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I think you've hit the nail on the head. I absolutely agree that "dumb" AI can be explained away and integrated into a game's design and story in ways that make

I think you've hit the nail on the head. I absolutely agree that "dumb" AI can be explained away and integrated into a game's design and story in ways that make it much more interesting and believable than typical bad AI on its own. I also agree that by providing a flexible and interesting enough scenario, with conflicting goals and motivations, you can improve the AI in ways that are both noticeable to the player and add extra layers of interesting gameplay. As an aside, unrelated to your reply, I just remembered another common excuse, which is that the enemies only exist for X seconds before the player shoots them, so effort on smarts would be wasted on them. For some games, I think its for sure the case, but I also feel that in many cases the enemy only exists for a few seconds because they are dumb and uninteresting.

eru 7y ago
All agreed. Both 'dumb' and 'interesting' AI can be useful in a game, it all depends on your game's design. To give another silly example: Tetris by default has very 'dumb' AI that just gives you pieces at random. You could imagine variants of Tetris with more interesting piece selection. For example, an AI that makes pieces as unhelpful as possible while keeping their distribution statistically indistinguishable from true random selection. Or there was an inversion of the 2048 game, where an AI plays the normal game, and your task is to give them unhelpful numbers.