For Kvatch that makes sense. It would be a MAJOR undertaking. But the Bruma Mages Guild. . . I really think it is giving a broad pass to say that making the place not on fire and inhabitable again would just have been too great a strain for the developers to manage.

Ok, we are talking about two different things. You are talking about the literal battle details. Exactly where people run, and when they attacked and who they attack. Yes, the games AI handles that 100%, and it's effectively random and can happen a million different ways.

I, on the other hand, am talking about what happens after the battle. How does the quest procide depending on what happens during the random AI fighting? What dialog lines do NPC's say? Where do they go next? How does the story progress? These cannot be infinite, since you HAVE to script them. The day that a game can on the spot make up dialog and voice acting for it depending on exactly what happened, will... well, never happen. I am talking about the overall outcome of the battle and exactly reactions and how the story progresses. This must be scripted, and therefor each additional possibility adds to the time it takes to do so.

Some may even then argue that they would rather have fewer outcomes, but a longer story, since the people don't spend all their time making 300 outcomes for one battle.

The way the poll is written makes no sense. 'Should the NPCs and game better reflect when your game choices deviate from the expected path?' Since they must add the 'reflection' if you deviate from the expected path, would that not mean that they expect that you could do that? Truely random reactions to things in games are not something that I see happening for a VERY long time. And I'm talking, like, not until we develope concious thought within AI. So, possibly hundreds of years?

I think that would be so so cool if it could happen but I don't think a game can do that. I don't really know though so maybe they can.

My apologies. Expected path should have read, projected or primarily intended path. The one that was most clearly intended. And, as I have stated, I would not expect scripting for every little detail or possible nuance the world might offer. But for those possible deviancies which would be rather significant and can be anticipated without terrible difficulty, it would be nice to have the game reflect those different outcomes. Generally in statistics standard deviations are factored into the overal data anolysis. That could be well applied here.

But those significant different endings are exactly what would need to be scripted.

I guess what I am saying is, yes they need to have a few. But those people who want even 10 different endings to a situation are insane. I would think having 1 major turning point in each quest within the main questline would be plenty enough. With maybe just 2 or 3 different outcomes.

They somewhat tried this is New Vegas, making it much more open and less constrained. I honestly found it so open that it was more like 4 side quests loosly linked together. If they go this far with the whole civil war thing and the main story (which is similiar in situation to that of the NCR vs Legion) I will be incredibly dissapointed. I would much rather have a main story more like Fallout 3's, but with a tad bit more choice. Then of course the only large decision could be picking a side in the war.

The end of battle is included to its simulative nature. Please try to look at the bigger picture with me. The problem here is the quest writer "Jim" WANTS to decide the outcome so he effectively limits the nature of simulation. NPCs will say the lines they always do. They will do what they have to do next on their schedule. The story will progress as how it should. None of these are problems.

Again I ask you, have you ever played Stalker or Mount&Blade? It isn't that hard to add mechanics like "captivity", "party morale" and "friend, foe, neutral" instead(or addition) of a 0-100 disposition number. "Thanks for helping" and "Please, spare my life" and a little bit more similar lines would be enough to support amazing number of possibilities. Instead of spending the dialog resources to 10 more linear quests, spend it on systematic casual dialog and receive thousands of unique quests. Casual dialog in quests will help hand-written quests too. These simple mechanics will allow all this. And you were thinking "conscious AI". You have to realize, we aren't getting ANY AI and what we're getting is being crippled with scripts nonetheless.

The problem comes down to the quest writer Jim. He can write quests without limiting battle's outcomes. Morrowind's main quest is an excellent example. The goal of main quest depends on items instead of scripts and NPCs... Yeah, that ultra linear, extensive main quest that took me 1 year to finish can be done in 8 minutes. Jim must write the situation. Jim must set middle events by adding goals to NPCs minds. Let the middle events to be random. When the goal is achieved, through sandbox abilities by the player, the outcome will be achieved by zero scripting because player will take care of the scripting part. Hitman games have only two objectives, kill the target, go to extraction. And that game can have many many situations because it is set on sandbox power so scripts won't hurt emergent gameplay. Thief is another game like this with unmatched excellent AI and that game is ANCIENT.

TL;DR
If you really want many outcomes, you don't script anything. You bite your hand when it wants to write scripted events. It isn't needed, it is a choice to tell a story. In gaming, there are other ways.

If devs continue to ignore the interactivity of this medium, we will wait for a long time indeed.

