I’m cautious with this game because I was really hyped up at the release of Morrowind. The game was absolutely awesome, one of those experiences you’ll remember for a long time, but the actual gameplay sucked greatly on all the basic aspects.

I’m suspecting that this sequel will follow a similar path. The environment is outstanding and the E3 trailer is rather impressive. But after the past experiences I’m sceptical on a number of features. With each chapter of this serie Bethesda improved the most problematic parts but the game always felt missing something to be complete and enjoyable. The immersion has always been the best quality, along with the music, but the dialogues, the animations, the combat mechanics and the whole interactive layer in general has been weak and lacking.

By reading a few previews and watching the video carefully I got the impression that even this time there will be improvements but without really addressing the problems. It seems that the biggest difference, this time, is about focusing the development on reusable schemes. Instead of spending years to carefully place each pebble, bush, mushroom and tree, this time they are going on a semi-randomized world generator. The same about the interaction. The first feature that was cut in Morrowind was the daily schedule of the NPCs. Since each one of them required a dedicated script it would have taken too much time to code every single action, so they just ditched the feature and just let all the NPCs wander randomly and react to very basic, shared patterns (the guards attacking wildlife when close to a town, or pulling out torches at night).

This time they are developing a general AI that will react to a series of parameters like it happens with “The Sims”. So each NPC will have basic needs that he needs to satisfy. This probably means that this time we will see a town actually “living” by itself. The NPCs will walk around, go to eat, sleep in their own houses and so on. At least in the intention of the devs because it remains to be seen how well these ideas will work in the final game. The intention, as for the random world generator, is to automatize part of the content creation in order to shorten the development cycle and focus more on reusable tools that can be recursively improved to affect the whole gameplay. But it’s obvious that there will be also drawbacks since the reusability of the tools is always inversely proportional to the their flexibility. You cannot achieve detail and scope with a single approach.

The game continues to look impressive on the paper but the same happened with Morrowind. In particular there are a few “hyped up” parts on the four previews I’ve read (IGN, boomtown, Gamespot and W4O) that just make me even more sceptical instead of more confident:

“The game’s characters might not be highly scripted, but they will, instead, use the game’s “Radiant AI” system, which will give them a rough daily schedule, a few specific goals, and some personal needs (such as the need to eat and the need to sleep). Then it will basically turn them loose in the world. We watched an example in which we entered a bookstore and chatted up the storekeeper using the game’s diplomacy skill (which has been changed from Morrowind to a circle onscreen that lets you move your cursor between options like joke or threaten; the character you’re speaking to will react accordingly with facial animations). The bookkeeper seemed to prefer jokes and smiled when she heard them. She then invited us upstairs to keep her company. The bookkeeper then went about one of her general goals: training in archery by firing arrows at a hanging target in her room while her enthusiastic dog leaped about. The bookkeeper’s aim was off, so she voluntarily quaffed a marksmanship potion, which improved her aim considerably. She also tossed her hungry dog a cut of venison, which affected the excited quadruped in much the same way it would affect a player. The dog then got so excited that the short-tempered bookkeeper cast a paralysis spell on her pet, causing it to tumble to the floor. The bookkeeper then attempted to lie down and go to sleep, but her dog recovered and began yapping excitedly again. So the impatient bookkeeper then cast a fire spell on her poor pooch, setting the dog on fire and sending it yelping from the room. After the bookkeeper laid down for the evening and subsequently nodded off, we helped ourselves to the two-handed claymore sword on her table and departed for the besieged town.”

“The floor was littered with the bones of past prisoners that could be tossed through the air and reacted with believable physics. The main character brushed against some shackles hanging from the ceiling and swung through the air, bouncing off of each other.”

“Arrows bounce off of stone and stick into wooden objects and can be collected after being fired. In a demonstration of the game’s excellent physics engine, an arrow was fired into a bucket hanging from a rope. The bucket swung from the impact then hung at an angle due to the weight of the arrow.”

