The closest thing we got to the idea of Radiant AI is probably Dwarf Fortress.
But entirely goal-driven (and thus unpredictable) game AI systems like this are usually at odds with story-driven gameplay where the outcome needs to be deterministic (or at least "winnable") and the player is the hero which the story is built around (while games like Dwarf Fortress don't have a pre-defined story, and also no player character to take care of, and the whole fortress being wiped out because of comically unpredictable events is a large part of the "fun").
Another similar game to Dwarf Fortres is Song of Syx [0]. It's more accessible then DF and I think they can have up to 20,000 entities active in the world at a time. The world map is pretty huge, and the player gets to control a one group among many. Every entity in Song of Syx is individually modelled, though probably not in quite the details that DF is known for.
That was also my thought. How does the world behave 100 hours into the simulation? If half the town residents have managed to get themselves killed by guards and some of the shopkeepers are gone, it's a bad outcome. Complex sims have emergent behaviors that are hard to tune.
The other thing is a bit more subtle. It's a big open world and all NPCs need to be active continuously for that sim to work. So you have a big N to squeeze into a tight per frame CPU budget. Also, things like path planning or object interaction only work if some information like object positions and pathfinding maps are kept in memory the whole time for the entire world. This sounds very challenging on a 2005 era PC.
One of the classic emergent behaviors (which I loved) that came from Dwarf Fortress was the cats dying of alcohol poisoning.
There was a patch note years and years ago about a bugfix that had to happen because all the cats were mysteriously dying in people's fortresses -- it was tracked down to the fact that cats would walk through the taverns, in which visitors would be drinking and occasionally spilling alcohol (There was a feature that had been added at one point for spilled liquids to form pools which could get on entities passing through, like getting mud on you by walking through a large puddle).
The cats also had a piece of functionality where they could self clean by licking after they became dirty with something, and would ingest some amount of it due to using their tongue to clean themselves.
The cats' fur would become damp with the alcohol as they stepped through the spills, and the cats self cleaning meant they would regularly get extremely drunk and die from the alcohol poisoning trying to clean themselves. Not intended at all, but two completely different systems colliding in an emergent behavior of interest.
I also always loved the behavior of undead zones. In them, any dead creature could be revived by dark magic in the area. It leads to the question though, what counts as a dead creature? Well, it would be anything with a tag indicating that it came from something that died. This does in fact include small bones though, or hair from a butchered animal. Fortresses in these areas would have quite the casualty rate trying to butcher a pack mule as its hair would come to life and kill the butcher.
The thing about Oblivion that the simulation tends to run up against is that hitpoints and death are an abstraction: a real human would die much more easily from the injuries that get inflicted, but also a real human would avoid a lot of problems in the first place (and have families that would take over their shop, and live in cities with more than twenty people hanging around). You run into trouble when one part of the simulation is taking things as symbolic while another part is taking it as literal. If you want it all to be literal you've got to be willing to go super deep into the emergent simulation.
>That was also my thought. How does the world behave 100 hours into the simulation? If half the town residents have managed to get themselves killed by guards and some of the shopkeepers are gone, it's a bad outcome. Complex sims have emergent behaviors that are hard to tune.
Thats why its a management sim. Dwarves take care of themselves up to a point, and that point is making adjustments to their environment to meet needs. Generally speaking the more successful you are, the deeper dwarves will reach to find needs and wants that arent fulfilled.
100 hours in you have hit population cap, and have dwarves demanding bigger and bigger churches and guildhalls.
I used to rely heavily on the "Danger room" concept, where spears are thrust up and down training dwarves in dodging. The issue is that dwarves will quite often carry their young with them, even while in the military. So you quickly end up with splattered babies, which sets off a depressive spiral in the fort.
In time since Oblivion we got games like Divinity: Original sin 1/2 where you can kill pretty much every character in the game and it will still be finishable.
The essential NPCs could also be flagged essential, or maybe have a variation of that flag where only way given character dies is if say 1/4 of the damage dealt to character is from player (so NPC can't accidentally kill important NPC basically).
Also, radiant AI can also just... not run on the plot significant NPCs.
Finally, Bethesda games aren't known from main story being the main selling point.
I think it's more than essential NPCs though. Already in Oblivion those couldn't die anyway (Morrowind was the last TES game where you could get locked out of finishing the main story if you killed the wrong NPC).
But fully emergent behavior would likely destroy some player's experience in other ways - towns without shopkeeps, most quests ruined, little staged moments going away, etc.
> you can kill pretty much every character in the game and it will still be finishable.
That was true before Oblivion, as well. Arcanum let you get away with that, for example. If I remember correctly, so did Fallout 2 aside from the starting village.
Some games in the Ultima series did, but Morrowind didn't, which is why Radiant AI was developed in the first place. The first chapter of the article is about that.
There's probably some mathematical way to express that... it'd be interesting to look at Todd's mythical "Radiant Economy", create a dynamical system model/game-theoretic mode, and try to prove that in the long run everyone doesn't end up broke or a millionaire.
I think Veloren has a sort of dynamic economy where NPCs trade in and consume goods. Well, maybe not NPCs, but at least settlements as a collective, or something like that. I'm unsure of the details, but I remember prices being different between settlements, and prices changing based on local NPC inventories.
> create a dynamical system model/game-theoretic mode, and try to prove that in the long run everyone doesn't end up broke or a millionaire.
