AI Generated Patrol Encounters (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Friday, September 02, 2016, 14:55 (3003 days ago)

With all the talk of Ai and procedural generation recently, I thought I'd share an interesting tidbit I learned about Destiny's development while researching my book.

If you remember, Jamie Griesemer's '30 seconds of fun' approach to encounter design was a pretty large part of what made Halo's battles work so incredibly well. There was always a flow to them, where you could take areas and push the enemies back, and each mini encounter flowed into the next making it feel like one big battle rather than just fighting individual groups of enemies. There was a direction of cohesiveness to it all, which was what made them so much fun to play.

Early in Destiny's development (2009-2010 or so), there was an effort to recreate this type of encounter design in AI. The idea being, that the patrol spaces were very large, and players could enter and exit from several different points. Players would also revisit the areas frequently. Because of this, is wasn't really feasible to finely tune encounters like in Halo, since not only would there be too many to design given player position and fireteam composition, but because the spaces were to be revisited it would be good for different encounters each time. So, if the AI could design such encounters on the fly the experience could always be unique and dynamic.

This idea was unfortunately abandoned and never gotten to work. If you look at Patrol mode now, with pockets of enemies the respawn in the same place every time, with no flow or direction to battles, you can see it would have been a great addition.