For en del år siden forsøgte visse udgivere i branchen, såsom EA's Blake Jorgensen, at påstå at markedet ikke længere har plads til traditionelle, lineære singleplayer-titler, og at spillere verden over havde mere hang til multiplayer-komponenter. Det var faktisk igennem denne påstand at Live Service-modellen blev født. Spørger man dog Gabe Newell, Valves CEO, så vil singleplayer snart gøre alvorligt comeback takket være smartere AI.
I et interview med Edge Magazine fortæller Newell, at AI-teknologi er kommet så langt, at de snart vil kunne tilbyde en mere dynamisk spiloplevelse uden andre spillere, altså at man kan blive udfordret mere, og at spiloplevelsen kan blive mere bred.
"If you think of lots and lots of people on the Internet as a way of generating entertainment experiences, there was a point in time where it became easier to connect meat than it was artificial intelligence.We're starting to head towards a period where that's going to reverse again, driven by what's happening with AI. Right now, the OpenAI bots are better than 99-point-some percent of all the Dota players in the world. That's actually a surprisingly narrow challenge for artificial intelligence. Beating humans is easier than entertaining humans. But over the next several years - and if you ask me, my little spreadsheet calculation is it's about nine years - we'll have artificial general intelligence that can do anything a smart person can do. It'll probably initially take something like a billion dollars to build one of these silicon humans, but then they'll just keep getting cheaper, and it'll get cheaper really quickly, and eventually reach the point where you have ten or a hundred people living in your computer all the time. And harnessing that will mean single player games get a lot more interesting. If you could build a single player game that just never ended, where I could play 20 hours a week and it just keeps growing and getting richer, and I'd be having as much fun 400 hours into this experience as I was in the first 20 hours... I think that is a way more likely scenario looking forward five years than it would have been looking forward five years ago. That's going to be a tectonic shift in the industry, with AI becoming way more useful, and it shifts the value-optimisation inflection point between multiplayer and single player games."
Ja, det er et lidt langt citat, men også en utrolig interessant teori, altså at AI vil kunne strække den traditionelle singleplayer-oplevelse en hel del. Tror du også det?