I've been reading a lot of good stuff about ARC Raiders.
In fact, I read and watched so many people recommending the game that I was sure most of them were getting paid to hype it, and that it was probably just another extraction shooter.
However, when I dug deeper into why people like the game, I found that the enemies aren’t traditionally animated, but are instead physically-based AI agents:
Transforming animation with machine learningHow we overhauled our animation workflow with machine learning, teaching physically-based AI-agents to walk on their own instead of animating movement.[...]Animation is a big bottleneck in all game development. Characters or creatures have to be designed and scripted manually, to achieve seemingly realistic interactions with the world. That makes it hard to achieve scale without growing your game team.So over the past two years, we’ve continued down the path of physical animation based on reinforcement learning. In short, that means we train physically-based machines to walk by giving them rewards for doing the right things — like virtual dog treats.As you’ll see in the examples below, achieving good movement behaviors can lead to more immersive and interesting gameplay, where the world becomes truly alive — where there aren’t any pre-made animations, stuttering transitions between poses, or weird ragdolls.Instead our agent — you can think of it as the AI player — observes its body and the world around it; and decides how to move the legs over the next few frames. This means that if the agent collides, is hit by, or generates some force by itself; it can adapt immediately for each unique situation. If you trip on a rock or get hit by a snowball you’ll do something unique every time — because no snowball or rock is the same.[...]
My emphasis cannot be overstated. This makes shooting the enemies extremely satisfying. Action sequences that other games have to script and still feel underwhelming, this game just has them out of the box during every encounter. As this video points out, the enemies are probably also intentionally robots to be even more immersive. If they were human, it would be much harder to make them feel real.
If you're on the edge about trying this game, really, give it a try. I think I just witnessed a revolution in gaming.
no, I'm not getting paid to say this