“Arrows will embed themselves into the flesh of enemies in a similar fashion, but will rebound off solid materials such as rock or metal.”

“As mentioned above, arrows will stay sticking out from your enemies, producing a rather macabre but realistic effect. The physics engine adds detail to the battles; for instance, a vanquished skeleton dropped its shield, which then rolled around a little before coming to rest on the floor.”

“Next we can see a goblin standing at the end of a tunnel going uphill, trying to push several logs down towards the player. Before he can do that, Todd’s character shoots him with an arrow. Todd then walks up to the logs and shoots an arrow into a log which then rolls down the tunnel.”

“Allies were seen fighting with the main character as well as riding on horses.”

“At one point the main character walked up to two townspeople and overheard a conversation about Daedra spawning just north of the town. Then, when speaking to one of these characters the previously mentioned topics appeared as a conversation options.”

And another piece from a less recent Gamespy preview:

In fact, one of the interesting problems that the team has had to face came about precisely because the AI is so good. According to Howard, the AI has caused guards to decide to eat and go hunting deer, only to get themselves arrested for attacking something. When they fight back against the arresting guard, the other guards see a fight and try to join in. In not too much time, every guard in the town was involved in the scuffle, which left the rest of the town open to thievery by other NPCs, resulting in empty stores. Much of the team’s current effort is going into putting sensible governors on the AI’s behavior to avoid situations like empty stores that would result in situations that wouldn’t be fun for the player.

I still wonder how much of what was shown at the E3 is actually what we will find in the games when they will be released.

After the demonstration, I asked whether this example was scripted or not, but it wasn’t.

Ain’t we a bit too much gullible?

EDIT – Bethesda Associate Producer (probably Matthew Wotring – Late edit: “Kathode” is Gavin Carter) wrote down a few precisations on QT3 about the doubts I expressed here as well:

Lots of bad information flying around, per usual :)

First of all, this was a demo area intended to show what the characters CAN do, not what they ALWAYS WILL DO. The dog is just intended to be a humorous situation to show how the NPCs can cast spells. Will they walk around the world setting dogs on fire at random? Obviously not. But they can cast spells at any target should we instruct them to.

The demo was not “scripted”. The whole point of our AI system is that we don’t have to write out tedious scripts for all our NPCs. The system takes functionality that is usually done through scripts and compartmentalizes it into data structures we call “packages.” So when the woman went and found something to eat, it was because she was on an “eat” package. In other words, we instructed her through our system to “find something to eat.” She located it in her house, sat down, and started to eat. We did not have to script her moving to the table, picking up the food, sitting down, or eating. All we did was fire off a package, and she performs the behavior. The AI system definitely IS capable of interfacing with our scripting system, and there was some use of scripts to trigger her from one package to another. But everything was systemized – she missed the target because her marksman skill was set to zero, not because we were scripting her to aim at certain places. She drinks the potion, and then she hits her mark.

I think the main problem is that people have a sense of a very strict dichotomy between something that is “scripted” and something that is random. Our system is a happy medium between the two. And it works great.

We can conditionalize them any way they want. For the most part they are based on time of day. But we can be crazy specific with them – how much health the NPC has, what the NPC is wearing, weather, how much they like the player or another NPC, what guild someone is in, distance to something, etc etc etc etc. Mix and match as much as you want. So it is not really “need-based” in that there is not a sense of desperation that causes them to act differently the more hungry they get, for instance, but we can implement that sort of fail-safe behavior if we chose, using conditions. In a world with 1000+ people we can’t have them acting quite as autonomously as they do in the Sims. In that game I can’t even manage a household of three without someone setting themselves on fire.

And another short quote about my scepticism on the physic engine:

Have you ever played a game that used Havok physics? All of that functionality is provided for by that physics package. We’ll even have a key that you can press in game to “grab” items and toss them around. Todd demonstrated physics in the first room by pressing and holding the “Z” key to toss the chains around and throw around the bones and other objects.

EDIT – Followup here.