There's been a lot of buzz in interviews about the new features of "radiant AI," but one thing I haven't heard about it's deductive reasoning among NPCs. In Every TES game (namely Morrowind and Oblivion in particular) NPCS are almost completely oblivious to anything going on around them, especially when it comes to stealing and murder committed by the player. They are never really aware of the players presence, nor do they gain suspicions about theft or murder of things/people related to them.

In oblivion, for instance, you could walk into somebody's house, walk right past them, and then go steal all their trinkets upstairs, and they won't even give you a second glance once they walk into the newly object-vacant room. there's no "hey, where's my stuff!" or "why are you skulking around upstairs," the same thing applies to murder, you can be dragging a dead body through the street without a second glance. I mean if the game allowed you to I'm sure you could dismember a guard's body and fling his limbs at people on the street and they'd just go about their business.

It'd be nice if this time NPCs would gain suspicions about you if they saw you doing something suspicious, such as if they see you in their house and then all their stuff disappears, they might lose disposition towards you, or might even run to a guard out of suspicion, in which case guards might be more willing to keep a close eye on you. Likewise if you murder somebody, and people had seen you around the victim previously, then they might gain the same sort of suspicions, or even put two and two together and find out you did it, depending on any circumstantial evidence. Not sure how hard such a thing would be to implement (depends n the extents of it), but just throwing the idea out there..

I think I remember doing this with Deadly Reflex once. Anyway, back to the topic at hand: I agree that NPCs need to think a bit more but can understand that it would take a heap of time and effort, let's just hope Bethesda's new engine touches on this.

Yes, true. If I'm right, people in Red Dead Redemption start shooting at you if you dare to draw your gun. I loved in OB how I could stand in front of an NPC, draw my bow, take aim and just shoot him in the face while he's standing there smiling at me, asking "How are you?" :facepalm:

Hopefully NPCs will notice dead bodies.
It's pretty odd and immersion-killing when you kill a bandit with a sneak attack, notice that another bandit is coming your way, unaware, and never notices his dead friend as you look at him from the shadows.

The guards did notice bodies, but they didn't do a thing about them. They didn't clean up the mess either, leaving the dead in the streets.

And, yes, home owners should keep following you if you wander inside their home, like the shopkeepers do. It was way too easy in Oblivion to run to the house's second floor while the owner is staring at a wall, steal everything valuable and be greeted on your way out.

Fallout New Vegas has NPCs who react when you aim your gun at them. Skyrim's NPCs will most likely react if you're walking around with your weapon out or if you're aiming at them with your bow.

I was just thinking about this myself. I lucked into a couple of good chameleon items and just after saving and before quitting I went on a mini-rampage in Bruma. Killed one person just as another person walked by the body that was still flying through the air. They looked at it and kept on going downstairs. Couldn't they figure out that someone had just killed the guy who hadn't even hit the floor yet. That or the fact that before I saved I was robbing Bruma blind without anyone noticing a thing. I hope that they improve on the situational awareness of the NPCs. It could help with friendly fire incidents too.

I did have one of the Surilie Brothers start following me when I was trying to rob there house. So they will follow you if they get suspicious (I suume it is becuase they almost caught you stealing). The entire staff of Bruma's chapel started following me after I started stealing books from their area as well. If only the behavior is improved while they are adding other friend asks you to stay the night when you enter late instead of getting mad reactions.

This is doable in some scenarios, but it would require a lot of specific attention per NPC - which means a lot of development time debugging all of them. For a game with 5 major cities, that could be a tall order. Still, it would be nice of NPC's weren't total drooling idiots.

Seeing you standing next to a recently living dead body should be fairly easy, as should becoming suspicious if you start mucking about in their bedroom. However, more complex deductive reasoning is going to be a lot harder - especially if its cross-cell. I wouldn't count on seeing any NPC detectives if I were you.

It's nothing to do with the engine really, more jsut AI scripting.

I wouldn't be able to write any code/script or anything, but just out of rational planning, I think each npc would have a preset timelimit in which they come looking for you if you've been out of sight in their house for too long, and a preset threshold for suspicion. Likewise there could also be a body "timer" in which an npc would accuse you for circumstantial murder if they found you near a body in their house, or if they saw you in their house and then found a body elsewhere in their house. Given those timers and values, I think each NPC could have an "awareness factor" or something on a scale of 0-100, and depending on that, it increases the likelihoods of them jumping to conclusions in the case of theft or murder, freaking out and running for the guards in the case of theft or murder, or following you around their house. If you've wronged somebody in the past, their awareness factor would increase, and they'd be more keen on keeping any eye on your for a set period of time until they go back to their default setting. In oblivion it's obvious that NPCs can acknowledge dead bodies, but they don't build any suspicions based on who was around at the time of discovery.

Same thing applies for theft, if they find missing goods in their house, and you are there, they may accuse and/or lose disposition towards you.

The suggestion mainly applies to their houses or things they are guarding if they are a guard.

Assassins Creed did a fairly good job at having civilians react to murder. Once they realized the body was dead, they ran. If you killed an archer on a roof and let their body fall to the streets below, people would panic and run, then the guards would come running to the scene and try to figure out who killed the guy. Sure it was simple, but it was enjoyable and pretty realistic on the large scale.

I'd like to see cities much more populated this time around. OB didn't really do a good job at making people look like they were "busy". Most NPC's just stood around looking stupid in the middle of the streets for no reason. Or they'd walk around seemingly aimless.

I'd like to see the poor huddled in groups around a fire to stay warm. There is a civil war going on so I'd like to see people traveling in groups for safety.

