Euphoria over Bad AI in Backbreaker?

 [This post originally appeared on Intrinsic Algorithm's IA on AI blog, May 26, 2010] 

Backbreaker Cover

While I commend NaturalMotion for attempting to move things forward in this area, there are plenty of things that need to be addressed, if not solved, if the genre is to advance further. Physics isn't necessarily on the top of the list. But hey, that's what they do.

This is particularly close to my heart because I'm an AI designer and a huge football fan. I am especially fond of football because of the deep intricacy of the team-based strategy that has to happen on every play. Of course, this is exactly the issue that is the hardest to address from an AI standpoint. Sports games—again, football ones in particular—are ridiculously hard to craft good AI for. For an industry that struggles to put together FPS squad tactics for 2 or 3 people, coordinating 11 people supposedly working together while being interfered with by 11 other people who are also working together is a tall order. The Madden franchise has been doing a passable job of this for some time. Sure, there are golden paths that bubble to the surface all the time, but those seem to be fewer and farther between.

Anyway, in this review, the author points out some interesting frustrations. He addresses it briefly in the first paragraph but I believe it summarizes things well (emphasis mine):

(Brief aside: Who uses "CPU AI"? Not only is that redundant, it says the same thing twice.)

I will skip over his impressions of how Euphoria works. If you want to know all that happy-happy stuff, you can watch a Euphoria sales reel. I will address the AI-specific stuff. He goes on to comment about some of the specifics of how the AI falls flat on its face (emphasis mine).

This is summed up by the clincher which is my point here:

This certainly seems to be an example of tunnel-vision on a pet feature while ignoring (or being incapable of addressing) the rest of the game that people actually want to experience. Is this a Euphoria sales demo or a football game? This is something that is more prevalent in the game industry that we care to admit. It isn't just Euphoria—or even physics—as the bad guy either. Swap in "game design", "story", "cool weapons", "sexy chick outfits", "huge environments" or whatever. AI is often the expression of your world. If your AI is broken, it severs the emotional connection to the game.

He continues:

Again, this apparently is broken decision logic. For those that don't know football, in the pros a "jump pass" is a rare event only used in certain situations. Commentators will typically hammer on a QB for not throwing with his feet set. In fact, theoretically, you could do a football game without even including an animation for a jump pass and no one would really notice all that much. Therefore, for the author to notice that this happening too often is rather telling.

More:

Again, I'm guessing this is either lazyness on the part of the development team, not knowing about football, or an inability to solve the problem. I hope it is the latter. The 2nd one is not acceptable if you are actually making a football game. The first... well...

A few more. Apparently it is not just the player AI that is troubling:

So this has to do with the logic for detecting penalty situations. These should be, in effect, simple rule-based systems. For example,

if (contact(player, receiver) 
&& !TouchBall(receiver)
&& CatchableBall(receiver))
&& ((BallThrown() || ReceiverDownField())...

If you are botching up your static rule-based systems, then doing the contextual player-reaction AI is going to be a bitch.

Naturally, bad AI tends to lead to exploits:

This is the natural result... and is always a game-killer. If there is an obvious dominant strategy, you have now taken Sid Meier's "interesting choices" and condensed them down into "choose this to win". Many games with bad AI could still thrive in the online world. However, in a game where you only control 9% of your team and are entirely dependent on the other 91% for success, you can still do all the right things and still get rolled. That is not fun.

My point with all of this really has very little to do with the game itself and really less to do with the Euphoria engine. In fact, a quick browse through YouTube shows that there are some people who think the AI is just fine (although watching the videos and descriptions shows that people don't really know what AI is or what good AI might look like). That being said, your mileage may vary. My point was that of the juxtaposition of the two points the author was making: you need more than pretty physics to make a compelling game.

This is really only a modified version of the graphics vs. AI debates. Originally, studios made pretty games with bad AI (and even bad physics). Now we seem to have moved on to making better physics... and with products like Euphoria, even better physics that take the load off of AI programmers trying to figure out what human reactions should be. None of that solves stupid AI play, though. And until we do that, we are going to be seeing otherwise decent games get shelved.