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

[schild]

The physics are odd. If you step on something it flies across the ground like it's an air hockey table. It's a neat game, and maybe it'll be the first RPG I beat by a white man that isn't a member of BIS or Bioware.

[Signe]

All mine's done so far is crash.

[schild]

The map is detailed, but not detailed enough. if you're going to give proper names to a small subset of a region, you should really note that subset on the map instead of just noting teleport points. It's cool that I can add markers to the map and they're saved, but it's not cool that I have to wander around until I find an area like that. Yes, I'm referring to the Thieves Guild stuff. Your experiences may vary.

[Big Gulp]

My sys reqs (from memory, I am at work)- AMD 3200+ (or something)- I think it is 2.2 Ghz. GeForce 6800 (128 MB RAM), 1 GB system RAM. I think that falls comfortably into mid-range, but I would like to hear some war stories about performance.


Goddamn it. I don't have the time to play this damned thing, but I am going to have to buy it.

I've got a AMD64 3000+ (2.0 Ghz), but I've also got a ATI X850 with 256 gigs of RAM, and 2 gigs of system RAM.  I exceed the recommended stats on everything but the processor, which is technically at the bare minimum since I doubt they made this thing to be 64 bit compliant.  Downloading it off of D2D right now, so I'll let you know how it runs for me.

[Miasma]

It's running fine for me, no stuttering or pop-in on my year old system with an Athlon 3500, 2 gigs of Ram and a 6800GT card.

I don't often gush over games but I must say that it looks spectacular, it's one of those games where you have to stop just to look all around you so that you don't miss anything.  It's a work of art, at least the world and characters are.  I find it very jarring to go from this beautiful world to the log book, map or dungeon loading screens, those look about ten years old.

The combat won't be anything to write home about but it is much better than Morrowind, and I loved that game even with the boring fighting.  I hope the quests and side stories are as good, those were what made Morrowind one of my all time favourite games.

[schild]

It's better than Morrowind but worse than Fable. This game does make me feel more evil than Fable though.

[Toast]

I enjoy it so far. 1900 by 1200 completely owned my system. The interface is a little bit odd after playing MMORPGs for a while.

The best thing is that I was able to get it at Fry's for 37.99.

[andar]

It's better than Morrowind but worse than Fable. This game does make me feel more evil than Fable though.

Hm, Fable was an open-ended RPG.. on rails.  I haven't gotten Oblivion yet, but I'm hoping for more of a Morrowind open-endedness, only with a bit more substance.

[Tale]

I've also got a ATI X850 with 256 gigs of RAM

How many rooms does it fill?

At midnight tonight in Australia we get the Xbox 360 and Oblivion launched together. I'm only interested in it as a news event. Neither item is yet on the credibility side of my hype meter.

[Rodent]

So Direct2Drive was a big misstake. Not only did it take forever to download ( I have a 100 mbit connection but Fileplanet never got over 400 kb/sec ), but when it finally was downloaded, it refused to install. So I'm 50 bucks poorer and currently mailing back and forth with IGN customer support. Hopefully I can get a refund or something, but it looks like I will have to wait until friday for when the game hits the shelves over here..

[NiX]

AMD64 3700+
6600GT OC BFG
1.5GB RAM

No stutter on all medium, bloom @ 1280x1024. Eat my ass with a spoon, Schild. Your glory hole mac-wannabe console ain't got nothin' on me! Here's to all those 360 fanboys that said my PC couldn't even begin to run Oblivion.

The game is beautiful and I just got out of the sewers. Just awesome. I did encounter 1 bug, but that had to do with me stupidly leaving BT running in the background while I played. I think they were fighting over RAM.

[Engels]

So Direct2Drive was a big misstake. Not only did it take forever to download ( I have a 100 mbit connection but Fileplanet never got over 400 kb/sec ), but when it finally was downloaded, it refused to install. So I'm 50 bucks poorer and currently mailing back and forth with IGN customer support. Hopefully I can get a refund or something, but it looks like I will have to wait until friday for when the game hits the shelves over here..

Oog, ya, I did the D2D once before, and had a big problem with their 'activation' method. Basically, if you are even so much as using a DSL Modem that's actually a router for an rj45 jack a USB connection and wireless, it doesn't like it. To their credit, they refunded me the full amount.

[MrHat]

AMD64 3700+
6600GT OC BFG
1.5GB RAM

No stutter on all medium, bloom @ 1280x1024. Eat my ass with a spoon, Schild. Your glory hole mac-wannabe console ain't got nothin' on me! Here's to all those 360 fanboys that said my PC couldn't even begin to run Oblivion.

