Phew - I really thought I wouldn't find a newsbit today :-). But now there's Shacknews, and they saved me with a Morrowind Q&A with Todd Howard, talking about the present and the future of the TES games. Here's a bit:
Jason: There's also stuff…just walking through the town, it seems like, for the most part, and there are exceptions, but for the most part, NPCs don't really have their own schedules. Unless you do something to tell them otherwise, they will pretty much always be in the same place. Was that ever considered, or…?
Todd: It was…we actually built our editor to handle that. So in our editor we can tell guys, "you're here during this time and you go here and you do this." And we did that in our initial town demo, and the sheer amount of time it took to make that look good was a really long time, and we weren't even in the level of it mattering yet. Having somebody tell you, "oh Fred's in the tavern now, he's not in the mine anymore." We sort of decided like, "okay we just did seven people, it's not really working out…we have 3000 more to do, maybe it would be better if we just let them stay there." We sort of felt like it doesn't help or hinder the game if they don't or if they had…we tried to focus our time on other things. |