Fucking hell. I wonder just how many fucking Yes Men Bethesda employs. Quite a lot, judging from those responses:
Guy Carver said:
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.
Except they forgot to actually integrate most of it into actual gameplay elements, which makes it little more than a distraction.
Ahn Hapgood said:
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.
Emergent behaviour good.
Stupid behaviour bad.
Dan Teitel said:
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.
This is actually one of the smartest things I've heard an Oblivion developer say. When one of your primary goals is to create an "immersive fantasy world", then steps must be taken to avoid shitting on the player's suspension of disbelief. Of course it also should be appended with a comment to the tune of "Of course, there is a balance to be struck between making sure everything works properly, and making sure that systems offer more than just the bare minimum functionality, because it's enitrely possible to have a game that works perfectly, but just isn't interesting or fun.
Erik Deitrick said:
I worked on interface and mini-games, and I'm very happy with how the lock picking turned out. It's fun right out of the box, and even after 200 hours of playing, even though I'm very good at it, I still have to pay attention or I start breaking picks. Plus a lock pick in German is a "dietrich".
#ifdef _XBOX
// Nice work Erik, you implemented a slick and workable interface to work with a limited control scheme.
#endif
#ifdef _WIN32
// Orders from above be damned. That's no excuse to create an interface that fails to utilise the strengths of a mouse driven interface and customisable keyboard interface. It's like the many faceted horrors of Sega PC ports in the late '90s were championed into Oblivion's PC version.
#endif
Happy with lockpicking? Don't be happy about how it turned out, learn your fucking lesson and do better next time.
Orin Tresnjak said:
I joined the company very late in the development of Oblivion, just after E3; I did odd jobs at first, and soon ended up taking over the distant level of detail system - that's the system that allows us to store and render a simplified version of the world out to incredible distances. So that's definitely what I'm most proud of - although it's a fairly simple mechanism, it really adds a sense of scale to the game and contributes to its distinctive look. There's just something beautiful about seeing Bruma clinging to the mountainside from miles away, or seeing the spire of the Imperial City from the hills near Chorrol.
Yes, congratulations on the draw distance. Now it's time to work on interpolation and concepts such as a LOD curve rather than a binary high/low, because that distinctive look is <------2005's detail------>|<-------1995's detail------->.
Bruce Nesmith said:
I was responsible for a lot of the game balance in Oblivion, both for monsters and for the economy. In virtually every game in every genre, game balance is considered to be one of the trickiest things to do well. I succeeded beyond my hopes and expectations, particularly for a game of the enormous scope and complexity of Oblivion.
When even the ESF picks up on how horrible the systems involved in "balancing" monsters and "economy" to the player are, be afraid. Let's hope he sets his hopes and expectations higher for the next game.
Emil Pagliarulo said:
I was primarily responsible for the Dark Brotherhood and Arena, had a lot of input in determining Oblivion's stealth system, was the primary designer for the lock picking mini-game, and wrote most of the combat dialogue. I guess for me, my greatest personal achievement has to be the Dark Brotherhood quest line.
Well, I'd say the Dark Brotherhood quest line seems to be the most highly regarded aspect of Oblivion, so he's on to a winner there. But lockpicking? The minigame where character skill has seemingly zero bearing on success, and broken picks only come through carelessness? The one that freezes time while you toy with the interface taking away any form of external pressure or tension? It's an utter failure within the context of an RPG, and it's not really "fun" either.
Karl Kuhlmann said:
My primary responsibility was the main storyline. Most of the things that I'm proud of are not due to my own personal efforts, but of the efforts of many people on the team coming together to make something actually work. The fact that we could actually pull off the Battle of Bruma, with close to 30 NPCs and creatures slugging it out in a completely unscripted real-time battle... I'm still amazed at that. When I originally put it together, I kept waiting for someone to tell me, "Kurt, sorry, but you're going to have to scale it back. Are you crazy? We can't put that many actors on the screen at once." That never happened, and we ended up with the Battle of Bruma in all its crazy glory.
