Considering the release date is 11/11. It's too late to scrap things, by now all that is left is VO and polishing/tweaking.

Plus, the things that were scrapped out of Oblivion was due to problems that needed a lot of tweaking, but since they had a limited time to adress these issues before the launch they didnt make into the final game. And why commit the same mistake again? I trust Bethesda this time, everything that I had expected and hyped on Fallout 3 turned out to be greater than I thought, and I enjoyed it a lot. I don't see why this wouldn't happen now. And having a date already set a stone is a big thing, it means they are confident on everything.

yeah but you dont tell your customers, hey you can do anything! cough fable and then you end up with not what you promised

same with npc dialogue ( Todd Howard )

that just makes you look like a liar, not be trusted and generally skepticism about anything you announce for an upcoming game

if you are unsure if something will go in then shut up and only open your mouth if its really going in

They didn't remove AI from Oblivion... if they did that, NPCs would just stand around and do nothing.

What they DID do was tone Radiant AI down considerably, still there was a reason for this.



No, that is not a lie, a lie is when you give false information, knowing it's false, out of an intentional effort to decieve another.

Or do you often accuse weather reports of lying to you? If you invite your friend to a party and he promises to come but ends up breaking his leg and therefore can't make the party, do you say he lied to you? If so, you must think everyone is a liar, because sometimes this sort of thing happens, sometimes, people say things honestly believing them to be true, but it later turns out that they're not. When you accuse someone of lying, it generally implies that they have an intention to decieve you. Now, making promises you fail to keep is still a problem, because it still leaves a sense of dissappointment, and if you get into the habit of breaking promises, people may start to doubt whether you are a reliable person, but that still doesn't make you a liar.



And which screenshots showed things that were not actually in the game? Just because they were removed or changed in the final product doesn't make it count.



In terms of plots, that'd pretty much true, because Morrowind's factions didn't have plots at all, they had a series of disjointed quests quests that usually had little or no connection to each other, and these quests were often rather boring in themselves, I'm not saying all of them were, but when your faction quests include an epic struggle to travel far and wide to reach the second floor of your guildhall in order to sneak the legendary fake soul gem into the desk of a fellow guild mate in order to sabotage her research and allow your friend to succeed in her quest of utmost important to reach the rank of journeyman before her competitor as part of some petty bet, you really can't boast quality in your faction quests, of course, Oblivion's factions had their share of boring quests too, but since the questlines went somewhere, I still cared more about them than many of the faction quests in Morrowind, which I usually just did because I wanted to advance to the next rank, as much as I liked Morrowind, I am capable of seeing that it is not perfect in any way, and I've always found that the large amount of tedious, boring quests is one of its flaws.



Ever consider that maybe he actually felt that way? I know this might seem inconcievable, but you know, sometimes, just because people express something that conflicts with your own completely subjective opinion does not necessarily mean they're trying to decieve you, it could be that they just have a different opinion from you. I know, that sounds really crazy, doesn't it? How could anyone possibly not feel the same way on a certain matter as you? It's true though, I'm not saying that MrSmileyFaceDude definately feels that way, nor am I saying I feel that I feel that way, but when someone expresses a subjective opinion, which saying a game is "good", and by extension, saying one game is "better" than another, generally is, before immediately shouting liar, you might want to consider that they could just have a different opinion from you.



Okay, I'll give you that one, you managed to find one thing they said about Oblivion that actually seems like a lie, congratulations, you've proven that game developers are capable of saying things that aren't true too, for this grand discovery, you win the internet.

Now if you really want to prove something, go make a list of every statement a Bethesda employee has ever made to the fanbase, then check each of them over, and count how many statements are true and how many are false, a few statements you believe to be lies doesn't prove much because you provided nothing to compare them to.

But really, you shouldn't bother, too difficult of an undertaking, I'd say, and it's not like anything cares, I'm sure whatever you're findings, you're not changing anyone's mind with them, just like I'm sure you'll insist that all the statements you quoted were lies regardless of what I say. As for me, I'd say keeping some degree of skepticism towards games in development is a healthy attitude, but automatically assuming everything the developers say is a lie is too extreme, might as well not bother following the development at all if you're not going to believe anything you're told about it anyway.

So back to the original question, I don't believe Bethesda is intentionally lying about any of Skyrim's features, that seems like a bad idea for a game developer to me since the truth will inevitably get out once the game is released, while it might be too late to hurt your game's sales, it's going to reduce fans' confidence in your ability to deliver on your promises for future games, and while certainly short-term profit, I'd say it would be unwise to sacrifice long-term sustainable business for its sake. But is it possible that the developers could be forced to cut features or content promised, for time, budget or technical constraints? Certainly, it's happened many times in the world of game development, sometimes, you just can't make the game everything you originally set out to. Or sometimes developers get too far ahead of themselves and start promising unrealistic things they haven't even worked on (Fable is a good example of what this can cause.) and even if Bethesda doesn't actually promise anything that they can't deliver, it's possible that fans can end up misinterpreting things, and foolishly allowing themselves to expect ther game to be more than it can ever hope to be. No matter what the cause, though, it's certainly possible Skyrim might fail to live up to the hype surrounding it, which could lead to dissappointments, yes. But in terms of Bethesda delivering what is promised, I take the fact that the game was not announced until closer to the release date than Oblivion was, and that Bethesda already felt comfortable giving out a release date upon announcement, to possibly be a good sign. Because if the game is already well into its development, there's much less chance of anything being cut as many things have likely been more or less completed, especially since Bethesda has been criticized for some promised things being cut in Oblivion, if Bethesda learned from that, then they'll probably be a little more cautious about such things in the future, but that's just how I look at this matter.

Okay, fair enough. I agree that would be nice.

But let's think about this for a moment - how can anyone working on something as complicated, convoluted, and prone to change as a videogame, be expected to even know that? There's a limited number of game types (and companies) where it'd be even remotely applicable that anyone working on the design phase could have anything approaching 100% certainty of any feature making it into the final cut.

For example - I'm pretty sure that for the last Halo game, that Bungie had a pretty good idea of what they were capable of, and what they were going to be able to accomplish. What they were really doing wasn't so much making a brand new game, but polishing up the previous one. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is really just a continuation of AC2. Fallout: New Vegas isn't breaking all that much new ground (and even then, there's every chance that any one of the new game mechanics would have ended up on the cutting room floor if they'd run out of time/resources/it just plain wasn't working like it was supposed to.)

The idea that Bethesda "lied" about Radiant AI, for example, pre-supposes that at that point of the design phase, the team didn't think that they'd be able to get it working properly in time for release. And I just don't see any way to prove that (one way or another.)

It's a creative process. If I'm working on something even as simple as a single drawing - it's still not going to turn out exactly like I expected. If I had to give an interview about a book I was writing - before I'd finished it - I'd likely be coming up against the same problem of things not turning out exactly like I'd previous said it would.

Sure, it'd be nice if developers somehow "knew" what was and wasn't going to be able to get jammed into the development cycle, and what was going to have to get left out. But barring psychic powers, I'm confused as to how anyone could at all be expected to live up to something like that. :shrug:

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