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[Sensei]

You know come to think of it, they promised crafting in Shivering Isles, and all that came of it was two merchants where you could exchange items (ostensibly materials, but really they're quest items just like in WoW because all you can do is barter them at a special merchant) for two sets of armor and weapons.

I don't think Bethesda makes bad games, but i wouldn't trust things they say in the marketing stage of any release.

[Neonivek]

My rule of thumb is never pre-order if you can help it.

[Sensei]

As well it should be. You could say the whole purpose of marketing is to 'trick' people into not following perfectly good rules. 

[Kitsunin]

As well it should be. You could say the whole purpose of marketing is to 'trick' people into not following perfectly good rules. 

Yeah...the only game I haven't regretted pre-ordering is Super Meat Boy...oh, and Fate of the World, probably.  Consider that I've pre-ordered like ten other games though and mostly I wish I didn't decide to to it, damn pre-order bonusez.

[Cthulhu]

I've only ever preordered two games, Left 4 Dead and Borderlands.  Both of them kicked ass, and I'm glad I preordered.

[The13thRonin]

You know come to think of it, they promised crafting in Shivering Isles, and all that came of it was two merchants where you could exchange items (ostensibly materials, but really they're quest items just like in WoW because all you can do is barter them at a special merchant) for two sets of armor and weapons.

I don't think Bethesda makes bad games, but i wouldn't trust things they say in the marketing stage of any release.

Did someone say 'promises'?



Whatever Bethesda promise it could be worse... They could be Peter Molyneux.

[Rose]

I, for one, welcome our viking overlords.

[Sean Mirrsen]

 I think Skyrim could be made as a mod for GTA 4. It'd follow the ES series progression nicely - even less overall size, even more details and needless quirks per square meter. It'd actually be an improvement, too, if the quest progression would become more nonlinear, if the vehicle (in this case, horse and dragon) and movement physics got more attention, etc.

 But seriously, I think the only game heading in something even approaching a right direction for a large-scale RPG, is Dwarf Fortress. Humongous world with lots of semi-random details and emergent behavior. Seriously, Bethesda could save millions on design work if they opted for perfecting random world generation algorithms. It can't be that big a problem. Instead of existing as a giant hard copy of itself on disk, the world would exist as a set of variables for the RNG engine, with a layer of modifiers and scripts applied on top of that. It'd be pregenerated and saved chunk by chunk, like it does in DF, requiring hard drive space only for areas the player has altered with his activity. I know this isn't an easy task by far, but I can't agree that it's a task much easier than creating nine hundred square miles of land by hand.

[de5me7]

Is it a coincidence that most people consider the Brotherhood quest line to be the best quest in the game? No, it's not.

i thought the thieves guild quest was the best.

imo morrowind, oblivion, and fallout have all come down to, going into an innocent persons house whilst they are sleeping, and carrying out everything that isnt nailed down, including their cloths, and then selling it all for about 60gc.

[nenjin]

Thieves Guild Quest was anti-climatic. I thought the Brotherhood quests at least had flavor, and kind of mixed up what you did a little bit.

[Neonivek]

Thieves Guild Quest was anti-climatic. I thought the Brotherhood quests at least had flavor, and kind of mixed up what you did a little bit.

It is better to ask what questline wasn't anti-climatic...

The answer was just about none of them weren't anti-climatic.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

Stuff like "I have no food" (solution=steal it, get caught, and get killed), or "I have no weapon" (solution=pick one up from the ground/a corpse).

NONE OF THAT STUFF HAPPENED IN GAME. I've played over 100 hours of Oblivion, and it's _all_ scripted. They promised the framework for a world that acts and behaves on its own, provides dynamic solutions to quests...

None. Of. That. Existed. In. The. Game.

Yeah, they found that it didn't work, so they scrapped most of it, leaving a predictable, not always batshit AI.

Perhaps the only decent example of what they tried to do is the Assassin's Guild quest line. People walking around doing stuff, eating, you can stick a poison apple in the food and they'll eat it and die.

That's the only tangible example of the radiant AI. Eating? You call every NPC in town heading to the Inn for 6 hours to repeat the same animation anything like what they promised?

Is it a coincidence that most people consider the Brotherhood quest line to be the best quest in the game? No, it's not.

I could never get the poisoned apple thing to work. Maybe I was just too impatient (I solved the problem by stabbing them instead). The Brotherhood questline was still the best of them, though.

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

I suspect the concequence of having tons of npcs going around commiting crimes, getting killed, causing problems in general and basically depopulating towns... may of been more the reason why its very toned down from the tech demos they showed in the begining. Likely they had conflict over having dynamic towns they couldn't predict and static towns that were predictable and fit the story/vision better.

God, does anyone still remember the spore demo where you could drag bloody corpses around? I was really looking forward to that until i saw the "E for everyone" sticker.

As I've said before, the tech demos were faked.  RAI is not actually capable of doing what was shown in the tech demos, it was all scripted.

NPCs did indeed steal stuff in-game, although it was rare and usually ended with a dead NPC.

And yes, Ioric.  That's exactly what I meant.  The Radiant AI demo was a malicious prank.  The BethSoft team, upon releasing it, wrung their hands and cackled maniacally, saying "Ha ha!  Now that we've demoralized the glorious PC-gaming master race, we shall crush them underfoot with generic, dumbed down games, and the world will belong to the teeming, grimy masses of console-playing proles!"

I was there, but they said if I told anyone they'd make Baldur's Gate 3.

Your sarcasm would be more effective if it was actually referring to anything like what I'd said.  As it stand it just makes you look like a troll.

You know come to think of it, they promised crafting in Shivering Isles, and all that came of it was two merchants where you could exchange items (ostensibly materials, but really they're quest items just like in WoW because all you can do is barter them at a special merchant) for two sets of armor and weapons.

I don't think Bethesda makes bad games, but i wouldn't trust things they say in the marketing stage of any release.

Did someone say 'promises'?

http://www.gameguru.in/images/peter-molyneux-1.jpg

Whatever Bethesda promise it could be worse... They could be Peter Molyneux.

Loony Molyneux has one key difference from Bethesda.  As far as anyone can say, he actually believes the shit he spouts, whereas Bethesda created a video of scripted events and told everyone it was their RAI in action.  It's a lot easier to ignore Peter Molyneux's insane rambling than it is to ignore a gameplay video 'proving' that the features are real.

[Virtz]

Thanks, I'll watch those when I get a chance. Back on topic, I also noticed that Oblivion severely lacked in role-playing ability. Very few dialogs actually had different things one could say (Ex. Emperor conversations in tutorial dungeon, Dark Brotherhood chatting with victims), rather then just a generic topic button.

That's because Bethesda fans consider this role-playing.

As far as the RAI goes, if it weren't for the blatant lies, I'd consider it (the NPC schedules) a valiant effort since most cRPGs have completely static NPCs. I mean, the result was still a bit worse than 1993's Ultima 7, but at least they tried.

[G-Flex]

It's kind of sad, because despite its technical flaws I found Morrowind to be one of my favorite games, and incredibly atmospheric with very rich atmosphere and world-building. I haven't played Oblivion yet and (from what I know of it) don't really plan on it, and I don't have very high hopes for other games in the series either, or in their ability to be technically competent at implementing a game engine (or the game using it). On the other hand, I don't know how much I blame them for their decisions I don't like, because the nature of the industry now is that games take a lot more money to produce, meaning things need to be extremely "accessible" in order to be profitable.