With open-world RPGs being so popular nowadays, I was wondering just how much effort people feel that developers should put into making their worlds feel truly lived-in. The Witcher 2 is almost out, and Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is on the way this November, and one of the things both games profess to include is an AI-powered populace that is more "alive" than ever before. Yes, this time they will have conversations with each other, they go and eat, they do their jobs, and they go to sleep at night.
If you just watch an NPC in, say, Oblivion, you'll see how hollow their day is. They always wear the same clothes, sleeping in them when they go to bed at night. They never use covers or blankets, and their conversations are dull and often non-sensical. In a Skyrim forum thread on another forum, someone suggested that maybe Bethesda could have NPCs actually pull the blankets back and sleep under them at night. But, I had to ask, why that specifically? Would that be so much more believable than what we have now? If we insist on having NPCs sleep under the covers, shouldn't they change into some kind of clothes for sleeping in? Or change clothes even in the first place? Do they just shuffle through a set wardrobe of, say, five outfits?
And do you know how difficult it is to properly model a character simply taking off a shirt? Imagine all those cloth physics, clipping issues, long hair, and such that'd have to be taken into account. Is it worth it?
You could go further. If the characters have clothes, shouldn't they wash them? Is there a laundry-person in each town that just washes people's clothes? They'd have to go through a daily cycle to pick them up, probably in baskets, wash them, then hang them up on some kind of awesome medieval clothesline. In a recent trailer for The Witcher 2, the developers showcased a dwarf weaponsmith that makes swords all day. I'm betting that this dwarf, if you just sit and watch him, always works on the same sword, day in and day out, never making any progress on it. Well, if you're going to push that as an amazing, awesome feature, maybe he should actually finish making a sword once in a while. But then, I have to ask, is there a finite amount of iron that he has to work with? Where does he get it? Is it shipped to him? Can we follow the guy that ships the dwarf the iron back to the mine, and watch miners actually use picks on the rock, hi-def-Minecraft style?
Now, I'm not suggesting that game developers actually go through all this. But I want to stress that everything a developer adds - or at least anything that makes a video game seem or look more like real life - only exposes five or ten other flaws, more things that the developer should add to make that look more realistic too. And each of those five or ten things, five or ten more, and so on and so on.
Maybe some day we'll have the math to be able to process all this procedurally, and it will get us closer and closer to the days of Star Trek's Holodeck. In fact, I see this as one of the bigger limiting factors in future generations of video games: that even with the amazing tools and fantastic HD graphics we have, there's always a finite limit of manpower available for putting these things to use. Sure, some studios have over 400 developers working on a single game, but look at what's happening: those games are deemed failures by their financial backers unless they sell millions and millions of copies.
In the future, I'm thinking that it won't be outsourced Asians making our interactive entertainment, because it gets more and more difficult to give a game a distinctive look and a solitary vision when you put thousands of people to work on the same project.
Maybe the answer is to have the computers do the game design for us.
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