The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

The article has been updated in response to this post.

(See the end)

RE who writes these things: I know you're probably referring to code here but on the actual dialogue side, there was a charming interview recently with the person responsible for translating Miyazaki's vision into English. He apparently did all of the writing (dialogue, item descriptions, UI text) for Dark Souls, and split the work with just one other person for all the later games including Elden Ring.

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

thats game design not something engine related. its been like this since before demons souls, i think it started out way back with the first kings field. its just the way fromsoft do things. everyone knows what to expect from them.

This post seems to be mostly (although not entirely) concerned with the combat AI. The plot based NPC interactions don’t seem to be very dynamic at all, mostly just a graph with a lot of dead-ends, haha.

How big are these trees that performance starts to matter?

I know very little about AI and game mechanics, but knowing how early Fromsoft games were (e.g., Kingsfield), a basic AI in Elden Ring is very unsurprising. That's not necessarily a bad thing!

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...

F.E.A.R. 2 has the best AI that I can think of. Wonder if it counts as high tech or they just squeezed a lot of juice out of basic techniques

My favorite high tech AI was Crysis. Might have been an update after it was originally released. The enemies will aggressively attack but then get quiet after you've taken cover. Eventually you'll realize some of them are flanking you while others keep suppressing fire on you to stop you from moving. You can hear them yelling to one another. Very cool touches.

This is game AI, games called this sort of thing "AI" for a long time. Behavior trees is (among others) one of the most common things someone with the role of game AI programmer will implement.

This has been the case since at least the 90s, it is not a new thing.

There are paradigms of AI that are not deep learning. If you took an AI course in the 90s or earlier, implementations like this are much closer to what you would learn about -- symbolics/GOFAI. It remains basic to some fields where stakes and complexity are high (air traffic control and military systems) but determinism is a strict requirement, not to mention others like gamedev that have lots of performance constraints -- and usually don't actually need or want anything non-deterministic or overly smart.

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...

FYI, one of the most well-known books about writing game entity behavior is literally called "Programming Game AI by Example." (published in 2004)

https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Example-Wordware-Develope...

That was called AI before the current LLM-AI era. Your comment reads like someone complaining that cryptography is called crypto

> What you're describing is a behavior tree: predefined logic, predefined responses, no learning, no inference, no model.

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.

You do realize that an LLM is an enormous decision tree? The prompt is the state and output tokens added to that are the subsequent state that's fed back into the machine. Running the math without deliberately adding any randomness would produce a deterministic output.

The logic used to implement game NPCs has been called "AI" since well before the current AI boom. And many of the techniques come from the previous AI boom of the 1970s-1980s.

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 isn't AI...It's a behavior tree. Calling every decision-making system "AI" is like calling a flowchart a neural network. What you're describing is a behavior tree: predefined logic, predefined responses, no learning, no inference, no model.

This is literally AI. A behavior tree is AI, all of those things are AI. It's just symbolic rather than neural network based.