I want an AI that can play like a human at my level would, such that the game is competitive and fun.
It’s much more fun to go against an AI that is dumber than you but generally more powerful.
In Counter Strike the AI can be super dumb and slow until progressively it becomes a dumb aimbot. It doesn't become a better player with gamesense ans tacticts, just raw aim (Try arms race if you wanna feel it yourself)
In Fear the AI is pretty advanced in a more organic way. It coordinates several enemies to locate you and engage with you in a way that sometimes feels totally human. That feels great and when you lose you try again thinking something like "I should have positioned myself better" instead of "I guess my aim is just not fast enough".
We just don't get enough of good AIs to know how good they can feel.
I want to play against an AI that is dumb enough for me to beat it, but is dumb in human-ish ways. Depending on the genre of the game, I want it to make the sort of mistakes that actual people make in wars, but more often. Or I might want it to make the types of mistakes that the baddies make in action movies.
Human players in videogames might provide a little bit of a signal, but they do engage in a lot of game-y and not “realistic” movements, so point taken there. Some people are less familiar with games I think, so they tend to make less gamey movements. Anyone who’s been playing games since the 90’s will bounce around and circle strafe, so they need to be filtered out somehow, haha. Maybe they can provide training data for some sort of advanced “robot” enemy.
But the existing AI characters also make some pretty non-human mistakes. Like often it seems that AI difficulty slider is just like: I’m going to stand stupidly in the middle of the road either way, but on easy I’ll spray bullets randomly around you, and in very hard I’ll zap you with lightning reflex headshots.
Moves like examining a tree of possible movements, flanking, cover, better coordination, that sort of stuff would be more interesting. Maybe the player data-set can provide some of that? I’m actually not sure.
As far as I can think, early Halo games and the FEAR series had be best AI. It’s been a while. Time to advance.