There's a lot of talk about AI these days, as the technology has taken huge steps during the last few years. The fact that it will be implemented in game development (way more than it already is) is probably something most people expect, but exactly how will it be used?
Tim Stuart, Xbox chief financial officer, has now shared some examples of precisely just this in a TechRaptor interview and says it could lead to a smoother workflow, better translations and fewer bugs:
"On the developer side, you think about the millions and millions of dollars in a game spent on localization, script, how you think about players moving from point A to point B and you have non-player characters have dialogue.
AI can take care of all that. You now say "I need the player to get from A to B" and instead of having to write thousands of lines of scripting or code, you just have the AI get you from A to B. Things like localization and putting things in new languages.
When we think about game testing, a million AI bots can run through a level of Minecraft and find where players get stuck, where they spend money, how they think about the level. So, this is -pun intended- game-changing for the developer."
Microsoft is one of the companies that has invested most in AI, but it will probably be a couple of years from now before we see any dramatic changes in game development.