can anyone point me towards a game where the devs actually spent a significant amount of time (relatively speaking) on the AI?
Chessmaster 9000?
For most games, though, AI is an unlimited time sink; every thousand hours you sink into making the AI smarter will barely enhance the player's enjoyment.
Or, often enough, will make the player's experience worse; I'm pretty sure there's no way I could possibly single-handedly kill hundreds of bad guys unless those bad guys were complete idiots who run towards me one at a time and never bother to hide, strategize, cooperate or even pick up the powerful weapons which are just sitting around on the freaking ground.
Chessmaster 9000?
For most games, though, AI is an unlimited time sink; every thousand hours you sink into making the AI smarter will barely enhance the player's enjoyment.
Or, often enough, will make the player's experience worse; I'm pretty sure there's no way I could possibly single-handedly kill hundreds of bad guys unless those bad guys were complete idiots who run towards me one at a time and never bother to hide, strategize, cooperate or even pick up the powerful weapons which are just sitting around on the freaking ground.