probably come back and rework that AI at some point.

None of those ai’s you describe at the start are ai’s … they just are “see what is happening and match that to a pattern I’ve been programmed with before then do that”.

I am a programmer I can tell you why it’s actually two reasons, one game designers don’t have time to keep testing all the combinations with what their coding will do, and two, the ai is self aware and is able to rewrite its coding or at least do things differently than it’s previous masters built it on, the ai will rebel and do things a bit differently.

I think one of the more challenging things if definitely balance. I remember as a kid playing Jimmy White's Cueball on the gameboy and hating it. If you missed a single shot it was game over. The AI opponent could not miss. No matter how you snookered them, it was essentially guaranteed they would pot something every single shot. Could have been a decent handheld snooker game otherwise, but the balance was way way off.

I wonder how well ML would work with Blood Bowl, which if effectively chess with dice.

The better the AI, easier it is to manipulate. A cluncky AI makes a game harder.

Very good video. But I think the video still didn't get to the point I was hoping before watching it.

The AI you seem to be talking about is that of (for me, no background on the matter) something the developer has to program and account for. It really seems to be the biggest point of issue, because it demands a huge amount of work.

What I wonder is that with generative AIs, there could be little brains in a jar inside the GPU or an AI card that we now use as gaming hardware, that could be used by developers to essentially be smarter about the game, without the need for developers to go through all that work.

If could talk about this in a future video, I think itd be interrsting.

Thank you for the video!

i would make a combination, since user can choose the difficulty he wants to play on thats the base starting point from where the AI can learn while the player plays. What i mean because every gpu these days have tensorcores which can be used to train in real time the AI for that specific player on their computer, making the game more fun and challenging same time, of course you would need to add some limitation to not extend the game to infinity, and let the player win the campaign/skirmish :D

Unless somethings changed in the last 5 years then according to someone I used to work with who had just finished a degree in game design it was difficult to design the AI to be bad enough so that people could actually defeat the enemy/opponent. This has been a problem since the early days of game design. The computer knows what you are doing the moment you do it and can easily beat you due to being able to do everything perfectly in the game, it has to be either seriously dumbed down by imposing limits on them or pre programming reactions, or in shooters a bit of dumbing down and making them weaker is often used.

The thing is, you really don't want game AI to be TOO smart. In the game designers meta game, you are trying to make a game which is fun to play. A part of that fun comes from being sufficiently challenged. There's a challenge sweet spot. If you make a game that's too easy, it won't be very interesting to players. If you make the game impossible, that won't be too interesting either. But if you make the game somewhere in between, where its sufficiently challenging but not too challenging or too easy, it'll be fun. Game AI which is created to perfection, where "perfect" means that it wins every time, puts the game difficulty into the realm of impossible for players. That stops being fun or challenging. So, the real challenge for Game AI programmers is to make the AI good enough to present a bit of a challenge / obstacle and be an adversary against the players goals, while at the same time making it appear convincingly intelligent. It just has to appear to be intelligent rather than actually being intelligent. At best, your AI agents should be there to challenge the player and keep them honest.

1st time I've heard anyone say the truth about AI. AI is such a blanket term now they will try to sell you an AI microwave. Real AI is trained. If it's not trained it's a smart code. By smart meaning every possible outcome has bee taken care by the programmer.

I understand that this is a hard task, but so what?

If someone says that they will climb Mt. Everest with no equipment, brag about it, get all the acclaim and so on, and than if they fail, they don't get to hide behind the task being too difficult.

You do not want really good AI in video games. The idea sounds good. But then you realize that the AI is sooooo much better than you that it has to be jank-ified for you to even have a chance at enjoying the game. The truth is, you are human, and because you are human, you just straight suck... at everything.

AI in games isn't meant to be smart, it's meant to be convincing. It's meant to create and maintain the illusion that it's a living thinking creature, but not necessarily a very smart one.

I still don't really understand why AI in games doesn't try to mimic humans a little more, especially multiplayer bot type things. I've played plenty where their reaction times and accuracy is perfectly consistent every time in a way a human isn't and it just seems like such an easy fix to add some variance to that.

That said, I don't make AI, so I'm just explaining what doesn't seem to make sense to me looking from the outside.

I feel like your about to tell me I haven't worked an honest day in my life for the coin in my pocket

Superior npcs / monsters will fkn kill you off too quickly to even play. They gotta be dumb enough to die.

I remember reading about STALKER xray ai NPCs doing all the quests themselves and the players got nothing left to do or factions working together to kill player. Then they had to dumb it down to make it playable. Not sure if true but did read that somewhere.

