Who needs to make substance any more?
True to a degree, but I don't think you lose the more casual gamer by including a bit of depth and substance, as long as you focus your marketing on them.
Why aren't you in the business any more, for example?
Basically because it got really fucking depressing to have so little faith shown in my ideas, and having no way to block the imposition of bad ideas from higher up. Basically I was (and still am) of the opinion that you have to make a game that works for you, and as soon as you try to cater for an audience, then everybody loses. My "bosses" thought differently, and that's pretty much an irreconcilable difference.
I thought about trying to make a living as an indie until reality set in, so now I'm doing my best to get a steady job, and good pay, so one day I can be a hobbyist developer.
True, but I am the type of person who would rather play a game that tries something new with AI than strip the system down to its bare essentials to avoid emergent "accidents" from blowing the sense of immersion. Let's pretend that the devs stripped a lot of the ancillary decision-making routines from the AI, so encounters were more focused and less was left to chance. Would that make it a better experience? What if you couldn't break into a person's home after hours, simply because the AI wasn't up to snuff and they didn't want players to see through the facade?
That's a good point, and one that's been ticking over in the back of my mind, because I'm certainly not a fan of developers who cut features as a means to get rid of problems rather than addressing them at the source. I'm also a huge proponent of innovation across the board.
The question is whether or not an ambitious design that falls short* of the mark should be considered "the best" and worth of perfect and near perfect scores, or whether it should be hailed as a great promise for the future that isn't here yet.
As I see it, it's not even clearly that. The Sims 2 employs a near identical system (in terms of the theory behind it) but I can't really compare the two without first hand Oblivion experience.
Again, I'm not rushing to the defense of a game I have yet to play. I'm merely stating the other viewpoint that every game has its flaws, though there are some titles that possess strong qualities that more than make up for their shortcomings.
Yep, and in this case, I'm hoping the shortcomings are exaggerated. AI mistakes can really detract from my enjoyment. FEAR for instance, could be said to be far more complex than Half-Life or Far Cry in terms of what the AI was capable of, but the percentage of AI fuckups was too high for me ignore.
For instance, I'd wince whenever I'd hear "fire in the hole", since half the time that meant some idiot was about to blow himself and/or his squadmates up.
And it was great that the AI would hurdle low walls/railings, but a lot of the time it did so at completely inappropriate moments. I lost count of the number of times a soldier would hurdle over the bit of cover I was hiding behind, giving me free, undefended fire against a target at point blank range. It didn't help that these were supposedly cloned super soldiers, either.
