Radiant Story is one of the big features we knew we wanted to pursue right at the beginning with Skyrim. Radiant Story uses a feature called the Story Manager to feed quests and events into the world based on the player’s experience. The Story Manager is capable of tracking almost any data you can imagine – it knows everything about the player, how he or she has affected characters in the world, the state of current events, various information about locations, and so on. The point of this is, of course, to deliver semi-procedural experiences to players. We may not be able to achieve high-order procedurality in games with the fidelity of Skyrim just yet, but with Radiant Story we’ve begun to scratch the surface.

One application of Radiant Story are what we call Wilderness Encounters. Late in development we were able to identify areas of the world where not much was going on, and use the Story Manager to send events towards the player based on this. One of these encounters is the “radiant assassin.” The event is pretty straightforward: the player is walking along when an assassin from the Dark Brotherhood attacks. If the player kills and loots the assassin, she may discover an assassination contract with her name on it.

We consider this to be a pretty effective use of Radiant Story, if only because it proved to be thought-provoking for players. In the weeks following Skyrim’s release, we saw a lot of commentary about this event online. People would relay what had happened and had various different stories about why this assassin would come after them. This was especially interesting because the Story Manager is only looking for two conditions in order to be triggered. The player must have reached level ten, and not begun the Dark Brotherhood quests. For all the data Story Manager is capable of tracking, that’s all we care about in this case.

Looking a bit deeper, the design implementation of this particular event is pretty small. We created an assassin NPC, a note that dynamically fills in the player name, and set up the Story Manager event. That’s not much authored story, but any assassination attempt is a loaded question, rife with inherent mystery. Players were comparing this blip of authored story we provided against their personal history, and drawing their own conclusions. Perhaps they had married an NPC another character was interested in, or it was a case of mistaken identity. Maybe their criminal record or meddling in regional politics had caught up with them – or maybe it was a clear cut case of revenge for somebody the player had wronged.


These and dozens of other possible conclusions make up what we’ll call the “possibility space”. This is the ripple created by the bit of authored story we created. As small as it was, the possibility space resulting from this story was quite large. I mentioned at the beginning of this discussion, however, that tendency of developers to add additional complexity. And indeed, it would be very common for a designer to see this story, feel encouraged by it and want to add on. So let’s suppose we provide information that traces the assassination contract back to a Jarl – one of the governers of Skyrim. There are a few issues that can come up if we do this.

First, and by far the least important – is the fact that we’ll need to add additional conditions to the story manager event, so it only triggers if the player annoys a Jarl. This will reduce the number of players for whom the event will trigger. We’re comfortable with players missing content in our games, however, so while we’ll take this sort of thing into consideration, it isn’t a big concern.

More troublesome however, is the fact that by validating one member of the possibility space – we’ve now established the idea that this is a politically-motivated assassination attempt, not romantic, revenge, or otherwise – we instantly invalidate every other member of the original possibility space. We haven’t necessarily increased the possibility space in a new or more interesting direction, either. So we’ve arguably put more effort into making a less effective or interesting story. Further, we’ve started down a slippery slope of implementation. The moment I attribute the contract to a Jarl, I have to consider reasonable reactions on the part of the player. Can the player confront the Jarl? What will be said? What if the player takes revenge? When we tack on story for its own sake, without an idea of where we are going, it can be difficult to know where to draw the line and move on.