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His dream is to immerse the player in a totally free and lively world, with NPC living their lifes...
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just to make a reference to Ultima VII.
Best coding of npc's i've seen to date, as far "life" keeps going.
Shops had open and closed times, npc's went home, slept, went shopping, or go out on a travel (had to wait a week for a merchant on a point), etc. You could even have sex with one of the NPC. And there were secondary plots very interesting (damn those goblins).
I've played the Arena series since day one , and the "not so funny detail" is that visually it has improved considerably in Morrowind, but has not in terms of the game itself, specially on the points above. It actually went backwards in Morrowind. In Daggerfall shops closed at night, people went home. In Morrowind npc's pretty much stand around all the time, and have the exact same lines of dialog, doing the same thing. Even U7 is better than that. Game lacks immersion on those key points. Even the secondary missons and plots aren't that great. Good, but not great. And given it's background, i honestly expected better.
So if Oblivion (which i'm waiting) doesn't excel in simple (and it is , simple) NPC interaction and behaviour (other points could be given), and even more now, from what i've experienced, players demand quality not only in graphics, it wont be as a hit as it's expect it to be. Pretty only goes so far.
PS: don't put Thief and SS2 in the same sentence, it's insulting
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