Arcanum Generated Dialog

I talk about how we created procedural dialog in Arcanum, to add variety and extra reactivity to conversations.

[@randomfaca]

Never apologize for Arcanum content! I love that game, it's such a huge part of my childhood and my love for WRPGs. I genuinely replay it at least once a year.

[@fredrik3880]

Yup

[@iamtheteapot7405]

Never played it but I just saw a review of it and I will definitely be trying it out. Looks great

[@totallynotthecia]

Make sure you get the fan patch fixes a ton of bugs and adds some stuff without really changing the overall game

[@pornoszyk]

I remember that putting barbarian armor which was very revealing increased my starting disposition with everyone (nice touch) but at the same time npcs reacted with a shocked "bloody woman, cover yourself". So it resulted in a slight disonnance, but it was actually very believable

[@thebolas000]

"I'm shocked and appalled. Keep it up."

[@iamtheteapot7405]

​@@thebolas000😂

[@IAmJunker]

I have been a fallout fan since Fallout 3. Then New Vegas came and blew me out of the water. So I went back and played the original fallout, as many did, and loved it. Fallout 2 was okay, but there was something intrinsic in Fallout that made me happy. Since finding your channel I’ve been on an absolute binge of the content, it’s very eloquent and insightful. Good stuff. Anyway, after I ran out of Fallout related videos, I watched some of the Arcanum talks. Out of curiosity, I looked up the game since I had somehow never heard of it. Needless to say, there goes my free time for the next month. I find it harder to finish games as the years go by. Faster and faster the gut sensation to load up a particular game dissipates after my initial burst of playing it. However, certain games will drive a hook into me and damn near refuse to let me go. Fallout, resident evil 4, etc. Most recently The Outer Worlds got 3 full playthroughs out of me in just a few weeks post-launch. I’ve actually talked with my girlfriend about this a few times, how I can tell “hey this game is about to grab me.” She’s been hearing your voice in the background a lot lately, and I told her “this is the guy that made fallout.” She says oh that’s crazy, then I say “yeah he also worked on outer worlds.” She pauses to look at me and says “well that explains a lot.” All of this long winded ranting just to say - your work is phenomenal, and it now seems to me that if there’s some Tim DNA in a title, it’s a good bet it’ll grab me. Arcanum is that game for me right now. It’s the game when I’m washing the dishes, or working, I’m thinking “damn, I wish I was running around Tarant trying to figure out what the hell is going on.” Thank you for making Arcanum, and thank you for making games! My children will be playing them one day.

[@iamtheteapot7405]

Fallout New Vegas is my favorite! I also love Resident Evil 4, great games. I haven't played Fo1 or 2 yet but I plan to.

[@EB-cz4te]

Arcanum was so wordy and I loved every moment of it, intelligence, beauty, persuasion and reaction modifiers were just so good and actually reflected with your character.

[@aNerdNamedJames]

Insanely cool that you got that down 20 years ago. Absolutely something you should be proud of.

[@boltonjack]

Arcanum is one my favourite games of all time. When I was 16, the rest of my grade went on excursion to the snow, and I stayed home and played Arcanum because I couldn't afford to go. I still play it every few years, trying different builds and uncover new characters and dialogue options. It also has the best soundtrack ever!

[@ddynamite3835]

I actually really like it when you talk about Arcanum, I would say it is one of the greatest worlds in gaming

[@fredrik3880]

Virgil, Raven, Loghaire, Geoffrey, Franklin and Magnus all had amazing voice actors. And have so much to comment on. Story state, places etc etc

[@fo4357]

What an awesome system! Crazy that no one wanted something like this in other games, it makes a huge difference for game feel. As much as I love Morrowind, most of the dialogue was shared among all NPCs, which made it very tedious after a while.

