Meet the Devs chugs on

[jfreund]

I generally dislike spoken dialog in games. It has its place in plot-critical conversations, but I read much faster than the characters speak, so I end up skipping most of it , anyway. Sulik's talking head in FO2 bothered me. Every time I wanted him to change combat settings, weapon, or armor, I had to hear "Whatcha be nee-" before I could click the option I wanted.

And, in general, the non-quest related NPCs in Oblivion all spouted the same few lines of dialog. Several lines were specific to a certain town, but multiple characters in that town say the same lines. Mutliple characters if different races have the exact same recordings. Oblivion was pretty good as a action game, but it did not achieve much beyond that.

 

[draeke]

Nuclear catapults are freakin stupid, end of story... Exactly who has the facilities and machinery capable of refining nuclear materials when every nuclear facility would have been a priority one target? Unless an extreme exercise in imagination, tactical hand-held nuke's don't fit harmoniously into the FO universe.

I'll agree with the sentiment that hand-held tactical nukes are ridiculous, there were quests in FO2 that involved fixing a working reactor and refining uranium ore. I don't remember anything like that in FO1 though.

 

[Plissken]

As Wolfric said, we've got quite a bag of tricks to work around various problems. But I think our biggest advantage here, as Todd said in the GI article, is that our number of NPCs are reduced, in the hundreds instead of the thousands. That gives us a whole lot of dialogue to play with, and I know I've been taking advantage of it in my quests.

When I played Oblivion the thing that annoyed me most was I felt like I was 1 of 5 people in the capital city. Damn, that place was EMPTY! It's the CAPITAL CITY! WTF!

 

[MrBumble]

When I played Oblivion the thing that annoyed me most was I felt like I was 1 of 5 people in the capital city. Damn, that place was EMPTY! It's the CAPITAL CITY! WTF!

Yeah, well that was always more or less the case with TES, but especially with Oblivious. Hell, even Ultima IX felt alive when compared to it !

 

[Bad_Karma]

Oblivion had a lot of NPC's...
But the NPC's seemed flat, because Beth tried to flesh out the background NPC's. They didn't give them important things to say (but okay, they were backgrounds NPC's), but they gave them a look so that you couldn't tell the difference between an important character and an unimportant one. So you were forced to speak to both.
That's as if your GM in a PnP descripes every single peasant you come along or every single citizien of a city. You go up to the first try to speak to him, and all you get is 'Ahh mudcrabs, horrible creatures [...]', you go up do the second (looking nearly identically as the first) and you get again the same lines. You've to repeat it 10 times to get some character (looking also very similar) who now gives you some important quest...
But after the second try you would have knocked your GM down, or have tapped yor forehead at him...
At least that's the feeling i got in Oblivion.

I think you gain nothing through interacting with such characters. It's like adding scences in movie wich are actually not giving any experience. - 'Oh look, the Terminator has an oil change' - 'Oh look, the predator is visiting the toilet' - 'Oh look this is the scence in wich Peter Parker is studying three hours physics' ...
If a character don't have anything important to say, some text over his head is simply enough.

And so it's stupid to cut important dialoges for sentences like 'I saw today a mutant-crab! Damn these are horrible creatures...'.
Look at Bloodlines, you got a lot of characters who were as flat, as a lot of Oblivions characters. But you don't remember them that much, because you hadn't to talk to them to get something. Because you could tell the difference between important/unimportant character.
In fact, you remember the important characters because they were done very well. But do you remember the appearance of the kid of the dead Emporer of Oblivion? - I don't remember him, simply because he looked and acted nearly the same as all the generic NPC's did....

 

[mortiz]

Even the important characters in Oblivion didn't have anything interesting to say, just the stock fantasy BS. In fact it was so bad that bullet-points would have been an improvement, at least we wouldn't have had to listen to those mind-numbingly annoying voices that were repeated all over the world ad-nausea.