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Developer Oxide Games has posted the latest video dev diary for its upcoming grand strategy game Ara: History Untold. This time, the dev diary’s host, Steven Bell, chats with Oxide Games software engineer Will Chambers to discuss the AI system that will be included in the game.
In the video, Chambers says that creating an AI system for a 4X strategy game like Ara can be more difficult than making AI in a normal game. He added that the specific features in Ara won’t allow the classic 4X AI to be used. He stated that Ara will use abstract long-term planning. He stated:
The point is to allow AI systems to, rather than grapple with all of the intricate complexity of every decision they have to make which is the usual way and just falls apart for games like this, they think in the abstract long-term ahead like people do
Then they have another Cooperative AI system that completes all of the minutia of those plans once they’ve been planned out in abstract.
Chambers offered an example of how this will work for players in the game.
Our AI can actually think all the way through the process of conducting a war down to the economic details, all the way into the flavor of how that leader would behave and make those decisions much more concretely. So what we hope to offer is a much more consistent experience that delivers both in gameplay and historical flavor.
Ara: History Untold is currently set for release on the PC sometime in 2024 via Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studios. You can join the Ara Insider Program right now to play pre-release builds for the game. Oxide announced recently that a new technical alpha test is slated to begin “soon” and you can learn more about how to participate on the game’s Steam page.