Simply ask yourself which factors in the real world lead or don't lead (depending on your political stance) to this outcome, and you likely have found the relevant factors that you have to include.
Regarding debunking the skooma merchant murder anecdote:
> The addicts live in a locked cabin, so it’s unlikely for the player to enter it unless they are specifically looking for it.
This is overlooking a crucial, obscure, and unintentionally hilarious detail: not all the skooma addicts are in the cabin! Out in the world are two NPCs who make a monthly inter-city trip to the den to get their fix. However, due to a bug where these NPCs are assigned to the wrong faction, they can't actually get through the locked door of the den, so they'll stand outside the door drinking skooma forever, unable to progress to the step of the AI package that would eventually return them home to their usual schedules, unless the player unlocks the door for them. https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Trenus_Duronius
Interesting detail, thanks for letting me now. I had a look at the AI packages of all three visitors (Gelephor, Gellius Terentius, Trenus Duronius) and at least in the base game (without UOP) none of them carry skooma nor are scripted to find it. So even though the game implies they are skooma addicts via dialogue & environmental storytelling, from a purely technical POV they are not addicts. Getting stuck outside the shack checks out, though I don't think faction membership is the reason for that — they simply don't have the key to the door.
> from a purely technical POV they are not addicts
Videos show them performing the silly skooma-drinking animation while standing there locked outside the den, so they must have some sort of flag somewhere, even without skooma in their inventory.
> though I don't think faction membership is the reason for that
The wiki claims that patching them to add faction membership fixes the locked-out bug, FWIW.
In any case, in conjunction with this bug we no longer need to assume that the addicts in the den are loaded and simulating at all times in order to make the murdered-skooma-dealer story plausible. It seems fair to assume that potions (including skooma) could once be consumed (per the demo video), and that a "consume skooma" package analogous to "eat" would have caused them to seek out skooma. It's true that shopkeepers have stored their shop inventories in hidden chests since at least Morrowind, but if we're charitable enough to assume that some "acquire from merchant" behavior was ever prototyped, then it's not hard to imagine some sort of hack was added to make it seem as though shop items were "in" a shopkeeper's inventory for the purpose of the AI's environmental search routine. Even if killing a shopkeeper did not literally make their shop inventory available from their corpse (for player balance reasons), that could still have caused the murder itself to happen.
After playing Starfield I don't really have any expectations for Bethesda to deliver on anything interesting anymore. The progression from Oblivion to Starfield has been one of becoming less like a small shop with character willing for its developers to take big risks with unique and intricate features, and more of trying to be a generic AAA studio that prefers predictable blandness. I don't think you can really hope that they'll magically return to making games the way they did 20 years ago.
They seem to now be under the mistaken impression that radiant AI is to get more content out of the game by implementing infinite permutations of simple quests, and that customers will think X things permuted Y ways is X*Y content and not just X+Y content. But the purpose of radiant AI was, I think, to make the world feel alive and even unique. Which means I really shouldn't even see every x in X or every y in Y.
If you want an interesting implementation of the same concepts as in Radiant AI I recommend checking out Dwarf Fortress. Every dwarf fortress world is essentially an entire history of thousands of radiant AI interactions up until you enter it, at which point your adventurer/fort becomes part of the world and continues the radiant interactions with its civilizations/wildlife/monsters/etc.
I think DF is probably the ideal existing game to considering adding LLM-characters and conversation to as a drop-in augmentation. DF already has the simulation and generation of realistic characters and stories working, but unfortunately it's very formulaic to interact with it as an adventurer. In that case the game actually is quite "alive" already, just without a voice.
To me, Starfield is a massive admission that either the developers don't understand what made their previous games work - or that no one will step in at a top level and prevent them breaking that core.
The modern TES games have been all about environmental storytelling, exploration, combat and crafting. All else is secondary.
Whether you like that focus or not is up to you, but that's the draw of games like Skyrim and FO4.
But Starfield completely broke it. They wanted hundreds of planets to explore, but the only practical way to do that is procedural generation. No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never anything interesting in them. You can't do environmental storytelling because that requires a human hand.
Due to engine limitations, making all the travel seamless was also completely impractical.
So instead of seeing a location and going "Oh man, I want to go there!", then just walking there encountering distractions on the way...it's Loading screen -> Loading Screen -> Loading screen -> Generic planet with nothing interesting to see.
How no one at a top level said "this can't work, the game's concept is bad, start over" is baffling. No one had a vision at the top level for how the game was supposed to work - or that vision was just wrong.
If Bethesda can't understand the fundamentals of their own best-selling game, I don't see how they can make a sequel.
> No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never anything interesting in them. You can't do environmental storytelling because that requires a human hand.
I would say, rather, that no one wants to invest the development effort to make them interesting enough to explore.
In my view, you can either use procgen to make development cheaper or to make it more interesting to explore, but not both at the same time. The roguelike genre was invented because the developers of rogue wanted to be surprised by their own game. And it worked to an astonishing degree.
But you've got to design in the systems that are interesting to explore, rather than relying on the amount of content.
Everyone hopes that you'll have multiplicative results so that content X times content Y goes exponential. But with procgen the multiplicative effects are more from different systems interacting; having a sword with different stats feels same-y, having a sword that combines two gameplay effects starts feeling more interesting, having a sword that integrates with a procedurally generated narrative and a system of tracking per-weapon kills that dictates your reputation among monsters starts feeling like there's a lot more to explore.
