Maybe I'm just too demanding

I've only just got a computer able to run Oblivion so I've only just started playing it, so I guess I'm behind the pack.

Am I the only one who's thoroughly disappointed by it? I know the game world is huge, and the reason I LIKE it is it's the nearest thing there is to being in a Fighting Fantasy gamebook (which I grew up on), but... this is 2007 and we're still playing games where the NPCs stand around swaying until you walk up and 'activate' them, the enemies run at you blindly not dodging anything you throw at them, the characters are all generic and say one line over and over again, and action scenes are inevitably running backwards clicking the mouse button as fast as you can. Being chased by a city guard doesn't seem to arouse interest in the major NPCs, who sit merrily on their horses waiting for you while you run around trying to block a guard.

I would much rather have a game set in one tiny village which had a smaler cast, who are all well defined characters who act realistically and react to what's going on around them. I can't believe that is beyond the capabilities of today's computers.

Maybe I'll have to make it then... What do you reckon? An Oblivion-beater in Blitz 3D? Should be a doddle!

I completely agree with the whole bad A.I. thing. I appreciate it's very hard to write good A.I in games but come on, taking WoW as an example, enemies dont' even try to run when your massivly more powerful than them, this is human characters and monsters. And the NPC's act the same boring way, again very repetitive lines, un imaginative quests too. It seems the graphics are basically the only thing that seems to improve over time.

I don't think it's that good AI is hard. I think it's that good AI is no fun. You think it'll be fun when you don't have it, but I suspect it's limitations would quickly become apparent if you did.

You go to meet Alladon behind the stables for a meeting about joining the thieves guild but he bumped into Lyanntha on the way to meet you and took her back to his place to show her his etchings. So you sit around wondering where the hell he is for hours.

Dargax the draagon flies away every time you're carrying the sword of IceWand, because he's vulnerable to it. He only stays put if he sees you coming with a non-magical weapon, at which point you've got bugger all chance of beating him and he has barbarian on toast for supper.

Good AI could easily be too good. I'm sure I remember reading about all the AI they had to take out of Oblivion, because it was too good. Like NPC's pickpocketing you, and removing quest items.

What Gabriel says is very true - you have to compromise reality for playability. However, I still think that there are still vast improvements that can be made.
Once the current quest for improved graphics and physics has been acomplished then I expect that AI would be the next logical route on how to make games more realistic.
I like Oblivion, its totally customisable. Using the supplied tool-kit you can pretty much mod aspect of the game including how intelligent the characters are. You can modify their daily routine for example change thier mood. You can create your own "intelligent" characters, quests and land masses etc, so really you can build an Oblivion-beater in Oblivion ! ( Or create a movie ;))
X3 Reunion is another game where you can have more fun programming the ai for your individual ships and fleets than from actually playing it.

I'd much rather play something like Fist II than any of today's offerings. You encounter an NPC, the come at you on sight, you have a bloody big scrap, if you win you move on. You lose, game over.

Thats how it was always meant to be. imho.

Maybe you're just like your father: too bold.

Maybe you're just like your mother. She's never satisfied.

Why do we scream at each other?

This is what it sounds like when doves cry.

[dooop][doop][doop]
[doop][doop][dooop][doop]

'Thats how it was always meant to be. imho. '

Nah - thing's have moved on from that old gameplay dynamic. Games are becoming more about the experience rather than 'you will repeat this part 25 times until you get it right and only when you have proved yourself worthy, will you be rewarded with further gameplay!'.

I,ve got a dozen or so mods installed and the game is "now" awesome. Marts monsters mod and the unofficial patch along with lots of graphical updates and eye candy make this one of the most immersing games I have ever played.

Oh yea, the Complete Ranger is fantastic. You get a wolf companion that you can train and some very cool spells etc...
That is if Rangering is your thing :)

The game rally doesn't "come alive" until you mod it IMHO.

Allan

The fun of oblivion comes when you accept the limitations and move past them. Don't worry about what you can't do, enjoy what you CAN do.

Try to find the guy in, its the town which has a road running through it in a ditch, drawing a blank on the name. There is a guy near the church who wants you to follow people. You'll see all the things they actually got right with the AI if you do it for him.

If ultra realistic graphics aren't your issues, I hear that "Animal Crossing" for the gamecube is sorta like that....note that I hear - not confirm.

Viva Pinata? :)

Fable or Gothic 3 if you are more after a living world.

@LineOf7s
I thought exactly the same when i read the topic... :O)

I played through Fable last year.

I finished it, but I didn't really care for it - seemed an uncomfortable mix between cliche, a kiddie friendly art style and some reasonably adult themes.

