It seems to me that a lot of people are asking Radiant story to do things it might not be able to do. Are we over glorifying it and making too much of it? Kind of like what happened to Radiant AI before Oblivions release. What are your thoughts?

I'm not saying I'm not super hyped about the game (I spent 5 hours straight watching the game play trailer), just afraid that some people are setting themselves up for disappointment with their outrageous expectations.

Yeah, pretty much. The important thing to do is not to think about it or make assumptions too much. We don't know exactly what's going on, and you know what happens when one assumes.

Well, Radiant AI had to be stripped down before release due to really silly things happening to the NPCs. I think that Beth has learned their lesson enough on figuring out how to time releases to make sure they have their goals sufficiently met before release, so what they say will happen with radiant story will probably happen.

Now, I do think that we probably all expect more than Beth thinks it will offer. Modders will be able to take control of it to make it do the more complex things we are expecting, but I'm sure we will be midly let down by the final product, not because of Beth's inability to produce, but due to our own lofty expectations.

I am just hoping that we do not have 5 million end game choices (such like FO: NV) I have yet to beat the game due to these choices..

Help me!

pfft theres not much to glorify, I don't feel current information on RAIS is suffiecient to say much.

People talk about Radiant Story on these forums like it's going to be the most amazing thing in gaming history in terms of AI development.
But you know who's saying that? You all are. Not Bethesda. They are keeping quiet about it.
Once Skyrim comes out and you realize that Radiant Story isn't all that YOU cracked it up to be, don't blame Bethesda. It's your own fault.

In the GI podcast Todd pretty much said the opposite and said they aren't trying to hype it up too much and it's not a "back of the box" selling point. It's just a cool feature they were able to implement and it adds to the game in many ways.

@shinovakhiin that's what I was thinking.

@Dragonborn1 I'm not worried about beth making the hype, just about the player's creating wild expectations about it.

very true

Seeing how far video games have come since 2006, I don't think Radiant Story sounds nearly as too-good-to-be-true today as Radiant AI did back then.

I think the gaming media is over hyping it, I think there are some forum members who never played Oblivion or loved Oblivion who might over hype it.

I for one am not expecting much from it. This way, if it's as good as advertised I'll be estatic. If it's not, it won't bother me because I'm not expecting much out of it.

Ugh, I wish for one thing that people would get these things straight.

Radiant AI: How NPCs govern the game world by means of schedules and activities, and how they react to you and events.
Radiant Story: How the game world governs random quests that are fitting to your play style in order to promote more exploration/variety/etc

Radiant Story is essentially an on the fly engine driven randomly generated quest that is more tailored to you based on prerequisites. It is NOT Radiant AI.

This is such a necessary topic. I hear people going "I know that [ridiculously impossible idea] is ridiculously impossible, but with radiant story, it should work". Radiant story is not an actual thing. It's a title for something with a simple and defined function, like Apple's facetime. Because it's not called what it actually is, and is left pretty vague, people just grasp at thin hopes that the game will allow them to live out their sick, twisted fantasies.

Radiant story isn't anything particularly great.

I think people seem to think that Radiant Story is meant to have the same depth that they were selling Radiant AI with before Oblivion was released. Radiant AI has a lot of potential in the future, as it develops and leads to better and more detailed ways for the NPCs to behave and interact. Radiant story is more of a one trick pony. A general way to bring quests and missions in line with Radiant AI, and also deal with some consequences of having a PC who likes killing people or the after affects of Radiant AI resulting in the death of an NPC that may have offered the PC a quest.

It would be frustrating for Radiant AI to kill off a quest NPC without your knowledge. Radiant Story gives you another option if that were to happen.

I know the difference, as I'm sure most do. It makes no difference to me. Neither one I'm expecting much from. Raidiant AI in Oblvion was horrible at times. I'm not expecting them to do much better with Radiant Story.

If they do, I'll be excited.

And it's not exactly that either. It randomizes the dungeon/location in which the objective of the quest is placed, and perhaps it allows quest givers to change if the original quest giver dies, but the quests themselves are not repeatedly randomly generated Daggerfall style.


This. It's not just radiant story though, people are overhyping the entire game all by themselves.

Yes, people are overhyping it. It will be nice to have randomly generated quests and world events as long as they are fully relevant to what you're doing.
Like a previous poster said, people are mixing Radiant AI and Radiant Story up, which is going to cause a huge ruckus come release time.
Side note: I don't expect much more from Radiant AI either, especially since most of the game engine is designed around console specifications. Modern computers can't do what people on here want either; you're just gonna have to wait a couple console cycles and extremely multi/parallel threaded processors to get what you want 'today', but when that day comes, you'll be expecting more than what can be done.... Vicious cycle. So, just expect what Oblivion gave us with NPC day/night cycles, only more of them doing it, and cities being a bit more fleshed out as opposed to ghost towns.

Radiant Story quests are pretty much random within certain parameters and as I've stated, they are generated by the game itself that caters to multiple things (eg your play style, locations you've visited, etc). However, these are NOT side-quests like you're thinking.

Side and Main quests are all scripted normally. Radiant Story quests follow a basic structure with variable elements, so essentially a randomly generated quest that's tailored to you.

Um what rad story does is allow some most or alot of various quests to be either randomized or based on what your character has already done or based on various other things the dev decided to base it on. Its very good in that it means there will be alot more changes game to game.

The only thing you can be sure, its the fact it will a very very very simplistic way and that what is being annouced is almost a lie.

There are people who think the Radiant Story is this magical AI engine when it's just a tool for conditionalizing quests towards the player.

Yup. Just like how it won't be in Skyrim, you won't be the Dragonborn, and it won't be an RPG.

It's actually going to be reskinned Call of Duty ported onto Gamebryo. The only thing it'll have is 1:20 horses confirmed.

That sounds good, if it's true. I hope so. Looking forward to hearing more. I'm trying not to expect too much from it though.

I don't know, but the below quote from the PC Gamer article sounds great to me. If Radiant Story offers these type of simple changes that add weight to an otherwise mindless act, it will be a great addition to the game.

"The target of an assassination quest might be picked from the characters you’ve spent most time with, rather than a perfect stranger, to make the decision to kill them more interesting."

I hope it adds these types of personal dilemma to the story.

According to Todd Howard, Radiant Story is the tool they use to create quests. At about the 27-minute mark in this http://www.gameinformer.com/b/podcasts/archive/2011/02/03/toddhowardse.aspx, Game Informer asks Todd to explain Radiant Story. Todd's answer covers the tool's strengths and weaknesses.