What was Radiant AI, anyway?

Summary

Table of contents Wake up, we’re here What was promised So what was Radiant AI? Radiant AI mythbusting Radiant AI and GOAP How Radiant AI changed before Oblivion’s release Radiant AI after Oblivion Conclusion The recent release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered has rekindled the public’s interest in the 19-year-old RPG classic, making it once again — at least temporarily — one of the most played and talked about Bethesda Game Studios titles. The remaster is a comprehensive upgrade of the original, featuring fully remade yet mostly faithful graphics, select gameplay improvements and a redesigned user interface. But it is still Oblivion, and I don’t mean that in the sense that it “maintains the spirit of the original game” or something like that. The remaster is quite literally built on top of the original game; the Oblivion from 2006, including its game engine and content, is still there, just with an Unreal Engine 5 wrapper handling the audio-visual side of things. Unreal Engine 5 can produce mind-boggling effects. And that is interesting because Oblivion was a very ambitious game for its time. The world was huge, the graphics were cutting edge, but perhaps more importantly, it promised to deliver a dynamic and living world, with over a thousand fully voice-acted non-player characters (NPCs). The technology powering this was called Radiant AI, but it was too ambitious for its time and was mostly cut from the final game. Or maybe it was used in Oblivion, but Bethesda gave up on it before shipping Fallout 3 and / or Skyrim. Or maybe it was never really there in the first place, and Todd lied to us all along. What was Radiant AI, anyway? This is a topic I’ve seen discussed in online spaces for quite literally decades, and the Oblivion remaster has brought it back into the spotlight once again among the terminally online. People mostly know it as the original Bethesda controversy; one of the first times BGS promised something they ultimately couldn’t deliver....