Revolutionary radiant AI will only appear once NPCs are able to react to the world around them in a way that goes much deeper than simply noticing you’re especially proficient at lockpicking (or, as Skyrim’s town guards like to say, “keep your hands to yourself, sneak thief”). Played all those Dark Brotherhood assassination contracts that never seem to end? Trawled through Vex’s limitless supply of thieving jobs? You have radiant story to thank for that. Instead of focusing all its efforts on radiant AI in Skyrim, Bethesda created the radiant story system. That might be normal behaviour for you or I, but it tends to cause issues when the blood of quest-givers are staining the cobblestones.
Ultimately the radiant AI in Oblivion was toned down as a result as, by the sounds of it, cities turned into lawless lands where most NPCs’ main way of dealing with problems was to kill whoever was in their way and then loot their corpse. Why? NPCs from the local skooma den were trying to get their fix, didn't have any skooma, and were killing the merchant to get it!”. During testing, the NPC would be dead when the player got to him. After designing certain NPCs to have a raging addiction to skooma, Emil Pagliarulo, Oblivion’s game designer, remembers when “in one Dark Brotherhood quest, you can meet up with this shady merchant who sells skooma. Oddly enough, it’s only when radiant AI goes wrong that you get to see just how powerful it is. When radiant AI goes wrong, it goes… right? We’ve long since gotten used to NPCs acting in that way, but small behaviours like that barely scratch the surface of what radiant AI is capable of. Join them in their daily routine and you’ll probably even notice them exchanging a few works with another character. You’ll have undoubtedly noticed it - guards patrol the streets in every major city in both Oblivion and Skyrim NPCs sit down and eat lunch farmers work their fields during the day before popping back home for sleep. Plenty of different mechanics work their way into radiant AI as a whole, among them functions like giving NPCs a routine so they’re not always standing in the same place from dawn until the dead of night.
First introduced in Oblivion and then included in Skyrim too, this bit of technology has been described by Bethesda as a system that governs the behaviour of NPCs. Radiant AI isn’t some sort of glowing artificial intelligence.
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