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").
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Procedural generation is fine. But you can definitely see that Starfield was intended to be a platform for user-generated content straight from the start, and I think they must have convinced themselves that they didn’t really need to care too much about the game itself, because those chumps - sorry, players - would add all the content for them on their own. It’s like Metaverse all over again. They forgot they actually needed to make something worth playing and users’ time investment before it would become a money printing machine. Also, probably like 4 people who worked on Daggerfall still work at Bethesda and most of their games between then and now didn’t use procedural generation much at all, so I don’t understand why so many people make this argument. Like oh it’s normal for me to put DSLs in my software projects, here check out this git repo I worked on 25 years ago when I was in college, our customers should have been prepared for the shit job I did with it this time.
Actually, I think I would be completely fine with Bethesda just churning out TES POI and storylines without trying to do anything significantly more complicated than what they did in Skyrim. Just focus on the world building and the story and do some simple gimmick that’s a little more creative than “shouts/dragonborn but in space”. I suspect most other players would be happy with something of similar scope.
> 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.
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.
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.
They've always been terrible at animation. 10 or 20 years ago, their animations have always been the absolute worst by any contemporary standard (the art used to be too - see Battlespire for some terrible art - but they improved it). Maybe part of that was because of the engine, but I think they just never had the culture for it.
They clearly did try to improve their animations in Fallout 4 in 2013-2014, which is the timeframe the most development happened, so it's not like they're oblivious to their biggest shortcoming as a studio. So what they did in F76 and Starfield is just a regression.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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;
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?
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 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).
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.
It's still gonna be hallucinatory AI slop. For the same reasons it makes uninteresting quests and boring planets. It's lazy and it can't replace actual writing and art.
AI is great for getting tasks done where you can pull the information you need out of the slop. For quality immersive entertainment it's not there.
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.
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!
The question that poses to me is the quantity of writing you need for training before you can reasonably expect a generation system to produce something new and interesting, however much work on the right knowledge is in the right place, and is worth the costs for how you expect the player to interact with the game beyond the manual work.
I doubt there's telemetry in the elder scrolls games, but I'd love to know how many go around the world exploring everything the characters have to say, or reading all the books. How many get the lore in secondary media, wikis or watching a retelling or summary on youtube. On a certain level it's important they're there as an opt-in method to convey the 'secondary' world lore to the player without a "sit down and listen" info dump, plus give the impression it was written by someone so these objects would would exist organically in the world or certain characters would talk about those topics, but I wonder how much of the illusion would still be there if it was just each book having a title.
For this to work you pretty much have to start from scratch, putting in "obvious" things like "the sun exists and when its out it casts light and shadow" and "water is a liquid (what's a liquid?) and flows downhill". Is there a corpus of information like this, but also free of facts that might be anachronistic in-universe?
Is that feasible? I was under the impression that fully training an LLM requires untold mountains of data, way more than a game dev company could reasonably create.
You are correct. The fact that so many people are saying “lol just train it on text about the game bro” reveals how little people understand how these models work, how they are trained, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What an amazingly well researched and interesting post. I’m very grateful to the author for having done the legwork to research all of this.
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.
It’s entirely possible that Radiant AI in its entirety is actually in the original oblivion and the remaster.
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.
Radiant AI is in Oblivion and every game they've made since then. There's nothing to enable. The issue is primarily with the game content; it's used all over the place, but in the final game it's not very impactful.
By “in its entirety” I mean as it was promoted and originally demoed. The release version is vastly different to the pre-release demos (some are linked in the article)
Yes, I wrote the article. I wouldn't say the system in the release version is vastly different to the pre-release demo (there was only one to my knowledge, the E3 2005 one), as that just demonstrates a tightly scripted sequence of events, which one of the developers was open about even before Oblivion was released. Some things about the system definitely changed (such as disallowing NPCs to pickpocket from the player), but I don't think we have any evidence of whole systems or major behaviors that were actually implemented at some point and cut before release.
That said, I’m pretty sure that they said the e3 demo wasn’t scripted (edit: the quote in your article confirms it, too).
We were expecting, at the time, a game like in the demos. But as you stated, it’s probably more content related, in that they didn’t actually schedule much (or any) complex combinations of those packaged behaviours or npc2npc interactions as shown in the demos - leaving only simple instances of the packages you described. Maybe the dependency chain of goals has some concrete limit, for example.
