Skyrim - E3 Previews

Here's a small collection of Skyrim E3 previews. They all saw the same presentation, so the content is largely the same.

• Strategy Informer
• Skewed'n'Reviewed
• IncGamers

A sample from the later:

The dragons are unscripted, apparently, and battle with a variety of behaviours. They're capable of randomly appearing to lay waste to villages and towns, or simply popping up when you're walking through the wilderness, and they're the game's equivalent of epic boss fights. Some – like the one above – will breathe fire and try to strafe you down. Others might use frost attacks. Some might prefer to get up close and personal.
One thing remains constant, however: once damaged, the dragons lose the ability to fly. Some will land and try to take you on in close quarters, while others will simply crash into the ground, throwing out a hail of dirt and stones. In this case, our protagonist opted to deal with the dragon in a suitably gory fashion via a cinematic execution animation: after a brief continuation of the battle he clambered onto its head, leapt into the air, and drove his axe through the back of its skull. Immediately thereafter the dragon's body burst into an ethereal flame and dissolved, as he absorbed its soul.

Click to expand...

More information.

They're capable of randomly appearing…

Click to expand...

Will someone else besides Bioware finally make a game with no random monster respawns? It's boring, annoying and the fun (for me) lasted till the end of Diablo 1. And that was ages ago.

joxer said:

Will someone else besides Bioware finally make a game with no random monster respawns? It's boring, annoying and the fun (for me) lasted till the end of Diablo 1. And that was ages ago.

Click to expand...

I like them a lot, but presumably you can use the provided toolsets to take them out of Bethsoft games as per your tastes.

The best part? The player can use the same things as the blacksmith to sharpen their blade, too (to give the weapon a temporary stat buff)!

Click to expand...

Interesting bit. They are going the same way as TW1.

I did not pick up on screens stats to suggest durability is included in the game.
Durability was forced in Oblivion through short durability of gear. Added to that, abundance of loot.

Waiting for seeing the result. Wonders if the buff is time or use limited.
Would like to know more about the rest of the gear.

A good part in one review

They follow a procedural AI that is completely unscripted. In one scene, a dragon swooped down unexpectedly to snatch a badly wounded giant from the player who was about to give the finishing blow, flew high into the air, and dropped the poor giant to his death. Why? Who knows, because the dragon then started fighting the player.

Click to expand...

Makes it read like the events in the demo case were not staged. A bit bad when the player's reaction showed that the dragon was expected to come.

In regards to the ai it looks just like the bait and switch they pulled with oblivion when previewing radiant ai a few years back.
Consoles are still memory starved and unable to handle complex ai in large open games so i verymuch doubt we can hope for more then a few gimmicy additions to the generic if/then attack script.

Biff The Understudy said:

Consoles are still memory starved and unable to handle complex ai in large open games so i verymuch doubt we can hope for more then a few gimmicy additions to the generic if/then attack script.

Click to expand...

In my experience AI doesn't take much memory at all however you do it - decision trees, logic, markov chains, GAs, neural nets etc. all require very little data storage, it's mostly just processing, which console CPUs are very good at.

I will be surprised too if need loads of memory for AI. Its rally the CPU thats the key for AI

And to add, if you have a passable AI you actually save memory, because you don't have to explicitly code on a per-scenario basis.

kalniel said:

In my experience AI doesn't take much memory at all however you do it - decision trees, logic, markov chains, GAs, neural nets etc. all require very little data storage, it's mostly just processing, which console CPUs are very good at.

Click to expand...

"...mostly just processing..."

Those take a LOT of horepower, and game engines do not permit more than a few ms in many cases for *each* of the AI tasks - pathing is included in that list. If it was a trivial as you make out, everyone would be building neural networks (or using more complex/accurate techniques) on the fly while doing all the other stuff that goes inside the part of the game loop which does not reside on the GPU. Good AI is hard - I for one don't buy the Bethsoft Koolaid.

I like how they put the crappy oblivion horses back in despite claiming they wouldn't if they didn't measure up to the ones in assassin's creed or red dead redemption.

It's also amazing how something like player movement speed and the means of transportation were not taken into account during the overworld design process.

KapitanUnterhosen said:

It's also amazing how something like player movement speed and the means of transportation are something they don't take into account when choosing the distance between points of interest while designing the overworld.

Click to expand...

Of course they do. That's the whole reason why the Imperial Province in Oblivion sometimes felt more like Disneyland than an actual country.

"Pirates of the ... Skyrim" ?

