(See the end)
It’s all part of the Fromsoft experience but man, who writes these things?
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.
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
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.
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.
"Make the person repeat what they just told you" as a process is very immersion breaking.
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.
a) you lucked out and it turns out your brain works exactly like the designer's and the cryptic hint make sense to you,
b) you use a guide/ask a friend/call a hotline,
c) you like the game so much you end up brute forcing your way through all of that stuff,
d) you just ignore that sidequest. I sure hope for you that finishing the main quest doesn't need you to guess something unreasonably obtuse... *COUGH* Legend of Zelda's final dungeon's location *COUGH*
The JRPG logic is annoying, but From uses it to beg important questions about the game world and the player. Fromsoft characters like Lautrec live in infamy for being so slippery and deliberately misleading.
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.
There's no ambiguity when speaking, but when searching Rust-related things I get a lot of Rust game stuff. "Rust crates" or "Rust drops" correspond to in-game things so the fandom wiki will pop up. Occasionally I'll even get rust-removal webpages.
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.
I find just juxtaposing these two normal words flows much more nicely from the tongue than the comparatively awkward "LLM".
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 "compiled" down to a bytecode VM similar to what some scripting languages use
Though if any of these two approaches makes any difference in performance i'm not sure and i'd expect it'd depend heavily on how exactly they're implemented (my kneejerk reaction would be to expect the VM approach to be faster because parsing a bytecode sequence might be more cache friendly than jumping through pointers, but i also suspect that since game AI scripts/behaviors wont do any real computation themselves and instead 99% of the code would be engine/native calls, any potential benefit would be diminished -- but as i haven't tried to implement the same stuff with a realistic setup using both approaches to compare, i cannot say one or the other for certain).
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.
Any good library author is going to try to bury the complexity so that users don't need to deal with it, but there can be a monstrous beast under the hood.
My vote for "high tech game AI" would probably be this old mod for Fallout 4:
>PANPC (Pack Attack NPC Edition) is a unique scripted AI management system for Fallout 4. Rather than treating each enemy as an individual proximity-based reaction agent (basically, a mine with a gun), this system generates social feedback between NPCs belonging to the same or allied factions.
>Enemies factor the overhaul health and success of their “team” into their tactical decisions, adjusting their strategies based on their social and threat awareness. As a result, they will switch between ranged, melee, defensive, and offensive tactics based on their perceptions of team advantage and individual risk.
https://fallout.wiki/wiki/Mod:PANPC_(Pack_Attack:_NPC_Editio...
1. Make individual agent AIs that can act on their own.
2. Make squad AIs that can influence their agent AIs.
3. Add even more AIs on top, like a scenario AI.
Each of these AIs can be a state machine, behavior tree, rule system or goal system. They’re exactly equivalent and can be translated into each other mechanically. So the whole hierarchical AI is equivalent to one big state machine.
https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/three-states-plan-ai-of-fea...
Transformer based AI had to wait until the world's compute capacity reached a certain level to become feasible.
It's OK, they'll just keep subsidizing it until it's eventually feasable...
and of course, lets you have a reasonable amount of control over different bosses
What you're describing is a behavior tree: predefined logic, predefined responses, no learning, no inference, no model.
Stop calling everything AI, guys.
Deep Blue, the first chess engine to defeat a world champion, was a GOFAI system
There was an article recently about a system used in production at a pasty chain in Japan to classify pastries at checkout that didn't use DL for most of its existence. Now it seems to be a hybrid system that uses symbolics and DL for certain functions
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-past...
This has been the case since at least the 90s, it is not a new thing.
https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Example-Wordware-Develope...
And I suspect that one day we might even think of LLMs as "low tech AI", assuming we move on to more advanced forms of AI (here's hoping).
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#Butlerian_Jih...
I know that we're all experiencing AI fatigue, but this comment is an example of the "once an AI technology finds a niche and becomes accepted technique within that niche, it ceases to be AI" meme.
This is literally AI. A behavior tree is AI, all of those things are AI. It's just symbolic rather than neural network based.