[@Esc0bar0ni]

Hi Tim. I started Arcanum about a week ago and I have to say that I'm absolutely blown away. The world, the setting, the details in dialogue (like the ones you mention in this video) have really aged wonderfully. So, thanks for the experience Tim! Also to your final point- I'm 100% sure that we can use some form of LLMs to produce amazing dynamic NPC dialogue in about 5-10 years. There still might be some wrinkles to overcome (how to make sure it won't hallucinate, for instance) but once those are solved it's going to lead to some amazing world building elements.

[@glitterglamboy7]

Arcanum is easy one of the top 5 well written RPGs of all time !!! Besos desde Uruguay 🇺🇾🧉

[@dustintaub]

I can't believe I'm just discovering Tim's channel. As a hobbyist game developer, I'm always looking for these kinds of behind-the-scenes stories. To hear it from one of my biggest influences is a whole other level.

[@anthonyapm]

I absolutely adore Arcanum. I was playing it in high school and it's one of the few rpgs I've binged.

[@GeomancerHT]

Thanks for your videos as always, at this rate you will be putting 100+ hours of great content a year, I'm learning a lot with these :D Please do talk about the memorabilia on your background, if you haven't, thank you!

[@AbtinX]

You were always ahead of everyone else Tim, and company. Cheers

[@sanfander]

Arcanum was my favorite game as a kid, I love this content and I'm astonished the team was so small and created such a masterpiece with so much interesting content

[@fuckmaster69]

Wow, really enjoying the videos discussing the programming aspects of Arcanum’s development. Very useful insight

[@idnyftw]

I tried to dig into Arcanum's data files on my dad's old laptop back in my younger years... the dialogue stuff was so dense it made my eyes glaze just looking at it! Now I get why :)

[@dom1310df]

I don't think I've ever described a game mechanic as beautiful before, but this certainly is. I would love to see this in more games.

[@beethovenlivesupstairs4182]

I really hope you talk about the Arcanum companion system sometime.

[@muchofcare]

Thank you so much for your videos Tim! Greatly appreciate them and a two-decade fan of Arcanum. I have played it more times than I care to mention. One thing that always stood to me and leave more questions than answers is the Half-Ogre quest. Over time I started wondering if the quest was just an authentic period piece or how did you and the team come up with it? What should a player make of it? Was it always intended to be unsolvable? And what was the general process of working on it. Can't believe it was a fun ride for the writers. Thank you very much!

[@olpika]

Your videos are such a delight to watch. I've been one of those players who tried to decypher how they were designed by playing them to death. I spent countless hours on a forum you may know as "glittering gems of hatred" to learn more (not the most confortable place to spend time). And I'm amazed at the amount of information you're offering us now. Thanks so much!

[@jtaco4101]

Really enjoying these sir. Thanks.

[@fredrik3880]

Playing Arcanum again. Having a blast, just arrived in Tarant. The dialogue is great so much reactivity! 12-14 people created a legend.

[@ARiverSystem]

This was so interesting to learn about, been binging your videos today and really enjoy your topics and the way you present topics. Cheers

[@SQron188]

this system, and the rest of the dialogues in Arcanum, is one of my favourite things about the game

[@aaronvold47]

Cool story I like when you talk about situation when programmers save other people so much time.

[@bernardfresson1951]

Arcanum is THE game for me. I played it some many times and I always cry when I listen to the main violin theme from the menu. F1, F2 and Bloodlines also my favorite games and it took a time for me to know that you made them (except for F2). Now its time for Outer Worlds but after every video about Arcanum I always want to play it again.

[@realbiscuitshield]

Any Arcanum related content is more than welcome. I just did two playthroughs last month. Never bored of this game.

[@aneckdope]

thank you for your content, Tim! really interesting to see more technical side of your projects.

[@AnvilOfDoom]

Very interesting stuff, thank you Tim. I always enjoyed the dialog in Arcanum. And I suppose I knew *some* of this stuff must have been done. But I never really thought about it much or truly appreciated how clever and expansive it was. I mean, I knew it was both. But still! :D

[@EscelatesQuick]

I spent a few hundred hours playing the first few arcs of Arcanum and never actually finished it the dialogue stuck with me, along with character progression and how the quests felt so organic. On reflection, how the game changed depending on what I played was so impactful that I felt like I "had my fill" without getting into the later game. The wild thing for me is that even to this day with things like BG3 being out, I don't feel that same sense of living in a world. The dialogue was a huge part of that.

