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Comment by Crespyl | Hacker News Reader

What's really weird about it to me is that games like Oblivion and Skyrim were doing sandboxy open world AIs with daily routines over a decade ago. That franchise also had more than its share of bugs, but the AI did more or less work.

That CP2077 couldn't even reach that level remains kind of baffling.

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In Oblivion and Skyrim IIRC, the characters were mostly individually configured by the level designers. That works fine for a world where you have what boils down to a few small towns but I don't think the same approach could be applied to a place the size of Night City.

In Skyrim you could place poisoned apples in your enemy's chests so that they're going to eat them and die some days later... And it was 2011. Bethesda will need a miracle, because the expectations for TES6 are too high.

Bethesda's Elder Scrolls and Fallout series have much less NPCs in their worlds and far fewer densely populated areas compared to a game like Cyberpunk, where there's crowds of people around every corner. If they really did intend for every single NPC actor to be on a TES level schedule I can see where the difficulties come from.

The conceit being that I want to watch some McDonalds employee brush his teeth before heading out to work, or get the chance to talk to some guy about his mortgage at a bar.

I don't know why you'd build a game simulating more depth of interest in background characters than people actually possess, and it's not like occlusion culling is a foreign idea.

And the largest city in Skyrim has 74 inhabitants. This kind of stuff has price.

Bethesda oversold their AI all the same though. Google for Oblivion and "Radiant AI", pretty big drama back in the day.

> Bethesda oversold their AI all the same though

The big difference was that Radiant AI was fun. You could join the Warriors' guild, jump across the road to the Mages' Guild, use an enrage spell on them, the run out into the street. Instant chaos ensued.

was probably that they didn't have time after scrapping everything else and trying to hit deadlines

Gothic (the game) introduced that concept even 20 years ago for me.

Can go much further back to e.g. the Ultima games, especially Ultima 7. The world was incredibly big and you had a decent approximation to a living world.

Another one from same time frame (1989-1992) was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Theatre Lure of the Temptress

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