So rather than scrapping the system and starting over with a system that has far less promise and is entirely predecided, they should have worked on improving it. They didn't continue that line of development though, they dropped it.
I don't think it makes towns much noisier, not in a good way anyhow. I am not sure there is a nice way to described their implementation where NPCs regularly interrupt me from being able to listen to a conversation that is going on in the background (and I can understand those being predecided for important places, like when you first visit a Jarl or part of a quest). Then the sort of pvssyr they decided upon...it's immensely problematic and I am at a loss as to why they'd pick certain things, like different VAs all being recorded saying the exact same thing.
Beyond people saying "hi" when you run up to them or bothering you for something important, I don't see what's to be gained here. It's not like there's anything complicated here and I think the game would have been far, far better served by simply really working on refining the Oblivion system rather than dropping it.
And that's the fundamental problem here. They basically scrapped all the progress they made with Oblivion rather than improving upon it.
They may have opted for the scripted conversations because they couldn't improve the system as much as they thought it needed to be or they just didn't have time and went for something easier to implement. That doesn't mean the technique isn't still there in their bag of tricks waiting to be refined and reintroduced. They wouldn't have put it into Oblivion unless they thought it was worth pursuing.
And I agree, the noise isn't
good. It's just noise. But I think that's one of the reasons why they put it in. Different VA say the same thing because it's easier to tell two people to say the same thing than to write two different things. Not a lot easier, but devs cut corners all over the place. Their writers may have been too busy working on quest dialogue to write hundreds of additional lines of idle pvssyr.
They tried something, it didn't work. Odds are the next ES will be some sort of compromise between the two, the way the level scaling is a compromise between Morrowind and Oblivion.
At some point product performance should be considered, no matter how innovative certain parts of the product might be. The Titanic had that problem. However, if the Titanic had been rushed out in the shape Skyrim was brought to market, it would've sunk at the dock where it was launched. With the Titanic, a good thing, with Skyrim, not so much.
Obviously. Calling people names is still irrelevant. By all means, make objective statements about the design, or voice subjective opinions about the game--you can even speculate about the developer's intentions; but leave subjective opinions about their character out of it. It's irrelevant and petty.
» Fri Jun 08, 2012 5:32 pm 