[@Marandal]

Arcanum!❤ Arcanum Dialog system, it's soo good omg. I want to do this in a game but i need to learn to program first(currently learning Godot) Thank you Tim!

[@skittlesbarber25]

Thanks for the Arcanum content. It's the most important game to me, grew up playing it. It's just amazing. Ofc you keep saying that it didn't need all the features you put in there for the game *you* envisioned probably, but for me and I believe many people - it's rather essential that Arcanum is the game that always has more content for you than you can reach.

[@JT-iv7ju]

Thank you for another thoughtful insight into Arcanum, Tim! One aspect of Arcanum I found interesting was the randomized loot and how its seed is generated by the character's name, race, and background, which can really shake up the early game. When it comes to loot systems in RPGs, do you prefer static placement (BG2, Pillars) or randomized?

[@pixhell]

I understand why Arcanum give me a special felling of immersion ... A character and personality immersion. This felling was amazing and surprise me too! at the point to be a bit disapointed to playing some video game's RPG and dont fel this. thank's you to bringed this experience and put so much effort on this aspect. it's very very classy!

[@LDiCesare]

Varied dialogue options were awesome in Arcanum. I'm pleased to hear about how you achieved that.👍

[@GypsumGeneration]

I missed seeing this video first thing this morning, but I'm glad I got a chance to catch it today because this was so interesting! Thanks Tim!

[@sethrangel6798]

I love your shirt. Didn't know you liked Peanuts. About Arcanum's NPC dialog, I found it pretty funny how people would be mistrustful and say something horribly mean about my dwarf character in the opening statement but became almost immediately neutral/courteous after I said something slightly apologetic. It always seemed to happen, too, which makes me wonder if the procedural parts were a little too ambitious for the amount of actual (core) writing you could realistically fit in the game or if characters outright hating you wasn't conducive to actually trying to role-play. It was neat, though - and I've only beaten the game once and a half times, so my memory could be failing me. Thanks for making it!

[@asaurat]

Great! There's never enough Arcanum testimonies, no pb :)

[@LTPottenger]

Tons of great ideas to chew over. Wow! And thanks.

[@sandwich2473]

This is very very interesting to hear indeed! There's a game with a sort of similar implementation for dialogue replacements which use the various checks for factions, personality type, etc to determine what line of dialogue can be inserted in amongst other written dialogue It supports for having multiple replacements so you can get a different line every time by inserting lots of these blocks it's really really cool

[@karamzing]

I was thinking of asking what you thought about generative AI possibly bringing computer RPGs closer to pen and paper RPGs in terms of flexibility. I guess dialogue reacting to player actions would be an example of that. I remember Planescape: Torment spewing paragraphs of expository dialogue at me (which may be a flaw), while in later full-talkie RPGs a lot that stuff was moved into "codex entries" and journals to manage the audio budget.

[@umartdagnir]

It will be interesting to replay Arcanum, knowing all these things.

[@KeiNovak]

This has got me thinking about possibly implementing this in something (what you usually refer to as 'toys').

[@Dorgrin]

I’d love a talk about how you implemented this. It sounds amazing.

[@CainOnGames]

I go into detail on Arcanum dialogs here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fYq6dpqHds1pidE and on the Arcanum scripting process here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/maCznIqvf66fY68 Those cover a LOT of the implementation foundation that supported generated dialog.

