FuzzyFuzzle: Heavens beast is a 3rd person act/adv game that to this day is in my top 5 most wanted games list, if not the NO#1. And I have seen or played all the games that count coming in the next year and a half. I mentioned it months ago,Abe babe was pretty interested in my discription at the time. It's a vast game in the mold of all the best 3rd person act/adv games. Characters will have up to 25.000 polys, a very high count. Great level or set design, it really would take me hours to type out all my experiences on the game and all my conversations with the dev team on all there concepts for the game.Fuzzy just keep it mind and in summer to early Fall you will certantly hear about it.It is by far above all we have seen to date. When I get some more info from the dev team and I will, I have a couple old friends working on sets for them, I'll spill what I can here then.Oh by the way the game is an XBOX XXXXCLUSIVE.
As for A.I. the machine has unsurpassed ability. To go into detail would be about 2 days worth of typing. So I'll get into one small discription of what you can expect with the A.I. of XBOX. Mind you A.I. can be used to many different advantages depending on the game.As you mentioned creature raising/training, well Project EGO is a perfect example of this.
AI has become a major factor in games today, and the most impressive has got to be Project Ego's. All villagers will respond to your character in a different way depending on how you look, how famous you are, how poor you are, what you're wearing, and if you're a good or bad character. Let's say you stride into village wearing brilliant armor, well groomed hair, and had just returned from a battle victorious; chances are they will look up to you, even bow at your presence, and treat you with respect. On the other hand, if you trample into town a weak, rag-wearing, un-groomed individual, chances are they will look away from you, and maybe even ignore you when try to talk to them. So this also shows, that your outcome as a character will affect everywhere you go.
Another factor that needs to be reviewed to increase realism is time. Time meaning, everything should keep moving along its schedule throughout the game. Such as people living their daily lives with out refrain and day/night transitions should be illustrated through contrasts of the sky. Everything must keep moving in time, to make the environment extremely believable. When you're in one village, another should continue to change, continuously in random ways. Say you enter a village and speak to a boy who had just turned 5 years old, when you return 20 years later, (in-game) that boy would have already become a married adult with seven children. Who knows?
XBOX has got A.I. in the bag.
Joe the Intern: Where ever you heard that Joe is absoulutly wrong, don't bother with that place anymore. Oddworld themselves have gone to XBOX just for the ease of creation, along with many other reasons of course. It is by far the easiest machine to develope for. And with this in mind remember that the developers out there know this and with the XBOX user base growing and growing into 2002 the dev's will jump aboard, which means more tittles to choose from and with the ease of developement on the XBOX they can create more in depth games with high level of detail instead of wasting time on more difficult and time consuming tasks. Time can be spent better on depth of gameplay, sets of great vastness and detail, longevity in games too, more bang for your buck. So Joe the Intern thanks for stopping by and hope to hear from you again. Keep asking and also give all the news you come by on XBOX here as well in our little corner of XBOX heaven away from all the noise and chatter of negativity.
I'll get some news from TGS as well and post here, so stay tooned.
A place "only" for XBOX and Munch lovers
. 
