The AI of Dark Souls Revealed | AI and Games #75 

Thanks for checking out not only my 75th episode of AI and Games, but the one dedicated to our 10-year anniversary. I hope you enjoyed it, and thank you all for your continued support of AI and Games! As mentioned in the video, this episode has been on the backlog for a *very* long time. In fact, long-time viewers may recall from the pinned comment on episode #50 that I had a different idea for celebrating our 50th episode. I recall looking my research notes at the time, but it wasn't far enough along for me to put it together. Let me stress I've not been working on this episode every day since 2018. It's been a little hobby of mine, as I sit and read the odd Lua script, or dig deep into a Reddit thread, trying to piece everything together gradually. And so when it came to celebrating 10 years of the channel, this was the topic that I just *had* to cover. As mentioned, my Design Dive on Bloodborne will be released in the coming months. Plus there is a lot of work happening in decompiling Elden Ring nowadays, and I feel compelled to add it to the backlog for a future episode. Oh and one last thing. Dark Souls isn't the only episode I've been working away on for years at a time. I hope to come back with another long overdue deep dive later this year.

six years in the making? This deserves more recognition than it has gotten, especially for covering one of the most influential and groundbreaking games of all time

From lore videos with Vatti to obscure details with illusionary wall, and now a deep dive into the code that makes this game so unique with your video. Thank you for time and effort you poured into this video, it really shows. It seems like no matter how much I learn about this game over the years, it just keeps getting better and even more impressive.

Not that it took a lot of time but it was pretty wild to hear someone introduce *dark souls*, as if it wasn't already a matter of course, I kind of appreciate that.

Oh lords I think I just got why sometimes the Godskin Noble in Elden Ring will immediately jump into the rolling animation even if you interrupt it or the start up animation. Usually, getting interrupted must trigger the "perform rolling attack goal failure", forcing the Noble to go back and start a new set of goals. This is how most enemies in general work. An enemy may then try to use the same attack it got interrupted preforming, but it'll start the attack pattern from the beginning. In the case of the Noble, playing the wind-up animation again. But for whatever reason, every so often, the goal will not fail when interrupted (like with a stance break), and Noble will immediately go into the rolling attack animation almost like a jump-scare, since it doesn't replay the wind up.

What a wonderful breakdown. The combination of research, clarity and obvious love for the source material makes this a compelling and educational watch. Thank you for your hard work.

My favorite boss will always be Manus, such a sick design and a really difficult fight, yet totally fair once you figure out how it works. Fromsoft dlcs never disappoint

21:07 I play Sekiro every day and this happen to me when I fight Owl Father Hirata. At some point of fight, we walk around ourselves looking into each other's eyes, and I know that if I I remain in that situation at a certain distance, for sure he will activate the fire owl attack and I will give him a nice mikiri. Its so tasty....

I remember my first time playing Dark Souls. I was intimidated by the game's reputation for being difficult, but I decided to give it a chance and I'm glad that I did. In the video you mention Sif is your favorite boss in the game, my favorite boss would be Gwyn. Most people would say Ornstein and Smough, but I wanted to be more original with my answer. Obviously he can be beaten easily by parrying, but Gwyn is more aggressive than anything you've faced before plus the story is building up to your final battle with him and showed where From Software was going with the bosses in their later games.

Great video, would love to see you digging up the boss AI

This is a phenomenal breakdown. Thank you for doing the research to get here!

Superb video and content as always!

Love this game and love this channel, so great to see them collide!

I love these videos, and Dark Souls is one of my favorite games of all time! Super excited to watch. Thanks for all the great content you put out!

I recently wrote a paper for uni about AI in video games, it was for the Philosophy of AI and mostly geared towards phenomenology (Enactivism & the Intentional Arc) though I cited your video and info graph in 'How AI is actually used in video games'. Thanks for making such great stuff!

Loved this video, great to see so many Scots (yourself, Writing On Games, Smoughtown) enthusiastically covering FromSoftware stuff.

really well made Tommy

Would love to see Bed of Chaos’ combat wheel to know what the probability of doing that really rare fireball attack is

just found this and hope to see more since i subbed, great video and cannot wait for bloodbornes vid, a game where i still need to beat the orphan and have yet to do so XD

Great video. I imagine finding the correct weightings for the behaviours must have taken a lot of play testing!

Fantastic video.

Please do a video on Elden Ring AI, just to confirm or deny heavy input reading.

never played this game to completion but this video is inspiring

God I won’t ever get how like, the game we play can just be read by lines of code. Straight up magic. But fascinating to see behind the curtain

Huh…Ceaseless Discharge has attacks. Who knew? Great video! I really enjoyed this deep dive into the AI.

I don't quite understand... The combat wheel, sure, that's a utility reasoner. Decomposing a goal into subgoals, I'd like a concrete example here; A top goal like "Kill player" would probably decompose to "Keep appropriate distance", "Keep up sufficient health", "Turn the player's health to 0", etc., but when a set of goals is established, how is that translated into actions? Is there some deconfliction between goals?

Very interesting video! This sounds much like how a combination of a behavior tree (allowing for hierarchical tasks) and a utility system (for randomness) would work. Is this different from that combination in some way?

