Whether or not emotive modelling should be part of NPC development is a difficult question to answer currently. And i do believe that it’s not exactly a yes or no question of whether it should have a place in games with NPCs and more of a question of should it be included in certain games. Emotive modelling means that the AI by having their own emotions can decide how they interact with the player and other NPCs. Now this could have serious impact on gameplay depending on the game and could be both positive and negative for the player. Imagine the player needs to talk to an NPC but that particular NPC was killed by another for somehow upsetting the other AI. Usually without this emotive modelling the NPCs wouldn’t be able to interact in this way. A good example is from the article below:
“There was one time I was playing a murder mystery game we had designed – and there was this doctor who came to diagnose how a character was murdered,” he says. “However, the doctor was being very rude to my character and kept making dismissive remarks. Initially I thought it was a bug because I knew the doctor’s personality was mostly pleasant, and I knew I hadn’t been rude to him. I thought, oh man, why is he being such an arsehole to me?
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“I looked through the code and it turned out that much much earlier in the game I’d been rude to a servant during dinner, and the servant had gone into the kitchen and told the people there what a jerk I’d been – one of those people was the doctor. He remembered that.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/12/video-game-characters-emotional-ai-developers
In FFXV AI are present constantly, from start to finish of the game. Some with their own personalities and traits, and others who are simply background characters. From enemy AI to friendly characters the player meets on their journey. When playing the game you’ll notice you are accompanied by 3 AI companions, each with different traits and personalities. They’re aimed at bringing something unique to the team and keeping the player immersed. They’ll follow the player wherever the player goes and they’ll traverse environments and fight in different ways. They appear to be quite intelligent AI on the surface but they do have quite a few issues.
They can notoriously get stuck on objects in the environment which means the only way to free them is to progress a large distance and the game will teleport them to you. The enemy AI in the game is relatively simple as they only have one or two attacks each with the exception of the final boss. The final boss of the game tries to mimic the player by fighting with the same weapons as them and using the same attacks, however they don’t seem to learn at all during the fight.