Why overcomplicate it? Just set the leveled list to slowly keep increasing the number of undead in a region or add one voiceover to a NPC where he explains the consequences or even a simple newspaper edition to acknowledge how a quest ended. Simple things. No one is asking for them to create Skynet.

I can hope that because they have more personnel now, they'll have more game testers who spot these things you've mentioned. They *have* learned a lot from the earlier games and we'll see just how much. It's usually the logic problems that bother me the most. I can deal with some tech glitches but the logic needs to be as clear and clean as possible. If not this then this.... It may be the hardest part because they are 100+ people and we are millions.

In one interview Todd Howard said he thought the mathmatical highest level was about 70. He wasn't positive though so that meant they haven't tested that yet. Time will tell, as always.

:tes:

This also doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition. You could set up special dialog and scripting for important deviations, and merely alter an NPC's mood for lesser deviations. I still stand by the concept of giving each NPC a data base of "things they care about" with tables relating to how they feel about it, and how strongly; and using this data base to determine how to act with the player and other NPC's. So long as the gradations are subtle, with a range extending from "I don't care" to "I will try to save/kill this person" it could be done.

The list doesn't have to be long. Most NPC's will only care about a few things - mostly regional. At each major decision point in a quest, NPC death, crime detection, the players database of actions is updated. The NPC will compare his list to your list (or another NPC's list when they are talking with each other) and decide how he feels about the player/NPC.

This is pure code, not scripting. It simply sets his disposition with a bit more granularity and uniqueness. However, in game it would appear that the NPC has unique "feelings" to go along with his mood. No two NPC's would be the same, and even if they appear the same, eventually you will be able to tell the difference based on how they react to you and others.

Attempting to create thousands of branches of dialog is silly. Only create special dialog for special circumstances. Otherwise, just let the outcome of the disposition calculation determine among, say, a dozen "moods" of dialog - from friendly to bleh to GTFO or die.

Note, by data base I really mean structure. We aren't talking about every NPC running a copy of MySQL in the background.

I think we are still talking about two different things here. You are talking about how the battle is fought. I am talking about the aftermath.

I have cut down the quote to one specific line I would like to point out. Notice that in Hitman, you have two objectives. Kill the target and extract. Those two objects were scripted, they are not random. No matter what window you climb through, or whether you shoot, strangle, or poison the target, or who else you kill, you always end up having to kill the one guy, and then get to a certain point. The AI and player decide HOW, but the ultimate result is SCRIPTED by the developer. Not to mention that this is a somewhat bad example, considering that every single mission in Hitman is independant of eachother, whereas in Skyrim, if you kill the NPC 'Scott' during a battle, he is never there again for the rest of the game, which can drastically change things. Those changes however, have to be accounted for and set up by the developer...

Well they've already stated that you can effect the productivity and output of a town/settlement by disrupting it's source of income (i.e. Lumber Mill).

So hopefully with this in mind, the DEVs were looking at the 'wider picture' with events that might affect the masses.

I'd love to see some sort of cause/effect scenario in game that's been inspired by my actions.

I don' think you are grasping the concept. There is not such a thing as "unscripted battle" or "unscripted behavior". There is no program (which is what a game engine is) that can think for itself and create situations on a whim or react to different situations unless a human has told the program what to do. Even what you consider as "random" has been scripted, that is, a set of parameters have been coded within the program to create a sense of randomness. Further, for the program to be able to "react" to a so-called random event, the program will have to be coded with different responses to that event.

Why do you think software bugs exist? You can come up with many definitions of a bug, but basically, you have a bug when an even occurs that the code has not been told how to handle, and not knowing what to do with that event, it spews an error or crashes the entire application. So, a person has to create a piece of code to tell the application what to do when that event occurs.

And I said an aftermath is included to a battle simulation itself. They are not separate.

I'm not saying there should be zero scripting, I'm saying with minimum scripting you can tell a story. Those two objectives can hardly be called as scripting, they are just objectives. You can make the guards kill the target, you don't even have to do it yourself. Emergent gameplay.

In Skyrim, a quest will pass to relatives in case the giver "Scott" dies. Radiant Story will apply preset stories to any NPCs. This means, the dialog might be unisix and carefully written to suit many situations. Bethesda is trying. I will see what they are doing with the Faction system and how civil war will be handled. If we can get enemy, friend and neutral NPC groups then half of what I want is accomplished. Morovir put the other half.