Sounds like the AI in Ultima VII was better...

Heh. Barely remember posting this topic, I polished off a bottle of wine while I played last night...

In all fairness I am enjoying Oblivion, and I'm looking forward to mods and such. I guess one sign of a good game is that it's infuriating because you can see how amazing it could be with more work.



That's not really what I mean. I don't mean AI in the sense of Deep Blue, something that is really good and can beat you all the time. I mean more realistic AI. For instance I went into an inn - empty, mind - at 10pm and the barlady gave me a quest to find some rare wine. I walked to the other side of the room and back, talked to her again and she asked me if I'd found the wine yet. Then she offered me a bed for the night, which I accepted. I got up about 5am and crept downstairs and she was standing stock still in exactly the same position. Making realistic behaviour for that kind of encounter wouldn't make the game less fun.

Or when the prior gave me the quest to find the heir, saying I was chosen by the emperor and had a brave and noble face, then I picked up a book on his desk and he jumped up saying I was a common thief - then I dropped the book and he wished me good luck on my noble quest...

Still, it's not going to stop me playing it to death! And maybe that's the point.

Yeah. Those issues stem from the complexity of the AI. Would it have been better if he just ignored you stealing from him? Perhaps not. As you add in complexity, more and more can go wrong.

I tended to just assume that everyone around me is completely insane. Sure it isn't realistic. But it gave context to the problems and allowed me to have suspension of disbelief while I played.

Also, having messed with the internals of Oblivion, it becomes clear why they couldn't really do a lot of what you expect. It would have taken a LOT longer to make the game if things were more unique. The biggest problem is later on, you'll stop opening things or looting corpses cause you already know what is in/on them and you -might- still open things that might contain gold. You'll completely ignore most things, even objects. Because all the chests in the game are filled with random objects from a list.

The NPCs do have daily schedules, but they have 'places' they go to. Those places are exact locations and sometimes exact interactions. They will interact with people that happen to pass by them. However, when you sleep for 8 hours they might be in the same spot, only because that is their spot for both times.

Origionally they were going to have a lot more interaction between NPCs and such. But they had 3 major incidences that really messed things up so they had to cut those things out.

2 instances were about picking up objects. NPCs were supposed to be able to use things around them. Then those things would either respawn every 3 days like the caves or something. The problem is that NPCs would pick up objects the play had just dropped or that they needed. All this ended up being is frustrating.

Also. There was a staff or item that casts a spell that creates a double of whatever it is cast on. In testing, someone dropped it and an NPC picked it up and used it on the player, creating an evil doppleganger that was as strong as the player and totally beat the snot outta everyone in the town.

Lastly, they were going to have NPCs have a likelyhood of 'random' movements. That they would act on impulse. Well.. After the game ran for a while, all the NPCs or at least most of them heard wind of some 'cool thing' at a bar and all decided to show up there at the same time on the same day.

Various big issues like these cause them to really cut out a lot of things that sounded cool, but ended up just making the game harder without really adding anything. And they didn't have a lot of time to fix the AI after they cut it back. SO there are problems. Hopefully that is one of the things they will work on for TES-5

Last year I had the idea to make a game world that synched to the real world time and season - guess they got there first!

I think those "big issues" sound absolutely awesome. Emergent behaviour I think it's called. Too bad these days the developers take their games so seriously and try to control everything, in a tidy corporate professional way, which is of course incredibly boring. Oblivion could have benefitted from some unexpected situations, even if they would have occasionally broken some quests. Most of them weren't really all that exciting in the first place.

Also I think that the graphics, while impressive, lead to situation where players demand too much from the AI. If the characters look realistic, you expect them to behave realistic. And when they obviously can't, players are disappointed and the suspension of disbelief suffers some damage.

GTA does it quite well actually. You run into a shopping centre shotting a shotgun at people and they run off screaming, then the police turn up and gun you down.

Or you go to do a mission at four in te morning and get told to come back in the evening.

It's almost a perfect example of developers building game mechanics into a realistic world.

The thing with GTA is that once a car or NPC is out of clipping range, they cease to exist. I think that with a smaller, defined cast, you could genuinely have them continuing to live and go about their lives unseen by you. I remember an Amiga game (I forget the name, but it was a point-click graphical adventure) that claimed to do this very thing, and dubbed the feature 'Vitual Theatre'. It was an exciting concept at the time, and in the end a bit beyond the Amiga's capabilities, but that kind of thing could surely be within reach now...

