Kejeniusan Fabel Berakar Pada NPC Inovatif The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion

This is an IGN opinion piece from writer Jeremy Peel, who has followed Fable since the Lionhead days, and is forever midway through playthroughs of Oblivion and Fallout: New Vegas.

There’s a moment in Fable’s latest gameplay demo, right after the hero saves a talking pig from being butchered and turned into chops for the Silver Trowel Feast, when the disposition of the locals perceptibly changes. You can see it on the faces of the people of Silverbrook: the slight upward turn at the corners of their mouths, signifying that somewhere behind the scenes, a number has changed in response to the player’s actions. Jack the Beggar, a hardworking commoner down on his luck, likes the hero because they’re virtuous. Megan the Merchant, meanwhile, appreciates the shrewd business deal the player made to save the pig from its ignominious fate. As an ambitious person, she values savviness.

“This is at the centre of our complex, nuanced take on reality,” says Craig Littler, Fable’s associate game director, as he narrates the demo. “Evolving beyond just right and wrong, it reflects real life, where reality is multi-faceted and subjective.”

On the contrary, I’m drawn to Fable’s reputation systems not because they feel real, but because they’re nakedly mechanical. They turn your decisions into a set of tags - Kind, Rich, Killer, Charming, Criminal, Entrepreneur - and then cross-reference them with the likes and dislikes of individual NPCs. That data is then used to determine how much a shopkeeper might charge you for a new pair of cropper trousers, if a bartender might be open to a romantic relationship, and whether a stranger greets you with a scowl or a smile.

These reactions are designed to take you by surprise, yes, and to envelop you in a sense that the people of Albion are watching and gossiping and holding grudges. But they’re also a system designed to be gamed: to be min-maxed for favourable outcomes, or bypassed by slipping a heavy purse to the town crier in return for an adjustment to the public opinion. When I see the edges of an NPC’s lips veer skyward during conversation, I recognise not reality but the legacy of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion.

Oblivion’s Radiant AI system was designed to bring life to the NPCs in its hamlets and alehouses. It assigned each a routine that took them from their homes to their jobs and to church, if they were so inclined - much like the routines that govern the day-to-day of Fable’s citizens. Oblivion’s NPCs would dynamically find a spot to sit and eat lunch. They would stumble into conversation with one another, and with you - where you could influence them on a personal level.

Fiddling with individual serfs was both fascinating and funny, since the seams of the system were clearly visible, and easy to pick away at. By interacting with Oblivion’s ‘persuasion’ wheel, for instance, you could Joke, Admire, Boast, and Coerce your way to a deeply felt kinship in a couple of minutes - causing an NPC to look the other way as you nabbed a prized possession from their living room. The routines were prone to breaking down, too. In one YouTube video, a soldier shipped to the Daedric planes asks his comrade how he’s doing. “Been better,” replies his fellow, as lava pools around his ankles.

In subsequent Bethesda RPGs, Radiant AI faded into the background, for two reasons: the studio spent less time talking about it, and its implementation became subtler. In Skyrim, you might have dropped the Mace of Molag Bal in the town square, and noticed that a little while later, two NPCs turned up to argue over it. Then you might have seen a nearby guard stroll up and try to defuse the tension. But most of the data-tracking that enabled that interaction went on under the hood, invisible and unnoticed until the moment it spun up a quest or event.

Of course, subtler is very often better. The dense atmosphere of games like Fallout 4 and Starfield benefitted hugely from an NPC system that didn’t constantly break the fourth wall with its goofiness. But poking and prodding at the limits of a game system is one of the great joys of this medium - and in order to do that, you have to know the system is there.

In the decades that followed Oblivion, few big-budget developers marketed their games via Radiant-like AI. One notable exception was Watch Dogs: Legion, the 2020 open world game directed by Clint Hocking. A Ubisoft veteran, he’d specialised in reactive NPCs ever since the development of Far Cry 2, which allowed you to selectively befriend fellow mercenaries and fight alongside them, so long as you didn’t leave them to die in a grassland blaze.

In Watch Dogs: Legion, you could recruit and play as almost any citizen in the city of London. Those you didn’t recruit maintained daily schedules and relationships with other characters: relatives, partners, sugar daddies, doctors. Those connections often determined how they felt about you. You might accidentally run down a man who turned out to have wronged another citizen - and that accidental good deed makes their victim much more amenable to joining your hacker organisation, Dedsec.

This system seemed stuffed with potential, and yet in the finished game, such systemic events mainly occurred on the periphery of Legion’s scripted central story. And since that story was a slightly odd blend of punk spirit and science fiction, Legion wound up disappointing overall. Any hope that its underlying NPC magic might be better exploited in a sequel has since been dashed. Legion evidently didn’t meet Ubisoft’s sales expectations, since the series sank to the bottom of the Thames. With it went fan dreams that Radiant AI might ride again.

Then, half a decade later, something completely unexpected happened. Bethesda surprise-dropped The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered. Within days, millions were playing - and the game’s mixed reputation was rehabilitated overnight. In an age when complex NPC routines had long been downplayed or abandoned, the overtly clockwork lifestyles of Cyrodiil’s residents were somehow charming.

That success has opened the door for Playground Games to capitalise on a renewed public enthusiasm for malleable and reactive NPCs. Ideas that previous Fable games only dabbled in - such as the ‘touch’ mechanic that enabled you to take the hand of a beggar and lead them to the workhouse - have been taken as a mandate to deepen your interaction with characters. A man panhandling in the street can now be recruited to work at a pub you’ve invested in. A curtain-twitcher who notices that you’ve married multiple NPCs in the same settlement might take to blackmail.

There’s a hope, too, that Fable might dodge the disconnect between systems and story that plagued Watch Dogs: Legion. Choosing to kill Dave the Giant - played with neurotic flair by British comedian Richard Ayoade in Fable’s first trailer - can enormously impact the people of Silverbrook, for instance. Before long, their farming settlement will become famous for its neighbouring giant corpse, and the tourism will drive up house prices. Maybe you won’t find a home for the hamlet’s homeless after all.

The potential is enormous, and after several years of tinkering, Playground has a chance of living up to it. Even in the shadow of a giant, Fable is starting to look really quite Radiant.

Jeremy Peel is a freelance journalist and friend to anyone who will look at photos of his dogs.