[@skittlesbarber25]

Speaking of Arcanum I find it funny that it turns out I had the most fun with a game in my life when I played it IGNORING the main quest due to a bug, but it wasn't frustrating at all because you just roleplay whatever in that world and it would react and there was enough of content, some of it I found earlier than main quest intended, but, tbh, the way I was exploring it myself was cooler than your quest. When you speak of Arcanum and allowing players to play different ways it sounds like you're speaking mostly of just allowing players with different builds/parties solve the quests in different ways, but what I did as a child was playing an entirely separate game, story in that world (yeah, because there were some bugs with dialogues + some quests didn't work well so I got stuck) and it worked great BECAUSE it was "kitchen sink" game I found ruins of Vendigroth WAY before I was supposed to and it was exciting for a kid. I didn't get the bits about age of legends, just, travelling the world of waning magic and rising tech, I found ruins of ancient high-tech art nouveau society that was destroyed by terrorist mage and to me it was a story about cycles in history - magic and tech dominance phases changing one another, not like "old magick, new tech" but that there was a magic revolution and it could be our world many cycles ago. And they kinda did such trick with Dark Souls, which, as opposed to Arcanum, has no plot at all, but ppl can explore the world and come up with own stories, which is another cool way of storytelling.

[@magikaru]

Really loving these technical deep dives!

[@Anubis1101]

I unfortunately didn't get to play with the dialog as much when modding Arcanum, only doing the most basic interactions for some NPCs in my custom world. But even just that superficial exposure gave me unrealistic expectations when I went on to mod other games and found their dialog system to be both more complicated and less flexible. It really was something special, and it's inspired me for my current game project, where I'm using much-expanded version of this concept that takes a wide variety of stats and flags into account for procedural NPC generation. I'm honestly not onboard with LLMs for game design at the moment, but I do recognize the potential and think some great things have been done with them so far

[@davdav1370]

Dude dont't apologize for Arcanum content :) We need moar

[@LandBark]

So much care and work went into the dialogues of Arcanum. Million ways to say no. While Fallout 4 had 3 ways to say yes while 1 way to say no/later.

[@TheYoungtrust]

There was no point to even have options, really. Along with the voiced PC, they should have just made a cutscene out of it. The sad thing is, even while taking away player agency, they did not put much work in native design. The main story had more plot holes than the side quests, and I have no idea how that happened.

[@fredrik3880]

F4 is one of the greatest games ever made. Just like Arcanum.

[@lrinfi]

​@@TheYoungtrust We could probably speculate all day about why that may be and still not come up with any solid answers, but I suspect the primary focus at Bethesda is creating visually stunning worlds to explore (even if the world is in ruins) and "world building", e.g. story and characterization, are pretty low to last on the list of priorities. Story and characterization, therefore, come off as an afterthought at best and not just in Bethesda RPGs. It'd be nice if story and characterization were given equal consideration to the technical and mechanical. It is in what we're calling "story-driven" RPGs today, not so much in games built around a gameplay loop like "Kill. Loot. Return." (

[@lrinfi]

​@@TheYoungtrust I might add that the same list of priorities appears to be shared among many different development studios today. You look at a game like 7 Days to Die and you can see that story and characterization are going to be dead last if the game is ever actually released as a completed project. It's been in development for 11 years and all the effort has gone into the crafting and death trap building systems. They've got the makings of a great gameplay loop going, but that's about it. The "quests" in place now are just randomly generated "jobs" the traders ask players to do for "quest rewards" and I imagine that's all the quest system will be from here on out until and unless they decide to put the effort and resources into telling a story. "Stuff to do" is actually what a good majority of players are asking for in the video games they're playing. If I had a dime for every request end-game players have made of Bethesda for "more stuff to do" in Fallout 76, despite that there's already too much "stuff to do," I'd be a multimillionaire today.

[@TheYoungtrust]

@@lrinfi Thanks for your comment.

[@StavrosNikolaou]

More Arcanum content, woohoo 🎉 How was the context (gender, class, etc) passed in the dialogue system? Was it just global variables, through input arguments to dialogue specific functions, or some other message passing system? Also for implementation purposes (especially now that you are more experienced) do you prefer state machines for these generators, some form of formal generative language (e.g. regular or recursive grammar) or something else entirely? Thank you so much for these detailed technical videos! Have a great day 😊

[@CainOnGames]

The generated dialog system had points to the PC and the NPC they were talking to, so it could check things like race, class, gender, spell status, etc. As for dialog generation, given that the results have to be localized, you are restricted to selecting pre-made strings and not generating them...unless you have an LLM AI trained for every language you plan to ship.

