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| Halo AI: has it progressed? Where could it go? | |
| Posted By: scarab | Date: 11/1/11 7:16 a.m. |
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I hadn't played many games when I first encountered Halo. But, in my limited experience, the AI in Halo seemed to be better than what little I had seen in other games. I remember playing first person shooters that had jack-in-the-box encounters. You enter a trigger volume and an NPC stands up from behind some crates and just stands there shooting at me until I pump enough lead into him to drop him. NPCs just seemed to always know where I was, once triggered they just knew where I as, they had God vision. Halo NPCs had a realistic perceptual model, they acted as if they had eyes, they only saw what was in front of them. I could sneak up behind them and take them down without them being aware of me. They also fixated on the last place that they had seen me so I could expose myself to them (no, not in that way), then go back into cover and sneak round behind them to take them out. To me, it would feel like I had out smarted them, that I had played a trick on them. The important point is that I saw them as thinking beings. I attributed mental states to them and I tried to manipulate those mental states to my advantage. Obviously they don't actually think and they are not really people but its nice to enter that illusion to feel like they really are people, just not very bright ones. This is the aspect of AIs that I want to think about in this post: the idea of NPCs having minds, of them being "people". Halo had other ways of reinforcing this. The contextual NPC speech helped a lot: "back me up", "I'm with you". The loquacious Grunts verbalized everything that they thought so I could form a model of what they were thinking and it would update with every new utterance. I knew when they were afraid and had advance warning of a switch to the offensive. Again the point is that I was thinking of them as people and I was using my model of what they were thinking to my advantage. I think that it is important that 343i encourages this and that their AI programmers and encounter and character designers should be thinking in these terms when they do their work. Because, after all, the AI is just a clumsy collection of code that doesn't think. But through a process of smoke and mirrors manages to convince us that we are fighting "people" and anything that can help this will improve gameplay for campaign players. Is there anything NEW that 343i could do to deepen the illusion that the NPCs are people? I will answer that in a reply to keep the post size down.
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