Exoprimal’s multiplayer matches contain some of the year’s most hectic moments, and they always seem to know the right combination of dinosaurs to challenge players with during a match. The game seems a little repetitive at first, but you’ll start to notice that the more you play, the more unique types of enemies and objectives you’ll encounter. The system is invisible to normal players and was not discussed much prelaunch, so Digital Trends asked technical director Kazuki Abe in an interview with Exoprimal’s dev team about how it works exactly.
It turns out, that like Leviathan pulling the strings to create these combat scenarios in the world of Exoprimal, the game has a behind-the-scenes AI that determines what players will face in each encounter they come across during a match.
“Exoprimal makes use of AI in the sense that it looks at players’ gameplay for an evaluation purpose,” Abe tells Digital Trends. “Based on players’ in-game progress, skill level, abilities, win-loss ratio, and other things of that nature, the in-game AI does an evaluation to determine where the player falls in terms of difficulty and offers up a variety of enemies based on that. If players are extremely skilled, there’s the possibility the AI will issue them more challenging dinosaurs in the next round of gameplay. If players struggle with a certain type of enemy, the AI will understand that this group of players might be quite as skilled and will do its best to shift the difficulty.”
Capcom did a lot of testing to ensure that this AI worked well on active multiplayer servers that thousands of players of different experience levels use. “Being able to balance the AI with the server functionality to make sure players are getting the optimal experience based on how they’re performing and the team composition they’re working with was challenging,” Abe says.
It’s some enlightening insight into what’s actually going on behind the scenes to give Exoprimal variety and ensure the experience stays fresh for returning players and still feels fun for new ones. It’s also technological knowledge Abe hopes to bring to future Capcom multiplayer titles. This AI system, along with the emergent nature of the game’s narrative in multiplayer matches, makes Exoprimal one of the most dynamic multiplayer games out now.
Exoprimal is available now for PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S and is part of Xbox Game Pass. Stay tuned for more from our interview with the game’s development team as well.
