Yes, I really like them as well. And I bet the game will be good too. I just worry about the game not selling good enough and with Microsoft’s current track record of shutting studios down, Obsidian being shut down as well.
AI is the new procedural generation, in that it will be touted as making the games more real and immersive but really only makes them boring and repetitive, thus stressing the importance of genuine creative handcrafting. I’m looking forward to smaller studios selling their games with a “no AI” pitch in a few years.
I mean, Larian is pretty much that. Instead of just doing Baldur’s Gate 4 although Hasbro fired all their contact people and probably would have urged Larian to rush a sequel, they are instead during an IP of their own next and refuse to go public and/or get bought.
That narrative LEGO thing sounds like a fancy way of saying that it’s a branching story with several outcomes like Detroit: Become Human, but maybe less linear? Which still sounds like a cool approach for a shooter.
They also flat out lied about what kind of game it is right until the release. They promised NPCs with their own lives and incredibly intricate dialogue choices that have ripple effects on the whole game. Nothing like that is in the game, even now.