3/22/06 - The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (PC, X360)

[Kitsune]

I've played a few hours so far, and it hasn't yet 'clicked' on me like Morrowind did instantly.  Mostly because my 6800gt card is a little on the stuttery side for the game, jerky framerates screw with my sense of immersion.  But a shiny new 7900gt with its very pretty price/performance ratio should be showing up on my doorstep tomorrow, and that'll hopefully smooth everything out.  Another thing is that Morrowind's weird setting really helped make it memorable with the freaky monsters and all, even if I was sick of brown after the first week.

That aside, Oblivion seems to be the superior game in most every regard.  The loss of some of the weapons and spells is regrettable but can be coped with.  The 'minigame' mechanics of speechcraft, lockpicking, and haggling are all fairly entertaining.  The NPCs are tremendously superior; I went to a mage's guild to finish a quest and was confused upon finding the main room empty, turns out the NPCs had retired to their rooms and were eating or sleeping.  Having everyone standing around like mannequins in Morrowind rather sucked, it was one of my major gripes with the game.

Magic's integration and the quick selection feature for weapon and spells makes life much easier.  Combat is better, but at low levels I haven't gotten any taste for the ripe fruit of the combat options that come from the higher skills.  I hunger for the fruit.

I really don't like the UI.  Morrowind's UI kinda sucked too, I hated going through the inventory to find items, but having everything tucked away in submenus makes it feel like wading through syrup to accomplish any task.

I like the voice acting.  Morrowind had me wanting to kill everyone in sight.  Especially the dunmer with their clogged-drain voices and the... I think it was the wood elves who had those squeaky obnoxious voices.  After hearing the same sentence in the same voice coming from the hundredth person in one town, I was ready to be an assassin for free.

I have yet to run across much in the way of religion.  Daggerfall had a big pile of religious groups that one could join, alongside the guilds, and I'm a little sad that Oblivion doesn't follow suit.  Ark'ay was my god of choice, by the way.

The graphics are mostly scrumptious, of course.  There is a very obvious popping when outdoors, it's hard to miss an entire tree just materializing in front of you, and the game is utterly merciless on graphics cards.  Those two qualifiers aside, however, the game looks fantastic.  When indoors you can't see far enough for the draw distance to annoy and the framerate smooths out, so it turns into pure joy.  (And even though the landscape does have a bad habit of abruptly appearing when you're moving, you can still see grand detail far away.  People bitch about not seeing the grass half a mile away while ignoring the fact that you can still see trees and buildings at that distance, which you never could in Morrowind.)

[Calantus]

So I see the leveling system is the same as Morrowind. I was hoping they'd fix that so min/max junkies like me don't have to max END asap and get max multipliers every level up. Looks like I'll be putting all my majors into skills I'll never use in the natural course of the game again so I can control when I level. /sigh

Still a must get for me.

[El Gallo]

Uh, is it possible to name your savegames?

I'm playing on my PC and I name my saves through the console.  ~ for the console, and just type:  save <whatever>

Really, you do.

[Miasma]

I used Signe's /save trick at the very end of the tutorial to make a file named CharStart.  Since you can edit your race, sign and class right before leaving you could use that saved game to skip the tutorial each time you wanted to make a new character.

[jpark]

The comments excite me.  Right after I clear reading another gig of pdfs for work I might try this game 

Hmm...if they added a multiplayer option they might call this a MMORPG - DDO got away with it  :-D

[Ironwood]

I still think the combat is pretty shitty.

You don't like food any more.

:)

Many Giggles.

[Ironwood]

Ok, I have it.  And it runs nice and sweet at work on my laptop.  ON MY LAPTOP.

I cannot wait 9 hours to get this thing home to my Gigawatt gaming rig.

Does anyone know how to feign a heart attack or summat ?

[Rodent]

Ok, I have it.  And it runs nice and sweet at work on my laptop.  ON MY LAPTOP.

I cannot wait 9 hours to get this thing home to my Gigawatt gaming rig.

Does anyone know how to feign a heart attack or summat ?

Have a fried bounty, clutch your chest and scream "This be the big one McGregor!".

Finally have the game, and loving it. Like 50-75% of everyone who plays it, I made a sneaky character first.

[Murgos]

Tips for older cards:

Turn off AA and instead turn up resolution.

set bDoSpecularPass = 0 in "My Documents\My Games\Oblivion\Oblivion.ini" (turns off shiney hair and other stuff, hardly noticable, big increase in frame rates on older cards like my 9800SE).

If your still having problems turn off "Draw Distant Objects" in the game->options->video menu.

The above game me a really nice improvement in gameplay in and around the oblivion gates (and everywhere else too) which had previously brought my machine to it's knees.  I might turn draw distant objects back on when I am not around an Oblivion gate or in Oblivion itself as it's not that big a hit uinder normal play.

