This from a quote by Dresslock, who wrote the Oblivion article in PC Gamer after playing the game for 8 hours:
Quote from
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk ... 11&page=10
Originally Posted by Dhruin
Did you get much of a feel for the quality of dialogue and some of the NPC personalities, Desslock? I admit I'm not the biggest fan of Morrowind but I don't remember a single NPC from the game.
Answer
I think this is, by far, the biggest change from Morrowind to Oblivion -- in Morrowind there are essentially no personalities, and no memorable characters (other than maybe Vivec, and he doesn't do much, and a few others associated with quests).
In Oblivion there's a few huge changes:
- the AI gives chararacters effectively "personalities", derived from their inclinations. It's just kind of cool to meet, for instance, a ranger in the wood, and see him hanging out at home, practising (and getting better) at marksmanship, making dinner, attacking creatures that come nearby, going to visit a neighbour - my column in the next PCG is largely on this topic;
- even aside from the dynamic AI behaviour, there's a lot of stuff semi-scripted in -- for instance, NPCs will run into each other and have very lengthy, meaningful conversations -- it's not just background noise stuff like they did (to decent effect) in the Gothic series -- for instance, in the assassin's guild, you could overhear one NPC telling another about his last job and the things that went wrong. I encountered a lot of those, and the best thing about them was, I didn't hear a lot (any?) redundancy -- I think there's essentially a pool of conversations for major characters that can pop up, as well as conversations that specifically relate to events that have occurred in the game, which seems really cool. There seems to be a LOT of this stuff.
