I was looking at screenshots of this today. It's fscking amazing.

WOW.

The graphics look amazing, and yes, the AI stuff sounds really cool. I cannot wait for this game. It sounds like they're addressing every problem I had with Morrowind, and I still loved that game to death, and have gotten hundreds and hundreds of hours of gameplay out of it, and never completed the main quest.

You know, the only things that really bugged me match at all in Morrowind were the following:

1: It doesn't matter which race you play, you walk like you have a load in your pants.

2: When you take the blimp bug things to a different town, it just fades out and you're there. I would have loved to like actually ride in the things.

So far everything's looking pretty bitchin. I anxiously await movie clips showing the thing in action ;_;

My only beef with Morrowind was that walking around the world was really boring. The landscapes were dull and uninteresting, I would love to have seen some other form of filler inbetween places such as cities. However, the game is absolutely awesome, Oblivion is most likely the winner of my 'Annual Game I Pay For'-Award.

Feyr, you're missing the point on the AI. The joke is that they're NOT doing what they're not supposed to (for example, banging into walls - an example of truly awful AI) but are in fact doing more than effectively what they were told. The AI has reached a decision entirely on its own based on what it knows and that's fairly impressive, even if in our eyes it's the wrong one.

Anyway, once they introduce some proper rules to dictate that there are certain instance of certain activities that the AI should simply let happen things will settle down.

The AI has reached a decision entirely on its own based on what it knows and that's fairly impressive, even if in our eyes it's the wrong one.

Eh. I'm a little iffy on that. I've written AI for MUDs (I was a developer and eventually administrator for a fairly popular game (http://www.merentha.com) for about seven years before I retired), and I've certainly done code that had 'interesting' and unintended effects like that, and I was never very impressed with it. Like the time I was helping another coder on the game do a massive, continuing war between a city of centaurs and an orc army. The looters that were supposed to run around grabbing dropped equipment and the medics carrying the dead and unconcious back to their home towns ended up getting slaughtered by the combatants in our first attempt, drawing more medics and looters to the area, which in turn made both sides concentrate more heavily on that area, etc. So you had a giant brawl in a handful of rooms (the atomic unit of location in the game) while the rest of the battlefield was nothing but the occasional soldier rushing off to join in the battle. And then the newbie coder I was helping decided he had better things to do than finish his area, so it got scrapped. *sigh*

Sounds roughly equivalent to what they did in Oblivion, and I think it smacks of a lack of forethought (which is what I laughed at myself for when I saw what was happening) than any intriguing new development. Emergent behavior is nothing new. The most immediate example that comes to mind is the trading system in 'X2: The Threat'. You could influence the economy of several star systems, or just watch as the independent traders, resource bases and pirates acted based on little more than the laws of supply and demand. Plus it had a nifty little programming console that let you write scripts to automate a fleet of ships, once you could afford to buy more than one. Of course I got bored with that once I finished writing a trading script good enough to pull in more money than I could use.

I don't question the possibility that they might be doing it better than anyone else has yet...someone has to, eventually. It's just that we (as gamers) have been promised dynamic worlds hundreds of times before, and I have never seen one that I'm satisfied with yet. ...of course, I doubt I'll ever be fully satisfied by anything short of a Turing-capable AI. *snicker*

Oh, hey, look at that. My reinstallation of Visual Studio .NET says it needs the second CD. I had forgotten I was installing it. o_O

Quote:Originally posted by Omni

It would be great if you could fly in Morrowind.

I mean, not like a super jump or just a float walk, but actual flight. With wings.

I had an absurdly godlike vampire sorceror and since I wasn't allowed on the Silk Striders I just equipped the boots of blinding speed and an enchanted ring of permanant levitation, pointed him in the right direction, toggled walk and then left and got a ham sandwich or something for the meantime.

I never beat the main quest either, which I understand involves a lot of errand running, courting the Great Houses and doing noble deeds to win Vivec's favor. Instead, I just broke into his chamber, murdered him and took the broken artifact from his corpse. :D I liked the irony of a hated vampire saving the world from Dagoth Ur, though I wish the option had been left open to use the Heart to make yourself a god as the Tribunal did-- but that would require (omg) cause and effect, which was sorely lacking in the game.

Alex, I remember you were one of the people hyping Fable like crazy before it was released. ;)

Actually I didn't post to a review, but a site that averages all of the known reviews for a given game (think gamer's rottentomatoes). Most Fable scores from reliable reviews are 90+ %.

But yeah. For any given game that presents (or claims) such great potential you will see the same things repeated over and over until the next hyped thing comes along. The hype will follow what there is to see, the anti-hype will claim that what you see 'doesn't make a game*,' and the middle-ground will be the usual 'well we'll see on release_date.'

* It works for everything. A good story doesn't automatically make the game fun, the graphics are awesome but the gameplay could be shit, the gameplay might be great but who cares if it hurts to look at and has music like nails on a chalkboard, etc.

Quote:Originally posted by rpgking

Alex, I remember you were one of the people hyping Fable like crazy before it was released. ;)
That's true! But it was just to annoy those Zelda people (if memory serves). :D