Oblivions Mad Radiant AI

Oblivion’s Radiant AI was meant to be revolutionary. A system that gave NPCs their own goals, schedules, and the ability to interact with the world in unpredictable ways. But in its original form, it was absolute chaos. Guards abandoning their posts for a snack, NPCs murdering each other over stolen brooms, and skooma addicts wiping out quest-givers before the player even arrived. Bethesda had no choice but to rein it in.

Yet, even in its final, tamed form, Radiant AI gives Oblivion an unrepeatable charm. It’s the reason why, nearly two decades later, players are still sharing stories of bizarre NPC behaviour, unintended mayhem, and moments of emergent gameplay that feel oddly lifelike. In this video, we dive deep into the history of Radiant AI - how it was meant to work, how it broke the game, and what remains in the final release. We’ll look at quotes from the developers, explore how it compares to other RPGs, and examine why, despite its limitations, it still makes Oblivion feel strangely alive.

Got your own Radiant AI stories? Share them in the comments—I’d love to hear them.

#Oblivion #ElderScrolls #RadiantAI

[illbrush]

I hope people never stop making oblivion content

[FoxAzureOfficial]

I do love the conversations NPCs have in Taverns.

"How are you?"
"Go away!"
"'Bye!"
"Take care!"

[centeroftheearthofficial]

Having a vampire character at the end of the main quest, maxed out infamy.. the chancellor proclaimed "all hail the grand champion of Cyrodiil!" All cheery and doughy smiles; when the dialogue ended he went apeshit-mad in his facial expression grunting "ville scum!" While evil-eyeing my character until he was out of sight.. Amazing!

[lordsnarf]

"Strange NPC's that don't quite act sentient, but at other times you'd swear that they are." As a retail worker, this is how I'd describe my interactions with the public, so...good on you Oblivion, you nailed it.

[TheMemeLord]

A guard walks into lava to say a dead body is still warm is a funny thing.

[Kirmon]

A Radiant AI weirdness story, as requested:

I remember watching my cousin play; he was doing some Mage's Guild related quest about defeating some necromancers in a fort. Finishes the quest, leaves the fort, looks around: "Alright, I guess I killed them all, let's quicktravel back to the Imperial City."

Then the instant he arrives, the battle music starts and EVERY guard onscreen IMMEDIATELY makes a beeline for... somewhere. Not to him. They ALL run down the road in a line - and MORE of them start pouring out of the city.

There ends up being a train of about 20 guards all sprinting on the road to Cheydinhal, ignoring everyone and everything else, every mounted road guard they pass dismounting and joining the train... until they make it most of the way there, and encounter a single necromancer on the road. Necromancer gets deleted by the guard swarm, battle music stops, and as one the guards turn around to calmly walk back to the Imperial City.

Best guess is the qt happened JUST as some random straggler necromancer noticed him, game got confused, guards reacted as usual and went ham on the hostile despite the huge distance. It was very funny to watch, though.

[jakezepeda]

As a kid Oblivion's AI was so cool to me. I liked to follow people and just see what their day was like sometimes.

[imperialproductions]

The issue with the Legion Foresters fighting each other isn't caused by one catching a stray arrow. Foresters hunt deer, and deer will automatically flee from anything that approaches, which makes it incredibly hard to kill them. Bethesda got around this by adding the Foresters to the deer faction, so the deer wouldn't consider them enemies. The issue with this is the AI considers any attack on an ally to be a threat, so the Foresters north of Bruma attack each other because one shoots a deer and the other considers that an attack on an ally, which is always responded to with violence. Normally it's not an issue, because Foresters are spaced far enough apart that their patrol zones don't overlap, but the two north of Bruma have overlapping zones and therefore come into conflict with each other.

[AsymmetricalCrimes]

11:09 The AI killing a Skooma dealer for not having Skooma is actually hilarious.

[MrThejoshmon]

Using rally, bound equipment and frenzy spells, I had the Adoring Fan assassinate rude shopkeeps I frenzied who I did not like that didn't sell or buy anything useful.

Because the game nets anyone who kills a merchant a flat 1000 gold bounty, even if you were never caught, the Adoring Fan became a wanted man. The guards would run up to him to arrest him but because NPCs cannot follow the law system he couldn't pay for his crimes.

Now every time I head into town, the guards will hunt him down and he will flee from them, leaving cities unguarded (as the entire force pursues him) and when they finally get him I end up finding guards all over Cyrodiil on their way walking back to town. Due to the fact that the Adoring Fan respawns after a few days unexpectedly and will rejoin you if he was last set to follow you, this has repeated multiple times across my playthrough and is always a great bit of levity between diving in dungeons.

[WooShell]

Yesterday I went afk in Bravil to fetch me a drink, and when I got back, City-Swimmer lay dead in front of me. Apparently, he got hungry and tried to pickpocket some of my food, only for the guards to kill him right then and there.

