Are you tired of scripted dialogues in a game's story?
Do you think an NPC is just a placeholder for quests or shopping?
Can you find ways to exploit your enemies limited intelligence to cheat the game?
I have news for you.
EVERYTHING IS ABOUT TO CHANGE!
With the accelerating advent of high level generative adversarial networks, machine learning, and deep learning, a lot has been said about its impact on our daily lives or medical care, its implications for safety and robotics, and the potential for space exploration and abundance. That's all well and good, but I'm going to tell you something even more exciting.
Advancements in AI will revolutionize gaming in ways people could never imagine
In the near future, you will be playing an online game with your friend, exploring some new area fighting mobs to grind for loot and moving through the quest to reach the next boss, etc. and during some conversation, you will learn your friend isn't even real, he's an NPC, entirely digital. In fact, you may not even be able to convince him that he's inside a videogame, because the designers will be able to emulate perspective-based intelligence for the purpose of simulation, so from his point of view any number of explanations could arise, but the idea of computers may not even exist in that world.
Taking it a step further, every NPC in the game world can be fully intelligent and aware of it's surroundings, forming their own goals, plans, fears, opinions, skills, and knowledge. These ideas are nothing new, ElderScrolls, Fable, and many other games have primitive versions of this already, but with the advent of recursion in AI the capacity for intelligent NPC behavior will fold over to be thousands of times more powerful, and by the end of it, you may have a hard time being the hero of the story.
Speaking of story, the current format is mostly scripted because the inhabitants of the game have no capacity to make meaningful decisions on their own. When the game is a thriving ecosystem of AI, you don't need a scripted story. Instead you will be able to say anything to anyone within the game world, and what happens after that is up to the AI.
It's not all unicorns and rainbows though. Your enemies in the game may also have the same capacity to think as your newly found self-aware NPC friends. Good luck playing an RTS on hardmode when every troop the enemy has is smarter than you.
The best part is I'm just scratching the surface, it goes way deeper than this.
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