EA Patent Could Lead to NPCs Capable of Learning and Adapting to Players' Behavior

gamerant.com:

The intelligence of non-player characters has long been a used as a selling point for new games by publishers like EA. The player’s immersion is deepened when the characters that populate a games world react to them and each other realistically. Most modern games NPC’s all work in a similar sort of way, with the quality of the NPC being dependent on the level of complexity attributed to it by the developer. EA is now looking for a way to move this intelligence forward while cutting back on the complexity.

The player is the only one in a video game world with any true agency, as NPCs can only react to a player’s actions. These NPC reactions are decided by behavior trees, which are essentially flow graphs deciding what the NPC should do next. The perceived intelligence of an NPC is measured in how complex and varied these behavior trees are.

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The problem for developers is, for every possible player action a new branch needs to be added to the behavior tree for an NPC to seem truly realistic and reactionary. Not only that, but as more reactions are added, more computing power is used by every NPC.Cyberpunk 2077 recently had to overhaul its NPCs to react more to player actions. But with a new patent filed by EA, NPCs could soon see a step forward in their intelligence.

The patent for is for “Readable and Editable” NPC Behavior. Essentially it describes a way of editing these NPC behavior trees on the fly, rather than having to increase the complexity of them to encompass all possible NPC actions. It also describes reading specific player data such as location and heath and using “reinforcement learning” to adapt that NPC’s behavior goal. But how close this system is to being