[MUD-Dev] NEWS: Oblivion RPG's (next version of Morrowind) NPC AI

[Mike Rozak]

Here's an interesting article about Bethesda Softwork's in-progress
CRPG, Oblivion. From the description, the AI sounds interesting,
including planning and factions.

  http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/the-elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion/558955p1.html
  http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/the-elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion/558955p2.html
  http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/the-elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion/558955p3.html
  http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/the-elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion/558955p4.html
  http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/the-elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion/558955p4.html

(The AI info is on page 4 and 5.)

Of course, similar AI could be implimented in a MMORPG if the
designers so chose. (Storage of the AI's memories might become an
issue though.)

Mike Rozak
http://www.mxac.com.au

<EdNote: Full text below.>

--<cut>--
		The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (PC)
			  By Allen Rausch
			   Oct. 22, 2004

Publisher:  Bethesda Softworks
Developer:  Bethesda Softworks
Genre:  RPG
Release Date:  TBA
ESRB:  Rating Pending

Bethesda leapfrogs over the pack to give the world a hint of the
next generation of games will look like.

  Spiffy: Unbelievable graphics, living world system, new combat
  system, construction kit.

  Iffy: The wait until we get our hands on it, can a world this big
  really be focussed?

Bethesda Softworks has never been a company that could be accused of
thinking small. Their flagship property, The Elder Scrolls series of
RPGs, have always been known for their vastness and wide-open
feeling. Long before anyone ever came up with the idea for an MMO,
Bethesda was hard at work creating enormous artificial worlds inside
the PC in which one could get lost. Their last game, however,
Morrowind (along with its two expansion packs, Tribunal and
Bloodmoon), went far beyond what even the company's most die-hard
fans could have expected.

Morrowind was literally a world in which you could do anything you
set your mind to. Want to go on the main quest of the story? Go
ahead. Want to forget the quest and just become the wealthiest
merchant in the land? The game could handle it. Perhaps you'd like
to join a tribe of werewolves and bring pain and death down on the
human inhabitants of Tamriel. The game could handle that
too. Morrowind offered the huge worlds of exploration and adventure
that make MMOs so compelling, but the experience was personalized
for the player, something impossible in an MMO.

Even better, an Xbox version of the game opened the series up to a
new group of fans. Console warriors who may have cut their teeth on
Japanese-style RPGs discovered the very different but no less
compelling D&D/Western-style RPG by finally getting their hands on
one of the best in breed.

Once you've achieved something as monumental as Morrowind though,
what do you do for an encore? Simple: jump to the head of the
line. Rather than just going for the guaranteed moneymaker that
would be another Xbox Elder Scrolls, Bethesda is bringing the next
game in the series to the next generation of PCs and consoles. The
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is being designed around the Xbox 2 (and
the PS3, although the company could not officially confirm any
platform besides the PC).

"We've always viewed The Elder Scrolls as a series that presents
worlds no one else has ever imagined being done," said Todd Howard,
the game's producer. "We love pushing the edge in every respect."
According to Howard, when the Oblivion team started thinking about
the project in mid-2002, they already had a couple of things they
wanted to accomplish in the next game. "We aim to create 'The RPG
for the Next Generation,' and this is not just in terms of visuals
and platforms." Howard said, "It's in terms of how RPGs are played
and experienced. It's time to move RPGs forward and really show how
entertaining they can be." In a moment of candor, however, he also
admitted that the length of time it takes to create an RPG also
factored in the decision. Since the team knew there was no way this
game would be complete before 2005 when the current generation of
consoles would be reaching the end of their lives, they decided
instead to "go big and go early" and create a game that would make a
big early splash during the next gaming cycle.

It's all very well for the Oblivion team to sit down and say that
they were going to create the next generation of RPGs, it's another
thing to actually do it. Once they had their big target in mind,
though, they began breaking it down into the basic RPG activities
and deciding how best to implement them. "RPGs, by their nature,
have repetitive elements." Howard says. "It's recognizing those
things -- combat, exploration, and interaction with the world -- and
putting the bulk of your energies into making those great." For
combat, the team wanted the player to have lots of options, have it
be visually exciting, and really, really deep. For exploration, the
team is looking to create a world that is very lush and is always
showing the player something new. For interaction, Oblivion will
feature photorealistic faces that can show emotion, voice-overs for
every line of dialogue and an extraordinary new "living world"
system.

Combat

Combat is one of the major gameplay elements that's being completely
revamped in Oblivion. Some of the most interesting feedback the team
got from Morrowind players concerned the nature of combat. PC gamers
are used to Western RPG conventions, most of which are derived from
Dungeons & Dragons -- conventions that include behind-the scenes die
rolls to determine success or failure. Those conventions aren't
nearly as common on consoles, especially in first-person perspective
games such as Morrowind. Howard described it this way: "It's amazing
how many people played Morrowind and said (to us), 'Why is my
character missing when he swings? The enemy is right there!,' or
'Why did that guy see me? I thought I was hiding.'"



