If the "NPC sells the diamond to the player because he's hungry" example was emergent, then some questions:
* Why would the NPC sell the diamond to me, and not a merchant? Just like the RAI drives the NPCs to go to a logical place to get food, why wouldn't it also drive the NPCs to a logical place to sell something?
* Given that the greatest strength of emergent behaviour is a degree of unpredictability, what's the assurance that the NPC will reach the conclusion that "selling diamond to player = food," unless it's specifically weighted in his behaviours to do so 100% of the time (ie, no longe emergent, but scripted)
* If RAI dictates an NPC must spend money to survive, then it should also dictate the next step in the chain, earning money
as a day to day thing in order to survive.
* Shouldn't there be other emergent behaviour from this? NPC realises his shit is stolen. NPC reports theft. Guards emergently decide on a suspect, ie the new guy in town.
Emergent behaviour is a great idea, but I fail to see how this example represents a good use of it. Like VD said, it sounds as though it's explicitly scripted, and aside from RAI making that task easier for the devs, it doesn't really offer anything to the player.
Now, on topic of guilds:
As it was said earlier, why should every fucking preview tell you how to join the Dark Brotherhood? Why? Because there's only four guilds, and so making one of them a secret suddenly gets rid of 25% of your guild related content.
Nevermind the fact that discovering things like that, for instance Lycanthropy, and how to cure/mitigate the effects in Daggerfall, is a whole lot of fun. It also rewards players who make a choice according to
their character, ie I decide to kill an innocent, because I'm a fucking loony. And suddenly, the Dark Brotherhood shows up, to my complete surprise. Armed with the knowledge that "killing innocents = dark brotherhood", the player makes a metagaming choice.
The first two are a force for good, while thieves are less morally stringent, but still honourable.
Why does there have to be this "honour among thieves" horseshit? To me, the "honourable" aspects of theivery, like not murdering your victim, are not done out of some rigid moral code, but are motivated by the fact that a murder is taken far more seriously than a theft. It's all about self-interest, not honour.
And secondly, why should the fighters gulid and mages guild have any kind of "alignment", especially if they're (probably) going to accept "evil" characters anyway? If the mages guild was some kind of moral majority, then they certainly wouldn't be doing things like teaching destructive or illusion magic to just anybody, given the ethical responsibility of such power.