It’s mostly just “go here”, “find food”, “eat food”, “sleep” (which I suppose emulates life, but isn’t what we were expecting).
Although I guess that the amount/complexity of wrangling the behaviours of 1000 (???) npcs to stop the game being unplayable due to goals being destroyed is why it’s just so passive in its release form.
There's another quote which explains what they meant by "it's not scripted": it's not using their (text-based) scripting language, but the entire sequence is more or less 100% deterministic, using AI packages to control the behavior:
> The reason it’s AI and not scripting is because it uses goals and rules to determine how something is going to be accomplished.
> In the sense that it’s a sequence of events that happen in a particular order, you might consider it scripted, but the way you set up those events, and how the actors accomplish them, is not scripted.
I was referring to you saying above that the e3 demo was “tightly scripted”. I never suggested it was, just that it was much more complex than what was released.
I'm not sure about the limits of the engine's complexity, but the game "shadows of doubt", a procedurally generated murder mystery game, has a giant sandbox with characters that have jobs, partners, visit restaurants, and more.
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.
I don't actually want to have a deep, philosophical conversation with a blacksmith.
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.
Agreed, that's the real dream of open world RPGs: dynamic worlds. Perhaps modern AI techniques can help in that a bit, but what you really need is an incredibly intricate simulation.
Do you really want that in a scrolls game though? I want the blacksmith to be first npc in the town, more or less always there, with 1 button on the dialog tree to get to the shop menu for me to unload an entire dungeon of loot onto this blacksmith. And he better have ore and leather strips.
And I want to be able to game player statistics using a combination of spells and potions so I can pickpocket the blacksmith and then sell their stuff back at marked-up prices. The traditional RPG numbers-and-skills-and-formulas part of TES was a great joy to exploit.
It doesn’t need to be a deep philosophical conversation. You could be striking up a “buy now pay later” business deal or asking him to produce a specific type of equipment according to your specifications, etc.
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").
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.
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.
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.
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Cacame_Awemedinade
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.
Actually, I think I would be completely fine with Bethesda just churning out TES POI and storylines without trying to do anything significantly more complicated than what they did in Skyrim. Just focus on the world building and the story and do some simple gimmick that’s a little more creative than “shouts/dragonborn but in space”. I suspect most other players would be happy with something of similar scope.
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.
They clearly did try to improve their animations in Fallout 4 in 2013-2014, which is the timeframe the most development happened, so it's not like they're oblivious to their biggest shortcoming as a studio. So what they did in F76 and Starfield is just a regression.
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.
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).
– 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.
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
Not to mention the current token cost.
> 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).
Answer those two questions and you will realize why your idea doesn’t work.
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.
AI is great for getting tasks done where you can pull the information you need out of the slop. For quality immersive entertainment it's not there.
I doubt there's telemetry in the elder scrolls games, but I'd love to know how many go around the world exploring everything the characters have to say, or reading all the books. How many get the lore in secondary media, wikis or watching a retelling or summary on youtube. On a certain level it's important they're there as an opt-in method to convey the 'secondary' world lore to the player without a "sit down and listen" info dump, plus give the impression it was written by someone so these objects would would exist organically in the world or certain characters would talk about those topics, but I wonder how much of the illusion would still be there if it was just each book having a title.
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.
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.
> "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"
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.
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.
That said, I’m pretty sure that they said the e3 demo wasn’t scripted (edit: the quote in your article confirms it, too).
We were expecting, at the time, a game like in the demos. But as you stated, it’s probably more content related, in that they didn’t actually schedule much (or any) complex combinations of those packaged behaviours or npc2npc interactions as shown in the demos - leaving only simple instances of the packages you described. Maybe the dependency chain of goals has some concrete limit, for example.
It’s mostly just “go here”, “find food”, “eat food”, “sleep” (which I suppose emulates life, but isn’t what we were expecting).
Although I guess that the amount/complexity of wrangling the behaviours of 1000 (???) npcs to stop the game being unplayable due to goals being destroyed is why it’s just so passive in its release form.
> The reason it’s AI and not scripting is because it uses goals and rules to determine how something is going to be accomplished.
> In the sense that it’s a sequence of events that happen in a particular order, you might consider it scripted, but the way you set up those events, and how the actors accomplish them, is not scripted.
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.
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.