Nethack is famous for having a zillion different hidden reactions that let different parts of the content work together in surprising ways, as anyone who has tripped down the stairs while wielding the corpse of a cockatrice has discovered. Dwarf Fortress has a zillion different moving parts, so that the giant shambling golem built out of salt can be defeated by shoving it into a lake. Caves of Qud lets you bring a chair to life and then use your psychic powers to swap minds with it and then go on to play the rest of the game as the chair (with rocket launchers).
They've all got a lot of interesting environmental storytelling, but in absence of the human scripting have to work a lot harder for it. A lot of games, unfortunately, stop at the X+Y generation, without building in the synergies to make the different values of Y unique and expressive enough for the players to care.
Bethesda had been doing procedural generation since forever though: Have you played Daggerfall? It's always been part of their studio's DNA.
Bethesda has always relied on top of the line technological innovation that makes us forgive all the jank that came with it. Whether it was a bad combat system, a level scaling mechanism that just doesn't work, uncanny graphics... this has always been there. It's the opposite of the old Nintendo Way, where the games always were less ambitious, but had so much polish that the games counted as mirrors.
We've reached a moment of much diminished returns though. 5, or even 10 year old games aren't so technologically inferior that they are uncomfortable. A very shiny things has more trouble covering for jank, and high budget games are just so expensive that neither coherent vision. nor significant innovation are likely. So the Bethesda way is just not workable anymore.
What I'd want Bethesda to do, Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom meets Morrowind/Oblivion, is just really hard to wrangle logistically. Getting anything done under those kinds of constraings just takes too long.
> No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never anything interesting in them.
I think practice shows this isn't true, Minecraft is pure procedural generation and people love wandering through Minecraft worlds.
I haven't played Starfield, but based on what you said the difference is in the complexity and amount of stuff, in Minecraft you don't have to go far to find more new things. Even if you're very familiar with the game you can still come across very unique areas, it's rare that I feel like I wasted my time by just wandering around a map.
Additionally Minecraft solves the story problem by simply not having one, which works fine for the kind of game Minecraft is, probably not so much for Starfield.
That is a major issue with Starfield, but it also felt like Bethesda missed the improvements happening in other games in the last decade or so. Many games now are much more cinematic in their storytelling, often with full motion capture. A very recent comparison would be BG3, which is very cinematic despite being almost impossibly large.
In Starfield you have a mostly static view of your questgivers talking. Which was fine 10-20 years ago, doesn't feel as engaging today when many games do it much better.
It's also not only about this aspect, you can make engaging stories with old-school methods. But the writing could not save the aging presentation here, it appeared very bland and tired to me.
What absolutely didn't help was the persuasion minigame, where you essentially broke all pretense of having a story-based reason to bypass a certain check. Persuasion checks are very common in RPGs, I've never seen them done so terribly as in Starfield.
The environmental storytelling certainly was the highlight of previous Bethesda games. But the main and side stories often were engaging as well. In Starfield they felt aggressively bland and mediocre in a way I haven't really seen in other games.
Proc gen can be engaging if emergent content is complex, dynamic, and novel. But again that goes back to Radiant AI being a vessel for generic fetch quests in the newer games, while in a proc gen game you would think there would be a major, if not the major dev focus on fleshing out the system in other ways (from dynamic tribes and factions to more fully fleshed out STALKER-esque persistent fellow space travellers with agency). The final missing component would be inspiration in design of the pieces, so they interact together in interesting but emergent ways, which is of course another element that the game sorely lacks.
Starfield also specifically didn’t understand what makes a space version of an exploration RPG interesting. They couldn’t ship ground to space flight so they convinced themselves it wasn’t interesting and replaced it with cutscenes and fast travel.
The whole excitement of games like Elite, Space Engineers etc is the seamless takeoff to landing between long planetary distances.
In a space themed game the journey is the story not so much the smaller interpersonal interactions at the destinations, those things are the reasons for the journey.
Modern Bethesda didn’t understand what they were making.
I recognize all of that as true to some extent, but still I have 230 hours in Starfield, and I haven’t even finished all the quests.
Does that truly constitute a failed game?
As far as I’m concerned their biggest mistake was not having something to travel around in the planets on the start. Walking around to the interesting locations was annoying.
Then there’s a bunch of pointless systems like the colony system, and the whole space magic thing, but the rest is still a bog standard Bethesda game with 10000 different handcrafted unique locations for me to explore following a bunch of sort of interesting questlines.
Yes. IMO Starfield's biggest failure is in the creative department. It is not interesting at all (for me) in terms of things like writing and voice acting etc. It is not a technical problem that can solved by innovative game mechanics like a roided up version of radiant AI (whatever that is).
Games like RDR2 and Witcher 3 left such a mark on me becauss they had bold personalities. Starfield in comparison feels like corporate memphis despite a nice Nasapunk foundation.
The funny thing about using AI to create an infinite amount of bland quests is that there is literally no audience for it. The people who play the game through once or twice aren't going to care about it and the people who want more of the game will download one of the thousands of mods created by the community. Oh, wow, you used AI to come up with a quest where I have to go to a cave and kill a creature. Amazing.
