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The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

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Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#11
post #5

Perhaps this explains why Fromsoft npc quests are easily the most inscrutable in all of gaming. Like, okay Hyetta, have another “grape”, aka eyeball, oh now you’ve moved to the bridge in Liurnia, cool. I’ve exhausted your dialogue but you’re stuck. Oh I have to reload the area and exhaust it again to advance your quest. Okay, cool. Now you’re in a random church and you want a “fingerprint grape”. What? It’s all part…

thats game design not something engine related. its been like this since before demons souls, i think it started out way back with the first kings field. its just the way fromsoft do things. everyone knows what to expect from them.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#12
post #5

Perhaps this explains why Fromsoft npc quests are easily the most inscrutable in all of gaming. Like, okay Hyetta, have another “grape”, aka eyeball, oh now you’ve moved to the bridge in Liurnia, cool. I’ve exhausted your dialogue but you’re stuck. Oh I have to reload the area and exhaust it again to advance your quest. Okay, cool. Now you’re in a random church and you want a “fingerprint grape”. What? It’s all part…

This post seems to be mostly (although not entirely) concerned with the combat AI. The plot based NPC interactions don’t seem to be very dynamic at all, mostly just a graph with a lot of dead-ends, haha.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#13
post #11
post #5

Perhaps this explains why Fromsoft npc quests are easily the most inscrutable in all of gaming. Like, okay Hyetta, have another “grape”, aka eyeball, oh now you’ve moved to the bridge in Liurnia, cool. I’ve exhausted your dialogue but you’re stuck. Oh I have to reload the area and exhaust it again to advance your quest. Okay, cool. Now you’re in a random church and you want a “fingerprint grape”. What? It’s all part…

thats game design not something engine related. its been like this since before demons souls, i think it started out way back with the first kings field. its just the way fromsoft do things. everyone knows what to expect from them.

Just to underline your point, Sekiro's NPCs behave in a much more obvious and linear way relative to From's other games, so it's clearly a game design decision and not a technical one.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#14
post #3

Low tech AI? Its sounds like standard game AI. I would really like to hear what the author would deem high tech game AI.

F.E.A.R. 2 has the best AI that I can think of. Wonder if it counts as high tech or they just squeezed a lot of juice out of basic techniques

You’re in luck, they made a great paper on this!

https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/three-states-plan-ai-of-fea...

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#15
post #3

Low tech AI? Its sounds like standard game AI. I would really like to hear what the author would deem high tech game AI.

F.E.A.R. 2 has the best AI that I can think of. Wonder if it counts as high tech or they just squeezed a lot of juice out of basic techniques

F.E.A.R 2 was released on the PS3 and Xbox 360, both of which have laughably low specs by modern standards. When you have to create dynamic experiences out of a potato you are forced to get creative and that involves squeezing a lot of juice out of basic techniques.

Transformer based AI had to wait until the world's compute capacity reached a certain level to become feasible.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#16
post #5

Perhaps this explains why Fromsoft npc quests are easily the most inscrutable in all of gaming. Like, okay Hyetta, have another “grape”, aka eyeball, oh now you’ve moved to the bridge in Liurnia, cool. I’ve exhausted your dialogue but you’re stuck. Oh I have to reload the area and exhaust it again to advance your quest. Okay, cool. Now you’re in a random church and you want a “fingerprint grape”. What? It’s all part…

RE who writes these things: I know you're probably referring to code here but on the actual dialogue side, there was a charming interview recently with the person responsible for translating Miyazaki's vision into English. He apparently did all of the writing (dialogue, item descriptions, UI text) for Dark Souls, and split the work with just one other person for all the later games including Elden Ring.

https://youtu.be/vIbKALhzHVc?si=WRAQs77WG2QwVkt5

More topical, I do actually appreciate some of the persistent jankiness like this that hasn't changed since their original games. They experimented with different approaches in DS3, where certain NPCs you encountered would essentially evaporate after you exhausted their dialogue, and they would later materialize back in the hub. I personally hated this -- one element I really enjoyed in the earlier games was this sense that the world doesn't revolve around you. The NPCs feel like rich characters with their own goals and motivations

Having them leave when you're finished talking to them sort of reduced them to utilities, which of course they are ultimately, but the gamefeel suffered a bit from making that more explicit. Don't me wrong though, I love DS3, but I didn't care for that particular change

Anyway, handling NPC progression in this way where the player needs to reload the area is more about navigating a technical limitation than anything else. But like many constraints it conspires with others to produce a certain gamefeel that I enjoy. It would feel a bit less impactful if Hyetta just moved on the instant I exhausted her dialogue -- it's more interesting for me to return and see that she has moved on

Another example of this sort of thing is FromSoft supposedly historically being bad at animating eyes, hence many critical NPCs being blindfolded or with faces hidden by helmets or otherwise obscured. This imagery plays nicely with their other sensibilities around character design and is thematically pretty rich

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#17
What do you mean by "low-tech AI"? This isn't AI...It's a behavior tree. Calling every decision-making system "AI" is like calling a flowchart a neural network.

What you're describing is a behavior tree: predefined logic, predefined responses, no learning, no inference, no model.

Stop calling everything AI, guys.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#18

What do you mean by "low-tech AI"? This isn't AI...It's a behavior tree. Calling every decision-making system "AI" is like calling a flowchart a neural network. What you're describing is a behavior tree: predefined logic, predefined responses, no learning, no inference, no model. Stop calling everything AI, guys.

This is game AI, games called this sort of thing "AI" for a long time. Behavior trees is (among others) one of the most common things someone with the role of game AI programmer will implement.

This has been the case since at least the 90s, it is not a new thing.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#19

What do you mean by "low-tech AI"? This isn't AI...It's a behavior tree. Calling every decision-making system "AI" is like calling a flowchart a neural network. What you're describing is a behavior tree: predefined logic, predefined responses, no learning, no inference, no model. Stop calling everything AI, guys.

FYI, one of the most well-known books about writing game entity behavior is literally called "Programming Game AI by Example." (published in 2004)

https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Example-Wordware-Develope...

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#20

What do you mean by "low-tech AI"? This isn't AI...It's a behavior tree. Calling every decision-making system "AI" is like calling a flowchart a neural network. What you're describing is a behavior tree: predefined logic, predefined responses, no learning, no inference, no model. Stop calling everything AI, guys.

> What you're describing is a behavior tree: predefined logic, predefined responses, no learning, no inference, no model.

Stop calling everything AI, guys.

Depends on how pedantic you want to get, one could argue that regular expressions are AI too.

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand...

Regexes were invented for much higher order tasks (modeling neural networks) than just making find-and-replace easier.

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