I think you don't know the difference between programming scripting and programming AI. If it is scripted then it is no AI. AI suits to all situations, it is a system not a script. And I didn't say it will be bug free. Errors will happen, errors are the spice of AI. Player doesn't need to know any of this, programs can be told to not crash for every error. The most important part is path finding that works good enough.



I guess no one plays Stalker or Mount&Blade here.

On the contrary, it is you who do not know programming at all, fairly obvious by the highlighted statement.
Call it programming, call it scripting, it doesn't matter; at the core, it is simply a set of instructions which the application uses to carry out a task. I don't know what artificial intelligence means to you, but it certainly isn't a program being able to make decisions on its own. It just can't.

You keep mentioning Mount & Blade and Stalker. I guess you think the engines running these games just know what is going on on their own and will make decisions on their own. Not the case. Just think about it: you mention battles in M&B. Do you really think the game engine has a concept of what a battle is? Of course not.

It works more like, say, create a function and call it "battle", then within the function state that, when this variable (NPC) is within this distance of this other variable, that both variables will engage in animation package "fight" , which in turn will call, say, another function called "combat" which determines how the battle is scored (which blows count, which don't, which variable has the better weapon, etc etc etc) , and based on how that plays, you then flagged one of the variables as "winner".

That is a very crude example, but still stands that no matter what you see in the game or you think is happening in game, instructions have to be given to create every single action and every outcome.

I didn't want to accuse you not knowing programming. Sorry for that. Clearly we have some differences on programming principles. There is also some misunderstandings, it is like I'm talking about Skynet or something?! All I asked was neutral, friend, foe AI variables and it is called SKYNET and conscious AI . :blink:

In my programming, there is no "battle" function. There is NPCs and their combat, grouping behaviors. The two sides attack each others based on their hostility levels and self-preservation. Some live, some die, some flee, some become captives. The situation is what the situation is, obvious winner is obvious. There is no need for flags. This battle might have different outcomes based on many variables going for it. Randomness helps.

An organized system is what I think. If you call organized systems as scripting then it is OK we're talking about the same thing.

This. For what the OP is suggesting, the entire game would have to be developed specifically around the player's choices and decisions, which Skyrim is not.

That would be a very generic and bad story... If everyone's dialog is simply "Ok now go to the next place!" and they don't specify so that it can be one of like 100 places... I have played both stalkers (Chernobyl and Pripyat), I'm fairly certain that game is pretty much 100% scripted. There is absolutely no randomness like what you are describing in it. If guy A tells you to kill guy B, there are probably 4 outcomes, you kill guy A, you kill guy B, you kill neither, or you kill both. They are all scripted for and accounted for, and there is no randomness to it. Where is there randomness within Stalker?

There are probably a lot of ways a game can commuincate to the player that it is 'aware' that certain things have or have not happened, and I love that idea.

This concept was what made me fall in love with the Dragon Warrior ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_warrior )series back in 1989 on the NES. I'm not a big fan of JRPGs, but what I liked about the first Dragon Warrrior game was that after you beat the main quest, you could keep playing and most of the NPCs in the world recognized that you had defeated the 'big evil.'

It was this concept, albeit in its infancy, that I found very rewarding in Dragon Warrior. I'm all for any game mechanic or system that further evolves the 'awareness' by the NPCs of the actions or inactions by the player.

How many computer roleplaying game has this feature?
You have branches like who house to join in Morrowind, however this does not change the game itself, just faction relationship and related quests.
Oblivion was weak here, not much of branching.
Fallout 3 had the blow up megaton quest who changed the gameworld pretty significantly. However this was also scripted, no rpg game as I know about does this unscripted.
Note unscripted, you do something, might be something totally stupid like killing all merchants in a city and expect the game to adjust.
It's possible to do as small changes you do in strategy games might change the game world, however I doubt this will be cost effective in a standard rpg.

My first comment had nothing to do with the technical measures for creating a game, it had to do with the properties of the game. I was referring to persistent changes in the game world as a result of your combined actions. Yes, there was some of that in Morrowind and Oblivion, but only for the main quest and specific guild memberships. For example, if you made it a habit of killing vampires, eventually other clans should know you - and they should get harder to kill. If you typically free slaves, areas with lots of slaves should keep a closer eye on you. Sure, if you never got caught, and never missed a witness, you might could go on like nothing happened, but how often does that happen?

I dunno, it's getting hard to define in here - but what I'm looking for is a system where the world, and its inhabitants, alter the way they react to you based on the entirety of your decisions - not just specific quest lines - and in a more subtle way than is presently done. It would also be nice if NPC's reacted to each other in this way as well, but then we get back off into AI and emergent behavior topics again.