The game is beautiful and I just got out of the sewers. Just awesome. I did encounter 1 bug, but that had to do with me stupidly leaving BT running in the background while I played. I think they were fighting over RAM.

Thanks Nix, I might pick this up even though my rig is probably 70% of what you have.

[schild]

With that machine I don't know who would say it couldn't run Oblivion. That machine can run anything. Too bad this game was made for a controller as far as I can tell. The control setup is phenomenal.

[Fabricated]

It's better than Morrowind but worse than Fable. This game does make me feel more evil than Fable though.

Morrowind was better than Fable, so uh.

[schild]

Morrowind was in no way, shape, or form better than Fable. Morrowind wasn't a game. It was a sandbox. At the very least Oblivion is a sandbox layered on top of a game.

[Fabricated]

Morrowind was in no way, shape, or form better than Fable. Morrowind wasn't a game. It was a sandbox. At the very least Oblivion is a sandbox layered on top of a game.

I'm guessing you didn't play Morrowind for very long.

[schild]

It gave me no reason to play it very long.

[Murgos]

Here is a cut and past of my impressions from over on corp:

I put in about 5 hours last night, the game is pretty much exactly what they advertised and considering that they advertised a whole hell of a lot that's saying something.

There are maybe too many options for faces, I ended up hitting random a bunch until I got something close to what I liked and then tweaked it by randomly moving sliders around until I decided I needed to stop before I ruined it. I can see that with some patience I think you could mimic pretty much anyone you wanted, stick your own face in there or maybe Jon Bigbootay...

Races still have all the same bonuses and modifiers from previous games, this is a good thing, it's a well thought out and balanced system that naturally lead your character down certain paths, orcs are just much more likely to fit their stereo type and be big bruising fighters for example.

I have played as a fighter/thief pretty my first time through the Elder Scrolls games ever since Arena and I was no different this time. By the time I hit the class selection section they guard is going, "You wanna be an assassin right?", pretty close. I think I ended up swapping something (acrobat?) for Heavy Armor. My play style is pretty much to sneak around the dungeon find critter get in a sneak attack and then charge in with sword and shield. I have found I can get in two sneak attack shots with my bow if I'm quick and firing from a really dark corner, it's pretty cool to nail something and stagger it and then pop it again and have it give the classic Hollywood back flip over a railing.

The physics are awesome, I spent a pretty good bit of time tossing skulls off walls and shooting things off tables with the bow. Depending on where the cursor is when you 'grab' (z key) something is where the leverage is applied so it's possible to stand things up and generally arrange them how you like it.

After getting out of the starter dungeon beneath the prison you see directly across the way a little island with some ruins on it. In there is a little group of bandits who have holed up in an abandoned mausoleum. Of course in killing them off you find that members have gone missing and there had been reports of noises in the night. Finding the 'secret' entrance to the rest of the crypt was pretty straight forward and from there the rest of the rest of the dungeon was really cool, skeletons, zombies, traps, hidden doors, lever activated stuff and even a necromancer. For a non-quest, 'random' dungeon it was pretty awesome, go check it out.

After that I went to the Imperial City for a bit of a look-see, very cool graphics, very nice architecture and layout. I was getting tired though so I just hung around long enough to realize I had no where near enough cash to buy anything better than the fur armor or weapons I was already using.

So, five hours and I haven't even scratched the surface of the game. My character is level 3 and I have done nothing on the main quest yet, joined no guilds, and only finished one of the many dungeons. I think my next step is to go ahead and try and knock out about a 3rd of the main quest line before wandering off into other things. The little red arrow on the compass is obviously going to come in very handy in this game.

I am playing the game on an AMD 3200+ 64 bit processor with 2 gigs of ram but only a Radeon 9800SE video card. The game is fine in 800x600 with most of the details on low and looks much better at those settings than you would think but I really want to see this game in all its glory so I will be dropping some cash on a new video card soon. Unfortunately I have an AGP bus motherboard but fortunately the X1600PRO with 512 meg RAM is only 135 at newegg. That wont get me max details and frame rate but it's not 600+ dollars for top of the line + MB and the hour or so to swap everything.

The intro movie was unwatchable with frame skipping, stuttering and random missing areas. I don't know what tech BethSoft was using to play it but it needs some work stat. I very nearly freaked out and returned the game without even trying to play it when I saw that but fortunately I pushed on and found the frame rates otherwise to be very smooth and responsive. The intro with the assassins needs help too because it gives the impression that combat is going to be a dead crawl for lower end systems, a real deal breaker, but that also is an effect of the video player system. The assassins 'morph' when they die and that video sequence loading and running is what caused the stutter for me. Combat in 'normal' situations, even with multiple enemies was like buttah.