[Balling-Nyamo]

During the quest "A Brotherhood Betrayed" an Imperial guard Carius Runellius had me wait in a Bruma's "Olav's Tap and Tack" inn until the guards track down the location of a phony vampire hunter. Entering the inn I spoted Ongar the World-Weary, who is a member of the thieves guild. Since he has 25 Responsibility he usually just steals the food on the table which makes everybody in the inn upset about it but nobody ever takes action. During this instance he was sneaking towards his destination but I remembered that this quest is the only second instance of a guard entering an inn. And so I tried to slow Ongar down before Carius enters the inn. After an ingame hour the guard enters the inn and I let Ongar steal the food before a guards eyes and the guard shouts "Halt!", which I hadn't had heard in the game before. I was certain, that when a guard will see somebody steal they would just attack, but this time Carius and Ongar initiated a conversation which immediately crashed my game. I tried to repeat all of this but all the next time Ongar would not steal food for some reason.

[conormartin]

Cut to Starfield, where all NPCs are basically in the same spot 24/7. The regression of Bethesda is such a shame.

[souperdooper]

I was blown away when I realized you could poison people with the poison apples you get from the Dark Brotherhood. It's a bit quirky, but it does work. You have to follow the character you want to poison around and find out where they get their food from, usually a barrel. If you just put the poison apples in their food barrel, they'll grab bread or cabbage and not get poisoned, but if you remove all the food from their barrel and leave only the poison apple, they'll grab it, walk to a nearby table, sit down, take a bite, and immediately drop dead. It was during the Glarthar quest that I noticed the pattern of specific NPCs getting food out of specific barrels and eating it, and one thing just led to another.

[beardalaxy]

The idea of an NPC cloning the player character who then goes on a killing spree is straight up creepypasta material.

[SpookSkellington]

What baffles me the most is that modern games have reverted to NPC's just being static objects that don't interact with the world around them.

If you're lucky they move around, walk a set route and then despawn offscreen. If you're unlucky you get something like Avowed where you can't talk to them, can't interact with them, can't hurt them, nothing.


We had all this nearly 20 years ago and we've regressed so far.

[tzeentch]

I once went into an aeylid ruin for a quest. The boss of the dungeon was a named lich and I didn't want to fight it, so I grabbed the item and ran. I fast traveled from the area and went about my day. A few hours later I was turning a quest in at a guards barracks in the main city, left the building, and in front of me was the lich (still mad). Every guard in the area came running out to fight it.

[SkyBlueFox]

This is an excellent deep-dive, but I feel like adding in my own two-cents as someone who has a biiiig soft-spot for Oblivion.

One thing that I think a lot of people overlook about Oblivion is, funnily enough, the randomly-generated conversations. They can be ridiculous, yes, and many of the "rumors" and other things can get a little bit repetitive... but the fact that they happen so often, and can happen between almost any pair of NPCs, makes the world so much more lively.
You hang around in the Mages Guild or Fighters Guild and you'll overhear your guildmates chatting about whatever, and that alone helps make them feel like lived-in places. This also helps sell your impact on the world much better - when you complete a quest or as you progress through a Guild's storyline, there's a good chance you'll overhear NPCs gossiping about the events at-hand. No matter how potentially-absurd or robotic the conversations can seem, the fact that the system exists at all goes a long, long way.

By comparison, Skyrim relies a lot more on pre-built conversations - two specific characters having a specific discussion about a specific thing. And while that does avoid the nonsensical elements that Oblivion "suffers" from... it also gets repetitive extremely fast, making it feel all the more artificial.
On top of that, there really aren't *that* many interactions like that in Skyrim in-general - which means characters are interacting less often, and thus the places you go don't feel quite as lively as you'd expect them to.
Like, the Thieves Guild hall in Riften has a variety of NPCs doing stuff, but they rarely talk to each other or even leave their "posts", which is especially noticeable if you play Skyrim and Oblivion back-to-back. Sure, it's "safer" in terms of implementation, but it's also less interesting and less ambitious.
(This is also why something like "dropping a weapon in Riften and watching two NPCs throw hands over it" catches so many peoples' attention - it's one of Skyrim's vanishingly-rare, sort-of-kind-of dynamic moments.)

[andrewdornan]

On my first playthrough I put in 527 hours, , and tbh a good 70 of them were me sleeping to the background music but I retired my character in the Crusaders Armour sitting on Sheogoraths throne.. where ever that old 360 hard drive wound up I hope he's still sitting there.

[NitakuDragonsoul]

One of my playthroughs of Oblivion when I was joining the Dark Brotherhood after sleeping in an in like normal Lucian wakes me up and tells me to go kill than turns invisible and begins to head out, however he decided before leaving he wanted to sit on a table and enjoy a bear while there an NPC decided to strike up a conversation with him to tell him and I quote "They say if you kill someone The Dark Brotherhood visits you in your sleep"