So do you guys think that with radiant story we can get an endless arena? Something like once you reach a certain point you can only fight once a day or week

You mean exactly how it was in Oblivion, but with people instead of creatures? Yes please.

Radiant Story is a quest-making tool. Not a random NPC generator.

Considering Oblivion had unlimited Arena fights to bet on and unlimited monster battles with one per week, they could have done this with Oblivion, so if Skyrim has an Arena, I would be disappointed if Bethesda didn't put two and two together to get to the concept of unlimited humanoid vs. humanoid fights for us to partake in. I'm also hoping these radiant quests will find their way into other factions so that, aside from the hand-crafted faction plots, we get unlimited, randomly-generated side quests for all joinable factions.

I never even thought of that, that would be great. An endless amount of actual challengers for your Grand Champion (or equivalent) title. That's what I always wanted in Oblivion's Arena. Instead you never get challenged. Ever.


I think he meant that they'll use it to make certain aspects of NPCs you fight in the Arena more appropriate. Mage characters will have opponents with Magic Resistance or something like that.

Don't radiant story simply means the folks doesn't really pay attention to you anymore?

What does it have to do with the Arena?

Sounds quite possible. It could also ensure that you always have a challenging Arena opponent by matching them to your level.
Could be fun to have 2 level 50 characters going at a battle to the death

What? No.

Random is kind of the wrong word to describe Radiant Story. I'd say the right word is conditionalized.

Anyway, I'm hoping they take use of this feature for the Arena...
So, perhaps, depending on what weapons you're using, what enemies you've beaten before, etc... you'll find more challenging enemies (but NOT completely dependent on leveling scaling!) and a greater diversity of challenges.

Oh, sorry, must have mistook it with something else.
But I still don't see its relation with arena enemies. You don't use a quest template and variable randomizer to generate an NPC to fight, you use character template for that

You can fix this stuff by scripting, You have a variable that acts as a difficulty modifier and several template NPCs. They don't need actual names just Challenger or Combatant or whatever. Then Radiant Story chooses an opponent and a random difficulty. Using the difficulty modifier it tweaks the NPC's stats/gear/spells/etc. It would be kind of lengthy for a script but it is easy to fool people into thinking something is dynamic and random. Heck even a basic Level Offset for them would keep it a constant challenge.

Todd Howard talks about Radiant Story.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXGXFM5yrCs

I'd like to see Radiant Story expand Arena fighting into a much larger, more varied experience. There are all manner of new combat mechanics to show off and this would be the perfect place. Rather then a single linear quest with the same dozen or so opponents and a quick road to victory, I'd see it become a bloody, brutal event across several cities with a wide variety of opponents, both man and beast... And mer... Oh and beastman. Tailored opponents for important matches. Random traps. Packs of animals. Screaming Nordic crowds. Dirt and mead flying everywhere. I want to fight in the snow, in the mud, in the rain. I want it to be a part of life in the North. There when you are a level one whelp. There when you are a level 57 Dovahkiin. I'm not saying make it impossible to ever become Grand Champion... I'm saying shoot for regional first. I'm saying make it harder, longer like the Nordic ladies like. I'm saying make it so epic and unending that people remember why Arena was made in the first place

I've probably said this in a dozen arena threads, but I might as well say it again.


I really hope the Arena isn't just a fight to the death, because it simply doesn't make sense.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1153456-imperial-city-arena-entertainment-or-genocide/

I would like to see a specialized Arena mod made where there was a certain monster that was very tough.

The object of the Mod would be to import a character from one of your current saved games and pit your current player character against that monster in the Arena. The Mod does not allow you to save your game, but every time you die it just respawns you prior to the start of the battle. The reason is so the Mod can keep track of how many times it takes your character to finally kill the monster, and how you finally achieve it given your character's possessions, perks, and skills.

Then that information is posted in a spreadsheet of some kind detailing the level of your character, his perks, specialities, and what items you used during the combat where you successfully killed the Monster.

