True, but in most cases, they now do a stepping pattern with sound, voice taking precedence, then effect, and finally music is generally set from one quarter to one third of the way up.
Depends on game type. In case of voices, most these days actually try to be cinematic and have music be the leading thing at some places (dramatic reveals, for example) till someone starts talking and then it goes quieter.
Exactly the problem, the editors get payed by the dev's and the publishers, or by being given bribes. To give a good review. The publishers themselves tend to green light things that will be able to get good reviews. Because good reviews in a magazines, mean you get more people to sucker into buying something.
Which brings us back to the point of doing things the console way versus just doing things the FPS way. Oblivion and Morrowind were examples of a viable console RPG way of doing inventory, which would still rake in good reviews. I think they just consciously chose to do it the FPS way without particularly looking towards what would get better marks.
Also, I wouldn't say the editors get directly bribed as such. Rather the sites/magazines which give higher marks are more likely to get exclusive previews, invitations to private showings, etc., giving them higher readership. Not to mention those who would rage and never again read something if it gave their favourite game too low a score. Giving high scores to popular games is safe and while some will mumble about something getting too high a score, they won't lose too many readers over it.
They are good games there's no denying it. They were just tech demos as well.
But that way you could classify a considerable amount of games as tech demos. Is Duke Nukem 3D a tech demo of the Build engine? Is Half-Life 2 a tech demo of the source engine? Is System Shock a tech demo of the engine they later used for Terra Nova? A tech demo generally aims to showcase all of the engine's notable features (and not really do anything else), and yet the later games made on these engines did more than was shown in the initial games using the engines.
Play Daggerfall, the cities in that, were completely procedurally generated, as was the landscape, but it still followed a general guide.
I did, but singular cases do not a rule make. Bethesda developed quite a few games besides Arena(1994) and Daggerfall(1996) at the time. They made about 4 different Terminator games. Some corridor shooters, some mission based shooters. I don't think anything besides TES was really procedurally generated. The only way to really know if it was procedurally generated would be to play the game itself and compare maps from two different sessions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZO-XWxkgeI, brief mention, then nothing else but the job offer.
Yup. Still something. Quite a bit more than a Doom-level storyline anyway.