I've heard he's now doing a game for the kinect... *facepalm* I bet it's going to be a complete "wtfisthi[censored]"
But still, lot's of respect. He's a veteran of the industry and made some serious strategy classics for the PC.

Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper...

DAMN YOU OBLIVIOOOON!

The trailers were never filled with lies. Bethesda intended to have the game as it was in the videos. I was more angry than most when RAI was neutered and Soft Shadows were taken out completely, and we were told they could not even be added in later because the engine code was rewritten.

But I know they did not intend for that to happen. (Although I still think they should have enabled the shadows on PC and just Disabled them on the 360, even though at launch I got the game on 360)


I am really excited to see gameplay videos with Todd's Narration. Because they have been so sealed tight about Skyrim, and it is now only 11 months away, I am positive what we see will be more or less what we get.

Therefor, If I see some truly great stuff come out of RAI, and Radiant Story, I can get as excited as I want without fear it will be cut.


My biggest fear is that they simply could NOT find a way to make RAI work as originally intended in any cost/time effective manor, and that we will just get AI similar to that of FO3. Which very may well happen, Considering they had a few years to tweak RAI for FO3, and FO3's version of RAI was even simpler(in non combat) than oblivion's.

Yeah. This is why I'm confident they'll deliver on many of the promises. They learned their lesson and wanted to finish the important bits before even revealing the existence of the game. So when they say AI has been improved, snow behaves realistically and that all objects cast shadows I believe them.

That's a huuuge difference there. The Sacred Ashes trailer was meant to keep people interested and hyped for DA:O -- it was a prerendered cinematic. It was not meant to show what the game would be like at all. The Oblivion demo was meant to give an overview of what the game will be like (even if not exactly).

In the Oblivion demo, it talks about having true dynamic soft shadows, while showing off a much more uniform lighting and shadowing technique than what was given in the final game. Walls casting shadows, better defined shadows, shadows cast by more objects, etc. At the very least it's deceptive, even if not intentionally. It also talks about NPCs being able to decide what they want to do, and automatically picking up and using appropriate items in the environment to make it easier to do them, and being much more intricate in their tasks.. picking up food for the dog, putting it down on the floor for it to eat, and after the dog eats it, it gets energy boosts which you could see in it running around more often, which annoys the shop keeper and causes it to paralyze and flame the dog. Nothing like this happens in Oblivion, and in my experiences with modding, is simply not even possible without scripting (which was another point in the video, it saying those activities weren't scripted at all). It was meant to showcase what the game would have, and it didn't have them.

Something that interests me, though, is how the male Imperials were all voiced by the same guy that did them in Morrowind, even though they at least had some of the final voice work done already (Patrick Stewart's lines were done, and the female Imperial/Breton voices sound like the finalized stuff, too). Also, Baurus was an Imperial. Of course, that's not a complaint. Just an interesting side note.

Actually, upon looking back, I wouldn't say they really lied to us about it, but rather barely told us anything that was going on. They stripped a lot of content that people deemed as major (Radiant AI, Soft Shadows, Sutch, etc), but barely told us much concerning that, so nobody really knew what all was cut from the game before they got their hands on it.

As for Todd Howard being a liar, I'd say that lying would be a strong word, but you're not too far off. He embellishes the truth a little too much, meaning there is truth to what he's saying, but it's not nearly as good as he puts it. Like how he said that Skyrim's graphics look so good that they're practically "next gen." Skyrim indeed does look quite impressive, but next gen? Not so much.

With Todd, you just have to imagine him talking about something as how a little kid would talk about it. Or at least that's what I do.

alot of that video was a load of lies, from dynamically receiving quests to (and this part hurts me the most ) the dark elf voices

They all lie to hype up games lets stop thinking like they are one of us(gamers) they may have been but not anymore. Selling games is now their job and that is what they do.....and Peter Molyneux is a genius.

Bethesda don't owe us anything, they can say and do what they want. They sell millions of games. We are not that important. :thumbsup:

agreed, i think daggerfall, and perhaps morrowind were the last games created by gamers.

Actually to pretty much paraphrase his exact words, he said that the game looks so good that you'll feel like you're playing it on a new console, and inferring that new consoles don't usually come until the NEXT GEN, you get my point.

As for the first response, you do have a point. But then why does everyone think that "OH BETHESDA LIED TO US!!!" rather than "OH BETHESDA HAD TO CUT SOME STUFF BECAUSE OF INCOMPATIBILITIES AND HARDWARE LIMITATIONS!!!"

I imagine they'll delay the release if there's anything they don't get done. However, when November comes, and it's delayed, I'll be heartbroken. Every moment spent waiting to play the game is agony...

What are you talking about? The Xbox360 is next-gen. That's why people kept on calling ti next-gen before it was released. That's why Howard called the game a 'next-gen game' in that youtube preview. If the game is on an Xbox 360 then it must also be next gen yes?

As for whether the Skyrim previews being filled with mistruths? Blame that on the game jernalists who take far too uncritical a stance in previews and interviews. They go on fishing trips - saying 'so, tell us about quests' instead of 'it's well known that your elderscrolls quests are usually linear and lack choices and consequences, can we expect the same in Skyrim or will there be a greater focus upon choices like in your Fallout 3 game?". If perhaps the people who are actually able to ask the PR people the questions ask actual probing questions instead of their usual fishing trips we might be able to get a bit less over-hype and a bit more solid information.

