The Game-changing Role of AI in Competitive Esports
In this blog, we’ve covered the many contributions that AI has brought to the gaming industry, from generative narrative to our own AI anti-cheat solution, there are many ways that AI has helped shape a more technologically advanced gaming industry.
In this piece, we will examine how AI has helped esports professional athletes and teams become even better at their games.
So, esports athletes train every day to become better at their game of choosing, either getting to know the maps and the movimentations on them very well, or how to use better a weapon or spell, or how to master a character and to use it in different ways to surprise their opponents. These things come from many hours of gaming, study and strategising with teammates and coaches.
AI Tools That Can Help Players Improve Their Performance
With the advent of AI tools for numerous activities, the esports scene also started using these tools to help develop player ability, tactics and other things to improve performance.
Esports video games like CS or League of Legends are, most of the times, decided in the tiniest of details, a pixel to the right or to the left can mean that a game is lost or won, a path choosing or a spell on a certain time might be what differs a team that wins the trophy to the one that keeps on losing in the final. What is all this? This is data, skill too, but data! And what is good at collecting and analysing huge amounts of data? AI.
So, there have been developments of tools that use in-game data to analyze player behavior and upgrade the gameplay of the athletes. The data analyzed by these tools can be of the nature of in-game decisions, match statistics and player movements on the map. With AI collecting and analyzing this kind of data, the team can know where the player missed an opportunity, why the player missed it and most importantly, how the player can improve at each moment of the game.
With esports attracting more and more funding and sponsor deals and with talks that sometime soon esports can become equivalent to sports and even figure in olympic games, constant improvement and game evolution have to go to the next level, if in a “traditional” sport you already do this with football clubs analyzing all the stats collected to buy players, making tactical changes and other actions, esports were expected to do that as well. An example of a tool of this kind is iTero, a League of Legends AI coach that helps players improve their abilities on map movement, champion pick and also builds.
AI Bots
One other topic that can be discussed is AI bots and how they can be used to help esports players. Now, it is good to play against bots, you are no longer considered a noob!! On a more serious note, with an AI capable of producing bots that can learn from real players’ moves and tactics, the world of bots is on a whole different level.
Nowadays, a player can train their skills with these high-end bots because not only do they have human-like behaviors but they can be programmed to play on the highest of levels, meaning that if you can win from these bots, you are one step closer to winning to all your opponents in real life.
AI Serving Esports Broadcast
On a different note, let’s talk about how AI can help the broadcast and content part of esports. The transmission of esports is somehow a new thing, up until now the broadcasts were amateur but they have been more and more professionalized by the official competition holders. The next step is for these transmission rights to start being sold to TV channels and other major broadcasters and with this, the transmission needs to go up in quality. With AI, esports broadcasters can learn how to better trim content for highlights, use past statistics to better comment on the games, and do post-game analysis with a more and more accurate perception of everything that went in the game, even some details that they might have missed during the transmission such as things that were happening on the other side of the map, builds, different paths and many other things.
With AI-tailored transmissions, the possibilities of generating content in each game that is broadcasted are up exponentially as well.
Other Possible Improvements from AI