Playing complex strategy games for many years, one of the things that irks me the most is that hard AI levels often just give the dumb AI cheats to simulate it being smarter. To me, it’s not very satisfying to go against cheating AI. Are any games today leveraging neural networks to supplant or augment hand-written decision tree based AI? Are any under development? I know AI can be resource intensive, but it seems that at least turn based games could employ it.
Oh that’s really interesting; I hadn’t considered racing games as a genre to benefit from this type of machine learning. I guess I figured there’s not so much to AI there that it’s necessary, at least when we already know the “ideal lap line” for cars to follow, but yeah it gets a lot harder when considering other drivers on the track and a huge array of unique car models with their own handling and performance characteristics.
I played Forza Horizon 4 and the Drivatars are pretty convincing. They make exactly the kind of mistakes on the track that I make and they can be challenging but beatable in a way that’s much more fun than any other racing game I had played before.