I think people like myself, who has experience in programming, appreciates the dragon AI more than others.

They have certain actions like "pick up creature or person", "swoop down breathing", "land", "land on structure", "circle around something", "attack in air". The choices they make however seems to be fairly logical and natural.

But think about the huge amount of "space" that is assigned to a dragon - it's a gigantic 3rd cylinder which can change if the thing it's attacking moves. This cylinder can have lots of obstacles like mountains, houses, rivers etc.

To get a giant dragon to move dynamically in this environment is not easy you know... There's 100s if not 1000s of variables at ever second.

As far as I've seen: A dragon has never landed on some structure which makes it clip or not be able to attack, it's never landed on a forest area where trees clip into it, it's never done it's "in-flight breath attack" from a position that it can't hit it's target, it's never moved upside down or otherwise defined physics of flying. I could go on and on.


If you know how difficult it is to create these dynamic AIs... You have to be impressed with Bethesda.
Congratulations to the programmers of Bethesda I say! :celebration:

I am also a developer and the way I think it was accomplished is that dragon's only attack in certain pre-set areas. I think they have marked the areas in a given zone where a dragon may land and not cause any glitches.

I too appreciate the dragon fights, but have been less impressed with my ability to use terrain to avoid breath attacks. They seem to go around natural elements that I am hiding behind - perhaps so the combats cant be trivialized by hiding behind a rock.

I'd appreciate it a lot more if I wasn't too busy running away. :ahhh:

Seriously though, yeah they are a very impressive achievement. :thumbsup:

Apart from the odd header in to the ground or side of a building, the AI is quite impressive
I restarted last night, and while going through the "Prisoner Escaping" part i realised i had never noticed the poor imperial soldier being dropped by the Dragon from a great height. Made my day!

I'm well satisfied with Dragon AI. I would only ever venture to improve by make them more dangerous without raising simply their HP.

However I am a bit put off by most other creature AI. For example there is no difference (at least in practice I don't speak for code) between a Skeever and a Bandit. They both appear to use the same pathing and have the same goal. Swing until you die. But it doesn't ruin my game. I know I or someone else will mod it when we can.

I could not disagree more.. if you think skyrim's AI is impressive ..you dont know gaming. Monster tri hunter had good Dragon AI .. this game..good lord.

The only thing I hate about dragon's AI is how they prefer to fight mudcrabs/wolves/trolls on the other side of the mointain(or just far away) than to fight their main enemy - Dragonborn, even when they saw you. And if the frost-breathing dragon fights with frost-immune creatures....you know.
Pisses me off to rush for them, it's like "Hey you, I'M HERE!!".

I absolutely love this game, but I must say that the Dragon fights are the worst aspect of the game. Sometimes they just fly around you but never land, and they move to quick to shoot with an arrow. And forget about killing one on your own, it will always land so that there is no real way to get up to it and start whacking at it without taking a ton of fire damage first, and then it just flies off.
I guess it kind of makes sense, I do like the dragon fights though when they attack cities, those are pretty good. But encountering them in the wild just svcks.

Alduin is actually throwing the poor bastard at you. He hit me once, and I couldn't stop laughing.

Come on now.

Just try and be fair.

How can you go on praising Bethesda about their Dragon A.I. when my character cannot even sit down cross legged on the ground?

All joking aside it is pretty impressive what goes on in game.

I came accross a dragon with a companion and the fight slowly made it's way into the midst of a giant camp, getting giants, mammoths, dragons and companions all thrown into the mix.

I can appreciate that everyone has their own personal preferences, likes and dislikes but when you see what some people are moaning about you have to wonder is it the game that's been "dumbed down" or some of the people playing it?

Azrael
The Nord with the Sword

I love them. Whenever I am strolling down on the roads and talking to my friend next to me, my Turtlebeach X11 quickly betray the roars of a Dragon, where I proceed to [censored] pants and exclaim "DRAGON" and when that invisible choir that follows me around suddenly goes active, it gets my blood flowing and plethora of other emotions coursing through my body.

Dragons are one of the best achievements of AI I have ever witnessed in a videogame.

I used dragonrend on a dragon in a city, to force it to land. It didn't, however, land anywhere nearby and flew all the way around a hill before it landed. Needless to say, it was able to go fly against instantly after landing. Not very impressive landing AI there. Makes me think that, like misterchris001 said, they have specific places they can land on and in that particular situation, the closest would have been around a hill, outside the city.

Good point but I've had dragons spawn in some pretty weird awkward areas... The world is huge, I doubt they could have gone over the entire with QA'ing if a dragon can land there.
Perhaps what they've done is defined parameters for the enviroment if a dragon can land on a it of ground (radius of clear ground, % of steepness, etc) and another set for when a dragon can "perch" on something.

Keep in mind as well that you can pretty much lead a dragon away from the initial spawn area, if you move slowly it will follow you and not fly away.

I think you're right about the dragon breath curving around obstacles. Though in real life if you tried to hide behind a little rock and someone fired a giant flamethrower at it you would get hurt!

