WHAT INSPIRED THIS ARTICLE?

Tekken 8's ghost battle led me to wonder if its possible to make a fighting game without real human players.

Is It Possible ?

Most of us know how typical AI works in video games,or if not video games just AI usage in our modern day activities.Things like "Alexa" or "Hey Google" or even "Siri" are forms of AI that have built in responses to your request. These are forms of basic AI which means they have predefined responses based on certain rules and logic that are explicitly made by programmers.They are not able to take in new information and return a different result.It's like telling someone that a dish needs more salt.Instead of adding more salt, they make the dish over again and add the salt during the process ,but that would just waste tons of resources and time to make the dish every single time a new ingredient or spice should be added.

So because of this limitation it impossible to produce AI that can be non repetitive or bias in it's decision making.So I ask you to imagine a fighting game(or even a souls like game if you want) that acts based on your responses and after either winning or losing the fight learns to not allow you to do certain attacks or moves and would actually punish you without just doing random attacks.

The Good Things

Here are examples of how this could possibly be a great idea. Again consider the other half of players who don't understand fighting games to begin with.

--> Instead of the CPU acting on your input it would act on the sequences of inputs and try to find a pattern instead.

An example of this is when you are playing a boss in a fighting game and when you go to grab him,he breaks the grab.When you try to do a low hit it automatically blocks low.When you do a super it either grabs you out of it or blocks it even though you combo-ed into it.There are plenty of fighting games that are notorious for having almost impossible boss fights and ways of beating them.

Most Fighting Game experts can tell it's because there are "pre-coded" hard rules to stress the player even when they know they should be winning.

--> You can make a fighting game that doesn't need other players to interact with

I know I know,fighting games are meant to be played with other people,but consider something for a moment.Not many people are as big fighting game enthusiast as you and me.Just like the Call of Duty Player who only wants to play the campaign and not the multiplayer,not everyone wants to play in a competitive mindset and have to deal with the stress of losing from another person.Its one thing to know a computer beat you because that's what it was designed for but another human being just bothers most people who simply want to enjoy a game.Most people do not even play games they have online capabilities because of their work life schedule or the level of gamer they are.Which is fine,but for players like me most often I would rather take on the challenge of other people rather then a CPU that doesn't truly help develop my skill overtime. I believe there is a market for a fighting game that explicitly focuses on having an advanced AI as it's main selling point.It would be great to not have to always play opponents online and have to deal with bad netcode. Granted their would be some significant downsides.

The Bad Side

I'm not an absolute crazy person when I write these blog post.I'm aware that most things have a downside to them no matter how great they may seem for the community or the developers themselves.

--> There would be no need for and online mode.

Would the game function online?Would there be a way to have both a great CPU for offline players as well as an effective net code for finding player matches? Every game has a set budget attached to it and I find it highly unlikey that a game can have an expensive machine learning algorithm/module baked in AND also have enough money to make the online function work smoothly. Basically there is only so much that a project can be able to have because of time and money constraints. The greatest games in the world usually have something good about them but lack certain features that most people like .Guilty Gear Strive has some GREAT net code but lacks the ability for players to find matches easily, without finding the same players over and over.

--> Removes human interaction

Most fighting games require another person who is aware of how to play or how the game functions.By removing human players or the ability to fight against a friend it becomes a non traditional fighting game. I highly doubt the FGC (Fighting Game Community) would love to play a game that can't be played against each other because the competitive nature of fighting games are what makes them special. Perhaps it would be a cool test for those who wish to face against something very hard to beat like most gamer's would enjoy.But overall the true nature of fighting games are the ability to test your skill against other humans since everyone plays the same characters differently.Thus giving you different play styles.Perhaps there can be a setting to make the CPU either aggressive,defensive,or tactical in it's play style?

--> AI can become unstoppable unless proper difficulty is in place

My final though on this is simply if all goes wrong and the AI module becomes unenjoyable to play against simply because there is no way to gauge a players skill set properly whether they are at an easy,medium,hard or hardcore level.Imagine fighting something on easy mode but still being unable to win a single round.If the developers don't properly set in place a level of difficulty that can both read the player but allow the player to still fight based on their skill level then it's all for nothing.This would require making three to four separate versions of the machine learning module itself and having each do certain things based on the player input,without expanding to far into another level of difficulty. But,how can you determine if something is easy? If a CPU is at an easy level but learns to make itself more challenging,is it still easy mode?

Conclusion

It would be possible to make a fighting game that uses Machine Learning to replace the need to fight other players,but I just don't see the reason why. Not even in terms of how fun it could be but overall I couldn't market a product like that considering most fighting games require human players.Not saying it is not possible in the future but the game itself would have to have a string budget with a team of developers who understand both causally and competitive players alike. Most fighting games now try to keep the hardcore players while finding ways to have new players buy the game as well,unfortunately most cannot do both as it is very hard to please both audiences.

Evo is this year in July and their will be some great side additions in terms of alternative fighting games to play that are not the main stage. Maybe then their could be a challenge to see who could face against the CPU and win,but in terms of the competitive scene it would be unlikely that people would enjoy or recommend it.