KapitanUnterhosen said:

I like how they put the crappy oblivion horses back in despite claiming they wouldn't if they didn't measure up to the ones in assassin's creed or red dead redemption.

It's also amazing how something like player movement speed and the means of transportation were not taken into account during the overworld design process.

Click to expand...

I think they look great. And there multiple methods of travel in SR, on foot, on horse back, fast travel like FO3 and an in game carriage system similar to the Silt Striders in MW.

I never used horses in Oblivion, but i like to have the option and at least to see them in the world. I think it's odd when fantasy games doesnt have horses at all, like in Witcher, everyone (traders etc) is travelling by foot, carrying the goods on their backs? Not a very beliavable world imo.. it's like that in Vampire Bloodlines too, which takes place in a huge city with no cars at all, really breaks the immersion imo..

Kefka said:

I think they look great. And there multiple methods of travel in SR, on foot, on horse back, fast travel like FO3 and an in game carriage system similar to the Silt Striders in MW.

Click to expand...

what is "travel in SR"? also what you mean by "fast travel like FO3"? not played FO3.

I take it that fast travel from Oblivion gone then? Click on the map and you go there. Which I think is good think.

I prefer fast travel options like Silt Striders, mage guilds etc found in Morrowind.

The one new thing I got from reading the 3 articles is that soul gems are confirmed to be in the game. I always enjoyed enchanting items.

crpgnut said:

The one new thing I got from reading the 3 articles is that soul gems are confirmed to be in the game. I always enjoyed enchanting items.

Click to expand...

Enchanting is back as a skill...

lostforever said:

what is "travel in SR"? also what you mean by "fast travel like FO3"? not played FO3.

I take it that fast travel from Oblivion gone then? Click on the map and you go there. Which I think is good think.

I prefer fast travel options like Silt Striders, mage guilds etc found in Morrowind.

Click to expand...

They say there will be three options:
-one moving all the path on foot, horse back
-two use a transportation network (that will probably include at least a time factor)
-three fast travel (teleport)

joxer said:

Will someone else besides Bioware finally make a game with no random monster respawns? It's boring, annoying and the fun (for me) lasted till the end of Diablo 1. And that was ages ago.

Click to expand...

I think it depends. I would love to see more RPGs with rare(!) random spawns of really cool or threatening monsters or of quest-related NPCs. Like the kind of stuff that used to be (or still is? I haven't kept track of MMORPGs for a few years...) in ye olde SOE MMORPGs like EQ or SWG. I believe it would fit quite well into an Elder Scrolls RPG, too, since the games have always felt a bit like offline MMORPGs anyway.

I have very fond memories of SWG and scouring the game world for some of the rare random creature/NPC spawns. Of course it was both exciting and frustrating if you didn't come across your desired spawn for days at a time but it was seriously awesome and rewarding when it finally did happen.
It was also nice from a community perspective as people on the forums were giving each other hints and tips how to potentially trigger the spawn.
Plus the extra level of entertainment when on a weekend night some stoned nutter would show up and post some really crazy but not totally out of question sounding "tips" that some people then actually followed up on and posted results of.
Good times indeed...

Unfortunately, I don't think that Bethesda is going to do this though. It's too risky to have a million teenagers threatening to commit live suicide on Facebook if their spawn doesn't happen within the next five minutes *sigh*.

booboo said:

"…mostly just processing…"

Those take a LOT of horepower, and game engines do not permit more than a few ms in many cases for *each* of the AI tasks - pathing is included in that list. If it was a trivial as you make out, everyone would be building neural networks (or using more complex/accurate techniques) on the fly while doing all the other stuff that goes inside the part of the game loop which does not reside on the GPU. Good AI is hard - I for one don't buy the Bethsoft Koolaid.

Click to expand...

Pathing is AI, correct, and one of the most demanding. Hence why there's a trend towards relative character movement (WASD, gamepad etc.) rather than click to move. But they already had reasonable pathing in Oblivion (think goblins/totem) so the location side of AI is probably sorted, now it's just behavioural and quest/encounter generation that's being particularly worked on. AI quest generation is going to be far cheaper than pathing, even if you were to go to the level of a NN or GA (we used to build NNs on the 80287 co-processor - the spare compute power of console SPUs etc. is far in excess of this). But you wouldn't need to - simple decision trees can still be used in a goal oriented AI system:
http://www.aigamesnetwork.org/_media/main:gamesai.pdf?id=main:events:ainpc&cache=cache for example (PDF).