Seriously? :rofl: Thats classic! I just looked up and saw this little figure plummenting above me. Never realised the evil bugger was actually trying to hit me with him

I've seen dragons do weird things, like getting trapped under the world mid-flight, or crashing violently to the ground from flying too low.

Still, I agree their AI is pretty awesome overall.

i love the dragons in this game, including any reasonable ai or even the ai glitches.
they strike fear everytime i hear the distant roar, or subtle music change of one appearing.

i dont think random dragon encounters in built up areas can be done much better. unless its scripted and/or in open areas like monster hunter tri (pfft) or dragon age(pfft)

I actually tend to disagree with the A.I of the dragons. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty good most of the times, even great, but, and this is a big but, the game itself makes the dragon's kneel to it.

Many of the dragons are programmed to have certain crash zones, for example, no matter how much you lead the dragon from Shear Point away from it's resting spot, it will always crash in the same area (often bugging up), or just simply land if there is no such place to land. Courtesy of the game trying to make the dragons non-glitchy, by adding specific points where they can actually crash. This is why only some areas spawn dragons.

Secondly, If you're being fair to the dragons, you are having a blast, and I generally tend to be as fair as i can. But hiding behind rocks/very far away, they sometimes just stand there looking dumbfounded. Most of the times they seek you out, sometimes i even have dragons peering behind a rock to breathe fire/ice at me, which is VERY cool. However, when the terrain doesn't permit them because they may glitch or bug up somehow, they just stand there like idiots.

Third, and this is by far probably the worst mistake. Dragons land before half of their hp. Now i know what you're thinking, melee characters are not viable etc. etc. Guess what, i don't care. Get a bow and arrow and shoot. Get magic and shoot. get .If i was a dragon i would NEVER give up the advantage of open air and breathing down on you, to land and be smacked around silly with a two-handed hammer. I loved it when i first saw the elder dragon attack Solitude (Wohoo an interior cell dragon battle!) but then it landed in between 15 guards and got killed in about 15 seconds. Now you can argue that they are prideful and whatnot, but pride != stupidity. I want to see a dragon being EVIL, shouting at my character until it can't do anything anymore.

Now if we get the creation kit on our hands, and i get some free time, I'm gonna check the script the dragons have. If their script is how i think it is, it shouldn't be too hard to make them smarter and tougher. Maybe possibly adding more shouts to the dragons (they did invent them after all, why should they only have fire breath and frost breath sans Alduin).

Now don't get me wrong, i still think it's great AI, i just think that the dragons themselves don't know how to use what they have to their own advantage.

wut? I always hide behind rocks 'n stuff to avoid breaths (if there are any nearby).

It's a small touch but I love the way my vision in 3rd person goes all dark and blurry for a bit (spec at night time) after a dragon :flamethrower: me.

It annoys the heck out of me when its happening but makes the fight that more epic. :thumbsup:

Ummm no. Some of my best dragon battles have been in the wild.

I was in the mountains and encountered an elder dragon and had the most epic battle in Skyrim to date. I had to hide under a rock arch and it would land and spray fire through the arch so I had to go out in the open again until it started to fly... I had to run and snipe it with my bow and get under the arch while it was in the air. It took me awhile to finally kill it.

This other time I was near a ruined cabin and a dragon flew over so I ran into the cabin and ended up fighting bandits. One guy I knocked outside, so he was stuck out there with the dragon. lol It killed the dude, flew off and then came back where I shot at it through holes in the walls and ceiling. It landed outside and blasted frost through the front door while I introduced it to more arrows.

Then there was this time I had a dragon fly over and I saw it attacking a group. I ran over there full tilt and assisted a group of travelling Khajiit in fighting the beast. Afterwards one of the cats gave me a quest..

Dragon battles have been a lot of fun so far for me. I agree with the OP, the dragons have been well done.

... I guess it depends on the level of experience one has.. I am not impressed at all. I am not saying it is not hard work to create the sequences, or that anyone can do it, but they certainly don't impress me. Honestly, the dragon behavior and animations in Witcher look better to me, not to mention the NPC animations.

And you are forgetting to compliment the non-Bethesda developers who make the sequences possible, like Havok developers, for example.

Hey I'm here? Wrong shout my friend. Use dragonrend

I actually agree with most of your post but this doesn't relate to the AI itself - it's just how they've setup the dragons.
The resting spot is as you say just a decision they've made to stop dragons from crashing at crazy places.
About landing at half health isn't an AI thing, that's just a parameter they set. Probably to make it easier for melee-only characters to kill dragons.

Most of your critisism is about the difficulty of fighting dragons and doesn't really relate to how they've programmed the AI.

I agree the dragon AI and Skyrim's overall AI for anything is incredibly well made.

I do have to state... I have seen the dragons go underground. fly irregularly (fly down then suddenly fly straight up in the air or something similar that just looks totally unrealistic), and fly through mountains/trees several times on many many many occasions.

I've not seen them clip underground or through mountains... They might have clipped some trees but with the engine not having enviro-destruction (in other words it can't uproot/break the trees) the only choice would be dragons getting stuck in forests.

I'm on PC so are you on console Shaddow? Different platforms have different bugs I guess?