OK, that’s way more than I intended to say on the subject. I need to get to work.

Edit:  Stay the heck away from the official boards - there is as much concentrated stupid there as anywhere I've ever seen.

[El Gallo]

That's pretty much what I have Toast (my processor is something like 2.4 I think), and I had to run in 800x600    Looks like it's time to upgrade my video card.

[Signe]

I can't even get past character creation before it crashes.

[Miasma]

Morrowind was in no way, shape, or form better than Fable. Morrowind wasn't a game. It was a sandbox. At the very least Oblivion is a sandbox layered on top of a game.

Morrowind could be played in a linear fashion if you wanted to by just working on the main story line's quests, if you played that way it probably wasn't very long either.  And due to its length Fable wasn't so much a game as it was a demo disk.

There is a bloom setting in the graphics options, maybe if you crank it up so high that shafts of light are bursting out of the characters' faces you will like it as much as Fable  .

[El Gallo]

The interface is consol-ey garbage, it drives me nuts.  It's like playing a game from 1992.

[Riggswolfe]

Well like several of you I played it for hours last night. On my 52" hdtv it was like watching a movie according to my friend. (In fact,he popped some popcorn and sat down to watch me play.)

My impressions:

Still open-ended but more focused. By that I mean the main questline is easy to get involved in but there are still a gazillion other things to do.

The NPCs are much, much better than Morrowind. Both in dialogue and their interactions. The first thing I saw after exiting the dungeon/tutorial area was a bandit hunting giant crabs on the beach. In my first experience in Oblivion I found myself chasing a summoner of some kind through this giant Daedric tower. He kept stopping, summoning or lobbing a lightning bolt, then running away. He ran through doors, through teleport points, etc. Our fight took us through about a 1/3rd of the tower and was really fun. After I finally killed him on a ramp his body and the mace he was using proceeded to slide down the ramp! That's another thing. You can't cheese out fights in this game for the most part. If you're fighting and run through a door to escape, a few seconds later whatever you were fighting comes through the door looking for you.

I haven't managed to find any of the guilds yet though I'm about to go to the Arcane University which is I'm hoping where the Mages guild is.

The control scheme is fantastic. The hotkey system, other than a pain with the diagonals sometimes is awesome. Nothing like shooting a goblin with your bow, lobbing a fireball, summoning a skeleton, then putting your sword and shield back on, all before he even gets to you!

I am still having trouble getting power attacks to work right in Melee but other than that melee and the active blocking is fine.

The persuasion minigame is extremely easy but also strangely addicting.

[Murgos]

The interface is consol-ey garbage, it drives me nuts.  It's like playing a game from 1992.

The F keys take you directly to the different aspects of your overview, such as inventory, character stats, journal etc...  I keep hitting M for the map myself and I for inventory personally - I will probably change this to the hot keys I am familiar with.  The actual game interface though?  Point and press space for actions (I will probably change space to jump and E to use, you know like Halflife, Quake, et al.), WASD movement and left click to attack. right click to block, 1 - 8 to quickswap spells and weapons are all about as basic and intuative as it gets.

Having to go Inventory->Alchemy->Mortar & Pestle ->Ingredients->combine is a little tedious though and if not for the console considerations could have been much friendlier.  Some right click context menu's would have been very welcome.

edit: also, like Riggs said, the persuasion minigame is great, best implementation of that sort of thing yet, and I am also really digging the lock-pick minigame too.

[Nija]

Having to go Inventory->Alchemy->Mortar & Pestle ->Ingredients->combine is a little tedious though and if not for the console considerations could have been much friendlier.  Some right click context menu's would have been very welcome.

edit: also, like Riggs said, the persuasion minigame is great, best implementation of that sort of thing yet, and I am also really digging the lock-pick minigame too.

Set your mortar and pestel as hotkey 8.

Hit 8, carry on.

[Rasix]

P4 Dual Core 3.0ghz
1 gig ram
6800 256mb

It assigned me to high setting and other than some rather sporadic chop (and really not much of it, just a few little stutters) during the much maligned intro movie, the game has run fine.  I think I turned the textures to medium, but I'm going to crank that back up to high after getting out in the open and seeing no slowdown at all. The mob textures look pretty good, only the faces of the PCs somewhat bother me.  I may end up turning off that glow shit as I don't see a reason why everyone's face should look like it's covered with an inch of iridescent goop.