I think Starfield gets a lot more flak than it deserves. Yeah, compared to Fallout 4, where there's something hand placed to observe or interact with seemingly every 100 ft in any direction, the world feels barren. But I think the departure is intentional; Starfield felt much more like a spiritual successor to Daggerfall than to anything since Morrowind. Overall, I spent less time in Starfield than in older Bethesda titles, but I liked what was there, despite it being less dense, and I spent more time than I have in many other games.
Why should Bethesda have to refine the same exact formula over and over? That would just turn into what Ubisoft does with Assassins Creed, pumping out soulless entry after entry into the franchise. In other words, Starfield was Bethesda taking a risk and trying to introduce unique features rather than releasing yet another another predictable "Bethesda RPG".
> Why should Bethesda have to refine the same exact formula over and over?
Because they are the only ones who can pull off that formula, and when they stray from it, they end up as just one mediocre title in a sea of similar mediocrity.
Perhaps Starfield was the most important Bethesda release. The animus toward Starfield will serve as an enormous signal/reminder to course correct away from this "unique feature." One can hope.
That's a fairly reductive take in my opinion. Oblivion made the game approachable to a much wider audience. That may have been to the detriment of the core gameplay but it wasn't a _clear_ step backward. Some things went backwards while others moved forward.
Games have a similar lifecycle to social scenes. Now and again, an amazing game comes along that captures the imagination of gamers. Usually it's made by really creative and innovative people with a clear vision and direction. Also these people usually have taste, which is a crucial element.
Their good taste attracts a bunch of early adopters, people with a finger on the pulse and who are eager to play and appreciate the game for what it is. But this interest attracts poseurs, people who play the game but just to say they are, to feel included and a part of something cool. There are far more poseurs than otherwise, so at this stage the scene can grow exponentially. This growth attracts vultures commoditize the scene in the form of penny pinching and "enshitification" through dark patterns. Monied interests strip out everything that made the game interesting and fun (because a good, fun experience isn't profitable), and then they milk it for everything it's worth until it's a dried corpse. These are the people who are driving the bad gameplay decisions and who aren't listening to the taste makers.
Usually in games this comes in the form of a pivot to MMOs. By that measure, TES died in 2014.
IMO this also applies to Final Fantasy (RIP 2010, plenty of new FF games but nothing that recaptured the magic of 6 and 7) and Warcraft (RIP 2004, no new warcraft games since).
Reminds me how more people play oldschool runescape than the newer version. Anytime jagex tries to implement some change to that game they poll the community forums. Seems to work alright for keeping people around.
RimWorld is only superficially comparable to Dwarf Fortress, if you want to talk about basic gameplay then sure, but what makes the latter special is the immensely complex world simulations and interactions going on in the background, RimWorld has absolutely nothing like that.
I'd be surprised if the majority is overwhelming since DF has sold a million copies on Steam so far. For comparison, Civilization V has sold about 10M.
As a Bethesda fan (spending 1000s of hours combined in Fallout and Skyrim), I enjoyed reading this post. Especially liked the use of creating your own NPC to test the various scenarios. I just now started playing the Oblivion remaster for the first time and I find that I am liking the NPC interactions / liveliness a lot more compared to their later titles.
The one item that stood out to me was:
"Todd’s mid-fight dagger acquisition
Verdict: Impossible in the final game unless scripted to do so"
I do not disagree with the verdict for the final build of the game but I recall observing something similar in Fallout 3. I had stashed a mini-nuke launcher and ammmo in the Megaton player home. Some sort of conflict transpired (do not remember what exactly, perhaps I provoked an NPC for fun), I witnessed one of the town-folk run into my player home (in its own cell) and come back out with my weapon. It is possible with 1000s of hours in Bethesda games I am just mishmashing memories together but I am pretty sure this is what prompted me to eventually download a player home mod (and eventually learn G.E.C.K. by "remastering" it).
It's an interesting anecdote, but from my understanding of the system that simply shouldn't be possible. Your house's interior cell isn't loaded into memory when you are outside in Megaton, so there's no way for the NPC to access your items. I think this fundamental limitation holds true for every version of the engine, from Morrowind to Starfield, but I'd be glad to be proven wrong with concrete evidence.
When I played gothic, I was in the wilderness and in the process of being killed by some beast. Completely unexpected, a core NPC (Lester?) joined the fight and slew it. It turns out, he makes a walk between 2 camps every day, and happened to be around just at the right time.
While already impressed by the AI, I was blown away by this l behaviour. He goes between 2 places that can't exist in RAM at the same time, and interacts with the world when it happens to pop into existence around him.
Oblivion has multiple NPCs with complex schedules that involve travel between cities. And yes, you can run into them on the road. Best example is the countess of Leyawin, once a month she visits her mother in Chorrol (opposite side of the map) along with her personal guards and advisor.
Radiant AI does work exactly like that. The game keeps the global cell-level pathfinding graph in memory at all times, and uses it to simulate NPC travel outside of the loaded area.