That said I'm not very hopeful. So far we only have one preview and the only mention of quests is this supposed Radiant Story feature. But there isn't any depth about how it will work. The examples given are obviously scripted, another NPC offering you a quest instead of the original NPC would be have been possible in Oblivion and Fallout 3, it just wasn't done because it added more work for little reward (in Oblivion it wasn't even necessary since they felt they needed to trigger-happy-proof the game, luckily they've seen in Fallout 3 it's possible to both make killable quest givers and find that people aren't falling overthemselves in anger that they may have accidentally killed them. The other examples are also easily scriptable. Put an actor value check in an OnLoad script and the magical NPC won't appear unless the player has a script above a certain amount. The only part that they mention that can't be accounted for is the mention that the item/macguffin whatever and the enemies would be put into a random unexplored cell - so lets hear a bit about that instead of little examples that you can easily implement with the existing scripting tools in the CS and GECK.

I forsee Radiant Story being set up to fail unless Bethesda's PR people clearly set out and explain how it actually works. If people expect procedurally generated content and find that all it is is specially scripted content with some variables in where it is placed then they'll get angry. Those are the types of things that people end up terming 'lies'.

I think the 360 and ps3 lost their "next gen" when talks of future xboxs and ps3 began to surface.

Err, "next-gen" means "next generation", i.e. the generation following the current one. The XBox 360 was next gen when the XBox was current gen. The XBox 360 is not next gen anymore, it's current gen. Just like the PS2 was next gen when the PS1 was current gen, and the PS3 was next gen when the PS2 became current gen, etc.

Doesn't help the confusion that this console generation is much longer than previous ones, though.

For my own two caps on this:

Will an upcoming videogame end up having to scrap some of it's grandiose ideas for various reasons? Is there going to be stuff from the early previews that doesn't make it into the final game?

Of course.

That's... kind of how these things work. I'd say that goes for almost any long-term creative project. You aim for the stars and then dial it back to reality.

I sure wouldn't want a game designer to start with lowered expectations of what they were going to be able to accomplish...

I second that, Peter Molyneux is the grand champion of false hopes.

I don't really see how Bethesda lied to anyone, I mean sure AI wasn't as complex as they wanted it to be initially, but things happen. They didn't take AI out of the game.

the only broken promise I found in that video is the soft shadowing everything else was the same as Oblivion
and Radient AI had a lot of bugs in it so it couldn't be in the game to the extent that it was in the videos

There will be some exaggerations no doubt.


Then there will be some things that are shown that a few in the fanbase misinterprets, talks about constantly, and eventually makes up its mind that this is some evidence of a revolutionary new feature. As this assumed feature is talked about more and more often, it becomes part of the "common knowledge" on what is going to be in the game.

Then, when the game comes out with something that works exactly like it was shown, but nothing like the feature the fanbase assumed, many of the forum users will say "BUT YOU PROMISED US!" even the forum users who didn't actually read the statements or watch the previews are sometimes susceptible to this anger.

I'm not just talking about this forum and bethesda fans, this has happened with every highly anticpated game I've ever followed.

never trust a game developer, NEVER.

specially if they made big mistakes before

Regarding the AI, I remember some dev mentioning a memory he had of Oblivion being developed. Something about chaining of random things that had serious concequences for the game. Much like the bookstore and the dog thing. If that's true then they have had to remove a huge chunk of code from the game, seeing someone here mentioned that this isn't possible in Oblivion as it is now, without specific scripting of events.

I've not read all of this so forgive if all mentioned...

Shadows and rAI were not lies. I do believe they really thought they'd be in the game, perhaps they released the info a little early, whatever, it all went wrong. So, it was a mess but no fibs.

The times they were somewhat economical with reality were things like:

[Kathode] "All screenshots we've released are 100% in game showing stuff we've already got implemented. We haven't done any special poses or anything like that, with the exception of magazine covers."

[Slateman] "Each of the faction lines in this game have plots and quests to much greater depth over MW. Quality, not quantity."

[MrSmileyFaceDude] "Oblivion is infinitely superior to Morrowind in every conceivable way."

hehe, I love this one and my suspicions are it will be as relevant to Sk as it was to Ob:
[Slateman] "Yep. To second MSFD, we don't auto-level exactly to your level. We have all sorts of adjustments available. If we didn't the game would be boring "

So...

It doesn't really matter whether they believed it would be in the game or not. They could've had every intention of it working in the final game, but the final game didn't come with what they said it would. It was a lie. It's just like if I say it will rain tomorrow, and when tomorrow comes, it turns out to be sunny. I could've had every reason to believe it would rain, but I still lied because it wasn't rainy like I said it would be.

Of course, it's understandable that some of these things had to be removed, and I wouldn't fault them for it (except for the graphics). They set their goals high (as they should), got burned (as happens sometimes), and had to back down on some stuff. I wouldn't go so far as to say they purposely deceived us, but that doesn't change it being a lie.