AI technology is growing rapidly over the years, with feats such as composing original music, beating world champions at their own board games and solving complex problems within seconds being accomplished at a record speed. But what if AI technology gets so advanced that it could create a dynamic story in a video game? That’s what I’d like to explore today.
To give you a idea as to how far AI tech as evolved, according to Forbes:
A Narrative Science survey found last year that 38% of enterprises are already using AI, growing to 62% by 2018. Forrester Research predicted a greater than 300% increase in investment in artificial intelligence in 2017 compared with 2016. IDC estimated that the AI market will grow from $8 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020.
It’s a growing market with a massive potential to change the world. Currently, AI involves Natural Language Generation, Speech Recognition, Virtual Agents, Machine Learning Platforms and Biometrics just to name a few. These are clearly very beneficial to businesses, medial researches, space travel and essentially the advancement of mankind, if we don’t mess it up so to speak. But what if some of it goes into building an open world experience like none other before.
Picture this, you log in to your open world game and begin to interact with the locals in a small town that you’ve just discovered. Using speech recognition, it could be possible to actually talk with the NPC. You could ask for potions, information on something or just ask them how they’re doing. The NPC would then use what information it has gathered and respond not by a preset dialogue written by a human, but by dynamically creating a response of its own.
If you think that’s impossible then just look at Sophia, the social humanoid robot who recently gain citizenship in Saudi Arabia. Sure, she said she would destroy humanity and then later changed her mind, but all that came from her own process of information that she had gathered to make that response. She gave that answer based on the data she has collected. We are living in the future people.
This type of AI technology could change the open world gaming experience forever. When developers say that no players will ever experience the same story, this time they’d be telling the truth. You could even take it a step further. The world can react based on what has happened with or without your influence. You could log off one day, come back in a week and find out that a village has prospered or has been wiped out by a mechanical beast from another kingdom.
I played game’s like Fable and loved the idea of how my actions affected the world around me, and something like Cyberpunk 2077, an upcoming role-playing video game developed by CD Projekt RED and published by CD Projekt would thrive on AI technology. Honestly, you could theoretically play a game like that forever with no end in sight as the possibility would be endless.
Of course, we are still early in the AI technology life-cycle but who’s to say we won’t see something like this in our games sometime in the future. Let me know what you guys think about this?