Then programmers for the Mod could anolyze the data in order to help refine the monster's fighting A.I. based on a cross-section of the data gathered from the various fights. Players could post this info to forums like this for bragging rights. "I killed the beast with only a 7th level Bard while a 9th-level warrior couldn't ever kill it!"

Every 6 months, the Mod could be refreshed to a new version, and you could try the same saved game again, only this time, the monster would know how to anticipate some of your maneauvers and fight more intelligently. Now you find the same monster takes a level 10 bard and a level 15 Warrior to be able to kill it.

Once this A.I. Solution was finally achieved or realized, the Modders could offer Bethesda this information as a way to make their Main Boss battles more intelligent and interesting, so that the Main Bad Guys would feel more intelligent, real, and alive. Bethesda could use that Mod then to help determine at what difficulty setting level to place Main Bosses that were unique and not Radiant Story created.

It could also become a competition to see at the lowest possible level some player could actually kill the beast. As in say, the word is that there is no way a 6th level Warrior can beat this monster, ever. And so a 6th level warrior tries every trick, and somehow, eventually, kill the beast, and wins some kind of a prize by Bethesda.

I'm thinking about this because of the Berkeley Starcraft A.I. challenge where they created a new AI called the Overmind that can now beat any human player no matter what tactics you employ. It sounds fascinating....
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A Variation of this idea would be to have 2 character slots that you can upload characters into. You load your current save game character, and your friend's save game (which he/she emails you)... you then launch the fight and try and kill your friend's character, which is powered by the computer's A.I. since there is no multiplayer. Your friend's character has a special password built in to it, so if you kill it, the last word it says before it dies is the password. You can then prove to your friend that you killed it by telling them the password. But the system is even a bit smarter, there are a series of passwords attached by the level of your character. If you try to cheat and load a higher level character to beat your friend's character, the password you get will tell your friend what level of character you fought his monster at. For example, my password for level 6 is Rose but my pass for Level 7 is Lilac. My friend claims he killed my character with a level 6 character but provides the "Lilac" password, and I know he lied. The only way for him to know the Level 6 password is to use a Level 6 character, so he must have lied.

This would be pretty siimple now randomised quests based off of some of the people you fight in the arena, that's more up radiant story's alley.

I'm thinking about this because of the Berkeley Starcraft A.I. challenge where they created a new AI called the Overmind that can now beat any human player no matter what tactics you employ. It sounds fascinating....

The thing is the AI does this by breaking the game. It isn't tactically superior to any human player, it can simply process data faster and make use of micromanagement that is far beyond human capabilities. If you've read up on how the AI fights it focuses on massing mutalisks because of the ease of pathing and the way in which it can manage them in combat to prevent any one unit takign too much focus fire. the efficiency with which is does this is outside of the considerations of the game balancers who were working on the asumption of human micro and macro management skills. It wouldn't work at all well in a one on one situation where the AI can't abuse its advantages so much.

It would seem that to be the former, it would need to be able to do the latter as well, but I could be mistaken.



Isn't that what level scaling is supposed to do?

But in any case, I don't think it's been confirmed that the Arena is in the game, though we haven't been told it's not either, but if it is, I'd hope that Arena fights are as a whole ness repetitive. In Oblivion, it was pretty much just "Kill this guy, now kill that guy, now kill those two guys! Oh, now you have to fight the Grand Champion!" I mean, I know that was kind of the point of it, but still, in the end, it just got rather tedious, with each battle feeling pretty much the same, and the efforts to add a little variety really help much. I think it would be beneficial to have more variety in fights, such as having special rules for some battles, or facing more enemies that use special tactics, or maybe having some fights not be battles to the death, as already suggested, perhaps there could even be events outside of just fights for this sort of thing, like archemy competitions or plays (This could be sort of like that quest in Tribunal where you needed to choose lines based on the script, although you could also have actions involved as well.) after all, even in Skyrim, I find it hard to believe that a society where the ONLY form of entertainment available is watching people kill each other can be practical, although perhaps that is getting into seperate territory from an Arena faction like Oblivion's. I'm not sure how much Radiant Story could help with this, if any, but Radiant Story or not, if there's going to be an Arena in Skyrim, I want it to be done better than Oblivion's.