Technology wise they should be comparable, but the way its used feels different. The Gothic world felt much more alive than Oblivion, even if Gothic is from 2001 and Oblivion from 2006
After hearing the "everyone pickpockets everyone and goes to jail and/or dies" anecdote for the "original" Radiant AI, I'm beginning to suspect that the following are incompatible:'
– there's always enough interesting characters to interact with to give quests etc.;
- live simulated world with emergent behavior that involves characters disappearing;
Honestly I think there is a fundamental incompatibility between: some sense of simulation or realism, and a high enough density of interesting events per character per hour to meet the player's entertainment expectations. A functioning society just can't supply enough arrests, trysts, bandit kidnappings, secret identities, feuds, marriages, etc etc, without rapidly tearing itself completely apart. There's a reason basically every TV show feels like it going off the rails after a few seasons: you can't lay rails in front of you as fast as episodes consume them. It only works at the beginning because you're borrowing against the stock of events that occurred in-universe before the show began.
Dwarf Fortress kindof solves this by zooming out to increase the character count, as well as the standard fantasy trick of super-charging the economic productivity of everything. Letting 1 dwarf feed 15 by working part-time on a 25 square meter plot of mushrooms helps a lot.
The "always enough interesting characters" problem needs to be solved by something along the lines of "if an important NPC dies, the role is passed to an heir". But ... also the world needs to be less murder-y, and (related) actually have a closed economy.
The article mentioned the problem of fitting audio on a single DVD (which would only be exacerbated by fallbacks, and no please don't consume my entire SSD) ... there certainly was a regression in video game creative dialogue when everything started to be voiced. And voice synthesis is an example of one of the rare problems that AI might actually be able to solve fairly reliably, though it's not clear if the jarring exceptions would be more of a problem outside the current utility problems. Though given that the individual input words should be known, probably just converting text to phonemes would suffice.
Yes, completely agree. We're fine with text for dialogue in indie games and it's a lot easier to store and generate. I would happily have all the characters in Skyrim talk in text if the conversations were more dynamic.
The only problem is that audio can give you location info. if someone is off to your left shouting that you'll pay in blood, it's a little harder to place them if it's just angry text above their heads
Interesting read. Got me thinking, I’d love to see what happens when modern AI meets open world simulation. Not just prettier graphics, but actual reasoning NPCs. Imagine arguing with a World of Warcraft innkeeper about the price of ale. Priceless.
Wiring a chatbot to dialogue is less interesting to me than the possibility of AI directing scenes and orchestrating reactivity across multiple characters. A reasoning model can ensure that the world responds to the player in a reasonable and narratively interesting way, without having to script everything or make individual characters particularly intelligent.
We're used to thinking of game AI as a property of the entity it's attached to (the NPC, the enemy, the opposing player) but an LLM can sit above that, more like a dungeon master.
Wasn't this the goal of the Director AI in Left 4 Dead?[1] Monitoring player progress (or lack of it) and tailoring how zombies and items spawned outside of script events, and in L4D2 how the map, pathing, and weather worked in order to maximize tension or encourage progress?
Years ago when I was a bit obsessed about the Holy Grail of a living & breathing CRPG world the approach that seemed most promising to me then was having an expert system style AI module running on top of the complex but mechanical and boring low level simulation. This GM module would then find and tie together predefined hierarchical abstract patterns from the engines event log, adding some narration and meaning to it all and slightly nudging things along to some hopefully more interesting and meaningful paths.
I have been thinking that the current LLMs might actually make something like this more feasible, a kind of an GM in a Chinese Room that translates game events in to potential narrative arcs that the player is then free to follow if they wish. As the LLM's actions would be both inspired and limited by the game engine this would probably also tone down the problems with hallucinations and slop.
Not possible, because can't be guardrailed with 100% accuracy. You'll ask it something outside of the Warcraft world (e.g. US politics), and it'll happily oblige. I imagine NPCs will generate really weird immersion breaking stuff even if you cannot freeform interact with them anyway.
You can do that also while playing a traditional tabletop RPG. Players typically don't do it because why would they ruin immersion?
I understand that in multiplayer with strangers it would be a problem because you could affect other players' experiences, but in a single-player game I don't see this as a big issue, as long as the NPC doesn't spontaneously bring immersion-breaking topics into the conversation without the player starting it (which I suppose could be achieved with a suitable system prompt and some fine-tuning on in-lore text).
If it's the player that wants to troll the game and break immersion by "jailbreaking" the NPCs, it's on them, just like if they use a cheat code and make the game trivial.
I’m not at all sure of this. You can use classifiers, fine tuning, and prompting to mitigate the issue both on user input and model output. And you’d probably want a bunch of fine tuning anyway to get their voice right.
> Not possible, because can't be guardrailed with 100% accuracy. You'll ask it something outside of the Warcraft world (e.g. US politics), and it'll happily oblige. I imagine NPCs will generate really weird immersion breaking stuff even if you cannot freeform interact with them anyway.
> Not to mention the current token cost.
You of course have to train the AI from ground up and on material that is as much as possible only related to the topics that are in the game world (i.e. don't include real-world events in the training data that has no implications in-universe).
Write a couple of lore books, in-universe cyclopedia, some character sheets and exclusively train on them. Maybe some out-of-game lore for cross-over universes!
I enjoy getting my ale at the click of a button, and keep my arguing capabilities for stranger online.
There may be a place for AI driven games but there is literally no reason to shove it everywhere. Pre-written dialogue is much more enjoyable to engage with on the long term, contrasted with having to think about phrasing for an NPC that spouts generic fantasy speak.
I have remembered the phrase "Radiant AI" from the Oblivion Marketing when it came out, 2005ish I guess, when I was in high school. I'm glad it stuck with someone else as much as it did for me: the hype, the disappointment, but also the wondering what it could have been, because it sounded like a legitimately very-cool game feature except for the part where it didn't exist.
