Van Buren talk

[Briosafreak]

There are a few threads on the Interplay boards about how Fallout3 should be made, with views from Black Isle Studios developers.
In one of those threads, called "Fallout3: AI controlled CNPCs (yeah, hypothetically)" i spotted this interesting quote by Briareus, a BIS developer:
<blockquote>
Pathing falls outside of my responsibilities with game development, but I assure you that the programmer doing pathing is very knowledgable and had every concern I had already taken care of or planned to. </blockquote>

Or is it hypothetically doing, i wonder

 

[Daemon Spawn]

Yeah, they have been doing a lot of work on Fallout 3 for how many years now?

 

[Tzorcelan]

omg http://www.gamespy.com/e32003/xbox/fallout/little_hot_X.jpg
what the **** did they do

ok ok, i won't look at the rest of them

 

[Celestial]

Automatically check for locked doors/containers and lockpick them? Always walk around in formation? Pickpocketing townies?

IMHO: I think (yes, sometimes I do ) that NPC's should not do the above.

Auto lockpicking won't be that good if you play a stealth type character, cause you probably want to open'em by yourself to get the xp (and if you play as other one it would all be too easy).

Walking in formation. In battle, yes. But why the hell somebody would want to draw his attention by walking around the town with a private army?

As for pickpocketing townspeople. It's the same reason as with the auto lockpicking.

Of course there could be somekind of option like NPC Advanced Settings where you could disable or enable all the things.