» Sat Aug 11, 2012 2:07 pm
NPC: Part of the Polygon budget.
Radiant Story: A new twist on the good old random text parser from days agone.
You can forget more NPC's until the next generation of consoles, assuming -they- have more than 512megs of ram (they =should=, but at this point, well.....). Or unless they develop for the PC and its resources first, then cut down to console resource pool size on the next one. Which doesn't seem very likely.
Radiant has some more lab time coming if they intend to depend on dynamic quest creation that fits into a specific culture/story framework. Remember that they have to craft each and every quest condition for the parser to assemble; if the tables are not done well, the result will royally svck falmer snot. If the assembling rules are not built around coherent story telling rules (and they do seem to be lacking there), then you get a weak mish-mash of a storyline. Add to that, they would have to generate NPC spoken scripting that could fit into such a random assembly system well for it to not stand out like a shaved troll in the square at Solitude. Plus, if they don't alter those rules for a new game, then the newbies might coo, but all the old sweats would be going 'You do know that we've seen this exact same thing before, don't you....?'. That tends to make for crankypants.....