[@ddaymace]

This is so cool. Tim, thank you for sharing

[@TheYoungtrust]

Thanks for putting so much love in this game. You inspired me.

[@Dermetsu]

That's a really cool system you guys came up with.

[@jimnms]

Arcanum has spoiled me. No other game feels so... alive. I missed out on the "golden age" of RPGs because I was a broke college student. When GOG opened in 2008, I picked up pretty much every RPG I missed out on. When I played Arcanum, it just blew my mind. Nothing before or since has measured up to it. Getting an actual address to go to and leaving it to me to find it instead of a quest marker, why aren't more games like this?

[@coupdeforce]

It really is amazing, and easy to take for granted that the NPCs "just react" like that. Arcanum is still amazing in general, because of all the possibilities and all the consequences.

[@Ferco19]

It's such entertaining to watch your videos, keep on ❤

[@noneofyourbusiness4616]

I like your early-era Peanuts art shirt!

[@Gadzinisko]

That was a great explanation. I remember that the quest for Master Pickpocket was running around naked across Tarant and afterwards people there greeted you according to that. And that after you gave a newspaper interview people were recognizing you and giving you money... I suppose these were also flagged somehow and checked at greeting?

[@cheez-itmcgee]

more arcanum! hooray!!! ❤

[@Galanthos]

Man, so, I never finished Arcanum. I don't think I actually got very far in it at all. I think I restarted a handful of times, tried different characters, but never really got a handle on what I was supposed to be doing. Everything you're sharing about the game makes me want to play it though. It's clear there was a ton of love and passion put into it.

[@illustrious-jaco]

great vid, would be curious to hear how you go about organizing that dialogue. i have similar ideas for my own games but would love to see how y'all did it

[@grappydingus]

Awesome Peanuts shirt!

[@beautifulbearinatutu4455]

Great video and great t-shirt.

[@sahilmishra2945]

the future of RPGs is gonna be wild if someone is able to use ai right. it's really cool seeing how fast the tools are going from papers to being in people's hands I could see this all happening at a ridiculous pace too

[@kevinjohnson495]

This is sooooo cool Tim

[@Quarter324]

Love Arcanum! I played and finished it recently and it’s one of the most unique RPGs I’ve played. I love these retrospectives, too! I’m curious, how did you guys feel morally about leaning heavily on the racial prejudice (and obscure race science in the case of the Half-Orc conspiracy)? I’m not making a judgment, but it often got uncomfortable how racist Arcanum’s world is. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this, especially looking back from on the game from our current political climate/perspective. Thank you for your amazing work!

[@nickk4653]

I’m so glad I came across this comment. Sometimes I feel like the being okay with racism in games is okay but my gut immediately hurts because of the current state of the world. As I’m currently working on a method for procedurally mapping characters based on personality inputs I keep feeling like I’m approaching a similar “prejudice-based” algorithm and this has me feeling uneasy. However, maybe there are building blocks on a deeper level that can be reached that push past racism and prejudice. Maybe it’ll be characters based on mental health disorders, or possibly a theoretical system of made up traditions… Sorry for my ramble…

[@cavauro]

Love this game and the videos on it

[@kevinlloyd74]

I'm here for Arcanum. Arcanum is the best game

[@dukdukgoos]

Tim, have you ever considered contributing to the Arcanum mod community? It would be awesome to have some changes and fixes from you to improve things you didn't get the opportunity to change back in the day.

[@BlarGames]

Interesting..I wonder if Baldur's Gate 3 has something along these lines, considering how huge that game apparently is and the amount of dialogue choices.

[@fredrik3880]

I wouldnt hold my breath if i were you

[@Kadwid]

I noticed that completed quests couldn't be botched, and always got the priest's blessing and completed kill the priest quest before Shrouded Hills ; )

[@RandoFromMars]

Huh, that's neat as heck.

