Emily,
Well, you handled the voiceover stuff very diplomatically...for which I'm grateful! I also thought you were diplomatic re: some of the inventory puzzles (such as turning on the machine) and the desert. But hey, I think we agreed on all the problems overall.
Eriq,
KQV was already well underway when I first got to Sierra, so I missed a lot of what went on at the beginning. I do think it was the first game to require outside artists; if I remember correctly, a lot of the art was from Korea (we had some superb artists, but not enough to turn out all of THAT great work).
One thing that Emily touched on very briefly that I'd like to expand on was Cedric's intended function. The way I heard it, Cedric was originally intended to be a sort of in-game hint system: he'd follow Graham throughout the game, would know exactly where Graham was in solving puzzles, and be able to give gentle direction.
But memory kept cropping up as a problem. We were always testing games on minimal configurations and ensuring that the game was playable (not necessarily ENJOYABLY sometimes, but at least playable from start to finish). The result was that Cedric was constantly "breaking" rooms. That's why Cedric keeps saying, "I'll stay out here" or so on -- we had to keep him out of rooms or areas that demanded more memory. As more effects were loaded into rooms, there got to be fewer and fewer places where Cedric could be safely used.
That begs the question of why Cedric as hint-giver was eventually deemed lower priority than other things that might've been preferable, from a design standpoint, to omit (like ambient animations). I don't know the answer to that, but I have a suspicion: hintbook sales.
--Josh
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