Oblivions AI is in no way advanced. Playing it through I could see what it was doing. it had a few var values, saying, Theif, Murderer, etc. These values either get +X or -X whenever you do something linked. it's hardly difficult,
then of course they just chose from a few preset "moods" for the people you talk to.

With oblivion, they had to CUT DOWN the AI to bring in playability, and for that I think it worked OK in the end.

Basically, what DampeS8N said- I only read that before i went to click Post :)

Really hated Oblivion, but for some reason I really enjoyed the predecessor, Morrowind.

In some ways I also enjoyed morrowind more. In other ways I liked oblivion much more.

Namely:

Morrowind had a better sense of ownership in your character and world. A lot of this comes from the fact that rather than being able to buy a house, there is no -real- ownership. So I could kill someone, and then take their house and it was then mine. In Oblivion I'm reminded that it isn't mine.

Morrowind had stronger situations, stronger and more varied NPC scripts and better writing in the general NPC. All the NPCs were very well thought out and almost all completely unique.

Morrowind had a physicsless, however easier to manipulate world. I could set my house up to look however I wanted for the most part, doing so in oblivion is much much harder.. And one bad step spells disaster.

Morrowind had a bigger emphasis on discovery and less linear questing and no quick-travel.

Morrowind had levitation.

Morrowind had real risk, because the monsters weren't all set to your level.

So as not to break form, things that sucked in Morrowind but rocked or were fixed in Oblivion are:

Lack of land-variation and the glassy spartin morrowind world.

Bowmanship was shoddy and too stat-heavy.

Cliff Racers!!!!

Weapons were very 'missy'

Sometimes it was really really hard to find things

following NPCs invariably got stuck and wouldn't just pop in behind you when you left them in another room.



Oblivion has a lot more refinements that in the end make it the better game in my eyes. They are both great games.

I can see liking Morrowing better and not liking Oblivion. With Morrowind, there were a lot of glitches, but the gameplay was solid and there is very little to complain about (outside the missyness of weapons and the cliff racers) while most of the issues with Oblivion effect gameplay, while the game is more stable.



Now. Someone said that they would like those big AI glitches. You might think you would, but if every time the game got to a couple years into the world everyone stopped what they were doing and crowded into some town leaving the rest of the game as a ghost-town, you wouldn't be happy. You wouldn't be happy if a guard picked up something that fell on the ground, or looted the guy who attacked you in the streets. You wouldn't be happy when the game breaks entirely and you can't do anything about it. It might be funny the first time, but some of these AI glitches really broke the whole game. Something you can't ship no matter how much you'd like to.

Interesting. I might look at Morrowind as well...



My thought on that is that the AI taken out for the sake of gameplay was not better - it was incomplete. If an NPC sees you drop something, but doesn't acknowledge that it's yours in some way, shape or form then that suffers from the same primitiveness I talked about in the first post.

I think it would be really brilliant for each character to have a 'knowledge bank' that gets added to every time they see/hear/experience something. Every time they encounter something, they compare it to their knowledge bank and thus remember previous occurences. Maybe this is too big for today's computers.

Also, I don't necessarily want AI that is brilliantly clever. I want a fun, cinematic experience. The AI could be more to do with what happens in a story or sequence, rather than what an individual character does.

Also, I get sick of dying and reloading. Enemies just run at you and bash you til you're dead. How about if they nearly killed you, then captured you, taking you away and thus triggering a new storyline for you to escape from? Or left you for dead, to be found and taken in by a passing traveller - another storyline. Or by some deus-ex (not the game - its actual meaning) type event, you are spared (say, you are fighting on a cliff face. If you win, fine - if you are near to being killed, the rock face crumbles and you tumble into the river below, to be washed up half-dead - another storyline.)

This was how I imagined the Fighting Fantasy gamebook I wanted to write. I always used to read them with all ten fingers stuck in various pages because at any moment you could die! Instead of dying, reloading and trying again, it would be cool for there to be a variety of outcomes for each encounter. If you fight badly, it may make your overall journey harder as you overcome bad things happening to you, and your path snakes around. But going through a heroic journey only to be killed by a lucky imp halfway through inevitably leads to the repetitive die-reload cycle.

Well anyway, that's a start on my adventure game design brief!

Thats an interesting concept. Maybe one of us should devise a plan to create something similar.....!

I would assume it would be a node-base system where there are sets of numerous predefined events that are linked to one another based off of different trigger parameters from the calling node. Throw in some randoming and thus you can have a very non-linear game that changes everytime you play - as long as all the nodes links to a common goal, or goals.

This is something I am definitely planning for a fantasy game exactly as I've described. I'm getting quite excited about it, and hopefully I can bring all my filmmaking and acting experience to bear to make it a real cinematic experience.

