Firstly, I love the Elder Scrolls series and have spent an obscene amount of time playing and modding ES games (many of you probably have as well) throughout my childhood.

I'm sure you would agree, however, that there is plenty of room for improvement in terms of AI behavior coming from Oblivion and, more recently, Fallout.

Two particular areas of AI behavior have consistently stood out to me in past games as being poorly designed: healing and fleeing.

No information has been revealed at this point regarding changes to these AI behaviors (as far as I know), so I thought I would offer my suggestions just to see what ES fans think of them.


For AI healing:

NPCs should be able to heal in a smart and efficient manner throughout combat.

In past games the AI typically just replenishes health/status at the start of combat and ignores healing items once combat has begun. This results in situations where NPCs who have plenty of healing items/spells will let themselves die in combat without using a single one of them. This behavior of course diminishes the believability of the NPCs themselves.

What I've done in the past to correct this is mod the game to give NPCs an appropriate allotment of healing items/spells based on their level, class, job, etc. along with a script to use those items at certain time intervals based on a randomized percentage factor inversely proportional to their health. This is tedious to do with the modding kits but I think it greatly adds to the sense of immersion in combat.


For AI fleeing:

NPCs in fleeing mode should retreat to an appropriate location instead of running 15 to 30 meters away and standing/cowering like imbeciles while you line up a headshot.

For me, the way fleeing has been implemented in past games is a complete immersion killer. It would be be more acceptable to me to have absolutely no fleeing at all than to have what was done in past games.

Example of what I would like to see in Skyrim:

A bandit NPC is near death and enters flee mode. The NPC intelligently selects from a list of designated bandit retreat locations and flees to that area.

If at any time in the process of fleeing the bandit moves beyond a certain appropriately set distance from the PC, the bandit's state is set to something like "escaped" and it is processed accordingly (e.g. taken out of the game world for a period of time or moved directly to a retreat location).

If the PC follows the bandit NPC to its flee location it would decide (based on whatever factors are appropriate) to either fight or flee to another retreat location.

This same model could be used for every NPC capable of fleeing.


I'm not a video game programmer so I don't really know just how feasible my suggestions are in terms of performance.

I don't imagine they would be that difficult to implement and I believe they would greatly improve the game experience (at least for me it would).


What do you all think about what I've suggested?

I agree. :goodjob:

Shady characters must use sneak and become partially invisible (like chameleon effect and invisibility) after fleeing from player, try change their position to be behind of player (scripted avoid line of sight) for make backstab, sneaky archer can change their position after become detected and sniper again, then they can use sneak attacks for more damage, such changes will make detect life more useful for mages, torches more useful for warriors, and rogue characters can make check of their sneak skill versus enemy ones to negate chameleon effect on them.
Stealth Wars
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=36493
Since player cannot see them combat music will not initiated until first strike or until player will detect them

Mages can use short teleportation (from mark and recall with some scripting) and blinking around if player will be close to them, or use Levitation to avoid melee combat, or use more dynamic version of sanctuary spell thats work like ghost dodge
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgkE0b88jJg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LLGoyUMX2I

won't giving the npc's healing abilities make the fights long and tedious?

Yes, an excessive amount of healing could be irritating. My solution to that would be to find an optimal level of healing that is not excessive but still leaves the NPCs with the appearance of being intelligent and real.

By "level of healing" I mean the quantity/quality of healing items/spells and the frequency they are used. This factor could perhaps be tied to the difficulty level.