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.
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).
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.
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.
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 loved how they were able to peel back the Todd Howard reality distortion field to really understand how Bethesda went from that famous E3 2005 demo to what we got in the end.
> "I have heard that the Nords of Skyrim have been warring with the Redoran of Morrowind."
> "It seems that these are turbulent times in the land of the Dunmer."
> "Stop talking!"
> "Take care"
You know who really did this? It's a game called Rain World [1]. In Rain World, the world keeps turning when you're gone. Literally: predators and prey go about their way, chasing and fighting and eating each other, after you die. When you come back they don't respawn. The game simulates their actions while you're away and you meet them again in medias res, doing whatever they were doing while you weren't there.
And what was the reaction of the gaming public to that? A typical reaction on release was this article by Brendan Caldwell on Rock Paper Shotgun, whence I quote:
Modern platformers that want to be difficult have learned the value of a quick and nearby spawn. Fell into some spikes? Never mind, says the game, and one second later you are at the last brick wall you leapt from. The slugcat doesn’t get this treatment, instead it is transported back to the nearest save point, the last hibernation chamber. The things you have done to the environment have been undone, the parts of the map you revealed have been recovered in shroud. You are ten screens back from where you were, only now the predators and prey will be in different places.
(...)
The oddest thing about it is that, like the controls, this difficulty feels entirely deliberate. It is like Rain World wants to have the strength of difficulty we find in Dark Souls. But that classic of dying and re-dying had the impetus of soul currency, a sense of gambling, a sense of pace, and the relief of clever shortcuts with near-perfect geography. Not to mention the HUGELY SIGNIFICANT gesture of always putting the enemies reliably in the same place, like a solid, immovable set of spiky hurdles. You always had the means to overcome and defeat them. You just needed to learn.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rain-world-review
In other words: "What? I can't just memorise enemies' positions so I can defeat them by muscle memory alone??? I have to think?? Each time?? During a game????"
:Throws controller:
Yeah, so much about AI simulating enemies that have an independent existence.
________________
I don't think the NPCs can do more than a handful of actual actions, but the way you can find who a character met by watching the security tapes of a particular restaurant from a particular time because on of the bat's neighbours says "I saw this person here last night" when you ask about your murder victim is extremely impressive.
There is definitely a sense that you've seen everything after a while because of the limitations of procedural generation, of course, but a sandbox like that combined with scripted quests would make for some really fun gameplay outside of the main quest.
The problem is that except for in a handful of cases the idea is often more appealing than the reality.
You need to spend a lot of work and add a bunch of behaviours and interacting systems for line to start going back up and arrive in place where games like Rimworld, M&B: Bannerlord or Dwarf Fortress are.
Like if your Radiant AI makes NPCs bandits go and attack NPC caravan, that's not all that interesting, and hell, player might not even notice and think it is scripted. Because aside from some quick loot there is no impact whatsoever on world, you can get rid the world of every banding within 10 mile radius and nothing will change aside from amount of loot in your inventory.
But if you do similar thing in M&B:Bannerlord... there is actual (if simplified) economy there. You CAN starve a city if you just kill all merchant caravans going in, and raid the villages, and the city economy will go down, they will man less guards on siege and have less resources... and on other hand you can make sure local economy flourishes and that will cause prices to go down on stuff, which will cause city that now has access to cheaper weaponry to have more guards.
If killing a bunch of bandits made city prosper a bit more (or vice versa, attacking traders and caravans made it poorer), if clearing local mine made some miners to move in to provide to city, if sabotaging army camp made a dent into political situation (imagine winning Skyrim rebel/empire conflict by sabotage like that), now we're starting into it being interesting rather than a gimmick.
I just want to see that blacksmith close up shop early because he's feuding with the town guard, or give me a discount because his daughter just won the local archery competition. I want a world that reacts to itself, not just to me.
The goal shouldn't be to make NPCs that can pass the Turing test, but to make a world that feels like it has a pulse.
You didn’t read the article, that’s not what Radiant AI did. This is from twenty years ago and has nothing to do with LLMs.
It’s just that they either forgot to enable the build flag, or part of their production release is to pick a random commit as gold master.
As people had already parted with their money it’s been given the same priority as the game breaking bugs - which is to say it was left for the community to fix.
Maybe they will put out a “hotfix” in another 15 years to enable it.
I strongly believe that no bethesda employee has ever played a release version of their games.
