Hi there, long time lurker, first time poster. Felt I needed to add to this discussion with a recent experience of mine.

I play Oblivion on the PC normally, but my wife recently "Wanted to have a go" and, since she prefers the XBox, we got a copy on there... so, no mods, just vanilla. As it happens, I end up playing through it as she got bored / finds the combat not "JRPG" enough for her.

How does this relate to the discussion in hand? Two ways: Firstly, I've been doing the "Aid for Bruma" quest and had just finished the Bravil gate. I entered town and ran into one of the Mythic Dawn sleeper agents who, due to political differences, decided to try to take me on. Radiant AI steps in and a local also starts attacking, along with the Captain of the guard http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Viera_Lerus. During the kerfuffel, Viera gets hit once by the Argonian Reenum.

So, the Mythic Dawn chap goes down "Hurrah" thinks I, "Saved by the woman who is going to go to Bruma to help us all". And then i see she's off chasing the poor old Argonian. "Ho hum" thinks I, deciding to try to chase them with a calming spell. Nope: she butchers the poor fellow and walks away. Onto the scene steps a Bravil guard who promptly declares "There's a murderer about", draws his sword and kills Viera. His own Captain. And one part of my reinforcement for Bruma (Although i understand she has a glitch that means she just turns around once she gets there... so, no great loss)

Talk about summary justice.

Anyway, its this black-and-white, no space in between and vaguely lopsided AI that irks me vaguely in Oblivion. The times I just want to yell "NO! Don't run in there!" to companions, or just give one of them a health potion. There's no option to step in as your character is semi "http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheVoiceless", or ability to stop it degenerating into a full on brawl as one AI accidentally clips another (Yes, part of the fun of a modded Oblivion...)

Secondly: The combat AI itself. Archers sit back and occasionally so do mages, whilst everyone else does a sort of "BUNDLE!" dive in. Even most combat specialist games (A la Mount and Blade) haven't gotten round this bunching problem, but still: the Battle for Bruma would have been interesting if you could say, set archers up on the high ground and have a stationary melee line to prevent enemies getting through, with the mages providing support. If Skyrim can at least have an illusion of group-ai combat thinking, that'd be progress. Hell, it'd mean fighting groups of enemies would require strategy: knowing the archers would hang back, the warriors just trying to pin you in place.

Tl;dr: I'd love the AI to be able to not make silly choices or anything that breaks immersion and to have a sense of group awareness in combat situations. No more fireball friendly fire, or repeatedly shooting arrows into the back of an ally, just because he's in the way...

Anyway, thats my first post, lovely to be here.

If they have a method in Skyrim that allows for

Welcome to TES, and have a http://images.uesp.net//c/c4/Fishystick.jpg!

I completely agree with you. Radiant AI really needs to at least give npcs the illusion of the ability to think. Just as you pointed in your post, they can do irrational things just because one npc accidentally hits another. They need to be aware of who their friends are and who their foes are, so then they can forgive each other.

I fixed the impetuous companions problem by creating a spell called damnedfool's salvation. It calms and caues invisibility on the target for 60 seconds per casting. Keeps those morons in order.

What was the AI like in Assassin's Creed? That game has got a similar setting to The Elder Scrolls (Weapons that aren't guns), and from what I remember from when my friends played it, the game world was quite immersive, there were quests besides the main quest and so on to complete... I think the NPCs were probably quite bland, two dimensional beings that went about their own lives, and the important NPCs were only to be found in certain instances.... But the friend who introduced us to Morrowind has completed both Assassin's Creed games and never even touched Oblivion. That's saying something

As long as it's better then Oblivion i could care less. Out of the some 100+ hours of gameplay over the years I've only ever seen 2 bar fights and one random encounter involving 2 Imperial Guard Hunters have an archery contest to see who can have the most arrows lodged into their torso. And it was those things, The little things, That could be implemented to occur more then once every blue moon. I doubt that over the span of 5 years there have only been 2 bar fights. And that only 2 guards are idiots ( Maybe that one is true but it was hilarious ). Point is. Active A.I. is a good A.I.

Simple AI is good AI.

Fix it. Now.

If they can have a special team to work on dragons I hope they assigned a team (of at least 1 person) for Radiant AI all these years. It's a big part of the game, one that is easily noticeable and they made such a big hype for it before Oblivion that many players who believed the "it's there, it's just not working at full potential" theory would feel double cheated if it wasn't greatly improved this time.

AI in Assassin's Creed was nothing at all... It was worse than Oblivion.
NPCs went around with no purpose at all, just wandering the streets of the cities, not even sleeping, not eating, not drinking, not stopping to talk to each other, just plain walking.^^
And it's a similar setting, but a different engine and all, which is not meant for big open worlds, but rather small open worlds.

"But the friend who introduced us to Morrowind has completed both Assassin's Creed games and never even touched Oblivion. That's saying something" - Yeah, it's says that he doesn't know what good AI is. Oblivion has a great AI compared to other games, but it got a bad AI compared to their demo.



You're mistaking Radiant AI for Radiant Story... And even then, I don't see what you mean. Radiant Story is a tool used for quests, not the system used for quests. It's used for some quests, not all.

Modern consoles really limit how much can be achieved. That's why you won't see more in the AI department. It takes a LOT of effort to squeeze out acceptable performance as is. Increasing the complexity only stands to make the effort to make it work on consoles even more costly. Who doesn't want more? Sure, but it's not happening this generation. You simply cannot do more, without increasing development time to make it run properly on current consoles.

I miss the option: "let's wait and see" !

I dare ya Bethesda, show us the new Radiant AI in a demo at E3 :deal:

Ah ok dokey then.

