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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
I mostly agree, though at least for me Minecraft was a game I loved exploring in despite it all being generated
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.
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).
Oblivion was a big step back from Morrowind: generic art style, map markers, no deep story.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
– 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.
Mistletoe•5h ago
jeroenhd•4h ago
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.