[Riggswolfe]

Man this game is grabbing me so much more than Morrowind did. I'm totally distracted by the many non-main quests right now and am busily running all over trying to finish as many as I can while exploring the landscape. I'm starting to see Oblivion gates all over the place but have yet to enter one that wasn't part of the main storyline.

So far I really like the dungeons in this one. They're fun, and sometimes have beautiful interiors. Especially the old ruins by that long-dead elf race.

[Glazius]

I let the guy at EB talk me into a strategy guide. 20 seems to be the maximum on levels for fixed-level opposition, in most cases things scale off your level. Even if you play completely to your racial strengths and class focuses, you'd start out with something like 45/45/45/45/40/35/35, which would coast to a stop around level 40. If you made a character whose class skills had no racial bonuses and were all from a sphere outside the alleged class focus, you could get to about 50 but it'd be a terribly long and crushing grind.

Current character is a Nord shieldmaiden born under the Lady. Combat focus, blade, blunt, block, heavy armor, restoration, alchemy, mysticism. I wish I could have changed her eye color to a nice ice-blue, but I couldn't find the setting for that.

It really doesn't make much sense that using skills that aren't your class skills gets your attributes up faster (since your class skills tend to be higher, and increase all at once if you use them regularly), but if you're aware of that and deliberately leave one "out" you can cash in liek whoa, especially since skills in your general metier supposedly have a learning bonus. I dropped hand-to-hand to build my strength and armorer to crank my endurance. (Now to go punch some wolves in the face.)

AMD2.2 GHz dual-core, ATI X800 all-in-wonder (PCIe) so I can plug my Playstation into my PC. The game auto-detected "high quality" and I've left it at that. Didn't really notice much choppiness or slowdown outside, even when I went third-person, swimming, or both. There is a little gripe I have with draw distance, in that while the distant landscape renders nice there's some pop-in on manmade structures.

The speechcraft minigame is fun and a bit of a puzzler, and gets easier with the rank 25 perk. The lockpick one can be a real bear, but it's a nice conversion of the process into something where your input makes sense.

Models seem to work on the EQ2 principle - the same armor looks the same on everyone. From a graphics perspective it seems to make sense, but as a result everything has a rather pasted-on (yey) look. The faces are really rather disconcerting. The graphics engine goes for photorealism but doesn't sync the mouth to the words very well at all, to the extent that it looks like the faces are a bad job of Flash animation, with static photos sliding around.

I'll have to tweak my graphics settings a little more and see if this whole disturbing faces thing is just an artefact of the animation settings or what.

--GF

[Bunk]

I'm assuming that the monsters in the Oblivion planes must scale. It seems unlikely you would have run in to all the Fire Antronachs and Daedra Caitiffs I found if you entered one at 2nd level.

Do check your settings Glazius, lip synch hasn't been an issue at all for me running the game on medium settings.

[Sky]

Daggerfall had a big pile of religious groups that one could join

Bring back the naked slave girls!

Game is playing great on my machine (Barton 3000+, 1GB PC3200, 9800pro 256MB), though not at maxed settings (but pretty close). I have shadows set low, no AA, still looks great at 1280x720, better than just about everything I've been playing but BF2, maybe (and better in most respects than BF2). Having just played a bit of Mafia...I wish they would use the faces from that game, there had never been any better implementation of heads than in Mafia.

Character creation is wonky as all hell. The game rocks. Glad I didn't drop a couple hundred on a new gpu, don't really need to.

I don't minmax, I roleplay :)

[Sauced]

Thank God its the weekend - this 2-3 hours a night shit is driving me crazy!

One of the things that is most distracting to me is the quests - where as they were there in Morrowind, you often had to go out of your way to decipher the "latest rumors".  Now that it clues you in via the journal, I find that I can't stop doing them.  I need to go exploring a bit, maybe find a dungeon to crawl around in, but the tight linear quest scripting scares me a bit.  I've had a few experiences all ready where I had to reload an old save because I didn't follow the quest line a>b>c, because c seemed so obvious that I just did that first - causing the quest to lock up as b never made it into the quest journal.  Sorry if that sounds confusing, trying to avoid specific examples just in case.

[Lantyssa]

If you hit New Game again, do they force you to go through the whole tutorial level again? It's a nice area, but it'd get old fast.

You do, but a friend recommends making a character and getting them to the end of the tutoral.  Make a save there and since you can redo everything use that as a load point for new characters.  He found this nifty character loader so that you only see save games for that specific character which makes it even easier, although I have yet to try it myself.

[vex]

He found this nifty character loader so that you only see save games for that specific character which makes it even easier, although I have yet to try it myself.

