Well I've implemented my main idea for getting more people over to the forums. Now the Oblivion, Quake and DOOM sites have the 6 most recently active topics shown in their contents. I am planning to add the feature to the Xbox 360 site as well, I'm sure Wester will want it up for the Half-Life site too.
At the moment this is done with JavaScript, I am however planning on adding an RSS feed up at some point to the forums, and then pulling the data from that using PHP to get it handled server-side to help compatibility with clients with non-JavaScript enabled browsers.
It appears to be having the desired effect with 21 guests now looking over the boards.