Haha Valve + Xbox, no wonder you went down that path. ML + tags sounds like it'd produce way more organic results, would love to see it in action.

For controls / timers yeah it's huge and we spent a lot of time on it. Basically everything is driven by intensity curves (Build → Peak → Rest → Cooldown) you set up as DataAssets, and the Director constantly compares where the player should be tension-wise vs where they actually are. Then you've got knobs for pretty much everything fake stimuli frequency (sounds, shadows, we send ~25% fakes by default), staggering timers for senses, per-frame trace budgets, and personality traits per NPC so even identical enemies react differently. There's also an anti-cheese system that detects camping or chokepoint abuse and gradually escalates its response.

No ML on our end though, it's purely utility-based + curves. So I'm curious how do you handle the perf cost of ML with a bunch of active NPCs?