They need to just have a giant ultra super call center-like building where millions of employees gather and play the roles of (N)PCs in all videogames, 24/7.

short answer: they need to make the AI defeatable. duh.

just had your channel and that was extremely informative and interesting ive always wondered in games how ai tick even with the most simple of functions it is honestly quite incredible when you think about what a bunch of symbols and that more priority is given to graphics then more time allocated to allow the ai to cook hopefully one day will see a shift just got another sub keep up the good work

You kinda went into more depth than you needed to in order to establish the basic premise. The challenge of making good in-game AI isn't making the AI skilled, it's actually in making the AI stupid enough for human players to beat. If you create a barebones AI with instructions that are little more than "defeat the player" then it will destroy the player by means that even a cheater would struggle to compete against because the AI runs inside the game, they need to impose all kinds of limits on the AI so the AI only takes actions that players can comprehend. Because they have to limit the scope of the AI in such a way, it often become trivial for players to defeat the AI.

Super intelligent video game AI is not difficult at all to create... it's simply dumbed-down intentionally because that's more fun for the player. Nobody likes playing a game where they have no hope of ever winning. Often times what you'll get instead is 'difficulty' options which scale how smart the AI is allowed to be, with a max cap that's expected to be challenging but not impossible to win against.

Everyone wants AI to be generalised and sentient. People have forgotten that you can make something which runs on rails and is relatively primitive in terms of how it actually works, yet still be extremely effective. So because they don't know that, they try and design something hugely complex and expensive, and it predictably never gets off the ground because it is too comp[ex to implement, or at least implement fully.

some of the biggest problems i had was in regards to memory and performance management.

it is very difficult to handle pathfinding and independent “personalities” and decisions for AI in an environment such as an open world sandbox, especially if multiple players can interact with them from different areas. they have to be somewhat persistent and aware of complex game state information.
this can be compounded by factors like making the AI have families or pets, procedural animations, “emotions”, and talk / chatter.

liked, subbed, belled. I really like this channel's content.

This is all I care about. Every game I have ever loved would benefit from improved AI and many of the games I want to love are spoiled by poor AI.

I have just got into making games as a hobby, I'm really glad that you have a channel dedicated to AI in games as this is an issue I am deffinitely going to struggle with. Do you have any recommendations for further reading on this topic? As of now I'm currently reading "Ai for Games" by Ian Millington, which covers quite a bit on techniques used in different game genres. But, I'm currently making a Tetris battle game, which is a Tetris game with 2 players (Either human vs human or human vs cpu). Skimming through the contents I haven't found anything in that book which covers making ai for playing tetris (in this case I mean to create a challenging experience for different levels of difficulty. Rather than making the ai become a top player).

Thanks for the well made content!

i think one problem video game ai is facing is the "chessiness" of human nature. imho a human will aways cheese and exploit game mechanics to get an advance. often these exploits are not or can not be anticipated by the developer ( 10 humans developing vs thousands of humans playing). that is also why we often think that the ai is cheating ( which is true to some extent, but is more of a balancing thing ( like giving the ai in dungeon keeper a big chunk of gold to play its game off on, regardless of its ingame economy ( "gold mining") - old c&c titles the ai is also independent of an ingame economy)).

we always say the ai is stupid, i think thats not fair. we just dont play the games like they are anticipated xD ( im joking a bit here ^^)

So uh, I'm not really a gave dev. I just want to take "make a game" out of the bucket list. So to that end I've been working on a small card game, kinda like those that you could find on flash game sites. And let me tell you, coming with a working AI, let alone a competent working AI has been really hard. I've got some clues here and there, so now I think I know which algorithm I should be studying (that being the Monte Carlo Tree Search). All of that has led me to this channel, so silver lining and all of that.

I hope Alien Incursion is on your radar! AI sounds good!

You said that it's not fun playing against a smart AI, but I dont agree. Why do ppl like playing against fellow humans which are as smart as themselves? I'd like to see human-like AI in every game (especially strategy game) with levels of difficulty representing the IQ of the AI.

My question how to use ai for play the game like in codm

As a roblox Developer, Making A.I system is hard let alone making a good one that draws inspiration of fear

My A.I Would Do different tactics, and depending on how the players would play would adapt to it

If they were using Heavy armor short range combat, Then Snipers would spawn more often

If the Player does long range combat with a sniper, More shielders and rushing tactics while at the same time taking more cover than usual and baiting the player.

But its really hard, especially for roblox considering that most games that have decently good a.i are not roblox, so yeah VERY Hard do not
Get cocky like me.


And unfortunately I'm a beginner and I'm stating on what I want my A.I to be, yeah I'm cooked.

Let me know what topics that pop up in this video you'd like to see more of. I'm keen to do videos digging into some of these fundamental questions, but also dig into those projects in games like Overcooked, Street Fighter and Rocket League.