Black Ops 3 was a cracking shooter, even if we only managed to fully appreciate its story after-the-fact. One thing we did like with our time with Black Ops 3 was the gunplay and the fierce machines that stared dead-eyed into your soul as they kept on coming, despite their “limbs” being blown away.
During PlayStation Experience 2015, a few members of Treyarch took part in a special panel that focussed on the A.I of Black Ops 3. The developers spoke of the challenges that came with introducing four-player co-op into the campaign and how the enemies need to change their approach to taking us pesky humans out.
According to one of Treyarch’s tech-wizards, it wasn’t that much of a case of “we can’t do this” but more a case of “we don’t want to do this” when it came to some decisions in the game’s design. Essentially, the developer stated that Black Ops 3’s campaign could never have been done on the last-gen consoles (and it wasn’t…) and that it’s due to the power of the next-gen machines that we’ve got such an ambitious single-player/co-op campaign.
The entire A.I system for Black Ops 3 was completely revamped and written from scratch. For comparison, the developers explained that each previous Call of Duty game would re-use scripts for enemies and, due to the games being a lot more linear than Black Ops 3, the A.I wasn’t especially smart. Enemy characters would have a pool of commands that they would initiate depending on what’s going on in the game world, but they’d be a fairly small selection and wouldn’t hold a candle to what’s present in Black Ops 3.
The developers were ultimately happy with the end result, but they did point out that Black Ops 3 has “set a lot of groundwork” for the future, and that as the developers learn what the PS4 and Xbox One can do and what’s possible with the machines, they’ll be able to push in-game A.I even further than before.
It’s a tantalising prospect, as we’ve become so used to pop-up enemies that seem to have total disregard for their lives. Maybe we’ll even get enemies surrendering? Perhaps they’ll even stop and wet themselves? Only the future will tell. In the meantime, we’re pretty happy to hear that Treyarch, one of the biggest developers in the industry, thinks there’s even more room for improvement. Happy days.