I'm a bit curious as to how heavily this new Radiant Story will pan out.

my biggest fear with it is that it will further strengthen the presence of level-scaling as the article said the generated quest will be tailored to you. Further more, with something like Radiant Story doesn't that void any possibility of "legendary loot"?

what I mean by this is, in every other TES game there're always special weapons or equipment that can be acquired either through exploration to as a reward from a quest. (IE: Staff of Magnus, the blade of woe)

with randomly generated quests you can't have stuff like that unless it can only be found through exploration or as rewards from Main Quest tasks (as those were confirmed as still being hand-crafted by the devs) if they did do that then there's no way you can get that item out of knowledge or skill, it'd just be pure luck that you got that legendary item as a reward. I'm confused as to how much the Radiant Story will be implemented. Will there still be Dev. Designed quests outside of the Main Quest?

and again the level-scaling also worries me.

at any rate, enlightenment would be appreciated

and please, PLEASE, don't let this become a flamewar.

I'm not sure what Radiant Story is. Where's the article with the information?

If I showed you I'd be doing something against the rules. It's basically this system where stories are formed upon what your character does.

From what I understand, there'll still be normal sidequests like in Oblivion. Radiant Story is basically just an advanced random encounter system.

I believe it was confirmed that Radiant Story isn't randomly generated quests.

I'm not sure there's been any actual mention of randomly generated quests. The GI article notes that Radiant Story will be able to select a cave you haven't visited as a quest target, instead of the target cave being statically assigned, and also that the encounters will be tailored to your play style. It doesn't really say anything about enemy difficulty or item scaling.

You can find all the information currently known about Skyrim http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1158506-skyrim-information-compilation/.

That's still really cool. I hope they got Radiant AI working at it's fullest or at least near it. If they did it will be very impressive.

Actually, randomly generated quests is one of the big features of Radiant Story.

I'm not entirely sure how it will work, but it has peaked my curiosity, nonetheless.

Radiant story isn't "random" It creates quests based on your character's decisions/stats/location. Random doesn't take anything into account.

I believe Pete Hines tweeted something along the lines of "If you believe Radiant Story is about randomly generated quests, you're mistaken." I'd try to find the actual tweet, but the site isn't agreeing with me right now. :brokencomputer:

http://twitter.com/DCDeacon/status/23821788408446977

"If you think Radiant Story is "randomly generated quests" then you misunderstand what it is."

It's an upgraded version of the Radiant A.I. system used in Oblivion, which governed A.I. in regards to them having lives and schedules with in the game world.

Based on the information given in the GI article, I think that the Radiant Story system is used to tweak pre-existing quests to better suit your character. In the examples given, the player killed the primary quest-giver, so he received the quest from the quest-givers daughter instead. In the same example, the game checked which dungeons in the area the player had already been to, and picked one that he hadn't explored yet to be the quest location. In another example, there was a quest that wouldn't even activate unless the PC's magic skills met a certain requirement.

Nowhere in the article does it say anything about randomly generated quests, that's just hyperbole created by some overexcited fans.

All quests are "Dev Designed" quests.

Radiant Story is just a was of saying that they will be randomly implemented depending upon when you happen to encounter them. It isn't like the game is making up a random quest as it goes along.

The devs create the quests just like they would any Main Quest mission and then the "Radiant Story" randomly implements. Its all still programmed and planned out by the Devs, and therefore so is the loot placed in it. (provided loot isn't randomly generated)

Devs create and plan every single part of the game. They shape every piece. Literally.


Then again I could be entirely wrong and the Radiant Story could be something else and I misunderstood the GI article and have now been rambling and talking out of my a$$ for far to long.


:tops:

The main story and guilds are not radiant, just random people that will come up to you and give quests based on what your character has done. So they wont give a know assassin a job for someone who is a knight. Basically how it is.

Holy triple post Batman!

The forums seems to have had a bit of a hiccup. I couldn't access them for about 30 minutes.

Same here...

Quick, everyone check. Maybe there's something new about Skyrim that Bethesda put on the forums during the uncannily extensive down time.

I believe what he means is that there's more to it than that.

Just because they said there would be randomly generated quests doesn't mean all quests are randomly generated. I would presume that there are just some quests that are randomly generated based on certain templates, and these are just side quests or maybe optional guild quests that you can still do even after finishing the main quests of that guild, allowing you to do them infinately. Like maybe you'll get quests to go to a certain dungeon and retrieve a certain artifact, and the dungeon you need to go to and item you need to retrieve is determined randomly. I'm not so fond of the idea personally as such quests will probably get boring and repetitive quickly and don't offer much room for creative premises or good writing, but as long as we still get our hand crafted quests, it's not that bad, I suppose.

And in any case, I don't think that "radiant story" means the same thing as randomly generated quests. I would presume it basically means that the story is shaped by your choices rather than just being the same story no matter what you to. Of course, I could be mistaken, but that's what I assumed "Radiant story" to mean.

I think you misunderstood the nature of radiant story. From the passage in GI article it would seem that radiant AI has nothing to do with the player character's level per se and is in no way random. Radiant Story is a system in which the gameworld reacts to the specific actions undertook but the Player character. One example given in the article is that a Character of who is proficient in Magic may be approached by another Magically inclined individual and challenged to a duel. Or dropping an item from your inventory in the middle of town and then a day later a young boy returns it to you. Or after killing a certain NPC, a relative hunts you down to take revenge. From the information I've seen I have little fear that Radiant story will be level scaled or random or negate "legendary loot.

hmm, I see, yeah I'm not too familiar how Radiant Story works, thanks for the posts

it does help to explain a lot and does put some of my fears to rest

thank you

I would have though Bethesda would have ditched the term "Radiant" by now, as it has become synonymous with false promises. When I hear "Radiant" my mind interprets that as "[censored]". Now, I don't think that the shortcomings of Radiant AI in Oblivion were malicious, merely the result of a lack of necessary development time to hammer out the kinks. Still, what I would have hoped for would be a new system, built from scratch, instead of more varnish on what by all appearances is a broken system.

This.