I'm sure all of this are things that the developers have already thought of so I'm optimistic about these things being in the game.

At least NPC's don't randomly walk into a wall repeatedly like they do in Morrowind. Sure, it was generally a pathing problem, but still - seeing a character just bounce off of a wall is kind of embarrassing.

It sounds like gamesas really took these kinds of complaints to heart, though. From what I've read so far, it appears that townsfolk will be much more "active" than before.

They said if you drop a sword on the ground someone may pick it up (for himself, or to give it back to you). That implies some degree of npc awareness, it's very likely it works for dead bodies alarm too. I can't wait to see the improved Radiant AI. I also hope the npcs will react in a convincing and natural manner to you being naked, or to your impressive outfit, or if they see you sneaking around. It's funny how many npcs told me 'you look like quite the alchemist' in Oblivion, how the lol did they know it, but no one said "oh boy, I would kill for a bow like yours" or "get that hood off, will you? someone may take you for a thief" and all this sort of remarks that give you the impression that those npcs are actually alive and see you.

That would be so great. Another thing would be that NPC in a group of hostile attacker should react to the death of their buddies - renewed rage, grief, fear and attempt to flee...

I hope they can manage that. I can see such a scripting devolving in exponential chaos - hungry NPC.1 goes in house.2 to steal bread, NPC.2 freaks out and accuses you, guards, chase... Not that I would mind.

I pretty much agree with everything in the OP. :goodjob:

*two guards are talking*
*one leaves*
*I murder the guard that stayed*
*other guard comes back, "wait... weren't you alive a second ago?o well, i didn't see anything so I'll just pretend nothing happened."

Metal gear solid has been doing much better AI since 1998

Metal Gear non-solid also has the most linear AI, the enemies can only see in a straight line.

lol thats what its like for everyone in the game.
put a whole group of dead bodies in a pile and no one would care lol

Baby steps. Don't expect a life simulator anytime soon. :poke:

It's not just reaction to murder as people are pointing out (it's handled slightly better in New Vegas). It's reaction to the states of faction members. If a fellow faction member is in a state of alert near the NPC, he should become alert to. What would help in terms of coding would be the addition of the following features:

- More NPC states that add AI packages to their behaviour:
A ) "Curious": They search the area and pick up items from the ground. Useful for prospectors, harvesters, scavengers
B ) "Entertained": They perform entertainment animations: Dance, sing, clap their hands, play instruments (if they have one), talk and drink alcohol (which makes them stumble around). Useful for taverns, parties, camps, holidays
C ) "Idle": In Oblivion they just wander around, but here they could randomly read, pvssyr, look at the sky, whistle, smoke, etc. Most importantly, they should look out for people they don't know and have a chance to add them to their relatives list.
D ) "Mourning": If they find a fresh corpse of a relative, they'll switch to alert state. If they find the the grave (or decaying body) of a relative, they have a mourning animation.
E ) "Bored": NPCs actively seek out faction members and relatives to copy their current package.

- Additionally, besides "Factions", each NPC should have a "Relatives" list, which consists of NPCs they are more likely to talk to, and which will cause them to switch states and/or to seek out those people and mimic their packages. They're also likely to travel and search for loved ones or protect them from harm.

With those, the world would feel far more alive. Modders have attempted to tweak Radiant AI to have a more realistic way to interact with the world. However, the problem is the amount of background threads dedicated to the AI and the way the engine deals with it. In Oblivion, everything operates in low-level priority in cells away from the player, meaning NPCs will only perform the most basic actions, with a huge delay. Everything is very "staged" in the sense people only wake up from their slumber in order to act around the player, except to be moved from cell to cell. So it's very difficult to simulate a living breathing world.

What I think Bethesda will be doing is to add more idle animations to the game, like in Fallout and Fallout New Vegas, so instead of seeing them sitting around, they'll appear to be doing something like tending to their gardens or repairing their houses, or making weapons. It's nothing new, Gothic did this 10 years ago.

yeah this was really fixed in 3 and 4 though. I was mainly pointing out the reactions to situations that did happen to fall in their line of sight.

In Gothic 3 if you stole alot of stuff or killed a few people in a town, the guards would stop you and say something like:

A lot of valuable things have gone missing or someone has been killing are people, do you know anything about it? And if you kept killing/stealing they would accused you again and if you could not bribe/talk your way out of it, they would attack you, it was awesome.

They should do something similar in Skyrim, simple yet effective.

I agree I think if an NPC sees a dead body in their home, They should run outside screaming "Murder, someones been murdered, help" which would lead the guards or more villagers to come into the home seeing the dead body and then go search for whoever commited the crime. Which is most likely will be the Dragonborn unless we have rogue NPC's running around.

Um, can you even drag bodies around the street? I don't remember the body dragging feature.

yes you could in Oblivion. It was just tough to do and it didn't do anything, so it wasn't worth the effort.

A little more situational awareness would be a plus.

At one time in Oblivion I was on a mission with a fellow fighter from the guild (Maglir). We ventured into an abandoned building looking for clues, and I accidentally snagged a carrot off of the table, after which he proceeded to scream for help to catch the thief! And of course the city watch showed up only seconds later (although it took me a full 30 secs to even get to that location after entering the building).

I was like: "Dude, we work together! And it's a carrot! From an abandoned building! WTF?"

In Dragon Age, you can put the corpse inside your inventory, I wish we can do that in Skyrim. :rolleyes:

What? You stick a dead body in your pocket, and no one notices?