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Original post by Raghar I wouldn't expect from Bethesda too much, they have history of failed implementations, and unfinished work.

No they don't.

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Original post by nilkn No they don't.

It's interesting point would you care to extend it? Actually it's hard to get discusion about no they don't.

Are you talking about possibility to finish unpatched Daggerfall? Or not neccessity to save game, look into folder and run a batch file to activate one of rather ... quests?

Or are you talking about Morrowind? It was slow, not because of geometry, but because of badly writen AI/game engine. It looked like they implemented an O(n^2) algorithm at aproximately 1/3 of speed it could be implemented. Also that city somehow lacked depth, too few buildings, too few people nobody important, everything looked prescripted. If they wouldn't be able to look at the ultima 7, and get some ideas, if they would combine it with some autonomous AIs, and something like was in Black and White 2, it could be interesting. Sadly it looked like they were unable to grasp asymetric multithreaded processing and out of frame slice computation, and it mainly looked like movement through flashy props.

If they would be better in current attempt we will known after a few weeks of play. I expect bugfest.

I didn't mentioned the shop system.
I didn't mentioned lack of archetipes.
I didn't mentioned lack of interactions with environment.
I didn't mentioned that battles and your opponents were worse than battles in dungeon crawl.
And I don't remmember contents of data files enough to back up claim about unfinished work by juicy examples.

BTW you could fall through the geometry in Morrowind as well. (It was nice to see the sky after vertex normal failed the test, so sky was visible. Not so nice after 2.5 hours of playing without save.)

@Raghar:

I should have worded what I said differently, and perhaps elaborated. What I said was very misleading as to what I meant. [smile]

I wasn't saying that their games weren't buggy or that their graphics algorithms were efficient (in fact, I'm not sure they even wrote the renderer themselves), but that they have always delivered on their promises and produced excellent games which, for the most part, satisifed their players to a great extent. This is much more than can be said for most game companies, unfortunately (*cough* Lionhead *cough*).

Sorry for the confusion.

You have to watch out with these marketting videos...

Not because the triggering of a certain sequence isn't scripted doesn't mean the sequence itself is not scripted.

Those dialogues are written by designers. The character doesn't actually deduce the quest from the dialog it had, the dialog unlocked the quest on that character and made it available to the player.

The game might be interesting though

The graphics engine in Morrowind was (at least heavily based on) the NDL Engine which is now NetImmerse or some such thing.

The NPC conversation isnt something to be amazed over, but the fact that the lady set the dog on fire was a sign of intelligent behavior, she was trying to sleep for crying out loud and the dog kept barking!

You create these behaviors by giving the NPCs desires/goals, abilities they can apply to the environment, and rules about how the environment might change. You can get quite interesting emergent behavior to appear when you do this right. The trick is balance -- if you let any such simulation go long enough, it'll typically start to oscillate and get stuck in some extreme point, unless you have built-in dampening and balances in the system. Of course, too much dampening, and you won't get any interesting behavior...

Now, if you have this basic system, and you start adding various more specialized goals and rules. For example, you start adding the rule that the dog quiets down if it's injured, and that the dog barking prevents sleeping, and that the woman really wants to go to sleep -- are you "creating AI" or "writing a script"? In my opinion, more of the latter than the former, but in a much more interesting way than a strictly scripted sequence.

I heard that one of the beta-testers earlier on in development killed an NPC and guards from all over the entire Oblivion world ran to kill the player. That's pretty cool, however that would HAVE to be fixed... how are we supposed to steal stuff? Either way I cannot wait for this game.

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Original post by Sharlin Umm, I don't know what's so amazing in that demo. The events were obviously heavily if not completely scripted to fit what the narrator is speaking about. Maybe the AI is good, maybe not, but that promo video isn't telling us anything about its real capabilities. And about the NPCs' dynamic attitude towards the player character, we had that in Fallout 8 years ago.

Did you watch and listen to the video? It's not scripted at all.

I would not and will not trust anything the narrator says in promo videos like that. 99% of that stuff is always marketing bullshit; as I said, we know nothing at all about the AI's true capabilities until we get to play the game ourselves.

Anyway, *IF* (that's one huge if) the behaviour in the video is truly non-scripted, I have to say I prefer a scripted approach over that because that was some most unbelievable AI for a long time. The bookstore woman setting her dog on fire, for goodness sake???? I for sure pity your pets if you think that is acceptable human behaviour!

Also, it seems that the poor woman suffers from attention deficit disorder, not being able to consentrate on one thing for more than five seconds at a time (how utterly convenient indeed that she does so much stuff in such a short time span so that the narrator can boast about all the kewl features...)