Ok, so I know there’s a million Oblivion threads, but I had to start one for this.
Has anyone else run into just completely insane AI activity? I know I’ve read one or two posts about people fighting in the woods and stuff, but what happened to me last night is in the zone.
[B]Spoilers of sorts!!!
[/B]So, I’m in Anvil last night and I’m sneaking around looking for stuff to steal when I happen upon a pirate ship. I decide to sneak in and see what I can do. I pick the captains pocket and get the key to his chest and the ship. After I loot his cabin I decided to go to the next deck and check out whats happenin. Then I saw something that completely baffled me: an orc and argonian running around STABBING SHEEP. WHAT THE HELL?? I killed them both and walked around the cabin looking. They killed 4 or 5 sheep.
On the less crazy end, but funny, I was also doing a mission in that harbor that a person asks you to clear out a ghost ship (this one ties in to some info you get when you become the head of the dark brotherhood, but you don’t have to be it to get the quest) and I realized that I only had shitty magic weapons on me. Oh well, I’m the head assassin, this shouldn’t be a problem… WRONG. A shitty magic dagger takes forever to kill a ghost. So, I kill the first 2 and the 3rd one starts tearing me up. I decided to run out of the ship and see if I could lose the ghost, which I couldn’t. When the ghost came out on the deck, the people of the town started attacking it. Some of them even put on their Mythic Dawn Cultist armor, which completely cracked me up. One cultist got punched off of the ship by the ghost.
[B]End Spoilers
[/B]Anyway, those two struck me as funny. Anvil is one fucked up town.
Similar story: I was in the Imperial Waterfront District, and I noticed there was another ship other than the Bloated Float docked. I started walking up to it and noticed a lady pirate hanging around near the docks. I stroll over and am about to start talking to her when suddenly two guys in plate armor just come out of nowhere and hack her to pieces! They then proceed to have a conversation about how disgusting rats are.
It was so unnerving that I reloaded in case something in the AI had gone terribly wrong.
I ran into that too but it progressed a little farther. What I THINK happened there is that she warns you to not step foot on her ship or she’ll kill you. I was standing on the gang plank at the time and she attacked me. The guards whacked her BUT GOOD.
Spoiler of sorts
Oddly enough, that ship is also tied to a Dark Brotherhood quest.
I was in the fighers guild basement in Chorral, and i had just chatted up the ‘blacksmith’ girl to her max level. There was an Orc wailing on this punching bag target, and i decided to try doing the same to see if my blade skill would level. At some point i must have hit the Orc, because his HP bar appears, he whips out his hammer and starts wailing on me. Then the Blacksmith chick whips out her weapon and starts attacking … him. Then they both dissapear through the door.
She reappears a little bit later. The Orc’s body was never found.
I saw a highwayman waylay a guard on horseback on the road between Chorrol and the Imperial City. The guy hacked down his horse, but then the guard picked himself up and really went to town on him, and the highwayman ended up fleeing into the woods with the guard hot on his tail.
I also just recently was walking along a road in the morning fog, and an NPC (not a guard) on horseback appears and goes flying past me at full gallop. I don’t know where she was going, but she clearly needed to get somewhere quick. Even really simple stuff like that makes the setting feel much more alive.
The horse thing reminds me of the time I decided to get off my horse and rest by the road. There was a guard nearby and I thought nothing of it. When I woke up, the guard had stabbed my horse to death and was getting back on his.
I was following a girl around in Skingrad for a quest. She went out to her job at the vineyard and at noon she took a break and went to sit down for a rest. That’s when I noticed another of the workers crouched down and sneaking after her. As she sat down he bumped into her and she screamed “Pickpocket!” and started beating on him with her fists. A guard nearby got involved and the thief ran away, followed by the girl. She caught up with him in a field a hundred meters down the road while the guard seemed to have lost track of him. So the thief turns around, kills the girl in a fistfight only to be shot dead moments later as the guard appeared with reinforcements.
As I was coming to the end of last night’s session, I strolled into one of the inns in Cheydinhal to find it overrun by a gang of Orcs, all presumably on a Top Nite Out. There was about 6 or 7 of them all hanging out and drinking. I bought a room for the night and headed up, and because my room was the only unlocked door upstairs, I found one of them sitting on the chair in the room. I chatted with him for a bit, and suddenly he and all the others left at once to go across the road to the other Inn. Obviously they were all on some kind of pub crawl. Maybe a stag night, who knows?
I bought a room at an inn (west weald inn in skingrad), went up stairs, decided not to sleep, came back downstairs, only to see Else God-Hater wailing on some random guy. She killed him. Body is still upstairs in the inn, after about a week.
She’s a loon. In my game she attacked my horse just as I got off it at the stables in Bruma - no provocation or anything, just started firing arrows at it. The horse charged her and hooved her to death. Hope she wasn’t important!
I decided to play some “Grand Theft Horse,” and stole one. Sure enough, people start chasing me. One guy is on a horse. While this was amusing for a bit, I got off the horse and just stood around to see what would happen. The horse guy shows up, dismounts, runs over to me but is attacked by crabs and a wolf.
