After finishing the call with Xia Jiang, Meng Chang held a small meeting with several key employees from the advertising and marketing department to finalize the interview arrangements.
Since Xia Jiang needed to first complete her interviews with Wu Zhicheng, Qiu Hong, and the incubation base, which would take some time, the interview with Meng Chang’s department was scheduled for next Tuesday.
Meng Chang had already made excuses about being too busy with work, but he needed to push a few key employees from his department to fill in and go through the motions.
Of course, he didn’t give any special instructions, because Meng Chang had always felt that the employees in the advertising and marketing department were obedient tools. They had worked together for a long time with pleasant cooperation, and were relatively trustworthy.
The other people in the advertising and marketing department were unaware of Meng Chang’s little scheme, so naturally, they weren’t concerned about any problems with the interview. All they needed to do was complete the interview process normally.
After arranging the interview-related matters, Meng Chang returned to his workstation and continued playing “Mission and Choice.”
He had been playing intensively during work hours and had finally completed about 70-80% of the storyline content in the test version.
Meng Chang had no prior experience with RTS games, but since “Mission and Choice” wasn’t a traditional RTS game and had low operational requirements, it wasn’t very difficult for him to play. With just a bit of thought, he could reach his current stage.
However, in the later parts of the game, the difficulty would increase, requiring a deeper understanding of the game and better operations to complete.
Actually, for understanding the game, Meng Chang’s current progress was almost sufficient.
Like many AAA titles, once you’ve played through about 60-70% of the main game content, most of the game’s mechanics and gameplay features have already been unlocked. Playing further is mainly just to see the story’s conclusion.
So, Meng Chang felt fairly confident. From his perspective, the game didn’t seem that enjoyable.
Especially the AI system that the game emphasized—it didn’t seem that intelligent, which greatly reduced the enjoyment brought by the game’s core gameplay.
Meng Chang didn’t understand advanced game design theories, but as an ordinary player who had never touched RTS games before, he could actually represent the opinions of many “players outside the circle.”
Considering the large investment in “Mission and Choice,” if the game could only please RTS game players and players in the domestic single-player game circle, rather than “breaking the circle” and attracting many players who weren’t originally interested in RTS games, it would be difficult to recoup costs.
So Meng Chang felt that there was a significant possibility that the game would have poor sales after its release and wouldn’t recover its costs!
This way, even if his promotional plan failed, he might still be able to get a commission!
This greatly encouraged Meng Chang.
But once bitten by a snake, one fears wells and ropes for ten years. Meng Chang didn’t dare to be careless, so in the coming days, he would still spend a lot of time playing this game, just in case.
Every time employees from the advertising and marketing department passed by, they could see Meng Chang playing “Mission and Choice,” and they couldn’t help but be inspired and moved by Brother Meng’s professional dedication.
……
……
April 5th, Thursday.
Department heads Hu Xianbin, Min Jingchao, Jiang Yuan, Shen Renjie, Wang Xiaobin, Chang You, and others gathered at the Numa Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to review the application results of the new artificial intelligence technology in the game “Mission and Choice.”
Shen Renjie first explained to everyone the basic principles of this artificial intelligence technology breakthrough. Although most people were bewildered, they at least understood the main features of the game AI produced by this new technology compared to the previous AI.
The new technology allowed the AI to randomly simulate the actions of each unit at every step based on the game’s basic rules, and winning strategies would receive increased scores. Through tens of thousands or even more simulated matches, everything from the movement of a single unit to the overall strategy chosen throughout the game process could be quantified by artificial intelligence into a specific win rate change.
This way, the artificial intelligence could simultaneously control both sides of the battle for self-competition at any moment, and once the win rate became quantifiable, it could self-adjust to keep the entire game development under AI control.
When this technology was applied to “Mission and Choice,” there were two outstanding features.
First, in campaigns with “realistic elements,” the performance would be more authentic, and the difficulty more linear.
Originally, representing “realistic elements” through computer AI was relatively rigid.
In battle, when a unit disobeyed orders or an entire troop scattered in retreat, different manifestations would present vastly different impressions to players.
He An, Meng Chang, Hu Xianbin, and others had all playtested the game and generally felt that the AI’s performance wasn’t perfect because the representation of “realistic elements” was difficult to satisfy.
