What AI Could Mean For The Horde
I think it’s safe to say that all gamers have a favorite genre. It’s what they gravitate towards when they’re looking for a pick-me-up at the end of a long day, or just a nice experience to eat up their Saturday morning. Well, unfortunately, survival/crafting games are the opposite of that for me. This has actually become somewhat of a running joke among my gaming friends, many of whom enjoy survival/crafting games, especially titles that fall into the horde survival category. So, this felt like a great place for me to air some of my grievances with the genre while also pointing out how advances in AI could help alleviate some of them.
For this article, I’ll overlook the crafting part of the genre. The majority of my frustrations with that are purely directed at the game developers’ choices in where to place things and how long it takes to acquire them. Instead, we’ll be focusing on the gameplay experience in interacting with the horde itself. Most titles in the genre use a similarly coded AI to control the movements of the horde and the individual enemies that it is composed of. So, if you know how to funnel the AI into a kill box in one game, you probably know how to do the same thing in most other games as well. That just feels boring and repetitive to me, and I can’t be the only one out there who buys games for their replayability.
It turns out that, with a generative AI model governing the horde, this is a very fixable problem. If the player likes to repeatedly build the same kinds of traps, the enemies might find a clever way to bypass them. Constant usage of the same weapons could lead to enemies that move in a way that makes it less effective. Now, I hear the zombie horror purists out there. “Zombies aren’t supposed to be smart.” Okay, that’s a fair point, but what if we’re not talking about zombies? What if the horde is made up of aliens, machines, or even abnormally large insects? Those are definitely all things that can learn and evolve, based upon player actions.
The most difficult part will be training the AI model to balance the scaling. If you turn up the difficulty too quickly, that boring experience will rapidly become an unwinnable slaughter of the players, and that’s also not a good experience. It would need to be developed in a way that allows the AI to counter enough reoccurring strategies to keep the game engaging without completely overwhelming the players. This, to me, is a much more ideal horde survival experience. It has the potential to keep a game feeling like a new and evolving experience for far longer than is currently possible, and it might even be enough to get someone like me to actually enjoy more than a single session of a new horde survival title with friends.