He kills them, runs back to his horse, rides down closer, dismounts again, then attacks me. So I hop in a lake and swim around, but I’m taking damage because, duh, he’s swimming after me. So I get out of the water, only to be attacked by… his horse.
I think there’s some NPC that does this regularly. A courier maybe? I know I saw her a bunch of times, never was able to get to her to stop and talk to her though.
I’ve seen the courier type NPC, but only on exiting out of somewhere, just for a second before they fade away due to view distance.
I had a quest the other day that had some funny AI moments (spoilers):
It was for the mages guild, where you have to speak to the Count of Skingrad. Of course this leads to an ambush meeting in the middle of the night outside the city. So I’m surrounded but I had approached on horseback so I just hightailed it outta there, back towards the ciy gates with the assassins in hot pursuit. A big melee erupted and spilled over into the nearby stableyard, with me taking potshots at assassins while their backs are turned towards the guards who came to my aid, as expected. So the fight is pretty much over and the guards are heading back, but I see one last guy the guards seemed to have missed. I attack him and knock him unconcious. He wakes up in a bit and starts to talk to me. Oops, that was the Count, who apparently came to my aid. He didn’t even mention the fact that I just gutted him.
I’ve already mentioned the helpful courier who cleaned out some goblins for
me elsewhere, but I’ve had one repeated example of not so brilliant AI.
Or perhaps it is. I haven’t made up my mind.
*** Mild spoilers, blah blah blah ***
The quest that goes wrong is an escort mission of sorts. I’m off to be
mugged by a certain mage (it’s a mage guild quest), and I have two
battlemages following a bit behind for ‘protection’. No matter what I did
on reloading the saved game, I just couldn’t get the imperial guard riding
along the same road to avoid killing the battlemages at some point. The
moment I was attacked, the battlemages started flinging spells in my defense,
even if they were 3km behind me. Just having the scripted fight starting
gets them going, and the imperial guard considers it a crime and murderises
them to bits.
I think he hates Destruction mages, or something. Since he is the law, he
can do whatever the hell he wants. That’s two more corpses for me to loot,
though, which isn’t so bad. Being Black Hand means I have no compassion,
anyway :)
She is (literally) the Black Horse Courier - she delivers that rag to the outlying cities. :)
So let me get this straight. There is a courier who delivers a newspaper, which is printed in the market sector of Imperial City, to all the cities? As in, if you were really, really fast, you could follow her on her route?
That’s freakin’ awesome.
I have a question for the evil bastards out there. I’m about to restart as an assassin/theif, where I steal everything not nailed down, and kill people who step on my fur boots. If you resist arrest, are you labeled as a target in the kingdom from then on, or only in that particular section of the city?
What I mean is, if I’m caught stealing something and the guard gives me that “hold it right there” speech, and then I resist arrest, he attacks me. But if I go from that city to another, will the guards attack me, or will they give me a chance to surrender and go to prison again? Also, how far will the guards chase you? Into the wilderness? Into dungeons? Into another city?
Sorry, one more question . . . can you sell stolen horses to anyone? In fact, can you sell horses at all? I haven’t been able to yet, even though I actually bought one legitimately (my current char is a good guy).
The quest that goes wrong is an escort mission of sorts. I’m off to be
mugged by a certain mage (it’s a mage guild quest), and I have two
battlemages following a bit behind for ‘protection’. No matter what I did
on reloading the saved game, I just couldn’t get the imperial guard riding
along the same road to avoid killing the battlemages at some point. The
moment I was attacked, the battlemages started flinging spells in my defense,
even if they were 3km behind me. Just having the scripted fight starting
gets them going, and the imperial guard considers it a crime and murderises
them to bits.
I had the same problem, but on my third reload I managed to walk slowly enough that my mage guards got into place, then waited until the Imperial was out of range. When the rogue mage attacked my buddies helped out and the intrusive guard never appeared. Pity: they had an awesome oppertunity to have the guard act appropriate… Bandits? Kill!
As far as having the world hate you goes, you get a bounty on your head when you do something nasty that can be paid off in coin and/or jail time at the cost of all your stolen items.
Unless you’ve got a friend of the Gray Fox on your side, then you can pay it off for half the cost, though they frown on slitting throats while you’re on the clock.
When your bounty is high enough, guards from other cities will come after you. Presumably there’s a wanted poster with your name on it circulated or something.
There’s a faction for people who have escaped prison/resisted arrest, which
guards and certain other NPCs are at -100 disposition with. I’ve found some
courts have these sort of characters, and one was a countess’ bodyguard.
In short, be prepared to fight anyone you talk to if you don’t have the guild
sort out your bounties.
One reason you might occasionally see an NPC kill another is because they caught that NPC pickpocketing from them or saw them stealing food from a crate or something. Sometimes they’ll call for the guards and leave them to the job, but sometimes it seems they’d rather handle it themselves - probably based on a combination of their Responsibility and Confidence stats.