Readit News
But entirely goal-driven (and thus unpredictable) game AI systems like this are usually at odds with story-driven gameplay where the outcome needs to be deterministic (or at least "winnable") and the player is the hero which the story is built around (while games like Dwarf Fortress don't have a pre-defined story, and also no player character to take care of, and the whole fortress being wiped out because of comically unpredictable events is a large part of the "fun").
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1162750/Songs_of_Syx/
The other thing is a bit more subtle. It's a big open world and all NPCs need to be active continuously for that sim to work. So you have a big N to squeeze into a tight per frame CPU budget. Also, things like path planning or object interaction only work if some information like object positions and pathfinding maps are kept in memory the whole time for the entire world. This sounds very challenging on a 2005 era PC.
There was a patch note years and years ago about a bugfix that had to happen because all the cats were mysteriously dying in people's fortresses -- it was tracked down to the fact that cats would walk through the taverns, in which visitors would be drinking and occasionally spilling alcohol (There was a feature that had been added at one point for spilled liquids to form pools which could get on entities passing through, like getting mud on you by walking through a large puddle).
The cats also had a piece of functionality where they could self clean by licking after they became dirty with something, and would ingest some amount of it due to using their tongue to clean themselves.
The cats' fur would become damp with the alcohol as they stepped through the spills, and the cats self cleaning meant they would regularly get extremely drunk and die from the alcohol poisoning trying to clean themselves. Not intended at all, but two completely different systems colliding in an emergent behavior of interest.
I also always loved the behavior of undead zones. In them, any dead creature could be revived by dark magic in the area. It leads to the question though, what counts as a dead creature? Well, it would be anything with a tag indicating that it came from something that died. This does in fact include small bones though, or hair from a butchered animal. Fortresses in these areas would have quite the casualty rate trying to butcher a pack mule as its hair would come to life and kill the butcher.
Thats why its a management sim. Dwarves take care of themselves up to a point, and that point is making adjustments to their environment to meet needs. Generally speaking the more successful you are, the deeper dwarves will reach to find needs and wants that arent fulfilled.
100 hours in you have hit population cap, and have dwarves demanding bigger and bigger churches and guildhalls.
I used to rely heavily on the "Danger room" concept, where spears are thrust up and down training dwarves in dodging. The issue is that dwarves will quite often carry their young with them, even while in the military. So you quickly end up with splattered babies, which sets off a depressive spiral in the fort.
The essential NPCs could also be flagged essential, or maybe have a variation of that flag where only way given character dies is if say 1/4 of the damage dealt to character is from player (so NPC can't accidentally kill important NPC basically).
Also, radiant AI can also just... not run on the plot significant NPCs.
Finally, Bethesda games aren't known from main story being the main selling point.
But fully emergent behavior would likely destroy some player's experience in other ways - towns without shopkeeps, most quests ruined, little staged moments going away, etc.
That was true before Oblivion, as well. Arcanum let you get away with that, for example. If I remember correctly, so did Fallout 2 aside from the starting village.
Simply ask yourself which factors in the real world lead or don't lead (depending on your political stance) to this outcome, and you likely have found the relevant factors that you have to include.
> The addicts live in a locked cabin, so it’s unlikely for the player to enter it unless they are specifically looking for it.
This is overlooking a crucial, obscure, and unintentionally hilarious detail: not all the skooma addicts are in the cabin! Out in the world are two NPCs who make a monthly inter-city trip to the den to get their fix. However, due to a bug where these NPCs are assigned to the wrong faction, they can't actually get through the locked door of the den, so they'll stand outside the door drinking skooma forever, unable to progress to the step of the AI package that would eventually return them home to their usual schedules, unless the player unlocks the door for them. https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Trenus_Duronius
Videos show them performing the silly skooma-drinking animation while standing there locked outside the den, so they must have some sort of flag somewhere, even without skooma in their inventory.
> though I don't think faction membership is the reason for that
The wiki claims that patching them to add faction membership fixes the locked-out bug, FWIW.
In any case, in conjunction with this bug we no longer need to assume that the addicts in the den are loaded and simulating at all times in order to make the murdered-skooma-dealer story plausible. It seems fair to assume that potions (including skooma) could once be consumed (per the demo video), and that a "consume skooma" package analogous to "eat" would have caused them to seek out skooma. It's true that shopkeepers have stored their shop inventories in hidden chests since at least Morrowind, but if we're charitable enough to assume that some "acquire from merchant" behavior was ever prototyped, then it's not hard to imagine some sort of hack was added to make it seem as though shop items were "in" a shopkeeper's inventory for the purpose of the AI's environmental search routine. Even if killing a shopkeeper did not literally make their shop inventory available from their corpse (for player balance reasons), that could still have caused the murder itself to happen.
They seem to now be under the mistaken impression that radiant AI is to get more content out of the game by implementing infinite permutations of simple quests, and that customers will think X things permuted Y ways is X*Y content and not just X+Y content. But the purpose of radiant AI was, I think, to make the world feel alive and even unique. Which means I really shouldn't even see every x in X or every y in Y.
