You often view 3D games on a 2D screen. That doesn’t mean that a game is natively 2D and the 3D world is an inconvenient step that can be bypassed. Actually the opposite, the 2D representation on screen is just a projection.
In VR, for example, the same 3D scene will be rendered twice, once for each eye, from two viewpoints 10-15cm apart.
If you don’t have an internal 3D representation of the world, the AI would need to generate exactly the same scene from a very slightly different perspective for each eye, without any discrepancies or artefacts.
And that’s not even discussing physics, collisions or any form of consistent world logic that happens off-screen. Or multiplayer!
In VR, for example, the same 3D scene will be rendered twice, once for each eye, from two viewpoints 10-15cm apart.
If you don’t have an internal 3D representation of the world, the AI would need to generate exactly the same scene from a very slightly different perspective for each eye, without any discrepancies or artefacts.
And that’s not even discussing physics, collisions or any form of consistent world logic that happens off-screen. Or multiplayer!