Here's One Area Where PS5 and Xbox Scarlett Could Make Huge Progress In

According to Youichiro Miyake, Square Enix's lead AI researcher, the PlayStation 5, next Xbox, and next-gen gaming in general are poised to make substantial progress in AI, especially when it comes to creating NPC crowd tech. The AI researcher believes that while we haven't seen large leaps in AI tech, especially in terms of how AI reacts to players, in the past, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Microsoft, and others are finally in a position to start advancement in this important area of game development.

"Another piece of the future of AI is obviously going to be machine learning coming in," said Miyake while speaking to VG247. "You're going to see more and more AI that reacts to a player's playstyle, to their personality. Are they a good gamer, a bad gamer, do they tend to go into combat, or are they exploratory? We're going to analyse those patterns and then the character AI will largely have a lot of automation, analysing these patterns and dynamically adjusting to that playstyle."

Miyake continued:

"However, a lot of the evolution of AI is going to come in the meta AI level, which will be controlled by the programmers. So them defining the overall rulesets of the game, but within it there's pocket-sized machine learning-based AI – that's probably the new thing we're going to see with AI evolution."

While the current generation brought a lot of changes to gaming, it was mostly in the visuals department or in online infrastructure. There hasn't been a lot of drastic tech changes that have changed and really evolved games, but it sounds like advancements in AI could provide the progress needed to usher in new types of experiences that were previously thought impossible.

In case you missed it, earlier this week, Sony Interactive Entertainment officially announced and partially detailed the PS5, which will be backwards compatible with the PS4, support 8K visuals, and have load times 19x faster than the PS4. At the moment of publishing, there's been no word when the system will release, or how much it will cost, however, Sony said the latter will be "appealing to gamers."

As for the next-gen Xbox, Microsoft has yet to officially announce anything or provide any information on specs or features.

Anyway, as always, feel free to leave a comment letting us know what you think or hit me up on Twitter @Tyler_Fischer_ and let me know there. What type of technological improvements do you want to see from the next generation of gaming.

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