Who you should blame for poor elements of Oblivion
Who you should blame for poor elements of Oblivion
Interview - posted by DarkUnderlord on Tue 18 April 2006, 07:30:27
Tags: The Elder Scrolls IV: OblivionRPG Vault have a Q&A article up where they "ask 15 team members at Bethsoft to tell us what they're most proud of within their contributions to the hit RPG". Here are a couple:
Guy Carver - Lead Programmer: I am most proud of the Havok physics. Brendan Anthony and I did the majority of the work on this system and I consider it one of the most fun parts of the game.
Ahn Hopgood - Programmer: I worked on all non-combat and non-pathfinding AI plus gameplay. I am most proud of when an NPC does something the designers do not expect because they decide to "think" for themselves. Drives designers crazy.
I agree. Those moments of sheer NPC stupididty sure are a laugh. Here's a particularly good comment though:
Dan Teitel - Programmer: I was responsible for programming the weather and climate systems in Oblivion, and for portions of the user interface. I think my greatest source of pride, in terms of my contribution to this game, were the times during the play-testing phase when I was able to find a really egregious bug that no one else had discovered yet. Knowing the user would never see what I just saw definitely made me feel like I'd earned that day's pay.
One of the strange aspects of being a programmer is that we often measure our success more by the absence of things that are broken than by the things that work. A poorly functioning system is often more obvious to the player than a properly functioning one. Our job is to make the environment operate in a way that feels so natural to the player that they forget they aren't in a real universe.There you go, Oblivion is great because of all the shitty things that aren't broken, not because of the half-arsed implementation of everything they actually did manage to squeeze in. I think you missed a few broken things though Dan, like that interface you were working on.
In other Oblivion news, the next pay-through-the-nose download called "The Orrery" is out. It's a whole 62 cents cheaper than horse armour AND it actually adds real content to the game!
Spotted at: Blues News
Guy Carver - Lead Programmer: I am most proud of the Havok physics. Brendan Anthony and I did the majority of the work on this system and I consider it one of the most fun parts of the game.
Ahn Hopgood - Programmer: I worked on all non-combat and non-pathfinding AI plus gameplay. I am most proud of when an NPC does something the designers do not expect because they decide to "think" for themselves. Drives designers crazy.
Dan Teitel - Programmer: I was responsible for programming the weather and climate systems in Oblivion, and for portions of the user interface. I think my greatest source of pride, in terms of my contribution to this game, were the times during the play-testing phase when I was able to find a really egregious bug that no one else had discovered yet. Knowing the user would never see what I just saw definitely made me feel like I'd earned that day's pay.
One of the strange aspects of being a programmer is that we often measure our success more by the absence of things that are broken than by the things that work. A poorly functioning system is often more obvious to the player than a properly functioning one. Our job is to make the environment operate in a way that feels so natural to the player that they forget they aren't in a real universe.
In other Oblivion news, the next pay-through-the-nose download called "The Orrery" is out. It's a whole 62 cents cheaper than horse armour AND it actually adds real content to the game!
Spotted at: Blues News
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