June 23, 2026
Maidenless and model-less
The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring
Elden Ring’s “AI” reveal sparked a comment war over whether it’s genius or just a fancy flowchart
TLDR: The article says Elden Ring’s enemies run on surprisingly simple scripted rules rather than some futuristic machine brain. Commenters instantly started brawling over whether that’s just standard game design, with others joking it finally explains the game’s famously weird and confusing quest behavior.
The big reveal from NEGA.TV is almost hilariously unglamorous: the monsters and bosses in Elden Ring aren’t powered by some magical robot brain, but by a pile of scripted decision rules that pick attacks, stack actions, and react when things fail. In plain English, enemies are basically following a very organized to-do list. And honestly? The comments immediately turned that into the real boss fight.
One camp was deeply unimpressed, basically yelling, “Low-tech? This is just normal game logic!” Several readers pounced on the article’s use of the word “AI,” arguing that calling this artificial intelligence is like calling a microwave a chef. One commenter flatly declared, “Stop calling everything AI, guys,” while another sighed that the term has become useless now that everything with a decision tree gets slapped with the AI label. The vibe was part classroom correction, part full-on semantic cage match.
But the funniest reaction came from players who suddenly felt their pain had been spiritually validated. One commenter joked this might explain why FromSoftware’s famously bizarre questlines feel like they were designed by a sleep-deprived dungeon master with amnesia: feed an NPC eyeballs, reload the area, exhaust the dialogue, pray at a random church, and maybe the story advances. So while the article set out to explain how Elden Ring thinks, the crowd turned it into a louder question: is this clever design, ordinary game scripting, or proof that “AI” now means absolutely anything?
Key Points
- •The article says Elden Ring’s AI logic is largely implemented in Havok Script, making the underlying behavior code relatively easy to inspect.
- •FromSoftware’s AI system is described as being built around parameterized Goals, which function as distinct AI states with callback functions.
- •Instead of a simple finite state machine, the article says the AI uses a stack of goals, which it characterizes as a pushdown automaton.
- •Goals can push sub-goals, and their update results—Continue, Success, or Failure—determine whether the stack remains, advances, or unwinds to a parent goal.
- •The Activate callback is described as the main decision point where bosses and NPCs choose actions using actor data, world context, and weighted randomness.