If you want an interesting implementation of the same concepts as in Radiant AI I recommend checking out Dwarf Fortress. Every dwarf fortress world is essentially an entire history of thousands of radiant AI interactions up until you enter it, at which point your adventurer/fort becomes part of the world and continues the radiant interactions with its civilizations/wildlife/monsters/etc.
I think DF is probably the ideal existing game to considering adding LLM-characters and conversation to as a drop-in augmentation. DF already has the simulation and generation of realistic characters and stories working, but unfortunately it's very formulaic to interact with it as an adventurer. In that case the game actually is quite "alive" already, just without a voice.
The modern TES games have been all about environmental storytelling, exploration, combat and crafting. All else is secondary.
Whether you like that focus or not is up to you, but that's the draw of games like Skyrim and FO4.
But Starfield completely broke it. They wanted hundreds of planets to explore, but the only practical way to do that is procedural generation. No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never anything interesting in them. You can't do environmental storytelling because that requires a human hand.
Due to engine limitations, making all the travel seamless was also completely impractical.
So instead of seeing a location and going "Oh man, I want to go there!", then just walking there encountering distractions on the way...it's Loading screen -> Loading Screen -> Loading screen -> Generic planet with nothing interesting to see.
How no one at a top level said "this can't work, the game's concept is bad, start over" is baffling. No one had a vision at the top level for how the game was supposed to work - or that vision was just wrong.
If Bethesda can't understand the fundamentals of their own best-selling game, I don't see how they can make a sequel.
I would say, rather, that no one wants to invest the development effort to make them interesting enough to explore.
In my view, you can either use procgen to make development cheaper or to make it more interesting to explore, but not both at the same time. The roguelike genre was invented because the developers of rogue wanted to be surprised by their own game. And it worked to an astonishing degree.
But you've got to design in the systems that are interesting to explore, rather than relying on the amount of content.
Everyone hopes that you'll have multiplicative results so that content X times content Y goes exponential. But with procgen the multiplicative effects are more from different systems interacting; having a sword with different stats feels same-y, having a sword that combines two gameplay effects starts feeling more interesting, having a sword that integrates with a procedurally generated narrative and a system of tracking per-weapon kills that dictates your reputation among monsters starts feeling like there's a lot more to explore.
Nethack is famous for having a zillion different hidden reactions that let different parts of the content work together in surprising ways, as anyone who has tripped down the stairs while wielding the corpse of a cockatrice has discovered. Dwarf Fortress has a zillion different moving parts, so that the giant shambling golem built out of salt can be defeated by shoving it into a lake. Caves of Qud lets you bring a chair to life and then use your psychic powers to swap minds with it and then go on to play the rest of the game as the chair (with rocket launchers).
They've all got a lot of interesting environmental storytelling, but in absence of the human scripting have to work a lot harder for it. A lot of games, unfortunately, stop at the X+Y generation, without building in the synergies to make the different values of Y unique and expressive enough for the players to care.
Bethesda has always relied on top of the line technological innovation that makes us forgive all the jank that came with it. Whether it was a bad combat system, a level scaling mechanism that just doesn't work, uncanny graphics... this has always been there. It's the opposite of the old Nintendo Way, where the games always were less ambitious, but had so much polish that the games counted as mirrors.
We've reached a moment of much diminished returns though. 5, or even 10 year old games aren't so technologically inferior that they are uncomfortable. A very shiny things has more trouble covering for jank, and high budget games are just so expensive that neither coherent vision. nor significant innovation are likely. So the Bethesda way is just not workable anymore.
What I'd want Bethesda to do, Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom meets Morrowind/Oblivion, is just really hard to wrangle logistically. Getting anything done under those kinds of constraings just takes too long.
I think practice shows this isn't true, Minecraft is pure procedural generation and people love wandering through Minecraft worlds.
I haven't played Starfield, but based on what you said the difference is in the complexity and amount of stuff, in Minecraft you don't have to go far to find more new things. Even if you're very familiar with the game you can still come across very unique areas, it's rare that I feel like I wasted my time by just wandering around a map.
Additionally Minecraft solves the story problem by simply not having one, which works fine for the kind of game Minecraft is, probably not so much for Starfield.
In Starfield you have a mostly static view of your questgivers talking. Which was fine 10-20 years ago, doesn't feel as engaging today when many games do it much better.
It's also not only about this aspect, you can make engaging stories with old-school methods. But the writing could not save the aging presentation here, it appeared very bland and tired to me.
What absolutely didn't help was the persuasion minigame, where you essentially broke all pretense of having a story-based reason to bypass a certain check. Persuasion checks are very common in RPGs, I've never seen them done so terribly as in Starfield.
The environmental storytelling certainly was the highlight of previous Bethesda games. But the main and side stories often were engaging as well. In Starfield they felt aggressively bland and mediocre in a way I haven't really seen in other games.
The whole excitement of games like Elite, Space Engineers etc is the seamless takeoff to landing between long planetary distances.
In a space themed game the journey is the story not so much the smaller interpersonal interactions at the destinations, those things are the reasons for the journey.
Modern Bethesda didn’t understand what they were making.
Does that truly constitute a failed game?
As far as I’m concerned their biggest mistake was not having something to travel around in the planets on the start. Walking around to the interesting locations was annoying.
Then there’s a bunch of pointless systems like the colony system, and the whole space magic thing, but the rest is still a bog standard Bethesda game with 10000 different handcrafted unique locations for me to explore following a bunch of sort of interesting questlines.
