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!