Looking for a game that might not exist

[rbx3]

I'm currently bored with all the games that I know, and looking for something new. I want something like this:

 

1. The NPC's have social ai, each different, so that interactions feel fresh and it all has replay value.

2. Not mmo. That includes IRL, which is the worst of all mmo's.

 

I'm bored with scripted interactions, and bored with mmo's. Had fun with Sims for a while, but recently bored with it because it is auto-win. In Sims, you could make the most incompatible sim on the planet, and be the lover and/or best friend of all the hottest sims at once, no penalty, outcome always the same.

 

Thanks in advance for any suggestions that get me past this! The game can have action or not, doesn't matter as long as I feel like I'm making a unique story with my character.

[kthompsen]

I've never seen a game that did random AI/NPCs very well. I don't think it exists. Bethesda probably comes the closest and even that isn't all that great. The randomized interaction and greetings don't work out so well, imo. It just makes me desire scripted/cinematic experiences even more, to be honest. That isn't perfect either, but at least characters and stories behave contextually this way.

 

It annoys me to no end, for example, when I talk to a character in TES.... like Ralof for example... who just experienced a once in a lifetime nightmare getting attacked by a dragon... and as we walk out of Helgen, he chooses from a pool of dialogue if I click on him. He only has two lines that fit contextually: "I can't believe it! A real live dragon!" and "I hope that dragon isn't still flying around here."

 

But it's crapshoot. He has like ten other lines that he randomly picks that are Stormcloak lines. Like "Hmmph... Damn faithless imperials." or "We'll show those imperial dogs who this land belongs to."

 

He just saw a dragon and might say stupid crap like that. It makes me hate him.. like he's some fanatic.

 

But I digress!! Sorry. I'd love to see something like you want, but I don't know of it.. or anything that works very well.

[rbx3]

I appreciate the response though! There are a couple of mods that improve the Skyrim ai a bit, but I know what you mean. I keep thinking that ai would be a wonderful thing for indy programmers to tackle. Something using a matrix ought to work. For instance: "attacked by dragon," in the past day, ought to push Ralof into a corner of the matrix where he mainly is thinking about the dragon attack, as you say. "Being in the battleground" would push him into a different corner of his personality matrix, where he is thinking about Imperials. Sure, it isn't super-easy to program in sets of arrays like that, but it also puzzles me why this isn't already commonly present in more than one big game.

 

edit: This also makes me want to comment some more on it. Part of a character's personality also includes the personality matrix cell where they mostly reside when not pushed towards one edge or corner. Sims 4 does this with moodlets, but it can be done fairly easily just with a constant. For instance, If Ralof has 4 main personality dimensions (the 4 corners of the matrix), let's day that one is the War, two is probably love of Skyrim in general, three is a reaction to whatever is present (dragon, vampire, thief, Dragonborn), four is maybe whatever he happens to be doing at the moment. His general personality will put his responses between the corners where War and Skyrim intersect. Therefore, his personality at rest is not at the center, but slightly distant from it--therefore not appearing random. When he's doing something or responding to something, it pulls him temporarily to another corner. User responses or actions could pull him to a desired corner such that quests could be done, if necessary.

Edited August 7, 2017 by rbx3

[kthompsen]

I appreciate the response though! There are a couple of mods that improve the Skyrim ai a bit, but I know what you mean. I keep thinking that ai would be a wonderful thing for indy programmers to tackle. Something using a matrix ought to work. For instance: "attacked by dragon," in the past day, ought to push Ralof into a corner of the matrix where he mainly is thinking about the dragon attack, as you say. "Being in the battleground" would push him into a different corner of his personality matrix, where he is thinking about Imperials. Sure, it isn't super-easy to program in sets of arrays like that, but it also puzzles me why this isn't already commonly present in more than one big game.

 

edit: This also makes me want to comment some more on it. Part of a character's personality also includes the personality matrix cell where they mostly reside when not pushed towards one edge or corner. Sims 4 does this with moodlets, but it can be done fairly easily just with a constant. For instance, If Ralof has 4 main personality dimensions (the 4 corners of the matrix), let's day that one is the War, two is probably love of Skyrim in general, three is a reaction to whatever is present (dragon, vampire, thief, Dragonborn), four is maybe whatever he happens to be doing at the moment. His general personality will put his responses between the corners where War and Skyrim intersect. Therefore, his personality at rest is not at the center, but slightly distant from it--therefore not appearing random. When he's doing something or responding to something, it pulls him temporarily to another corner. User responses or actions could pull him to a desired corner such that quests could be done, if necessary.

 

 

You clearly know a lot more about it than I do, but those seem like good ideas. Is it beyond the scope of a mod to improve Skyrim itself like this? Or does call for an entirely different game?

