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[Soadreqm]

Eh, nothing wrong with scripting as long as the illusion works. Half-Life 2 had scripted everything, but you never really paid attention to that. Pulling it off in an open world sounds a lot harder, though.

[MorleyDev]

If you believe their lies claim that they are 'dynamic' (whatever that means), Bethesda almost certainly still have put some kind of a "call down a motherf*cking dragon" command into the scripting language anyway.

[Sensei]

If it's anything like previous elder scrolls games, they'll leave it in, too.

~ coc noobtown
dragon_call

[Grakelin]

Granted, when I saw this on E3, the guy was literally gushing over how happy he was, because the dynamic AI Dragons turned out so well they actually put additional dragons all over the map. In the video I saw, he follows the dragon around with his camera, but it is obvious where it is because it is massive and in the sky, and at one point it almost crushes him. I'll still hold my judgement of the dragons until I get to play it first hand, though.

[3]

Alternatively they could just use AI schedules like everything in Oblivion did. On a tuesday, choose randomly between Location A and Location X. Fly to the chosen location.

[scriver]

...Which is scripting. And yes, that's most likely what they're doing. Or at the very least part of it.

[3]

Internally it's fairly distinct from actual "scripting", but yeah, along the same lines.

[scriver]

It's setting up how they're going to behave. It's not just deciding where they should go, it's also deciding what they're gonna do once they're there, what animations to use, who to attack, and lots of such stuff. It's just roundabout scripting, most likely in combination with "real" scripting determining the finer points.

[3]

Sure. But as far as Oblivion's concerned, the "radiant" schedules (AI packages) are far too unwieldy to have much use beyond "go to x location under y condition(s)". They didn't factor into combat or anything such. Pretty much everything ran on the same AI as everything else with a few variables (attacking distance, propensity to use powerattacks because most animal enemies had nothing but powerattacks, etc.). In Morrowind there was just a flag that set if a creature was going to attack at range or not; everything else was preprogrammed. It was possible to make things more involved in those games, but there were so many hoops to jump through that it clearly wasn't the developers' intention.

My point being that I wouldn't be surprised to see something like a "dragon AI" box in the CS and the actual contents thereof being directly built into the engine.

[Cheese]

In related news, lulzsec have hacked Bethesda and released a load of information. 

RPS article. I think the details have been released now, this article was an hour or so before it was released.

[Grakelin]

Their release is stupid and has little, if anything, to do with Skyrim.

[Rose]

yeah, it's mostly just admin accounts and passwords.

[MagmaDeath]

Blah.

The armor system is very similar to Oblivion’s. The main difference is that the upper and lower body armors, the cuirass and greaves, have been combined into one piece. This helps create armor styles that have the look we needed for Skyrim. In most of the Nordic designs we created, the upper armor would completely cover the lower armor, making it unnecessary. We get much better visual results combining those pieces, and it renders a lot faster too, so we can put more people on screen, so that was an easy tradeoff for us. We can also make a lot more armors now, so the number and variation types are more than we’ve ever had.

So yeah.
Bethusda is continuing to remove customization.

[Soadreqm]

Didn't most people just wear the best armor over their whole body?

[scriver]

For a good reason, at least. It makes little sense to have "Viking" armour and clothing in upper and lower parts, for the same reason it makes little sense to have robes in upper and lower parts. But yeah, leg parts - I'll miss you.

Seriously, I'm more worried about these:

You can even get married. If you own a house, your spouse will move in with you.

It's going to be so hilariously sucky. Can you imagine the "love" minigame? Horrible thought!

4) Are the main and faction quests branching or linear? What about side quests?
Bruce: We’ve focused on telling one story well. There are decision points in all the quest lines that can change things, but overall it’s a single story. Because the side quests are smaller stories, they are more likely to have major branches. For example, you can decide to save or betray someone, which changes the whole end of the quest. Overall the quest structure in Skyrim is closer to Oblivion than Fallout 3, in that there are many more quests, but they have fewer branches.

So, no.

12) Is there any game content (story, quests) that might be locked for a character based on race/faction/politics allegiances/morality/choices? Or one can experience all the content in one single play?
Todd: We do have some stuff that gets locked out based on decisions you make. It’s wherever it felt natural. It wasn’t a goal that you could or couldn’t play everything with one character. The game’s honestly so big that we don’t think about it much.

Again, no. Unless you count when the game bugs out because they didn't think of the consequences of your actions.

11) What are the differences between the races? I guess they'll have different skill bonuses, but will they also start with different perks or have different "hard-coded" attributes, such as different running speeds or maximum encumbrance, etc.?
Todd: They each start with some skills that are higher by default, but those aren’t hard to overcome with another race in a short time. They also have different starting spells and each has its own passive abilities, like before, as well as powers, like before. So Khajiit can see in the dark, Orcs have a berserk power, Redguards have Adrenaline Rush, and so forth. They work differently in the new system, but the flavor is the same. We kept all the racial movement speeds the same, that’s now a factor of what you’re wearing and have equipped. And starting max encumbrance is the same and is based on your Stamina attribute.

Because making Bosmer and Khajiit move faster than other races would have been so game-breaking. It's not like it's fitting their Archetypes or anything.
A great opportunity for customization and differentiating between the races lost. At least this can be modded in.

20) Will any sort of karma system be incorporated like there was in Fallout, or will it be the Fame/Infamy system of Oblivion?
Bruce: We don’t provide a numeric score that you can track, but the game knows if you’ve been naughty or nice. We felt that a number really didn’t do your fame justice. Characters in the world will acknowledge the specific things you have done rather than just a generalized reputation. If you are a criminal, they’ll know that too. But if you pay your debt to society, all is forgiven.

Consequences? What's that? What kind of society bears grudges after the murderer pays the arbitrary sum of 1000 gold for the lives he took?


But lastly, the good stuff:

9) Can we have some specifics about the PC version of the game? How will it's UI be different? Will there be a 64-bit executable?
Todd: 64-bit specific exe? Not at this time. As far as UI, it visually looks the same across the platforms, but the controls are entirely different. There’s also a lot of “power user” stuff we do with the keyboard from how favorites work, to quick saves, and more that is similar to what we’ve done before in that area. We’re packing a lot of info on the screen and the whole interface is much less ‘look at giant fonts!’ than, say, Oblivion. The PC version also gets higher res textures, larger render modes, and a bunch of other effects you can scale up if your machine is a beast. Last but most important, is the Creation Kit we’ll be releasing for the PC. Modding the game and making it your own is very important to us and our fans, so we’re going to keep doing whatever we can in that area.

Good to hear them say that. I was worried.