By “in its entirety” I mean as it was promoted and originally demoed. The release version is vastly different to the pre-release demos (some are linked in the article)
Yes, I wrote the article. I wouldn't say the system in the release version is vastly different to the pre-release demo (there was only one to my knowledge, the E3 2005 one), as that just demonstrates a tightly scripted sequence of events, which one of the developers was open about even before Oblivion was released. Some things about the system definitely changed (such as disallowing NPCs to pickpocket from the player), but I don't think we have any evidence of whole systems or major behaviors that were actually implemented at some point and cut before release.
That said, I’m pretty sure that they said the e3 demo wasn’t scripted (edit: the quote in your article confirms it, too).
We were expecting, at the time, a game like in the demos. But as you stated, it’s probably more content related, in that they didn’t actually schedule much (or any) complex combinations of those packaged behaviours or npc2npc interactions as shown in the demos - leaving only simple instances of the packages you described. Maybe the dependency chain of goals has some concrete limit, for example.
It’s mostly just “go here”, “find food”, “eat food”, “sleep” (which I suppose emulates life, but isn’t what we were expecting).
Although I guess that the amount/complexity of wrangling the behaviours of 1000 (???) npcs to stop the game being unplayable due to goals being destroyed is why it’s just so passive in its release form.
There's another quote which explains what they meant by "it's not scripted": it's not using their (text-based) scripting language, but the entire sequence is more or less 100% deterministic, using AI packages to control the behavior:
> The reason it’s AI and not scripting is because it uses goals and rules to determine how something is going to be accomplished.
> In the sense that it’s a sequence of events that happen in a particular order, you might consider it scripted, but the way you set up those events, and how the actors accomplish them, is not scripted.
I was referring to you saying above that the e3 demo was “tightly scripted”. I never suggested it was, just that it was much more complex than what was released.
I think more likely scenario is that in QA testing there was so many edge cases that between demo and release they disabled a lot of it; limited amount of power of consoles might've also been a factor
