6. Advanced AI
Any gamer will tell you that one of the biggest things that can hold back a game from feeling immersive is the intelligence of the other characters. Whether they are your allies or enemies, you can always expect their responses to be limited in some capacity. For example, in Mass Effect, you can only talk to your crew so many times before they just repeat the same dialogue over and over again. This limits the amount of interaction between you and your crew, which limits your connection to them. One minute you are talking to a character, getting invested in them, when suddenly you are hit with the fact that they are not real. Of course this fact is never lost on you unless you are crazy, but it still stings because it breaks the illusion instantly. It doesnt ruin the game or anything, but it pulls you out momentarily. One of the hopes for video games going forward is that this illusion breaking limitation of the AI will eventually disappear, or at least be designed in a way to best present the illusion of a real being. Now I realize that intelligence and behavior is one of the hardest things to program, so the difficulty of such a task is not lost on me. There is also the voice acting of the characters to account for, which could be a nightmare considering how many variations and responses you would need to simulate life. Still, finely crafted intelligence is a hope I think we all share for video games. Flawed AI can break a game. If your enemies dont have the intelligence to best avoid you killing them, it is not fun or immersive. And in games where you have other characters to care about, this is not possible if they dont feel real. Artificial intelligence that accurately replicates a real living being is something weve strived towards achieving for a long time. Lets hope were not too far off from that goal.