"We've realized how much combat people really do in a game like this
and made it more of a priority to get it right," Howard
continued. The Oblivion team actually developed three entirely new
combat systems and did extensive testing on them all before settling
on the one that will be in the final game. The basic idea of
Oblivion combat is to impart the 'kinetic energy feeling' of guys
bashing each other with swords. The game will have a number of
special moves available and blocking is actively under player
control, not automatic. As a result, timing moves, shielding
yourself, and responding to the enemy becomes a key strategy in
fighting. The team also didn't shy away from the gore either. It
isn't over the top or gratuitous, but it does fall in line with the
design philosophy of trying to make the game as realistic as
possible. Basically, when you really smack someone with a sword, you
expect a certain level of blood to come spewing out, so the team is
trying to fulfill those expectations.

Action gamers, on the other hand, won't necessarily have an unfair
advantage. As Howard himself pointed out, the combat system in every
Elder Scrolls game has walked a fine line between RPG and
action. They've all been first-person and players always controlled
their sword arm in real time, but in prior games, the die rolls
added an extra layer of randomness between the player and the
world. While the combat system of Oblivion tries to remove those
layers, RPG players can breathe easy knowing that their beloved
stats haven't gone anywhere. This difference this time is that the
player's stats determine what they can do, and how effective those
things are, but they're now in full control of the "when." Blocking
a blow is manual, for instance, but the effectiveness of that block
is determined by your character's block skill -- things like how
much damage the block absorbs, how much fatigues it causes and so
forth. Striking an enemy with a sword is no longer random, but the
amount of damage caused is a function of strength and weapon skill.

Exploration

To an extent, all RPGs are about exploration. In fact, one of their
greatest attractions is the chance to travel an exotic land seeing
incredible sights and encountering bizarre creatures (who inevitably
get beaten to death like piñatas for the goodies they
drop). Morrowind took this aspect of RPGs to an almost absurd
level. The world of Tamriel was beyond huge. Players could wander
the countryside for months, coming across miscellaneous generated
quests and dungeons that were so elaborate they rivaled the main
quests in lesser RPGs.

The problem was, Morrowind was so huge and free flowing that it
turned off as many gamers as it turned on. Many of the people who
started playingMorrowind stopped playing because they didn't have a
specific direction or they simply got bored. Howard and the Oblivion
team acknowledged the problems inherent in their previous games and
are working to fix them in the new game. "That's what we want to
address," Howard said. "Never let the player be bored, always be
entertaining. We want to 'show you the fun,' and always be pointing
you to something fun in the game, even if you don't know it's
there." One of the major ways that they're doing that is by
completely reworking the game's navigation and orienteering tools.

"Right now we're working on our dynamic compass that will show you
how close you are to dungeons while wandering the forests or where
the person is that you need to talk to make a quest progress,"
Howard said. They've also altered the way players travel in the
world. Technically speaking, the world of Oblivion is actually
larger than Morrowind, but as Howard himself pointed out, Bethesda
doesn't want "hundreds of hours of gameplay" to consist of a few
minutes of fun punctuated by hours of boring traveling. Instead, the
game will include a revised fast travel map that will hopefully
eliminate a great deal of the annoying repetitive travel over long
distances.

Of course, merely having a huge world to explore isn't much of a
feature if the world itself isn't interesting. Bethesda seems to
have that angle covered as well. First, the game is graphically
amazing, not only on PC, where higher resolutions should be par for
the course, but the eventual console versions as well. The Oblivion
team is currently developing one code base that will work on PCs and
next- generation consoles at the same time. "We don't focus on any
particular platform and we try to do the best we can on each one,"
Howard said. "So, Morrowind may have started on the PC, but by the
end of the project we were not focused on one platform or the
other." With Oblivion, the team has known from the beginning that
they'd be doing both console and PC versions, so a great deal of
energy has been spent on creating a scalable code base that can be
adapted to whatever eventual configuration the next generation of
consoles adopts. In fact, one of the advantages of skipping the
current generation of hardware should be avoiding the technological
limitations that force scalebacks in design and gameplay that have
plagued recent games that were developed simultaneously for consoles
and the PC.

A quick glance at any of the screen shots for the game gives only a
taste of the kind of graphic splendor gamers can look forward to
Oblivion. Expect to see the kinds of light and water effects that
were so praised in Morrowind expanded out to cover literally every
surface in the game. Dungeon walls will now glisten with
moisture. Skin, stone, blood and wood will accurately absorb and
reflect light in amazing ways. Specific techniques include normal
maps for lighting, diffuse maps for color, specular maps for
shininess, and parallax maps for geometry detail. Parallax mapping
is a new graphic technique that's similar to displacement mapping,
but is much friendlier to video cards and will help ensure that the
graphic splendor isn't restricted to the PC version.

Still, if there's one thing that reveals the game as a
next-generation product, it would be the forests. Anyone even
remotely familiar with game technology understands why RPGs like
dungeons more than forests. Dungeons mostly consist of straight
lines; forests, on the other hand, consist of trees -- and trees,
with their millions of different sized and shaped leaves, are an
absolute nightmare to render with any speed. That's what makes the
forests of Oblivion so remarkable: the fact that they look so
unremarkable. Looking at a forest in Oblivion is pretty close to
looking through a window in Bethesda's office. The technology used
to create these landscapes combines procedural generation of the
ground based on soil type and years of erosion, places trees based
on species and random growth clustering, and make a grass base on
regional patterns, all of which create randomized yet realistic
woodlands. When combined with full canopy shadows from the trees,
Oblivion truly takes you to another place.