That sounds really useful.  Can you share where that came from?

[Yoru]

If you hit New Game again, do they force you to go through the whole tutorial level again? It's a nice area, but it'd get old fast.

You do, but a friend recommends making a character and getting them to the end of the tutoral.  Make a save there and since you can redo everything use that as a load point for new characters.  He found this nifty character loader so that you only see save games for that specific character which makes it even easier, although I have yet to try it myself.

Yup, this is what I did last night when making my shiny new Redguard character; ran him to the end of the tutorial (being careful to get as much as I could packed into it) and then used the console save command to make a save entitled, oddly enough, 'GameStart'.

[Lantyssa]

He found this nifty character loader so that you only see save games for that specific character which makes it even easier, although I have yet to try it myself.

That sounds really useful.  Can you share where that came from?

It is called the Oblivion Save Manager.  I only now got it, so I am about to try it out.

[Shockeye]

Save Game Manager and the Oblivion mod wiki.

[Lantyssa]

Ah great.  Thank you for the links.  I still had not been able to find out where my friend got that from.  The "UI Mod" from the wiki is going to be useful.

[Fabricated]

I'm finally home from California, and I've been playing for a few hours.

It's basically Morrowind but about 10x better in most every regard. The interface is better than Morrowind but still reeks of console port stink for the most part. I'm loving it so far. No glitches, and pretty good performance ignoring combat during "loading area..." notifications (3Ghz P4, 1GB Ram, GeForce 6800GT).

[MrHat]

Delicious so far.

Apparently I'm a blade wielding archer slinging self healing mad man.

With an afro of great justice.

[schild]

Well, my 360 decided to go berserk with some autosaves effectively deleting most of the savegames we had. There's one left for each character and 2 left on autosaves (of which only one should exist). That's possibly my fault for using the memory card and harddrive. But nonetheless, this is the second game with savegame issues for the system (DOA4 being the first).

[Sairon]

This game has been keeping me up now on the weekend. It's a great game but there's some things that really lowers the grade for me.

I played an orc warrior for ~9 hours and decide to use one of the shrines which summons a weapon for you, just for trying it out. So I get a piss poor knife and quickly hit my hotkey for switching in my claymore again. I get a message saying the claymore is equiped but it's aparantly not, I'm still wielding the knife. It turns out there's also a duration on this thing so I run around and toy with the knife until the duration runs out. During this time I quick save, big misstake, turns out that the game crashes as soon as the knife is to disapear. So since I never use the manual save slots I'm totaly fucked, to make matters worse both the auto save and quick save files went corrupt. Yay for starting over again.

The other time around I'm aiming for a caster. Casters are the total opposit of what they usualy are, owns early game but aparantly sucks majorly late game. Spells scale horribly, dmg/mana ratio doesn't get any better than at level 1. Mobs also have this irritating habit of actively dodging your slow ass fireballs as well. What makes you deadlier with spells is really willpower which grants mana regen, to bad it seems to be very minor and doesn't really keep up with mob hp. So far I've found no direct mana regen stat. The real ace here I guess is the conjuration spells. These are fucked up too though. daedra spider girly for example which is supossed to be good, is a caster summon. Caster summons has pathetic dmg output and aim just as bad as the mobs do. The best summon is the one which should be the crapiest ( it has the longest duration ), the 100% melee summon.

The one thing that pisses me of the most though, which was the case in morrowind as well, the mobs are generated relative to your level. I don't see the reasoning behind this since this game is an explorers wet dream. The experience is totaly destroyed in this regard though since you know that you wont find any bad ass things to kill/get killed by. This also borks the economy totaly. In the begining you get very little cash, nothing magical drops whatsoever. When you finally get some levels under your belt and hit some magic limit, magic stuff drops all the freaking time and you get filthy rich.

The skill system is also crap as mentioned. It's easy to get a gimp character if you're not paying attention. I didn't know stats cap out at 100 and now I'm going to get a problem staying away from int skills in order to not waste multipliers on a skill which I can't increase.

[Ironwood]

Played the crap out of this.

It's not working for me.  Um.  Ooops.

Hardware and graphics and all the rest of it are all fine.  No show stopping bugs (one or two crashes, that's it) or severe problems.  Sure it looks lovely, but it ALL feels dumbed down and pointless.

I do not care about the world, the quests, my character or anything.  It's the strangest feeling after loving the death out of Morrowind, but this so far, is no Morrowind.  None of it makes any sense at all.  The only thing I have looked at thus far and thought - COOL is the 'perks' that are added to skills. That's a brilliant idea that should have been in all of them.  The interface and UI are horrible.  The AI, similarly, is stoopid beyond believe.  The control system is retarded (please tell I'm not the only one who swapped my space and E keys RIGHT AWAY).

