Oblivion: Radiant AI Follow-Up

I wrote a post recently about coming back to Oblivion, and how many of the game’s quests seem designed to highlight one system in particular: Radiant AI.¹ I’ve been playing the game a bit more since then and have a few examples to share.

This is a pretty typical example; meet this character in this place at this time. Fairly cut-and-dried, but still a way to highlight the game’s awareness of time. If you’re early, you’ll also see Garrus Darelliun² making his way to the inn - he doesn’t just teleport there the way he might in other RPGs.³

On a more interesting note, we have the Dark Brotherhood quest “Accidents Happen”. Unlike Skyrim’s early assassination missions, each Oblivion quest has a cohesive storyline and, often, some special quirk or interaction. In this case, we need to kill a man and make it look like an accident by sneaking into a crawl-space within his home and dropping a stuffed head onto him.

To pull this off, we need to wait for him to settle in for his 3-hour relaxation session in his favorite chair, avoid his bodyguard, and sneak out again after his unfortunate accident. So not only do we have a scripted set of behavior running on a loop (every night between these hours he will sit in that chair), but also a special animation and interaction built into his home. And! Because criminal action is tracked systemically, there needs to be an exclusion for this particular quest where loosening the fastenings kills our target but in no way counts as us killing the target.

There’s a lot going on in this quest and it feels like a particularly neat example of the Radiant AI system in action.

On a separate-but-related note, I’ve recently started playing Skyrim again on a heavily-modded save. Might share some takeaways from that in the near future!