The Monolith Productions team isn't alone in believing that one of gaming's frontiers lies with the unpredictability of AI-controlled enemies and allies. Mitu Khandaker teaches on the topic as assistant arts professor at NYU Game Center -- but as chief creative officer at artificial-intelligence company Spirit AI, she's also working with a team to develop technology for companies to use in their own games.

"What we do is build tools to help developers creatively author story scenarios and author personalities for characters and the kinds of things that characters might say, but then those characters might improvise based on the space that you've authored for them," Khandaker told Engadget. "There's a lot of potential there for players to really have deeper, more meaningful conversations with characters."

"There's a lot of potential there for players to really have deeper, more meaningful conversations with characters."

Spirit AI's efforts could be summarized as "building technology which will let us make the walking simulator a conversation," according to Khandaker. Think of the squad's idle chatter in Mass Effect, or the casual smalltalk during long car rides in Final Fantasy XV: Pre-written, nonessential dialogue tumbling out of an algorithmic generator that organically delivers exposition and character detail. But what if those AI characters talking to the player and making up responses on the fly — even if they're enemy grunts with their guns drawn?

Khandaker can imagine creating games where the enemies aren't just tokens or pawns but more fully formed virtual characters. "Instead of just committing violence upon some kind of enemy, maybe [players will be] trying to understand their motives, she said. "Now, in this cultural context, more than ever, a human understanding of the reasons why people make decisions they do is super-important. Even if, on some level, we think decisions people make might be evil, we still need to have the level of understanding because that's how we learn and grow and how we combat evil."

What Shadow of War won't have are human enemies that players can mind control or kill in gruesome ways: Your foes will be Mordor-born Orcs who span the gray-brown gamut and exhibit the violent, traitorous ways of their race. This is intentional.

"One of the challenging things is striking the balance of having a game that's fundamentally pretty gritty and violent, but also making sure that we have this humor in there and this levity to it," de Plater said. "Ultimately, even though it is dealing with some dark themes, there is a cartoony level of violence as well. Orcs represent these caricatures. Everything's turned up to 11 in terms of their personality and their characters and their faults, and the violence of their society and how power-crazed they all are; how backstabbing and cutthroat they are against anyone."

In short, you'll be dispatching and commanding a class of enemy designed to be dynamically interesting yet disposable in a way that shouldn't trigger a player's ethical qualms. Game critic Austin Walker believed that the first game, Shadow of Mordor, failed to justify Talion's anti-Orc kill-and-enslave crusade: "But we're told again and again that these Orcs want to destroy beautiful things. It just doesn't hold up, and this tension extends to every element of their narrative and systemic characterizations. These Orcs have fears, interests, values, rivalry and friendships. Some Orcs are lovingly protective of their bosses or underlings. But they are 'savage creatures' that 'hate beauty,' so go ahead and enslave them," Walker wrote.

At least Shadow of War will strive to explore new and uncomfortable relationships between player and enemy. Even if it never lets players forget Orcs are villains at their core, some will attempt to liberate themselves from any overlord, dark or bright, de Plater said. He didn't specify whether these autonomy-seeking enemies will be a scripted faction in the game. But imagine wandering down the sludgy Mordor foothills only to find a procedurally-generated band of Orcs that avoid conflict and try to run away from you, the bogeyman who's murdered (or recruited) all their friends, as they search for a better life.

Imbuing enemies with relatable traits -- human traits -- is as fascinating as it is discomforting. Since their inception, single-player games have driven a hard wedge between players and enemies by making the latter alien and threatening. Space Invaders and Galaga literally used aliens, while Missile Defense tossed unthinking explosives at the vulnerable people populating the player's cities. The dawn of the first-person-shooter genre featured demonic monsters in Doom and Nazis in Wolfenstein 3D, enemies so unrelatable that players don't think when gunning them down.

Spirit AI's clients are using its AI-conversation tech to augment NPC allies, though Khandaker's team is starting to graft it onto enemies. But it's really up to whoever uses Spirit's tools, and whichever studio decides to challenge players with ordinary foes that do more than shoot in their direction.

"I would love to see that as a moral choice that you make. It should be sometimes deeply troubling, depending on your particular game, that somebody is so human and so full of their own motive, doing the things that they're doing, that it's not so easy to dehumanize them," Khandaker said.

"I think that through good, well-considered design, we'll get to a point where actually these interactions with characters help us to better understand the motivations that real people have."

"This is why I think it comes down to designing photo-realistic, naturalistic AI really well. If [designers] let you push them around, you're going to maybe transfer that to real people. If, however, they don't — if they push back and they try and do the emotional labor of helping you to understand what it is to interact with someone in a nice, well-considered way — then you can maybe transfer that to your interactions with people," Khandaker said. "I think that through good, well-considered design, we'll get to a point where actually these interactions with characters help us to better understand the motivations that real people have."

Whether AI tech will develop substantially in the next few years and, ultimately, whether improving enemy and ally AI will positively affect the player's experience, is another question. As Compulsion Games' Creative Director Guillaume Provost points out, making smarter enemies doesn't matter much if the player doesn't know what's going on.

"Making AIs that are believable often involve stuff that's not that technical and has a lot more to do with the acting parts that are involved in the AI," Provost said. "So it's not so much the sophistication of the technology behind it as it is the sophistication of expressing what's going on in their heads to the player."

"It's not so much the sophistication of the technology behind it as it is the sophistication of expressing what's going on in their heads to the player."

For Provost, that meant tweaking some gameplay in Compulsion Games' latest title, We Happy Few, which was released in Early Access last year. In it, players try to escape an English city whose denizens imbibe drugs en masse to forget their communal crimes -- and punish those who won't do the same. In playtesting, this meant making the hostile NPCs warn the player several times before violently reacting. They couldn't assume players would pick up on cues because in gaming, players' attention is focused on what they're interacting with at the time.

"The truth is, it's not a movie where you sit down and watch people the whole time. You're actively doing stuff. You're running around, you're stealing stuff. The player has a smaller portion of their brain left to understand what the people around them are doing," Provost said.

Which is why developers have to treat player attention as a resource and be smart about what they make intelligent. Provost recalled a story about the grunts in the first Halo who were programmed to yell out "I surrender" and wave their arms around -- but players would gun them down before the little enemies could bark out their lines. Similarly, Provost doesn't see nearly as much use for plugging more AI into enemies to make them smarter in future games.