How AI affects the gaming experience

Players seek a realistic and immersive experience in games. AI plays a huge part in forming this gaming experience by bringing realism and fun to the virtual world. Imagine that you are accompanied by a dog as you walk around or a flock of birds scatters when you make some noise. An enemy opponent is perhaps the most common and important implementation of game AI. The few types of game AI—navigating, fighting, assisting, or analytical—add the missing elements to other players to make them feel real and challenging to compete. This dates back to when it was used most notably in Chess, Nim, Pong, and Pac-Man. Up until now, it has been used in a war frame, with procedurally built levels. As the modern game design moves quickly by introducing new features to game play, such as the open world, massive in-game characters, and social interaction, it also introduces problems because these features cause AI decision making to require more input in unpredictable environments. Even now, AAA titles have their own complications with AI that result in poor user satisfaction. We will introduce in the following sections some powerful techniques to help create this important AI module and discuss how they are implemented in Unreal Engine.