I can't help but think that maybe it
should have been scaled back. I only bothered to get help from two other towns and that battle slowed my PC from it's usual 25-30 FPS for outdoors to about 2-5 FPS. And from the occasional stuttery glimpses I got of the happenings were basically of the AI doing the same stupid shit it does in most combat encounters, but with 20 people doing it all at once. It's also hardly an impressive accomplishment given that even over a dozen years ago Doom and it's clones were pushing around "completely unscripted real-time battles", and "30 NPCs and creatures slugging it out in a completely unscripted real-time battle" is basically a description of every fucking RTS since Dune II.
Mark Nelson said:
Personally, I'm most proud of the conversation system in Oblivion. I really wanted the world to seem like it is populated by living, breathing people - like an MMO without the annoying people. Any time I hear a good conversation in the streets or in a tavern, I feel like we've gotten a little closer to that vision.
From my limited experience, most MMO's do a better job of simulating "living, breathing" NPCs, and even a verisimilitudinous world in general. Ironically, the only MMO players Oblivion successfully emulates are the "annoying people", without the saving grace of /ignore.
Erik J. Caponi said:
I looked through each of our cities and sought out ways to make the residents seem alive and bustling. I tried to reinforce the character of each NPC with actions that they would spend their days doing. The few lines of dialogue that even the background NPCs had still contained unique character and I did my best to work with that. A few of my favorites are Astia Inventius in Anvil who spends her days on the docks painting, the Arena addict in the Imperial City who always manages to not be watching a fight when his wife comes looking for him, and the hunter in Chorrol who spends his days practicing because, well, he's just not very good.
Wow, RAI schedules sound like scripting machinima from The Movies. Entirely uninteresting and dull for all but the creator. I've noticed far more instances of utterly baffling behaviour than any that uniquely characterises an NPC. Mind you I'm not particularly impressed by the one dimensional nature of
a painter, who fucking spends her time painting! Who'd have thought!?!
Joel Burgess said:
My title means that I had a hand in many of the 200-plus dungeons scattered across Cyrodiil. Most of the ones I worked on are random romps without quests attached. This gave me a lot of freedom to create interest through atmosphere and gameplay. I'm proud of several of these, but I won't mention them specifically here; half the fun is stumbling across these in the wilderness.
Atmosphere? Maybe. Occasionally those cookie cut prefab blocks were altered enough to be visually interesting, but gameplay? There are basically three dungeons. Marauder/Bandit, Necromancer/Conjurer, and Monster/Daedra/Undead. Even quest dungeons with a great deal of attention paid to creating a fairly unique architecture (such as Vaermina's quest) don't really play any differently to every other fucking dungeon.
Michael Ryan said:
I designed the dungeons for the main quest and the Mage's Guild, along with several dozen random dungeons scattered throughout the landscape. As proud as I am of my dungeon work, however, I think I'm most proud of the collaborative work I did with some of the designers to get the Highwaymen and especially the Orc Adventurers into the game. The ghost pirate cave also. I'm definitely pleased with my ghost pirate cave.
Orc Adventurers? The corpses that are basically just containers? And the highwaymen that run up to you and ask for 100 septims regardless of whether you're a ten foot tall daedric equipped veteran of a dozen trips to the Planes or just some lowly prison escapee? I'll reserve judgement on the ghost pirates, but I don't expect much if he's proud of that other shit.
Jonah Lobe said:
It was immediately apparent that, although Bethesda Softworks has grown considerably in the last few years, it's still very much a cohesive team where imagination and creativity are encouraged (although technical considerations can, from time to time, temper <s>overly</s> even mildly ambitious ideas).
Fixed.
Matt Ouzounian said:
As for what stands out most in my mind, it would have to be the development team here at Bethesda. I've yet to meet everyone properly, but even in the depths of crunch time, the team was friendly - or at the very least cordial - and receptive.
Well, that they may be, but fuck me, they need to stop believing the hype, and get some fucking perspective. Self-criticism is a very important thing. For instance, taking each comment and saying something bitter quite clearly shows me up as the cunt that I am. But since I recognise that fault, I can work on improving. The fact that basically every single thing that each of the developers is proud of is deeply flawed or at best just plain average is worrying. But then again, if you're onto something that sells as well as Oblivion has and will, then who needs to do something well?
Nuff said 
:shock: :D :twisted:
