Hello, and good day to you all! Find below a few words from Kevin Gu regarding the state of Heroes of the Storm A.I.
My name is Kevin Gu, and I am a Senior Designer on the Heroes team. I have been working alongside Jeff Beaudoin, our Lead Gameplay Engineer, on our game’s A.I. We wanted to take a moment to update you all on where we are and how our three major A.I. initiatives are progressing.
Reconciliation of the Goal and Tactical Systems
There are two systems under the hood of Heroes that work together to drive agent behavior: the Goal system and the Tactical system. The Goal system is responsible for determining where A.I. agents should move, while the Tactical system provides agents with awareness of their surroundings so that they use and target their abilities intelligently. Last year, in an effort to improve agent in-combat positioning, we made it possible for the Tactical system to override the Goal system. Although we believe the changes were ultimately a good iteration, they did expose several underlying issues that we are addressing.
Moving forward we will be reverting some of changes made in the last major overhaul and restructuring the Tactical A.I. behavior tree. We are reinforcing the intended separation of the Goal and Tactical systems, and will be paying closer attention to make sure that any future changes do not disturb this delicate balance of power. This will reduce the frequency of agents being pulled in two directions at once, most commonly observed as agents rapidly bouncing back and forth in place. This work will also allow us to more quickly diagnose the root cause of misbehaving agents.
Laning and Defense
Our second priority is to improve A.I. agents’ understanding of “laning” and how they approach pushing and defending those lanes. In the most recent patch, we added logic that allows the Goal system to understand that lanes pushed closer to a core are usually more valuable to defend. Our next step is to include units within each lane to further modify how valuable lanes are to defending agents. Both pieces will ensure that the A.I. will better understand how to defend their lanes.
Goal Staging
Our third priority is to improve the ability for agents to prepare or “stage” for their assigned Goals. Our internal Tactical A.I. tree can now better determine if all assigned agents to a goal have arrived. This allows agents to intuit if they should wait in shrubs because their team members are not yet near their collective objective, and subsequently helps agents work together.
Thank You
We want to extend a big thank you to those who have shared feedback on A.I. We hear you! We are hard at work improving the A.I., and plan to bring the items mentioned above and more into the next major Heroes patch. Again, thank you for your continued patience, and we’ll see you in the Nexus!