This is a neat game. I didn't play for long, maybe 90 mins (hey, tonight was BWL night, got my TS BP for only about 2 months worth of DKP /sigh), but what I played, I enjoyed.  Sneaking was well done and I'm playing my light armor/blade assassin that I enjoyed so much in Morrowind.  Stuff can already hit me pretty hard, though, so a move to heavy armor might not be a bad idea.

I like the changes to travel and questing already.  Removed 75% of what I found completely frustrating in Morrowind.

Interestingly enough, it crashed the first time I tried to start it staying it needed some sort of dxwhatever file.  Clicking on the dxsetup file on the dvd fixed that, even if it didn't bring up any sort of install screen (had to check processes to verify it was running).

[Yoru]

Has anyone had any DRM issues? My DVD drive gets rejected by a lot of games' copy-protection systems, although those are mostly on CD.

[El Gallo]

Thanks for the reminder about the function key shortcuts.  Still, the interface seems clunky to me.  All the windows and fonts are OMG HUGENORMOUS.  Part of that has to be that I'm running the game in a low resolution, but I should be able to have some UI elements up without them taking up half the screen.  I can only see a couple items at a time in my inventory.  Only 8 hotkeys in a game with this many spells, skills and weapons -- 8 hotkeys on an OMGHUGE wheel thingie full of wasted space?  You have to pull up a different OMGHUGE window to swap anything else?  I dunno, it just seems very consoley.  But, like I said, this may be largely because I'm running in a shitty resolution.  I'm sure I'll get used to it.

[ahoythematey]

Oh you motherfuckers.  I swore I wouldn't waste money I do not have on this game until it was bargain bin, and then you give it all this praise with barely any being about the graphics.  Sigh...

Oh, and schild, I am assuming a 360 controller attached to my PC would probably work, right?  My rig can handle the game(athlon64 3400, 6800gt, 1gigRAM), so if the controls are that fine-tuned to a 360 pad I may just pick that up and get the best of both worlds.

[Sauced]

It runs fairly well on my laptop, Athlon64 3000+, 2G RAM, 128M ATI Mobile.  The opening movie worked great, so I got that going for me.  The only problem I'm having is that it's widescreen native, and when I try to run in 1280x800 (so that the NPCs don't all look like double-chin having, disease-infested fatasses), I have to turn just about everything else off, and combat still goes a little slow on me.

Played for about 5 hours so far, with my usual theif/bow/destruction class (apologies for VLs rampant boredom last night, she wasn't prepared for my disappearance apparently), and while I still have to suss out how to get into the Thieves' Guild, I did run the first Mage Guild quest out of Chorral, which provided an instant opportunity to be a scoundrel.  Hooray.

[squirrel]

Well i broke down and bought the X360 version as the PC version was sold out everywhere i checked, too bad as my 4600 X2/6800GT rig is probably ok for running it with AA on. Still the 360 version looks very nice and i've had no performace issues. 720p widescreen luv.

Anyway, am enjoying it a fair bit. Watch out for some of the quests though - I got stuck in one and had to revert to a save, i couldn't kill the baddie and that was the only way to get out. Overall pretty cool game so far.

[squirrel]

I picked up the 360 version strictly because the PC version was sold out everywhere i looked and i had to have it RIGHT FUCKING NOW. I can't speak to PC performance (although my rig - 4600X2 and 6800 GT - should run it fine) but the Xbox version performs really well, suprisingly given it's mediocre hardware relatively. No stutters so far, quick load times and awesome visuals at 1280x720.

I played for about 4 hours but am starting over tonight. I got stuck in a quest where you enter a painting and the only way out is to kill these paint trolls that were WAY above my combat capabilities. That and the desire to tweak my skills (went with the stock Scout class) = reroll and start over. Overall am enjoying the hell out of it so far.

Oh and IMO it's easily > Fable. Fable was just too restricted in what/where you could go and do things for me.

[Morfiend]

So, I got this yesterday.

Installed it, and then the installer was frozen. Click "play" any way. Intro movie ran fine, game runs fine. It auto detected me to Very High (I think) and so far, only a few minor stutters.

The graphics are very nice.

I made 2 different characters. I pure melee guy, and a Mage/Melee hybrid. I couldnt get over how funky my face looked on the mage hybrid, so I am sticking with the pure melee guy for now. I might try a stealth melee guy later today. This has always been my probelm with TES games. Character indecision.

So far killing stuff with magic seems a lot easer than with melee. Specially with a 2h sword its hard as hell to hit the mobs, as they are constantly jumping out of the way and stuff. Every fight seems to leave me at half life or lower. I am really giving my heal spell a workout.

[Ironwood]

Friday.

Lum has a pic of his avatar on his site and says it's fun, though crashy.

Roll on Friday.