How did they downgrade the NPC AI so much?

[ChiefMendez]

No schedules, NPCs just dissapear if you follow them. Literally Oblivion had more advanced AI.

[blumoose]

Wasn't Oblivion's AI more advanced than Skyrim's? It was always weird to me how they didn't keep building on the AI.

[ZombieHunter]

Skyrim did not have advanced AI. I followed an NPC and all they did was wake up, walk to a barn, stare at the barn for 8 hours, walk back and go to sleep. It was a schedule for sure but it was not interesting.

[zpc]

If you are talking about the NPCs in the cities - a bunch / most of them are only dynamicly generated filler stuff - which you can disable in the graphical settings. My guess is they added those zombies to populate the city. The "real" NPCs are still there - but of course they don't have obvious schedules like chopping wood, going to the market ...

[Kai]

The 'citizen' that are blank named are filler NPCs, they aren't scripted into the game world at all, but 'generated'. The 'named' NPCs and specific 'roles' like guards and stuff are not pre-generated but assigned schedules and patrol routes and such.

You murder as much 'citizen' as you want and loot credits off of them, they are infinite in supply. Your bounty on the other hand isn't infinite.

[EliteForceQc]

Engine limit

[Doctor Eggman]

Originally posted by blumoose:

Wasn't Oblivion's AI more advanced than Skyrim's? It was always weird to me how they didn't keep building on the AI.

Oblivion basically had the most advanced TES AI to date, it was so good that important NPC's could literally be found dead thanks to their subroutines, the randomness to their schedules literally meant that an NPC going about his business might get randomly killed whilst finding food etc.

They heavily locked down what the AI could do after Oblivion due to the fact that hungry AI would often steal food and then get killed by guards as they have no way of paying bounty.

[Langkard]

The AI of enemy NPC's is much improved. They hide, they dodge, they use med pacs in battle, they use melee weapons instead of sniper weapons when you get in melee range, even robots try to dodge, and wounded enemies try to crawl away. Creatures that are losing a fight will flee unless you corner them.

And zpc is spot on about the citizens. I turned crowd levels to low just so I didn't have to dodge all of them constantly. Still there, but way fewer in number.

[Mister Burkes]

My best guess is they had to scale back on computationally expensive things like NPC AI to get this to run at 30 FPS on XBOX Series S.

[solidap]

Originally posted by blumoose:

Wasn't Oblivion's AI more advanced than Skyrim's? It was always weird to me how they didn't keep building on the AI.

Yes it's been downhill since Oblivion. And even Oblivion's final release had to tone some of the Radiant AI down because they would occasionally ruin everything, kill entire towns, steal all the items from shops, etc. But even just the concept of Radiant AI seems to be gone from modern Bethesda games. They're just right back to being Morrowind sign posts

[blumoose]

Originally posted by Doctor Eggman:

Originally posted by blumoose:

Wasn't Oblivion's AI more advanced than Skyrim's? It was always weird to me how they didn't keep building on the AI.

Oblivion basically had the most advanced TES AI to date, it was so good that important NPC's could literally be found dead thanks to their subroutines, the randomness to their schedules literally meant that an NPC going about his business might get randomly killed whilst finding food etc.

They heavily locked down what the AI could do after Oblivion due to the fact that hungry AI would often steal food and then get killed by guards as they have no way of paying bounty.

I think those were all fixable problems, tbh.

[Mister Burkes]

Originally posted by Langkard:

The AI of enemy NPC's is much improved. They hide, they dodge, they use med pacs in battle, they use melee weapons instead of sniper weapons when you get in melee range, even robots try to dodge, and wounded enemies try to crawl away. Creatures that are losing a fight will flee unless you corner them.

And zpc is spot on about the citizens. I turned crowd levels to low just so I didn't have to dodge all of them constantly. Still there, but way fewer in number.

True, enemy AI seems better but unfortunately 1/2 of them glitch out or get stuck in walls and railings.

[Vox Maximus]

Originally posted by ZombieHunter:

Skyrim did not have advanced AI. I followed an NPC and all they did was wake up, walk to a barn, stare at the barn for 8 hours, walk back and go to sleep. It was a schedule for sure but it was not interesting.

Gothic had more advanced AI lol

[ZombieHunter]

Originally posted by solidap:

Originally posted by blumoose:

Wasn't Oblivion's AI more advanced than Skyrim's? It was always weird to me how they didn't keep building on the AI.

Yes it's been downhill since Oblivion. And even Oblivion's final release had to tone some of the Radiant AI down because they would occasionally ruin everything, kill entire towns, steal all the items from shops, etc. But even just the concept of Radiant AI seems to be gone from modern Bethesda games. They're just right back to being Morrowind sign posts

Haha yep. Didn't Bethesda devs say that if they didn't tone it down that NPCs left to their own devices would extinct the game world?

Some of the AI issues are b/c they need to direct the story. So they don't let you kill certain NPCs and nothing you do illegal will cause them to leave b/c if they did you would be stuck and unable to proceed in the game. Other games have taken a different approach and let you kill quest givers and then you auto fail that quest. Outer Worlds did this quite a lot. I think you could only kill side quest givers and not main quest givers.

[Doctor Eggman]

Originally posted by blumoose:

Originally posted by Doctor Eggman:

Oblivion basically had the most advanced TES AI to date, it was so good that important NPC's could literally be found dead thanks to their subroutines, the randomness to their schedules literally meant that an NPC going about his business might get randomly killed whilst finding food etc.

They heavily locked down what the AI could do after Oblivion due to the fact that hungry AI would often steal food and then get killed by guards as they have no way of paying bounty.

I think those were all fixable problems, tbh.

Yeah, honestly I wish they'd kept most of the systems. Skyrim still uses the same Radiant AI found in Oblivion but rather than fixing its flaws they went the opposite direction and simplified what they could do. Kind of a shame really.

I'm guessing its just due to the fact that with it being more advanced there's more interconnected layers that has to be bug-tested and fixed; but still...

[ZombieHunter]

Originally posted by Doctor Eggman:

Originally posted by blumoose:

I think those were all fixable problems, tbh.

Yeah, honestly I wish they'd kept most of the systems. Skyrim still uses the same Radiant AI found in Oblivion but rather than fixing its flaws they went the opposite direction and simplified what they could do. Kind of a shame really.

I'm guessing its just due to the fact that with it being more advanced there's more interconnected layers that has to be bug-tested and fixed; but still...

And b/c they need to create a game rather than a real life world that sort of works but has major issues. So better to tone it down and be able to actually accomplish their goal than try to get it working with little benefit to the overall end product.

X4 kind of has this same issue with respect to NPCs and the world. Not in the same way but sort of. The economy is 100% real and anything can affect it. So at times it begins to stagnate b/c faction A wants to hoard a material that is needed. And then b/c of this B hoards it b/c the prices go up. But then what happens is unless you can build a factory that produces that material or component you are stuck. Or you wait till they release it for sale or something gets destroyed that needs a lot of it and things start to work again. But b/c it is 100% emergent economy it doesn't exactly function as you would think all the time. It is very slow and once it stagnates it is hard to pinpoint where and why and then fixing it is a completely different issue.