There have been a number of developments in A.I. software research over the past few years, however, AFAIK this hasn't seemed to have any significant impact on gaming.

I haven't played a game so far where the enemy A.I. seemed "smart," or used tactics in an intelligent manner. In most games, it seems that enemies either rely on scripted events, or else they are buffed in certain ways to compensate for not being tactical adversaries. In the case of Civ5, the devs had major problems adapting the A.I. to be able to handle the transition to one-unit-per-tile, and in order to offset this, the player was simply massively nerfed and the A.I. controlled civs were buffed.

I have also noticed that RPG companions seem to have a tendency to run into a group of enemies and quickly die (or in some cases, if they are too effective, the game becomes too easy for the player).

Have any of you played games where you were impressed with the quality of the enemy or NPC A.I.?

Do you think recent A.I. research will eventually have an impact on videogames? This conversation between two chatbots would seem to suggest some interesting future potential for player interaction with NPCs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY

I do think recent AI research will filter it's way into games, but it will still lag several years behind. There isn't a lot of AI where I've thought "Wow! That's clever!".

Alpha centauri had brilliantly intelligent rivals. They weren't buffed, and you weren't debuffed either. The AI was practically perfect, especially in the higher difficulties. They spotted what you were doing, planned tactics to surround you, forged alliances and then undercut them when a better ally came along, occasionally turning on a weakened ally to seize their cities.



Galactic Civilisations 2, nearly a decade later, was also intelligent, but not so much in it's tactics as it's ability to predict the player's actions. One time I was building a large fleet of transport ships that would quickly conquer a star system along my border, so I sent a small attack vessel to dawdle near the border ready for a lightning attack. However, the neutral faction who controlled it contacted me and told me that they could see that my patrol vessel was planning a premptive strike to soften the planet up for a ground invasion!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=1GtSEvmHTRY series has http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZR59DjhbSg

When it first came out, I find the AI of normal grunt soldiers from FEAR (1) quite good.

I think that even today the AI from FEAR can be considered very good.