Skyrim - On Skyrim's NPC and On Gaming's Old School and Legend

Two more newsbits for this game has surfaced. The first one is Positech's Cliff "Cliffski"Harris who looks at the NPCs in Skyrim, the second one is an editorial at GamaSutra who longs for how the TES game used to be in the 1980s and 1990's and thinks that Skyrim brings some of that old school feeling back.

As usual, some excerpts, beginning with Cliff "Cliffski" Harris from Positech:

It’s voice acting isn’t it? Lets be honest. We cannot afford to have 500 different lines fo dialog for that character, because the assumption is that all games need to be ‘fully voiced’. This is CRIPPLING to AI. I bet the AI coders on skyrim grind their teeth like maniacs, knowing that the simplest and cheapest text adventures can have twenty times more immersive character interaction that the trillion dollar AAA hit game skyrim.

Second and last, we end with the opinion piece from Gamasutra:

More than one of my gamer friends has told me about entirely inventing imagined endings for games they could tell others about, just to propagate legends and make others believe they'd achieved something no one else had. The enormously complex culture of myths and secrets that was part of the experience of being a gamer when we were young just doesn't exist anymore. But with Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, gamers seem to be getting a little of that cult storytelling back. Indeed, I've a hunch that therein lies much of the game's appeal: Skyrim certainly isn't successful because of its degree of polish, its cohesion or even its originality (I see it having none of the above in notable quantity).