[@BuzzKirill3D]

This might possibly be the most reactive dialogue system ever.

[@jonbigcawk]

Arcanum is amazing!

[@ambulance_666]

Arcanum was my first real rpg. I wish this game was polished by professionals (reduced bugs, optimized for current hardware) and maybe completed (finished? it feels like it needed more time). I wish modern games focus harder on variety of ways player can play. I love dumb dialogues

[@PaulieMcCoy]

I'd really like to see the code but in another video you said you own the code to Arcanum (and another game I believe) but you said you can't release it. If that's true, maybe you could modify it. I think it would be cool to eventually get the source to some of the games you've done. Alternatively or not mutually exclusive to that, it would be cool for you to touch on software topics, tricks, etc...

[@munkaccino]

tim, have you heard about drog black tooth? he's an ukranian modder that managed to make arcanum playable in modern systems, you mentioned you had the code, I think it would be very nice if you guys get to talk about it

[@skittlesbarber25]

Hmmm... speaking of diagloues, there used to be bugs when you'd have NPC answers in your speech options and their responses would be all random - most importantly with Nasrudin when I approached him and couldn't speak to him in any intelligeble way, so just to test I killed him and got teleported to Void, or Willoughsby and diplomatic quest. I thought it was f-ed up translation because, OF COURSE, there was only pirated version with pirate localization and without English available, but I guess, years later I encountered the same bugs in English...

[@MicoSelva]

We can only hope that someone will try to create another RPG as ambitious as Arcanum again.

[@user-ob6qs8gg9u]

Amazing!

[@legoyodascream]

You'll never hear me complain about Aranum content. I really wish you had access to the IP.

[@skittlesbarber25]

Ah yes, NPC commenting your lack of clothing or barbarian armor

[@BonesAO]

Thank you

[@gravypod]

Do you think you would consider open sourcing the code for Arcanum?

[@CpsLock3]

Damn it, If i was confident in the unity engine i would make a faithful recreation of the fallout and arcanium games

[@K4g4m1]

Super cool

[@Jay-ie9pp]

Are you going through the Arcanum code because you're going to release an update?

[@paulwilliams8278]

talk more about Arcanum thats perfectly ok :D

[@LOC-Ness]

Honestly this sounds good enough without AI shit. I don't think it needs to steal people's voices or writing to be viable. It's already a good framework for actual voice acting and writing.

[@Shannovian]

"I know I have been talking about Arcanum a lot", No. Need more Arcanum.

[@Banefane]

Very Cool!

[@ananasmasque1793]

tim cain best talking head

[@kerghan2232]

Is Mirror Image a removed spell?

[@CainOnGames]

Yes, it got replaced with Blur Sight in the Phantasm college. The code check and reply strings for it remain in the generated dialog system.

[@kerghan2232]

@@CainOnGames I see, thanks! And thank you for making these videos. I love hearing about Arcanum's development and your recollections about it and Fallout in general.

[@vast634]

Hi everyone, its me [NPC-Narrator_15]. Today i will talk about [EXPOSITION_104]

[@decem_sagittae]

Could we get more Fallout videos pls?

[@jtaco4101]

Is arcanum playable in 2023? My uncle gave it to me as a kid and I was just too young to understand it. Thinking about giving it a try for 5$ on steam.

[@Esquarious]

With a little tweaking it runs fine. There's an unofficial patch (UAP) that still has community support. Personally I had to install the UAP minus the high res patch and then tweak a few files to get it to run smoothly.

[@cmdr.jabozerstorer3968]

Did this work with dunb dialogue too? Eego, did NPCs respond in a sarcastic or sympathetic way, if the PC can barely speak properly?

[@CainOnGames]

No, dumb dialog was handcrafted by the narrative designers. It was "bespoke", as the kids say these days.

[@PostapocMedia]

This is why I felt that Arcanum is superior to Fallout.