Um.  More later.  Gonna play a bit more.

Thank fuck for Mods.

I am singularly unimpressed.

[Calantus]

The [E] and [space] bindings were the same in Morrowind so it hardly stands as a blow against Oblivion as compared to Morrowind. When I got the game I looked up the keybindings while it installed so I was able to rebind that idiocy before I used either key ingame, so I don't see how it's so bad.

The interface... really could use a little bit of adjusting (like covering my whole screen so I can see more stuff, or even scaling down the elements a little so I can see even more), but I'm slowly getting used to it. I find it both better and worse than Morrowind's, but since I never really cared for the morrowind interface that doesn't mean a whole lot. I'm hoping I can bind some of the interfacepanels to keys like [M] for the map, etc. I haven't checked whether I can, but I'm not thinking it's likely.

I'm not a fan of the AI to be honest. The world exists to serve me as far as I'm concerned, so that shopkeeper going to the inn down the road really doesn't thrill me when all I wanna do is sell my shit. Waiting for 10 hours also kills the exta "immersion" that is supposed to come about from this. It really is a minor gripe though as I can just wait till the time they are where I want them, but still annoying. It also leaves the taverns desolate during the wrong hours, they need to add in some hardcore drunks who are there at all openning hours or something.

The combat is more engaging than Morrowind, and the spellcasting intergrates into combat much better, and the quest system is much easier to follow. The world looks nice... very little brown that I've seen. The faces are much better than Morrowind (I could have used a few "stock" faces to use instead of messing around with my own until he looked a little less pansy), the humanoid models are as crappy, and the general graphics are better. Basically I see it as Morrowind 2, which I wasn't quite expecting, but I'm still happy with is being roughly the same game.

It's hard to be excited about a game I more-or-less played a few years back, but it extends the fun and that makes it worth the money for me.

[schild]

You want hardcore drunks? Go to the Flowing Bowl in Anvil. Anvil is also home to one of my three favorite quests. Without giving anything away, it involves an expensive house.

Also, Anvil is based on a Longfellow poem. Though whoever interpreted the poem is slightly on the slow side as they managed to fubar it up a bit. Not like I can laugh at them though. I decided to play the game on hard mode. Also known as becoming a vampire during major questlines involving fire throwing bastards. And knowing full well that 90% of the creatures in Oblivion gates throw fire. I R TEH N00b.

Fake edit: Fubar isn't in the spellchecker.

Also, I'm going to be reviewing this game tomorrow me thinks. I logged 30 hours this week and picked up Blazing Angels yesterday. Fair warning: I did not finish the main quest line.

[Signe]

This game is so full of bugs and crappy code, it's hardly worth the bother.  Bethesda is defintiely going for the Buggiest Game Award previously held by that other game they made.  They've got that market cornered and have broadened it to include the 360!  Go them! 

[Rasix]

This game is so full of bugs and crappy code, it's hardly worth the bother.  Bethesda is defintiely going for the Buggiest Game Award previously held by that other game they made.  They've got that market cornered and have broadened it to include the 360!  Go them! 

Nah, that award was snatched away by VTM: Bloodlines.

Guess it's a matter of perspective. I've had one total in game CTD and haven't encountered any real bugs.

[Fabricated]

This game is so full of bugs and crappy code, it's hardly worth the bother.  Bethesda is defintiely going for the Buggiest Game Award previously held by that other game they made.  They've got that market cornered and have broadened it to include the 360!  Go them! 

Maybe God just hates you. Not a single crash or noticible bug here.

[Murgos]

And here is the first nudie mod:  http://www.adultgamemods.com/portal/component/option,com_docman/task,cat_view/gid,37/Itemid,26/

I was overly generous in my estimate it seems, of course this is only partial nudity so there is still time.

[NiX]

Looking at that mod made me realize how manly the female models can look. And OMGZ DAEDRA BOOBIES!

[Signe]

This game is so full of bugs and crappy code, it's hardly worth the bother.  Bethesda is defintiely going for the Buggiest Game Award previously held by that other game they made.  They've got that market cornered and have broadened it to include the 360!  Go them! 

Maybe God just hates you. Not a single crash or noticible bug here.

Nice.  So me and what appears to be thousands of people can't run this game because God hates us?  Sorry... didn't mean to ruffle your fanboi feathers, but this game appears to be very dicey for a lot of people.

[NiX]

Did you play Morrowind? THAT was buggy on all fronts. The Oblivion bugs seems to be hardware related problems. With how computers work, I'm not surprised or going to say it's the buggiest game ever. There has been worse. A lot worse.

[Ironwood]

Ok, the Dark Brotherhood and the Thieves Guild make the game a lot more fun.


It's still a dumbed down Morrowind and suffers accordingly.