Due to the AI’s limitations, sometimes a troop’s retreat seemed completely irrational, which greatly diminished the sense of realism.
After applying the new technology, the AI’s simulation of “realistic elements” was based on projections from existing win rates. Every unit’s behavior when disobeying commands had a certain rationality to support it, greatly enhancing the sense of authenticity.
Simply put, when troops originally didn’t follow instructions, players might think “they’ve gone crazy,” but now when troops don’t follow instructions, players would feel like they’ve encountered a foolish subordinate.
The difference between “crazy” and “foolish” was the change brought by the new artificial intelligence technology.
Even in plot points after the protagonist’s speech, when human troops unleashed powerful fighting will due to encouragement, the AI could make smarter decisions than humans.
These decisions would significantly improve overall combat performance yet wouldn’t make players feel like they were cheating. There was no improvement in numerical values but rather tactical improvements, which maximally reduced the sense of unreality for players.
Second, as time progressed, the ceiling for human-versus-machine gameplay would be infinitely raised, supporting the introduction of more related gameplay features.
“Mission and Choice” was, after all, an RTS game. Although players like Meng Chang who were completely unfamiliar with RTS games might get stuck, for veterans, completing the game’s storyline wasn’t difficult. After completion, they would lose the motivation to continue exploring the game’s depth.
Other RTS games solved this by opening ladder matches, automatically filtering skilled players within the player base through the ladder system.
As players improved continuously through competition with skilled opponents, always pursuing higher goals, the game’s lifespan would naturally extend correspondingly.
But “Mission and Choice” took a completely different approach from traditional RTS games. To lower the entry barrier, it greatly reduced the operations required from players and only had two races with no balance to speak of.
PVP ladders could be implemented, but the effect would definitely not be good. Regular PVE intensity wasn’t enough, and skilled players would quickly lose interest.
Now, the new artificial intelligence technology could provide an “Eternal War” gameplay mode, or an “Endless Mode.” In this mode, the AI’s combat power would continuously increase, with a very smooth difficulty curve, allowing skilled players who enjoyed the game to climb the ladder through PVE, giving them a long-term goal.
Of course, PVP and even multiplayer gameplay modes could also be implemented, but because of poor balance, these modes would exist purely for entertainment.
Beyond this, the original campaign mode would also benefit.
Originally, campaign level design was completed by designers, and the difficulty curve might not be smooth. Sometimes the difficulty increase wasn’t enough, and players might complete several levels in succession without feeling any change. But if the difficulty increased too much, players would get stuck.
With the help of the new artificial intelligence technology, designers could not only optimize and adjust the original level designs but also dynamically adjust level difficulty based on real-time win rate calculations, making the story mode experience smoother for players.
After this series of changes, “Mission and Choice” had finally filled its last shortcoming, perfectly resolving the final minor flaw!
From now until release, Tenda Games’ designers would adjust the level design and some details of “Mission and Choice” to ensure the game would reach a perfect state upon release.
“Mission and Choice” was one of the first games to benefit from this breakthrough, and the reason for calling in Wang Xiaobin, Min Jingchao, and others was to apply this artificial intelligence technology to more games.
Especially “Fitness Battle” and GOG.
In “Fitness Battle,” game characters frequently conversed with players. This new technology could enhance the deep learning capabilities of in-game characters, allowing them to adjust their behavior based on player feedback to better align with player preferences.
In other words, the original character development only included physique and clothing, but after incorporating artificial intelligence technology, the in-game characters’ personalities would also change as they grew closer to the protagonist.
This way, every “Fitness Battle” player could cultivate their favorite character into a state of greater rapport with themselves in the game.
In GOG, this technology could also be used to develop higher difficulty AI opponents for human-versus-machine battles.
Of course, GOG already had a large number of professional players with various tactics and strategies already well developed. Given the current state of artificial intelligence technology, it was impossible for AI to fully grasp these tactics and compete with professional teams—there was still a long way to go.
But at minimum, this level of AI could certainly hold its own against players below the Platinum rank.
Although this was still just a prototype, its development potential was huge. Perhaps someday in the future, we might even see artificial intelligence competing on the same stage as professional teams.
In other words, although this artificial intelligence technology didn’t directly enhance the competitiveness of the AEEIS artificial intelligence on OTTO phones, it had an extremely profound impact on many of Tenda’s game departments!