Oh dear. Is this as good as it gets? Oblivion's combat AI was terrible. You could defeat someone just by standing on a rooftop and pelting them full of arrows. Assassin's Creed gave the illusion of good AI because the guards would follow you up to the rooftop. (I lied. I played Assassin's Creed for half an hour at a friends)

Following a schedule isn't AI. I don't mind if NPCs wander around the streets of the cities for ever, it's suspension of disbelief. In a large, living city, it makes sense that life is going to keep going. They are indistinct enough that you don't notice that they are going around and around and around because there's so many of them, and the enemies can react to your actions, and solve the problem of not being able to reach you on the rooftop by following you. NPC's don't need to eat/to sleep/to spend four hours training with a weapon each day. They need to react to the fact that I stole all of their food, stole all of their weapons and that there's someone else sleeping in their bed, rather than stand there stupidly looking at their empty plate, stupidly looking at a target and stupidly looking at the person sleeping in their bed. That's TERRIBLE AI.

Following a schedule is half of what AI is about.
But yes, reaction to the player's action is the other half of it. (And Bethesda has already said something about that, but I doubt they have said all, since they are still tweaking it.)

Regardless of what is what with the radiant AI and or it being 5 years since Oblivion was released, regardless that it I guess seems like the AI hasn't improved as much as some believe because Todd can't fill every detail about it in a podcast or a interview does not mean it hasn't been majorly improved. We just saw the first trailer of the game not that long ago, there is only so much you can fill in a interview, a article, a podcast and so may different things that a dev (Todd) has to cover.

It's obsessive yes, im obsessive about this game but not to the point of it making me post threads like this. I am not totally disagreeing with the OP & I understand completely where he & some of you are coming from to a extent but all I am saying is with Radiant AI specifically it is too early to jump to solid conclusions about how or less conservative they are going to get with the AI.



On a whole other note, I voted yes on the POLL question regardless of what I really think because it ask the question like the game is about to release like E3 & quakcon already came and gone. Voting No or not concerned is like voting "No, I do not want more weapons, more content and etc". Again who cares if your satisfied with the AI this early in the game that they have talked about so far always vote yes always for more.

reaction to the player's actions is the important half of it...

Yes I'm pretty much also thinking that we haven't even passed E3 yet... Hope there will be something on the AI there and some actual gamplay.

Thanks for the welcome (Sorry for my belated response to it!)

I enjoy the incidental touches of AI: the routines that NPCs conduct etc, as it adds depth to the game. Radiant AI was a tentative step in the right direction, albeit without the dialogue queues and realistic responses to back it up (I need to download that idiot AI mod, thanks for the linky!), but that was more a limitation of a) the THEN understood space restrictions on the xbox and B) the fact that it was a new engine with a few quirks. One quirk being that the AI tended to have hissy fits at itself.

Radiant story, on the other hand, looks like it could add that gem of replayability and "redundancy": channels of the game aren't closed off if an NPC accidentally gets killed by either a rampaging beast or an overzealous guard :dry: and it also "perhaps" means we won't have to retrace our steps through a dungeon we may have already been into.

I think its important to keep in mind that Radiant story isn't replacing ALL the dungeons. From what we've been told and seen in interviews, it seems to be being layered on top of scripted and hand built dungeons (I think they're all hand built, just that some content will be modified by radiant story, in order to ensure we explore more) Its not as if the entire story is randomised.

Overall, I just want to see how they present it at E3; Oblivion's demo of the conversation between NPCs was a little overdone, as it actually sounded like a coherent conversation, rather than the stilted often repeating convos that we got in the end. Hopefully, with an efficient enough dialogue link system and enough dialogue resources, the effect may seem a little more believable.

I agree. BGS has so much they could potentially show us though, that I'm not really sure what they will show. They could show a dragon fight (which will likely happen), show off Radiant AI (but we know how that went with Oblivion), show off Radiant Story (which is a bit more likely), show off the new crime system (which is also a good candidate), or just a number of features we know little to nothing about so far. Ultimately though, I would think BGS doesn't really have adequate time to show us everything. Hopefully, they will just explain many features they don't show in the demo in interviews and what not. Knowing BGS, they will try and make a demo that shows the diversity of combat, immersion of the atmosphere, and what really makes the game stand out from others, similar to their Fallout 3 demo.

I think the problem is that almost every NPC fight is to the death. The NPCs have no social stopgap to tell them "enough is enough". A lot of this chaos (personally, I love it, but after a whole town is wiped out, you reload a save game) could be mitigated if NPC were more willing to surrender/run away AND stop pursuing each other. Perhaps NPC aggression should automatically lower after a short time after the initial "trigger" event, so they stop chasing each other, and injured NPCs should be much more eager to yield or flee. Futhermore, and perhaps most importantly, NPCs must be much more conscious to the presence of guards. They should simply suppress most of their aggression if guards are nearby, and attempt to stop fighting if they are spotted by them.

The problem is basically the same as with crime - only the trigger event (the exact moment when the crime is commited) is checked, with no follow-up of things that might happen after that (i.e. an ongoing check of new circumstances). As long as you're not actually spotted stealing something, there's no suspicion of you, even if no-one else could have done it. Likewise, with NPC fights, nobody stops when guards come running, since there are no running script checks for these things (I'm assuming there are no such scripts, since that's what it seems like), only the initial trigger check of the NPCs aggression and disposition towards its victim.

I still say intervening guards/village elders is the best solution for all of these things, particularly if the NPCs are coded to be defferential towards these officials the overwhelming majority of the time. It allows the random to occur without turning into a wrecking ball.