The Witcher is an awesome game... The taverns in TES feel a little lifeless whereas the taverns in The Witcher feel a lot more alive with the fistfights, musicians and so on... It's not only the taverns that feel more real in TW, the shops, streets and squares do too. I bet this will be improved even further in The Witcher 2. I really hope Bethesda will take some of the ideas and elements and implement them in the game.

Now, on topic:

I really love the ideas, Immersive Interiors really do make interiors much more real. This won't be hard to do.
As for the "disappearing in front of the door", The Witcher and Zelda did it good decent enough. In Far Cry 2 you can see the interior while you open the door so that should be possible too..

Sure they are. every time I come home and open the door I'am dissapearing an there is loading screen with some tip's like "If u don't feed ur cat it can ill and even die!"

To me it doesn't seem like the tech will be a problem.

I think the bigger issue, at least in the older games, was that both towns and buildings were much larger inside than they were on the outside. It's all relative to the player model and the movement speed. In Oblivion, if the buildings were as small on the inside as they were on the outside, they would be either extremely simplistic (one or two rooms) or very, very cramped, let alone having interesting interior aesthetics and designs. It wouldn't surprise me much if the interior artists/designers and exterior artists/designers didn't overlap much beyond trying to match up the general shape of the building and having windows/doors in the same locations. Additionally, hallways and rooms were not to scale with the outside world and/or halls/rooms in reality because it would be cramped and impossible to move around well considering the quick movement speed and control sensitivity. All the items would be too close together and the insides would be more boring. There is always a tradeoff between realistic scale and versatile environments.

My guess is that there have been changes to the engine and the way the player moves so that this shouldn't be an issue anymore.

It would be nice to have interior windows lit up at night when looking at them from the outside. Looking through the actual windows would be neat but I doubt it's gonna happen.

Did the article state the new engine tech? I did (and still) wonder if its not the FO3 engine but with Gamebryo ripped out and a different renderer placed in. :shrug:
(If possible, that would seem the most practical from a developer standpoint. It could mean that a lot of the existing custom work might still be re-used ~almost unchanged... Again if practical.)

Something to the degree of Immersive Interiors (and All Natural for that matter) shouldn't be an issue if it is done that way from the beginning. New Vegas already has interior lighting that changes with the time of day, Fallout 3 may have as well, I can't remember, but that at least is practically guaranteed. Personally I think interior cells will be back, but it may be varied by the size of the building, smaller shops and one to three room houses may be load-less, but castles and such I expect to be separate.

It would be more immersive, but the detail of the interiors would be much less.

At the very least I hope that when you look out the window at night it will at least be dark

Word. :goodjob:

this could be achieved with "portals" to create a window into another cell.
they did this once in fallout 3. In the one vault where you looked through a window and saw an illusion, but when you went into the room it was different, well when you looked through the window you were actually looking into another cell.

if the engine supports this trick in all interiors with minimal lag, it could be a possibility

I don't know why people keep getting confused with this...
Immersive Interiors does not make the windows transparent. Weather: All Natural does. It makes the windows transparent along with adding meshes representing the outside half of that window piece. It also adds scripted weather effects so that interior and exterior weathers match. Immersive Interiors only adds meshes outside the windows (nothing more) so that people have an exterior representation to look at when they use Weather: All Natural's transparent windows.

Simple answer: dynamic doors that lead into a generic dark box, where the NPC will be teleported to the interior cell once the door has closed.

I thought they were the same size. :/

cells are lame, make them for dungeons and huge buildings only

I was wondering the same thing while looking at the GI magazine.

It doesn't have any screenshot that could help us on the matter, beside the lack of windows, which suggest different cells.

Oblivion looked great. with very hioghly detailed models and lots of textures. What was its downfall was the lighting. Now aside from it looking so good there was a downside, Oblivion had no poly culling. It meant that the more objects you had in an area, the slower Oblivion would run because the game was also rendering things you couldnt see. Now if they put poly culling into Oblivion, we could have seen alot larger cells and more heavily populated areas. Which means we could have the interiors of buildigns in citys in the same world space.

But certainly not anything like the maps for Stalker: COP, that had very large maps for the game but the problem was the whole map was loaded into the RAM, which meant low amounts of debri. So we had this great map which looked very very good and the graphics and textures were amazing, but there was nothing in the buildings and not much debri on the map aside from the occasional box and rusting car.

Grand Theft Auto seemed to have solved this issue back in 2004 with San Andreas.