Friday, October 2, 2015

AI in Video Games (part 5)


How will AI influence and change video games we play in the future? PC and console hardware is getting more and more robust all the time, so game developers are now facing new territory—games so vast that they might not be able to fully playtest it before release. In the recent past, many big-name game releases have been plagued with bugs at the beginning, and developers scrambled post-release to patch the problems that the gamers discovered—bugs that the developers themselves couldn't possibly have discovered in the limited time they had to produce the game. Once a game releases, hundreds of thousands of gamers will be playing it, and if there's a bug to be found, it won't take long. Consider the cost of hiring even a small portion of that number of gamers to playtest a game—we'd rarely see any games hit the market. The cost of an AI program, however, is much more reasonable, and an AI can fully explore and test a game, reporting back with data on all encountered errors. We may be seeing bigger and better games released to the public much faster than we've seen before, and these AI tested games are likely to have fewer bugs. Imagine starting up a new game and being able to play it right away, instead of waiting for an hour while a huge update patch slowly downloads. Hard to imagine these days, but it's the wave of the future!

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