Bottom line, all actions should have consequences. Not just the ones that show up in your journal.

Well, radiant story might be generic and bad. Or not. In a game as detailed as Skyrim, it doesn't have to be. We'll see about that. I gave Morrowind's MQ as an example. LOTR is like that too. See it is all covered, Tolkien is a master. It is all covered and it is not even a game!!! Item fetch quests are the most basic version of this. It is the characters and their backstories and the intents that makes an item fetch quest a good story. Think big.

The zone in Stalker is always on the move, regardless of player. Faction groups are always fighting and I can join sides and the outcome can be anything. The world is living by itself. I'm giving that as an example of emergent gameplay. M&B is also have a complete random world with bandits and pirates fighting all the time. PC can join any fight and outcomes aren't scripted. They are not powerful at all in their story-telling department, Stalker is bad, M&B is non-existent. What I ask is designing quests on top of a system like that. Such system can help the situations needed for a well written quest and also cover the situations asked in OP. You know, "living breathing world"...

But again, no matter how random the actual fights are, and who you join, the result and reaction has to be scripted. A real life person has to write out the dialog where the leader of Side A says "Oh no, we lost!", or "Oh yay, we won!", etc. Those things must be predetermined. The only way to get around exact details is to be generic. Like, if one of 10 men can kill someone's child, the father could be like 'I want you to kill him." Where he never says the killers name. This allows for many different possible situations, however this is a bad thing. Generalization of dialog would be bad in a deep and immersive game like Skyrim. So I am always happy when there is a big event presented in front of me, they give me like 2 or 3 very direct, solid choices and I can pick one. I would rather have that than 30 possible outcomes but crappy dialog and loss of personalization.

So really, in a way it can be done, but I think it would sacrifice too much and is not worth it at all. This is what I have to deal with while making my quest mods. I only have oh so much time to work on the mod, so how do I balance detail with choice. I could make the most linear quest in the universe and it will all be the most detailed quest ever. Or, I can make it have several dramatic turning points, branching out to different outcomes, but then everything is less detail and more 'poorly done'. So I think a good point to arrive at is, mostly a focus on detail, with enough choice to keep it from being one straight boring story. Which, yes, Oblivion and Fallout 3 had. They of course went overboard with NV. Making the main quest go 40 different ways, and really just being a nasty mash of confusion and lameness.

And what I am trying to tell you, is that as far as the program (game engine) is concerned, it has no concept of what an NPC is, or what "combat" is, or what "group behavior" is, or what "hostility" is... to the program, is merely the function of matching a set value to a variable. Any and every "behavior" you see, it is because someone wrote a set of instructions for that "behavior" to present itself in-game.

Until we have an overseeing AI running the game, we won't see that kind of "limitless options" ideal in a game which requires scripted events.

Maybe when there is an AI controller of the story that can script events on its own, we'll really see limitless options. And yes, before you quote me, I know you're not suggesting limitless options, OP. I still think it would be more like adding timed quests if they changed based on you "omitting" the finishing act of a quest like killing Umaril in your example. Thus I doubt that would be feasible. Maybe for a select few quests, but that still requires a huge amount of extra scripting.

I understand what you are saying, and I am not saying it is not possible, but for a PC game, it is unfeasible to implement gameplay whereas the game world changes with every decision the player makes, because any reaction to the player's behavior would have to be scripted (or coded in, whichever term you want to use). Not only would it take a tremendous amount of work to create the code, I doubt any personal computer would be able to run it.

Some decisions, sure, but these decisions will first need to be defined - and not by YOU, but by the developer) , then code would need to be implemented into the game to respond to that decision. If the dev says "ok, let's have it that if the player starts killing vampires, then the vampires will group in no less than 3 NPCs, and if less than 3, try to run away from the main character". Well, you have to code the player's behavior (variable) so it can be recorded, and once the variable reaches a certain value, then trigger the vampire's behavior.

As you state, games already have that to an extent, but not to the wants of the OP. Think about what the OP says (paraphrasing): "if I stop doing a quest, the world should know about it and react to it". Ok. I'll ask, for one, how does "the world" know you are doing that quest? Then, how is the world going to know you stopped doing the quest?

So, again, the "world" may react to some of your decisions when these decisions are pre-determined or expected within the code, but you cannot expect the "world" to react to any decision you make if it doesn't know in advance what that decision is.

I will, however, recommend The Witcher to you. The game play changes substantially based on decisions you make, some of them you wouldn't even think would matter down the line.