Well sure, but "actual tease" isn't quite accurate. Certainly got everybody hyped and was a lot of fun to follow, but that doesn't change its legitimacy. :P

It's certainly changed since Oblivion. They talked more about the Radiant Quest system, which brings the player to random dungeons for smaller fetch quests.

2299 was not an actual tease. It was all based on a script written months earlier by an individual that wanted to force Bethesda's hand and piss people off. It is completely unrelated.

It says in the docs that the player character was alive prior to the war, and wakes up in a cryo-chamber, which makes the family history make more sense.

You know, I hated the One's design at first, but it's starting to grow on me. I'm a Playstation/PC guy personally, but I like how it's a box, but shouts to the world that it doesn't give a flying shit that it's just a box. It's... Confident, I suppose. After all, the external appearance really doesn't matter.

I wouldn't, not unless it came with 40 live crows to do my bidding.

I certainly have heard of SpeedTree, but wasn't aware of how wide-reaching its featureset was.

I highly doubt that the trees themselves are modeled procedurally. Perhaps texture randomization, different color palettes and the like for each planet, but I highly doub tthe engine crafts unique trees every time. Maybe it morphs the models in by bending the trunks in random directions or something, but creating a…

It seems you can. It wouldn't make sense to be only able to land in one place on the planet, for example. I remember the post-VGX interview stated that even a mountain miles in the distance would be climbable. By that alone, I would imagine that the planets would be fully-realized rather than small areas.

Indeed, it was very impressive. Kind of amusing how unimpressive the game as a whole was in comparison.

Well, an interview question mentioned a galactic map, so I would guess that might play a part in faster travel across the galaxy. We also saw the ship jump to (presumably) light speed at the end of the first trailer

It essentially means that no world, no star system, etc. is created by the developers themselves. Instead, they have created a set of assets (trees, rocks, creatures, etc.) and programmed into their engine a list of parameters (a desert planet should have few trees and little water, for example) that together create…

Plus, so many of the big studios focus on "Ohmehgawd graphics" and "Ohmehgawd marketing", which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it tends to be where a lot of the money goes.

Indeed. I was a bit skeptical of it from the beginning, but it sure was fun to follow along.

No, it was a countdown, various Morse code messages, then plenty of text messages that required different ciphers. They pieced together the beginnings of a story, you can read about the insanely elaborate hoax here.

If I had to wager a guess, I would assume it uses music or voices from the original game (or any other type of resource), and as per Bethesda's terms, you cannot distribute them for use in other games, including their own.

I think it'll still get better. The 360 was Power-PC, which isn't exactly an unknown platform like the Cell.

Sure, but so did plenty of the early titles of the last generation, but the graphics of games on both consoles increased as time went by. Developers will learn how to better take advantage of the hardware at hand over time.