Next Generation Game AI

What will next generation game ai look like?

It will animate smoothly. This is not a trivial problem but it is one that is solvable with modern tools and techniques. You can see some of it already in games like Battlefield 3 and Madden. Up the animation budget by 10x and the processing budget by 100x and suddenly you can start using some new animation techniques that weren't possible before.
 

For starters search becomes a viable tool at runtime. Not sure what stop animation you can play when running forward aiming backwards and jumping over a red turtle? No longer do you need to bake that transition into a graph. Search over stop animation frames and pick the one that pose matches best. Pops and bad blends are now only an issue because of lack of data and not because your hand built graph didn't handle every possible case.  

Fancy IK starts to be more reasonable. The players left foot is on a curb and his right is on the ground and he's strafing left. Well if his left toe crinkles then his hips will rotate by some massive jacobian * x. You laugh but this type thing will make a visual difference. It will help give actors that wonderfully overused artist term *weight*. Perhaps a better example might be handling two sword fighters clashing swords. Having the IK try to model the muscles involved would be complex but would give awesome results.

Just having more animation will make the AI look way better. Procedural hacks that slide guys around, melee animations that miss by several feet, walking near things without adjusting motion, these all go away when you can replace with animation. Well theoretically. It might become a cost issue as actor time for mocap becomes and issue. It could be expensive to have and actor climb over the 5ft wall and then the 4ft wall and then do it ten more times for variation.

So no, next gen game AI will not make you think you are playing with real people. It will not help you solve puzzles or make you feel like the world is filled with living things. It will animate smoothly and that is awesome.