I mostly agree, though at least for me Minecraft was a game I loved exploring in despite it all being generated
Games like RDR2 and Witcher 3 left such a mark on me becauss they had bold personalities. Starfield in comparison feels like corporate memphis despite a nice Nasapunk foundation.
Why should Bethesda have to refine the same exact formula over and over? That would just turn into what Ubisoft does with Assassins Creed, pumping out soulless entry after entry into the franchise. In other words, Starfield was Bethesda taking a risk and trying to introduce unique features rather than releasing yet another another predictable "Bethesda RPG".
Because they are the only ones who can pull off that formula, and when they stray from it, they end up as just one mediocre title in a sea of similar mediocrity.
Oblivion was a big step back from Morrowind: generic art style, map markers, no deep story.
Definitely a different type of experience, though.
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Their good taste attracts a bunch of early adopters, people with a finger on the pulse and who are eager to play and appreciate the game for what it is. But this interest attracts poseurs, people who play the game but just to say they are, to feel included and a part of something cool. There are far more poseurs than otherwise, so at this stage the scene can grow exponentially. This growth attracts vultures commoditize the scene in the form of penny pinching and "enshitification" through dark patterns. Monied interests strip out everything that made the game interesting and fun (because a good, fun experience isn't profitable), and then they milk it for everything it's worth until it's a dried corpse. These are the people who are driving the bad gameplay decisions and who aren't listening to the taste makers.
Usually in games this comes in the form of a pivot to MMOs. By that measure, TES died in 2014.
IMO this also applies to Final Fantasy (RIP 2010, plenty of new FF games but nothing that recaptured the magic of 6 and 7) and Warcraft (RIP 2004, no new warcraft games since).
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The one item that stood out to me was: "Todd’s mid-fight dagger acquisition Verdict: Impossible in the final game unless scripted to do so"
I do not disagree with the verdict for the final build of the game but I recall observing something similar in Fallout 3. I had stashed a mini-nuke launcher and ammmo in the Megaton player home. Some sort of conflict transpired (do not remember what exactly, perhaps I provoked an NPC for fun), I witnessed one of the town-folk run into my player home (in its own cell) and come back out with my weapon. It is possible with 1000s of hours in Bethesda games I am just mishmashing memories together but I am pretty sure this is what prompted me to eventually download a player home mod (and eventually learn G.E.C.K. by "remastering" it).
It's an interesting anecdote, but from my understanding of the system that simply shouldn't be possible. Your house's interior cell isn't loaded into memory when you are outside in Megaton, so there's no way for the NPC to access your items. I think this fundamental limitation holds true for every version of the engine, from Morrowind to Starfield, but I'd be glad to be proven wrong with concrete evidence.
While already impressed by the AI, I was blown away by this l behaviour. He goes between 2 places that can't exist in RAM at the same time, and interacts with the world when it happens to pop into existence around him.
Radiant AI should and could have been like this.
– there's always enough interesting characters to interact with to give quests etc.;
- live simulated world with emergent behavior that involves characters disappearing;
- no one enters or leaves town.
Dwarf Fortress kindof solves this by zooming out to increase the character count, as well as the standard fantasy trick of super-charging the economic productivity of everything. Letting 1 dwarf feed 15 by working part-time on a 25 square meter plot of mushrooms helps a lot.
The article mentioned the problem of fitting audio on a single DVD (which would only be exacerbated by fallbacks, and no please don't consume my entire SSD) ... there certainly was a regression in video game creative dialogue when everything started to be voiced. And voice synthesis is an example of one of the rare problems that AI might actually be able to solve fairly reliably, though it's not clear if the jarring exceptions would be more of a problem outside the current utility problems. Though given that the individual input words should be known, probably just converting text to phonemes would suffice.
The only problem is that audio can give you location info. if someone is off to your left shouting that you'll pay in blood, it's a little harder to place them if it's just angry text above their heads
We're used to thinking of game AI as a property of the entity it's attached to (the NPC, the enemy, the opposing player) but an LLM can sit above that, more like a dungeon master.
1: https://left4dead.fandom.com/wiki/The_Director
I have been thinking that the current LLMs might actually make something like this more feasible, a kind of an GM in a Chinese Room that translates game events in to potential narrative arcs that the player is then free to follow if they wish. As the LLM's actions would be both inspired and limited by the game engine this would probably also tone down the problems with hallucinations and slop.
Not to mention the current token cost.
I understand that in multiplayer with strangers it would be a problem because you could affect other players' experiences, but in a single-player game I don't see this as a big issue, as long as the NPC doesn't spontaneously bring immersion-breaking topics into the conversation without the player starting it (which I suppose could be achieved with a suitable system prompt and some fine-tuning on in-lore text).
If it's the player that wants to troll the game and break immersion by "jailbreaking" the NPCs, it's on them, just like if they use a cheat code and make the game trivial.
> Not to mention the current token cost.
You of course have to train the AI from ground up and on material that is as much as possible only related to the topics that are in the game world (i.e. don't include real-world events in the training data that has no implications in-universe).
Games is one place where running local LLM's is a no-brainer.
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There may be a place for AI driven games but there is literally no reason to shove it everywhere. Pre-written dialogue is much more enjoyable to engage with on the long term, contrasted with having to think about phrasing for an NPC that spouts generic fantasy speak.