Not really an ai response but I remember the path following and aggro is really smart in Elden Ring and earlier Dark Souls. That is you try to run away after pulling aggro and when you think you're safe you'll run into some other strong enemies, after which, oops, the original enemy followed you down a ladder and stabbed you in the back. Of course they have a bunch of occasions where enemies are in places you don't expect them as well. It isn't really about the mob ai as much as level design and the balance of difficult-to-kill enemies at inconvenient times.
The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring
51–60 of 101 posts
Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring
#52Perhaps 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…
It's hard and expensive to do branching games. Most games just fake it with a "branch and merge" system (save Carley or Doug, but the one you save is still going to leave the party forever in 20 minutes).
Fromsoft wants to do major seperate quest lines, so they have to cut corners elsewhere. I guess they choose a robust system that is sometimes annoying for the player.
Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring
#53As a game dev, the fact "AI" as a keyword became totally unusable is quite annoying.
I try to say "LLM" as much as possible, but I'm aware that it's unlikely to work. Partly for technical accuracy, partly to manage the average person's expectations when they hear "AI", partly to avoid contributing to a big dumb-money "everything is AI" bubble, etc.
You can try "language model", that's what I use when talking (when writing I use LLM when I expect the abbreviation to be understood).
I find just juxtaposing these two normal words flows much more nicely from the tongue than the comparatively awkward "LLM".
Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring
#54Perhaps 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…
Elden Ring quests are implemented in a totally different set of systems from the one described in TFA, mostly something called EzState (dialogue trees) and EMS (map events). These are basically very primitive bytecode interpreters with unusual execution models and a small API surface to interact with the game world, so I think you're onto something. I can imagine the designers having a hard time implementing nicer interactions without constantly modifying the engine.
According to [1], earlier versions of the EMS editor were built on Microsoft Excel, took 30s to open, and didn't support undo/redo. They rewrote it for Elden Ring, but Dark Souls quest design makes a lot more sense when you realize how hard it was to change anything.
Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring
#55As a game dev, the fact "AI" as a keyword became totally unusable is quite annoying.
As an ex-game dev, I always found it a little annoying that they used "AI" for what was essentially just hard-coded logic.
It's a hard problem because "AI" has been a term since the 50s but has been used to describe different approaches to making a computer do things over time. The way game developers use "AI" to mean "hardcoded logic for game behavior" is fully inline with what "AI" meant in the 60s when they were using symbolic AI to write the first computer-controlled chess games.
Then AI programmers hit the wall of hard-coded logic, went through an AI winter, and what survived on the other end was logic that was automatically trained from big data sets. We used to call that "machine learning" because "AI" had connotations of snake oil from previous AI winters. But then within the past decade, tech companies with grandiose ambitions decided that "machine learning" was too nerdy so resurrected "AI" to refer to LLMs and their ilk.
The term is just a muddled mess.
Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring
#56Perhaps 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…
When I finally started using the internet to figure out what I'm supposed to do next on some of the quests, I couldn't believe how many of the answers were "Talk to the NPC three times in a row to exhaust their dialogue". Like, are you shitting me? Why? After a while, I would do this to every NPC, every time. But, yeah, it's a bad design.
Yeah, it did always get me as a design issue. I get that "there's more to ask them" is valid. But there's never an indication of "OK I've said everything now". You only find out when they start repeating themselves.
"Make the person repeat what they just told you" as a process is very immersion breaking.
Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring
#57The article keeps on mentioning about the performance issues of the decision tree that somehow this approach avoids, but it doesn't seem to actually put any real detais about the why here. Especially considering that: 1. Many scripting languages you'd find in games are implemented by evaluating the syntax tree directly (IIRC WitcherScript in Witcher 2 and 3 is implemented like that) 2. A behavior tree can be "compile…
How big are these trees that performance starts to matter?
Usually one would start with "is there a measurable performance bottleneck here?" :-P.
TBH i haven't played Elden Ring but from what i've seen there are so few "active" NPCs around that i highly doubt there'd be any performance issue coming from this.
Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring
#58Perhaps 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…
When I finally started using the internet to figure out what I'm supposed to do next on some of the quests, I couldn't believe how many of the answers were "Talk to the NPC three times in a row to exhaust their dialogue". Like, are you shitting me? Why? After a while, I would do this to every NPC, every time. But, yeah, it's a bad design.
The entire franchise is filled with what one would consider objectively bad designs
It makes for a deeply unique experience overall
Perhaps the one you’d most object to is the DS1 DLC, that people paid money for, lacking instructions for access. It involves killing a specific enemy and returning to a previous location.
At the time, people forked over cash and had to prowl the whole game playing spot the difference.
Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring
#59What 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.
Video games have been calling this kind of thing "AI" for multiple decades now.
Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring
#60And for Dark Souls AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrHKzKQdZxY&t=1366s