Bethsoft has announced their new game Oblivion in their site and there is also a news column in Gamespy.
This is interested for several reasons. Bethesda claims to have skipped a game cycle and will now develop in paralel to PS3 and XBox2 as well as the PC platform. Their own software is so generic they claim it can be easly adapted to all of these platforms with a minimum effort. I have some doubts however they can do this so easly for the PS3 architecture.
Another interesting fact is the way the AI is planed. Here’s a bit of the gamespy article:
“In fact, one of the interesting problems that the team has had to face came about precisely because the AI is so good. According to Howard, the AI has caused guards to decide to eat and go hunting deer, only to get themselves arrested for attacking something. When they fight back against the arresting guard, the other guards see a fight and try to join in. In not too much time, every guard in the town was involved in the scuffle, which left the rest of the town open to thievery by other NPCs, resulting in empty stores. Much of the team’s current effort is going into putting sensible governors on the AI’s behavior to avoid situations like empty stores that would result in situations that wouldn’t be fun for the player.”
This way of dealing with AI will complicate things a lot for quest designers who will be forced to become more technical and avoid the scripting aproach in favor of dealing with complex AI entities. In short giving orders to AIs like stand there and wait for the Player wont work anymore, because AIs have their own agenda.
One last interesting info is the use a paralax mapping instead of displacement. This is claimed to be more friendly to consoles and hardware in general.
