The Elder Scrolls 4 – Oblivion is one of the best and easily the most technically advanced game that I’d played (I’d played it a long while back). One thing in particular that surprised me was the AI. I sometimes used to follow around NPC to see where he goes and the AI was remarkably lifelike, and I stumbled across an interview with the developers of bethesda and the radiant AI, and how the spoke of the AI, which’d gotten so complicated so that the following disturbing situations arose:
1. One character was given a rake and the goal “rake leaves”; another was given a broom and the goal “sweep paths,” and this worked smoothly. Then they swapped the items, so that the raker was given a broom and the sweeper was given the rake. In the end, one of them killed the other so he could get the proper item. 2. In another test, a minotaur was given a task of protecting a unicorn. However, the Minotaur repeatedly tried to kill the unicorn because he was set to be an aggressive creature. 3. In one Dark Brotherhood quest, the player can meet up with a shady merchant who sells skooma, an in-game drug. During testing, the NPC would be dead when the player got to him. The reason was that NPCs from the local skooma den were trying to get their fix, did not have any money, and so were killing the merchant to get it. 4. While testing to confirm that the physics models for a magical item known as the “Skull of Corruption,” which creates an evil copy of the character/monster it is used on, were working properly, a tester dropped the item on the ground. An NPC immediately picked it up and used it on the player character, creating a copy of him that proceeded to kill every NPC in sight. 5. In one test, after a guard became hungry and left his post in search of food, the other guards followed to arrest him. The town people looted the town shops, due to lack of guards. Bethesda worked to fix these issues, balancing an NPC’s needs against his penchant for destruction so that the game world still functions in a usable fashion. In-game there are over 1,000 different NPCs, not including randomly spawned monsters and bandits. The result is that the AI in the release version is much reduced, only featuring NPC schedules.
Apparently, the developers did not mean for this to happen, and the final version had to be dumbed down but still I found some disturbing AI.
Now this makes me question: “If a game AI can go out of hand, if we dabble with real AI, and things can really go out of hand.” What this might mean is that the terminator type of story might not be so far away after all.
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