[rbx3]

I'm guessing a different game. Not sure how much more the already strained Skyrim engine can handle. Maybe a rebuilding based on matrices, instead of separate scripts, might make games like Skyrim run smoother and better. Each matrix cell might point towards a planned action (we humans call that a "fixed action pattern"), which could seem relatively natural. I don't know if there is less strain for the game to keep up with variables or to run a lot of scripts at once, but I'm guessing that variables are easier to store and retrieve when necessary.

 

What we have already isn't much different though--but maybe the implementation of a recognized matrix would make the different fixed action patterns relate. When Ralof is thinking about the recent dragon attack, he wouldn't be still running his script that makes him run to a war camp. Instead, he'd shelve those data and unload that script until it is needed again. Once the terror of the dragon attack wears off, that matrix cell will lose its pull and Ralof will unload it. Ralof's personality matrix will then go back to his home *personality matrix cell and he will be caused to remember that he's supposed to be headed somewhere. Seems like it would be much more natural than what we usually see in games.

Edited August 7, 2017 by rbx3

[rbx3]

I guess the reason why Skyrim would need to be rebuilt is because all this would require changing the way things are normally done. To make sure that Ralof someday gets to that camp, we have to make sure that he doesn't encounter 20 dragons along the way, the way it might normally happen in Skyrim! After all, we're not supposed to run across dragons every two minutes on the road in a believable Skyrim. If that happened, it would stop being special anyways--it would become meme-like if Ralof is just as astounded by the 27th dragon as he is by the first. The whole game would have to be rebuilt from head to toe to purge out many of the unrealistic things that happen because "games are just like that." It would be a really ambitious project though, and I'd like to see it! I guess that's why I'm wondering if there is a game out there already sort of like that.

[kthompsen]

I guess the reason why Skyrim would need to be rebuilt is because all this would require changing the way things are normally done. To make sure that Ralof someday gets to that camp, we have to make sure that he doesn't encounter 20 dragons along the way, the way it might normally happen in Skyrim! After all, we're not supposed to run across dragons every two minutes on the road in a believable Skyrim. If that happened, it would stop being special anyways--it would become meme-like if Ralof is just as astounded by the 27th dragon as he is by the first. The whole game would have to be rebuilt from head to toe to purge out many of the unrealistic things that happen because "games are just like that." It would be a really ambitious project though, and I'd like to see it! I guess that's why I'm wondering if there is a game out there already sort of like that.

 

lol... and here is why I see the benefits of simpler, cinematic sequences in games. All of this would be so much better to me if I simply had a Final Fantasy/Bioware-esque situation with Ralof, where we ran out of the caves, and maybe get some specific camera closeups or two... and him saying some lines about a dragon.

 

But then, the rest of the game would probably lose it's TES flavor, which is part of the charm.

[rbx3]

Yeah Bioware does circumvent all of that by being more of a storytelling company than a world-building company, for sure. I guess another option is to have a variable "Ralof_Dragon_Count" for instance, where once he's seen many of them, he just mutters about how the dragons are a menace, helps out with the wounded and dead, and then gets back to running sooner than after the first time.

[kthompsen]

Yeah Bioware does circumvent all of that by being more of a storytelling company than a world-building company, for sure. I guess another option is to have a variable "Ralof_Dragon_Count" for instance, where once he's seen many of them, he just mutters about how the dragons are a menace, helps out with the wounded and dead, and then gets back to running sooner than after the first time.

 

When you put it that way, it's not a worthy tradeoff, I guess. I don't want them to be a storytelling company like Bioware per se... but there are specific times when I do. If only it could be limited.

 

It's funny that you mention MMOs in your first post though. Because to me, these are the worst of both worlds. Very "theme parky" and static like Bioware, but at the same time, more dead than Bioware. There's hardly any life to NPCs or story worth telling. The only element of MMOs I like is the absurd nature of real players. Especially player killing, when it was rampant in the Wild West Early Days of MMOs. It was horrible to the point that many people couldn't even play and relax, but the "story" to me was funny in a way... like something out of Mad Max. It's funny that for all of the "Intelligence" that real players bring, it only amounts to chaos.

[rbx3]

Yep that's why I burned out on mmo's first off. *Edit: actually expanding on that--it would be great if the stories built by the player-characters in mmo's had lasting results. That would solve a lot! Instead, a character's relationship with the quest giver is determined by the game's story line and not by my own. In the RP servers, people had stories with each other, as long as they agree to remember them, but somehow that takes value away from NPC's.

 

I do sort of like the idea of a Ralof Dragon Count variable--it adds story progression and establishes the role of his character in Skyrim. Once it gets over 7 or so, he could unlock different sandboxing stories to tell in camps and inns. Maybe for the Civil War he'd have to just teleport if the player fast-travels, though. I can also see why Bethesda doesn't do all this already: they'd probably still be writing all the dialogue for Skyrim!

Edited August 7, 2017 by rbx3