Exactly as you say with the nodes. Sort of based on those FF gamebooks. Just like making a decision and turning to a new page, or rolling a dice and going to a new page - each passage would be a semi-scripted game sequence, and hopefully the effect would be quite seamless. Or alternatively, at a given point you're asked what your intentions are, and then a scripted sequence of events is created based on that. Branching storylines, but also converging storylines... Maybe your path to a particular scene is different so you come into it with different items/experience/allies and this changes how you play THAT scene which in turn gives different branching outcomes.

I'm toying with some more advanced conversations too, inspired a bit by the old game Captain Blood. You have a vocabulary, and you can pick a sequence of words like WHERE BLACKSMITH? and if the character has that knowledge and chooses to give it to you, they do. Somewhere between Oblivion/Deus Ex and those programs that supposedly recognise things you type in.

Okay, here's a definite example. I just went to a mages guild, took all the alchemist's stuff from right under her nose, and then sold it to her! Still, pretty useful bug when I need gold... Hasn't stopped me playing it til the early hours of the morning either. :)

*Sigh*
The guilds in Oblivion are really screwed up. I ended up being a member of every guild, and it somehow works out fine.

I encountered an annoying moment the last time I played, where the Thieves guild wanted me to steal from the Mages guild. My rank in the mages guild helped, but it was retarded! I had no option to say "Err... no!".

A similar thing happened when I wound up joining the evil guild (what are they called?).
I didn't much like that messenger guy, but I decided it would be useful to maybe help to bring an end to some of their evil by tricking that messenger.
He had me ordered to kill some old guy, so what I was hoping to do (suspension of disbelief at this moment) was to help the guy escape death!

Well, I followed the quest, found the old guy and encountered three options: Kill him, kill him without speaking, or don't kill him (but kill him later).
Struggling to keep that wonderful immersion going, I decided to ignore that and I changed my goal to sacrificing that guy's life in order to gain access to the evil guild and steal from them, etc.
Ta`daa! Nope.
It worked, I became a member of the dark alliance, but as always any attempt to steal stuff -- even if there was ABSOLUTELY no way anyone could have seen me committing the act -- would result in my removal from the guild. Killing folks in there was equally useless, and moreso by the fact that half the NPCs can't be killed.

It would be dumb to say Oblivion isn't a neat game. There was a really interesting event at one point where a town I was in (I think Bruma?) was attacked by a few monsters. They killed a bunch of guards, and a woman who is the wife of some guy who runs a shop.
There was a noticeable panic and a lot of movement, so it was pretty nice.
Of course, looking beyond the surface, it was still totally flawed. After the encounter, nobody seemed to care. The guards pretty well just stood and stared at the dead bodies (apparently unaware of the creatures that had just swooped in and killed the people Right In Front Of Them). The husband of that dead person was unchanged. The dead bodies disappeared into oblivion... (Still no graveyard thing going on?).
The only person who lost anything was myself. (And yes, my character definitely did lose a bit there! I felt a strange requirement to protect the innocent citizens, though it was in no way backed up by the game's own lack of any character).

Anyhow, my point is sort of that Oblivion is not nearly as open-ended as it should be. It acts "open-ended" by having a bunch of quests, but those quests are as linear than ever.
In fact, there are hardly any RPGs that succeed at open-endedness!
The problem there is that these completely linear RPGs don't want to admit they are linear! They try so hard to look non-linear that the actual storyline becomes uselessly, horribly sparse. A shooter game like Half-Life 2 delivers way more immersion, story, sanity and detail than a quest in Oblivion. Not once during Half-Life 2 do I end up thinking "darn it no, I want to help that guy!" only to be unable to do what I want.
Why? Because the developers are not afraid to admit that their game is linear. When they do that, they put effort into really closing it up to be cleverly linear so everything feels right instead of just sparse and motionless.
With Oblivion, the NPCs can't react very realistically because there is so much to react to and everybody wants to do something different to them. With a linear experience, every character clearly knows what is going on and reacts to it as told by the script. It is a wonderful effect :)

Some day, I guess, somebody will get it right...


I agree, a small-town RPG would be incredible. I've dreamed of such a thing myself, though I imagine we all have :P
(I'll add it to the list... item #74).

Quite literally, in this instance.

Yeah. I spent some time increasing my conjuration skill in Bruma, conjuring skeletons and killing them, and guards would walk right past the skeletons, sometimes even gently pushing them aside!

I was disappointed at first in all this, but now I've got used to its limitations I'm really enjoying it. And it's all inspiration for my own programming.