Bandai Namco Studios Inc.

Bandai Namco Studios uses an autonomous AI system to automatically play through game levels and dungeons to detect bugs during game development. The AI navigates environments without prior map data, building its own understanding of the space as it explores.

The AI testing system, developed within Bandai Namco Studios' AI Tech Unit, uses autonomous navigation technology similar to that used in robotic vacuum cleaners: it creates its own maps of dungeons and terrain to move through the game world without pre-programmed routes. The goal is to surface bugs caused by in-game map elements and AI character interactions. This work is described by a technical director in the AI Tech Unit's Game AI Section as distinct from in-game character AI, and is an active part of the studio's development workflow.

Bandai Namco Studios uses AI systems to control the behavior of non-player characters (NPCs) and enemy characters across its game titles, enabling them to navigate environments, make combat decisions, and react dynamically during gameplay.

The studio's AI Tech Unit, specifically its Game AI Section, develops decision-making AI for in-game characters. This work, which won a CEDEC Award of Excellence in 2021, includes systems for enemy behavior in the Ace Combat series and group behavior for party-based battles in Blue Protocol. Engineers describe the technology as enabling characters to avoid obstacles, adapt tactics, and move autonomously. A next-generation AI town system making RPG NPCs behave more like real humans is also in development within the Innotech team.

Bandai Namco Studios uses an in-house AI-powered super-resolution system, developed by its Innotech research and development team, to upscale in-game graphics quality. The system has been tested or actively used in more than 20 game projects across the studio.

The super-resolution system was developed by a machine learning engineer on the Innotech team using computer vision techniques. It takes lower-resolution game imagery as input and produces higher-quality upscaled output, allowing games to look better without proportionally increasing the computational cost of rendering high-resolution assets from scratch. The Innotech team also applies machine learning to speed up particle systems for real-time fluid simulation. These tools are embedded directly into game production pipelines alongside game teams.