I always imagined Dark Souls AI boiled down to "walk to the player and play random relevant attack animation depending on range and/or specific animation states the player is in", because that's roughly how it seems to work in the actual game. I wonder if it was something they already had in the engine for previous games or maybe they wanted to build some system a la Radiant for NPCs, because it sounds like a huge overkill for monsters.

Great vid, and once again congrats on the 10 years! Completely unrelated side note: not that its a game this channel woild neccess8cover, but the new Chinese Room ge appears to have an entirely scottish cast of characters and I feel like they really dropped the ball not hiring you on to voice😂

Ah, 2019 was when I first played ds1, and to this day I've since played through the game numerous times on both pc and on my switch, hell, I had half a mind to get the ptde edition on ps3 just because.

This was fuckin sick man!

An interesting side effect of characters being more likely to block in Sekiro is that leashing them feels rather different. The miniboss who whistles wolves into the fight is a good example. He infuriated me a couple times, but pulling him away to the edge of his 'zone of interest' means he will just mostly get stuck blocking your attacks. I think O'Rin does similar...

I wonder if any fighting games have similar scripting as I imagine they have similar needs for shifting rng wheels like this

Enemies "respawning" dead and re-ragdolling feels thematically very appropriate for Dark Souls. Does Solaire (I think he'd be the only one) use one of the two combat scripts (overworld vs. summoned) when he's encountered as an enemy in between the Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith, or is there a different AI configuration for that encounter?

wether an item has been used by the player?! I knew they hit me for healing :D

Lautrec fights way differently than solaire ive noticed

ah someone sees the elden ring search bonus coming

32:20 "At least on the normal difficulty". Sorry, what do you mean by that?:)

Oscar's family saying should be shorter, like Live, Love, seek the eternal flame

"the _ability_ to lose your accrued souls at the point of death..." lmao

Would you say this video is a good place to begin understanding AI in game design? i rather enjoyed it. I'm wondering if there is another video you've released which is more generalized

I'm wondering if Thousand Land might be where fromsoft started doing this type of AI. It centers around AI driven units that carry out tasks ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-CRi7TBELlAg.html Another possibility is that they weren't satisfied with the AI of early armored core games, where enemy cores could have some huge number of configurations and having to manually make finite state machines for all of them.

So what is the Dark Souls of AI? 😉

no boss battle fights the same way twice? might i introduce you to the dragon rider from ds2?

Plz do the ai of tom clancys the division the lmb soldiers tactics are si cool

As an indie dev trying to make a soulslike, this video is a goldmine of information for planning out enemy and Fauna AI systems

Hi, Please forgive what will likely be a longer comment than most. With subtlety & nuance being in rare supply online, I try to be as clear as possible. But my blunt nature is often mistaken for arrogance or condescension. Which is never my intention. As that's pointless when trying to communicate with anyone. I am but a scrubby indie dev. Who's chosen to focus on systems design. I've been learning UE for 5 years this November. I'm also legally blind (albinism = 20/200 vision). In 2020 I strained my eyes to a point of functional blindness. I could still see. However keeping my eyes open for any length of time caused me physical pain. So from June 2020 to June 2021 I was basically blind. All I could do was listen to Caverns & Creature audiobooks & the UE tutorials on loop. Which also gave me a lot of time to think. The technicalities, limitations & realties of game development are wildly misunderstood online. Often leading to name brand gamers innocently spreading misleading information. I thought it was an issue of language. As in game development using common phrases. But "Optimization" means something different in game development. In comparison to the way "Optimization" is used in gaming discourse. Online the term is often reduced to "X game is poorly optimized because it can't hit 60 fps." So when my vision finally recovered. I set out to listen to gamers and take notes. What do gamers want? What type of systems do they dislike? Things like that. It didn't take long to realize how misunderstood making games is. Or that well meaning RU-vidrs are often the source of rumors like "60 fps is standard." For the record. Yes, 60 fps is great. But out of the 1300+ 9th gen games 39% run at 60. If 60 was indeed a standard, we should see something like 45-51% of games running 60. I've talked to 12 AAA devs on the matter. Every last one agrees 60 is better. Every last one also acknowledged the technicities, limitations & realities that can make it impossible for every game to hit a solid 60. My point... I absolutely love your channel. There are plenty of people analyzing games. But your combination of in depth break downs. And practical experience is well priceless. Because if gaming discourse is every to improve. We need more than the often surface level information being presented as facts. I've found Ai and Games, No Clip & Game From Scratch to be the best sources for solid information on RU-vid. And just wanted to take a moment to thank you for this video. As well as the rest of your body of work. Take care and have a good one

Kind of amazing that fallen order looks to dark souls for its combat, has several years of better tech and a whole series of games to base it on, yet still made probably the worst combat in a game I've seen in years.

I really like this 😛💣💚

gg

Prepare to die by simple AI.

how can you explore somenthing that almost nonexistent.

After shadow of the erdtree the idea that ds1 bosses are hard is laughable

remastered ds1 looks so bad T_T they still haven't fixed the broken leg animations during rolls lmaooo

The one exception is dark souls 2, of course it fuckin is. It was a weird time ok, we try and forget about it. Its best if people just don't mention it.

Lot of talking a coping to dance around how the ai is just really stupid and just throwing random bs to confuse stupid people. It a well know concept that the human brain dose not process random very well and like bad gamblers gamers prefer to throw them selves at a problem Arlen brute force it. Stupid ai for stupid players.