The best part about this new technology, though, is that gamers will
be able to get their hands on all of Bethesda's cool new toys. The
PC version of Morrowind came complete with "The Elder Scrolls
Construction Set," a series of tools that allowed gamers to build
their own worlds and tweak the game to their heart's content. In our
discussion, however, Howard revealed that the release of the
Morrowind tools was more an experiment than anything else. At the
time, they weren't really sure that players would want to take the
time to learn the sometimes difficult to use tools. The response
from gamers, though, went beyond their wildest dreams. A quick
glance at the Morrowind Summit page reveals thousands of homemade
classes, quests, and modifications available to plug into the
game. This time around, the construction kit will be easier to use,
have better interfaces, and the code base of the product will have
simpler script, object and quest systems that can be directly
manipulated by the kit. Howard described the tool kit succinctly,
"It's all in the Construction Set. We used it to create Oblivion,
see what you can do!"

The Living World

Fans of Morrowind may be a bit disappointed to find out that
Oblivion isn't a direct continuation of that storyline. It does,
however, begin the way the previous Elder Scrolls game did, with the
main character in prison. While you're there, the Emperor comes
through your cell via a secret door trying to escape from an
assassination attempt. The escape, unfortunately, fails, leaving the
player with the dying Emperor who hands over the "Amulet of Kings,"
the token of the true Emperor along with a charge to find the one
person who can "shut the marble jaws of Oblivion." Oblivion, the
Elder Scrolls equivalent of Hell, is sealed away from Tamriel only
by the will of the Emperor, and with him dead, the land starts to
see an influx of demonic creatures bent on destruction.

The player will never find out why they were in prison. According to
Howard, that's because putting down a backstory for the main
character might hinder that player's freedom of choice when it comes
to determining how they're going to interact with the world. So
whether they feel like they're wrongly incarcerated for a crime they
didn't commit or they're a multiple murderer looking for a little
payback, the moral, ethical and lifestyle decisions each player
makes is completely up to them. Indeed, how they approach the main
quest of the game or whether they choose to pursue it at all is
likewise up to them. The beauty of Oblivion is Bethesda's new
"Living World" system, which means that the choices you make will be
reflected in the world around you.

"We've really gotten much better at this," Howard says when
discussing the living world of Oblivion. "We're really focusing this
time on how people in the world react to you, because that's the
most fulfilling thing about being good or bad or in-between." The
game sports a new "Radiant AI" system that Howard says is best
described as a combination of Ultima 7 and The Sims. Rather than
following pre-scripted paths, every NPC is given a set of general
goals they'd like to achieve, but the details of fulfilling that
goal is entirely up to them. If a citizen is hungry, they'll look
for a way to get food. They might buy food, hunt it, or steal it,
then find a place to sit to eat and so on. This means that every one
of the game's 1,000 NPCs follows a full 24/7 schedule that continues
whether or not the player is there to witness it. It also means that
the NPCs react to each other, so a townsperson who decides to steal
a loaf of bread in full view of the guards may find himself under
arrest.

It also means that everything the player does in the game that's
witnessed by NPCs is processed and remembered by them, who will then
use that information to decide how to react to you. Interactions are
governed by what the player has done to them, what groups or guilds
they're both a member of, whether the player has messed with anyone
in their family and what their general reputation in the Empire
is. Players who just watch the NPCs going about their daily lives
will often witness townsfolk in unscripted dynamic conversations
gossiping about what's going on in the kingdom and what rumors and
news is currently hot.

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.

The team is also focused on creating a world that's interesting
enough that the player would want to take sides. The game's factions
are much more polarized this time around and they include options as
diverse as the Fighters' and Mages' Guild who are generally good,
the Thieves Guild, which is generally bad, and the Dark Brotherhood,
which is really evil. The Nine Divines lets the player become a
monk, while the Arena Guild obviously focuses on gladiatorial
combat. All of these factions have their own stories and intrigues
and contain enough stuff to do that by themselves they'd probably
fill a whole separate game. Putting them together ensures that no
matter how much time the player spends in the game, there will
always be some choices passing by that they'll want to come back and
try later.

The Future

There has long been a tendency among gamers to decry an obsession
with graphics power over quality gameplay. This is certainly not
without merit, as we all have a tendency to be dazzled by the next
advance in graphic technology. The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion though,
shows we may finally be coming to the end of that cycle. Graphic
beauty in the next generation will not be in how we display the
fantastic, but in how close we get to the ordinary. Oblivion is an
amazing harbinger of things to come because the Oblivion team is
using their power to create not just spectacle, but a believable
world in which to experience that spectacle. With this game as an
indication of what the next generation of consoles is capable of,
the future of gaming is brighter than anyone believed possible.
--<cut>--
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev