Skyrim has a radiant AI. Their npcs have factions which like each other and other factions which hate each other so you can get "emergent behavoir" happening

For example their are some totally unscripted mods ("Populated lands road paths" and "immersive patrols") that all they do is spawn npcs and set them walking along roads to certain map points across the map. Due to the faction preferences these npcs may decide to attack bandit camps they walk by and other npcs will then get involved if they see their friends being attacked.

Big battles occur when stormcloaks and imperials meet. Bandits attack merchants and their body guards help defend them and may wipe out the bandits. All of these events are totally unscripted.

Skyrim also has something called radiant quests. These are repeatable quests that randomly pick who is involved and what location it occurs. For example a rescue kidnapped person radiant quest can randomly decide any town or village npc has been kidnapped, and place them in a random place with enemies for you to rescue.

@CortexDragon

That's like a layer of dynamic events in an otherwise static open world. Kind of interesting, but I'm not sure if it creates the immersion I want to have. For instance, does the bandit's attack have any consequence in the world? Would the city where the merchants go to suffer some kind of shortage in food or weapons or something, making them more vulnerable to attacks from enemy factions?

In his latest game review, AngryJoe talks about how he's tired of triggering scripted events and that he had hoped CoD would implement some kind of campaign mode with players joining divisions, creating dynamic strategic situations on huge maps etc. Very fitting.

@Kylotan

>To do the same for in-world events, you'd need to devise a mental framework for what form that should take, and only then could you consider a code-based one.

I wouldn't have the slightest idea on how to do that.

On 10/16/2017 at 11:22 AM, ConsumerHans said:

I know the title sounds awful - I'm after some real world feeback about an idea I have had in my head for about a decade. I have to say I'm not a game dev, I'm a consumer.

There are game engines - Frostbite, Unreal, to name some that I have heard of myself. They add the physics, AI, rendering, collision and some other aspects of the game. What they don't seem do is to simulate the world that the game actually plays in. Therefore more often than not, this world seems to be simulated by scripted events (missions, waypoints, etc.) or in a more "Open World" kind of approach that let's you do whatever you like, but often without any real consequences.

I was thinking about a framework that simulates, on an abstract level, an artificial dynamic world, and that could be connected to a game engine by choice via API/interface.

I'll try an example:

There's a table with a suitcase full of guns. It is rendered by the game engine. I can kick the table and the suitcase will fall down. But if I pick up the suitcase and go out on the street and happen to run into a police control, I'll either get arrested or, in case of resistance, shot at. So on an abstract level, there's an item A that triggers a response from a group B based on my action C. I know that this can be done by scripting, but that's not what I'm interested in. I'm looking at a dynamic framework layer that a game dev could connect to a game/physics engine in order to create a game.

Is this understandable? If so, is this in any way doable or marketable, from a professional's point of view?

Thanks, Michael

 

That's really 'just' a feature.

A system that does a lot of the 'grunt work' and expose it to a middle-man, possibly in the form of Scriptable objects (unity) or similar.

In and of itself, it is not a game, and it would be hard for people to fully grasp the potential of the system without having a game that adapts to it. My take on this is it would not see nearly as much use as rendering and physics these engine leverage, but you might find an asset on the Unity asset store that does something like this if you dig long enough.

11 hours ago, swiftcoder said:

Mount and Blade does something like this. The factions war among themselves with or without your assistance. By default they sit in a sort of equilibrium where no faction will be entirely defeated until the player tips the scales against them.

I can't find much on their implementation, but someone must have written about it before.

Thanks, I will take a look at this game.

What you're asking for is a mechanic originating from strategy games. Any strategy game campaign that isn't following a scripted story is a dynamic campaign. Total war, civilisation, hearts of iron, sins of a solar empire, stellaris, distant worlds and crusader kings are all dynamic campaigns in which AI factions interact with each other and with the player without the presence of the player needed.

As it was said, Mount and blade has a dynamic campaign, but instead of a classical strategy control scheme, you play with an RPGish control scheme to build and control your armies. To name a few, X3 terran conflict is a 4x space opera in a dynamic campaign. Dwarf fortress is a management game in a dynamic campaign. Stalker is a FPS game with some dynamic world elements. Arma has many dynamic campaign mods.

As for the implementation, it's a strategy AI running in the background. In an RPG for example, the orc commander AI could evaluate its resources, spend them accordingly to train more troops and buy equipment and send them to attack or defend various targets all while the player is doing his own things. The combat happening outside of the player sight would be an approximate simulation because having thousands of orcs in live combat all over the world could kill your CPU very quickly.

On 17.11.2017 at 8:47 PM, Michael Aganier said:

What you're asking for is a mechanic originating from strategy games. Any strategy game campaign that isn't following a scripted story is a dynamic campaign. Total war, civilisation, hearts of iron, sins of a solar empire, stellaris, distant worlds and crusader kings are all dynamic campaigns in which AI factions interact with each other and with the player without the presence of the player needed.

I can agree in the way that a game based on a dynamic campaign would become more strategic by default. That's a great thing; an RPG that is not just about leveling your armor, but leveling your armor so you can survive the strategic and tactical decisions necessary to beat the game.

Also, I'm not saying that there have been no games with dynamic campaigns. But why is it not an industry standard then? Why does Warframe add a new node that is basically pure Open World, and people write in forums that there's really nothing to do except fishing? Why are we still on that level, I don't get it.

It's not our common 4x game like Civilization, I sunk too many hours into that game, and if it was the experience I was looking for, I wouldn't be posting here. It's about 1st or 3rd person, rendered by a physics engine. 4x games are basically symbols and texts, which in the end is much more like a board game than anything else.

Also, I played one of the games in the X3 franchise - can't remember which one - and I desperately wanted to like it. I wanted to master the mechanics to experience a great adventure in that universe. But it's exactly those kind of games that triggered my idea in the first place; you have extremely complex and sophisticated tools at your disposal, and nothing to do. I always felt that these games presented a great opportunity, but they were only half finished, because something important was missing.

4 hours ago, ConsumerHans said:

Also, I'm not saying that there have been no games with dynamic campaigns. But why is it not an industry standard then?

If you build a game around a dynamic world, it gives the burden to the player to understand how it works. Even if you have an extremely well built tutorial, the mechanics are no simpler. Unless this dynamic world is very simple, you've lost 90% of the gamer population right there which is why huge AAA games will never have a dynamic world. Triple As want to be as accessible as possible to increase the profit. Notice how more popular are action and adventure games than strategy games. Most people just don't want more complexity.

The X3 games have more to do than most games out there (it's minecraft on steroids in a dynamic campaign world). The thing is that it's so complex that you need to read the manual and/or do a lot of online research to know and understand what to do. All the text in the game is mostly statistics and meta-information which is there to be used once you know the mechanics behind them. The complexity is deepened by the fact that you have to play with a shooter perspective to handle strategic decisions. If you don't go out of your way to learn how the game works, it will seem as if there's nothing to do.

You haven't played X3 if you haven't at least done that:

1. Build a resource production facility
2. Establish a trading route with your favorite AI faction
3. Build a military station
4. Build a fleet
5. Invade and conquer your first sector out of 200+

If you never played the game, expect to put 100+ hours to learn and do this whole process. The story of the game is for the most part only a series of combat missions and is only the tip of the iceberg compared to everything there is to do.

The reason it's not a standard is that it's much more costly.  Having a game that plays itself, in addition to the player playing it, is extremely resource intensive. Not only that but it requires much more development work, on AI, on optimization, on assets, on design, etc.

Now, if it is better (and it definitely is), that could be worth it, but at equal cost it means the game will have to compete with similar games offering a much more refined experience. The simulation completely changes the game, but from an outside perspective it will just look like a lesser game. Only people that really get into it will see the difference. There are also new challenges, like chaos and complexity. Because the player has much more freedom, you have much less control over his experience. That lack of control over the player experience is why players end up reducing a potentially rich and dynamic open world to a boring fishing/walking sim. That's why they have trouble dealing with the complexity of the game, or its difficulty.

However, while it's not a standard, it's slowly becoming one. Open world games are becoming the norm, non linear games are becoming the norm, immersion and freedom are considered more and more attractive. Eventually, most rpgs will adopt that model, we just have to wait until technology makes it more cost-efficient.

And learn from games that are already doing it. Either because they have huge amounts of resources and can support such systems (mmo), or because their nature makes such dynamic systems very cheap to simulate (turn-based, 2D).

Mmorpgs are a good example, because they have the resources to do that kind of thing. GW2 for example has dynamic events, and while those events are limited by the multiplayer nature of the game, they achieve what you describe pretty well. On the other end of the spectrum, Rain World has a completely dynamic ecosystem. It's a truly unique indie platformer and it's both excellent and terrible at times. A great example of how even a very simple dynamic world can generate huge design problems. For every beautiful and unique outcome of the dynamic system, you have a completely chaotic and frustrating one. It's both the reason to love and the reason to hate the game. And the game could be absolutely great if only it supported its dynamic design.

A dynamic world means that you need a dynamically controlled player experience, otherwise it's just chaos. Dynamic difficulty and storytelling will become the norm as well, because without them those kind of games simply cannot work. Designers will have to find new tricks to control what players do in games where they can do virtually anything they want.

18 hours ago, Michael Aganier said:

If you build a game around a dynamic world, it gives the burden to the player to understand how it works. Even if you have an extremely well built tutorial, the mechanics are no simpler. Unless this dynamic world is very simple, you've lost 90% of the gamer population right there which is why huge AAA games will never have a dynamic world. Triple As want to be as accessible as possible to increase the profit. Notice how more popular are action and adventure games than strategy games. Most people just don't want more complexity.

If that's true, then dynamic campaign games would remain niche products, which would make the development of a dynamic campaign framework useless. However I'm not really convinced yet that the future of mainstream gaming consequently has to be linear or static Open World, or somewhere in between. It's like saying fossile buring cars have to be the norm forever, because anything else is too complex to conceive. I really do believe that dynamic campaigns are the next step in gaming evolution. If there's no such thing as evolution in gaming, then I'll gladly stop this discussion :).

18 hours ago, Michael Aganier said:

If you never played the game, expect to put 100+ hours to learn and do this whole process.

Just like Falcon 4, then. The difference being, while in X I had the feeling of flying through an empty universe where nothing ever really happens - which was slightly depressing and the typical Open World experience for me -, in Falcon 4, I got hooked by the dynamic campaign. You feel you're "in there", not isolated "out there". But since I can't remember which game in the X franchise it was, I apologize if I'm not doing justice to X3 the way it is today.

6 hours ago, Syracus said:

Only people that really get into it will see the difference.

While I do agree that in the case of existing games this is kind of true, I wonder whether it *has* to be that way. So far, dynamic campaigns have been developed and played by people who were passionate enough about the idea to put huge amounts of time into niche products. Whether that means that dynamic campaigns forcibly have to be niche products remains to be seen.

6 hours ago, Syracus said:

There are also new challenges, like chaos and complexity.

Sounds like the most interesting challenge a game developer could ever face. But that's just my opinion.

6 hours ago, Syracus said:

A great example of how even a very simple dynamic world can generate huge design problems.

This sounds very true. Philosophizing about a game concept is one thing, implementing it is another. It's like moving from two dimensional to three dimensional. It's also one of the main reasons why I was thinking about a dynamic campaign framework. Ideally, such a framework would take a lot of weight off the shoulders of developers, so they could focus on said challenges. But as Kylotan already said, this would require some kind of concept that I cannot provide because I'm not really familiar with the implementation of current game engines.