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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

The Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion

  
  

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T Blixius
19:04 / 04.03.06
Take a gander at this...

Well, the game isn't out yet, but It has gone gold.

It's gorgeous. I'm already breathy in exhilaration of looking at beautiful outdoor wildernesses rendering at sub 10 frame per second rates on my once state of the art rig.

We haven't had a decent RPG game with the latest graphics technology yet. This is it. Sure Half Life 2 was fun, but lets be honest, linear first person shooters are only so great. Theres something awesome about a game where you have no track, you can complete the quests in any order and have one of several possible outcomes. Hopefully this thread will pick up some speed when the game actually hits shelves and we all have a chance to play it. That's only 2 weeks away. In the meantime, i have a child-like excitement I haven't felt since I was anticipating Ultima VI....
 
 
*
20:25 / 04.03.06
Between this and Spore it looks like I'm going to have to buy a game machine, and take an extra year to finish my MA.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
20:48 / 04.03.06
Theres something awesome about a game where you have no track, you can complete the quests in any order

You know what? You're right, but only if those games also provide *some* structure. There always has to be a backbone, otherwise you just end up with a pile of sagging, unsupported flab that flops about on the ground, gasping for air.

Morrowind, as far as I'm concerned, is a laughable mess of a game. It has too many flaws to mention - and I'm not talking about the endless bugs and glitches here, I'm talking about flaws that are built into its design. Agree to take on a mission and you're given no indication whatsoever as to whether or not you stand a realistic chance of completing it. Walk up to a character to talk to them and you might well find them casting some megaspell on you and killing you in one shot without any prior warning. The entirely stats-driven nature of combat makes a mockery of the first-person viewpoint (not to mention the whole business of making to stab a stationary worm with a dagger and constantly missing). Map design in a number of significant places is utterly baffling.

It's a game that's frequently described as a single player version of an MMORPG, and I'm afraid that, to me, is possibly the most pointless thing ever. You forgive MMORPGs their lack of non-player character intelligence because the NPCs are the least important characters in them. You can't make the same excuse in Morrowind.

Everything I've seen of Oblivion to date makes it look like nothing more than a prettified Morrowind, complete with these exact same flaws. I want to be wrong about it, because Morrowind at least got some things right - the sense of exploring a real, living worlld (if you ignore those NPCs and just focus on the terrain and flora), the potentially smart character development system.
 
 
*
02:18 / 05.03.06
Walk up to a character to talk to them and you might well find them casting some megaspell on you and killing you in one shot without any prior warning.

Weird. I've never had this happen.
 
 
Tezcatlipoca
04:37 / 05.03.06
I too am looking forward to this, being something of a Morrowind-meister, although I'm assuming we're going to have the same situation with regards to plugins...

...Morrowind was great, but needed a fairly sizeable bunch of plugins to turn it into a truly gorgeous, and more importantly properly working, world (I run a little under 80 plugins with my game). Now most of these are little things the designers forgot, or didn't have time, to put it (the need to eat and drink, properly working botany (so plants don't unrealistically function as containers), realistic time passage, wildlife, weather, etc.).

Now I'm assuming the same will exist for Oblivion. The game will look great, but for a myriad of minor tweaks that need to me made before it stops just being a great world and starts being a stunning world, and that'll take time. My estimation is that I'll buy the game the day it comes out, but start playing it properly at least 6 months later; the time in between being spent with coding and/or downloading, installing and testing plugins.
 
 
Isadore
04:41 / 05.03.06
I am waiting for March 21st (release date here) with bated breath and a Radeon X-850XT sitting poignantly on my shelf. (Which reminds me, I need to finish grabbing the rest of the parts for that new machine...)

Morrowind was, for its time, utterly gorgeous, and even though the graphics have aged terribly the game remains huge, about as non-linear as it gets, and remarkably enjoyable to just wander about whilst taking in the sights and sunsets. Oblivion's playable area will supposedly be smaller, carrying on a trend present in this series since Daggerfall, but then, the graphics will be much, much shinier. (Though the E3 tale of a woman and a dog causes me to wonder just how good the vaunted AI improvements will be...)

Expectations are high, but Bethesda is good at what they do.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
09:06 / 05.03.06
id> It happened a few times to me. The one that I remember most was entering a sewer system in a big multi-storey block of flats thing (down in the far south of the island, iirc), spying an elf dude and going to have a chat with him. Pink shit flies out of his hands and I'm dead.

Tez> I'm not sure if I've said this here before, but what you've described there isn't a great game. It's a great engine for a game. If you compare the PC and Xbox versions, this shows up more clearly - the console version has its own specific bugs, but the design flaws are the same across both. In that respect, I actually prefer the console game - it stands as a fixed-state example of just how many things were wrong with the title before the fan community got their hands on it and decided to create the game they wanted (and Bethesda were incapable of providing).

That's also why I'm disappointed and annoyed with Microsoft's softening of regulations regarding the release of patches on the 360.

Thing is, Bethesda are responsible for a game that I think's massively under-rated: Terminator: Future Shock. I wonder if that doesn't add to my dislike of Morrowind.
 
 
*
19:09 / 05.03.06
It happened a few times to me. The one that I remember most was entering a sewer system in a big multi-storey block of flats thing (down in the far south of the island, iirc), spying an elf dude and going to have a chat with him. Pink shit flies out of his hands and I'm dead.

You went to talk to some dude wandering around in a sewer, and you were surprised he killed you? Think about this one. It's the really real world. You're wandering around in a sewer— gods know why; maybe your flatmate flushed your hamster and you're hoping against hope it hasn't been eaten by the boa constrictor your mom did the same thing to eleven years ago. Some dude in dark clothes is down there too. You go up to him. "Hey, have you seen my—" And then he hits you in the neck. Would you be naive to be surprised? I think so. (To be fair, my roommate thinks my view of the world has been warped by videogames.)

Maybe my experience of the game was substantially different from yours because I expected people I met in caves, sewers, and tombs to try to kill me, having discovered early on that they were almost universally Doing Bad Things down there that they didn't want anyone knowing about.

Now, I can see being surprised that the Ordinators try to kill you if they ever see you wearing Ordinator armor, and the fact that they don't forget is a bit of a bastard, too. But still, it's pretty obvious— you're not one of them, you wear their armor, you must have either killed one of them or stolen it. This seems like evidence of a decent amount of thought behind the AI, not the opposite.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
20:12 / 05.03.06
It's the really real world.

I've not yet had anybody kill me with pink shit fired from their hands in the really real world.
 
 
*
20:35 / 05.03.06
Oh, all right, fair enough. I guess what I meant was, in a game where the world is set up such that there are bad people who want to kill you, is it necessarily indicative of unrealistic programming if someone you meet in a sewer turns out to be one of them, and does so?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
21:58 / 05.03.06
That depends, I suppose, on how much you value that kind of sense of paranoia over a relatively smooth playing experience. If I've just trudged over empty fields for fifty minutes in order to get to an unexplored settlement, then spent a further hour familiarising myself with that new area and talking to all its inhabitants, having somebody take my head off with a single blow and make all of that a waste of time is going to annoy me to the point where I resolve never to play the thing again.

There are ways around this that the designers could have taken that would have avoided this kind of unfairness without damaging your involvement in the world. Have at least one character within that settlement mention something about how dangerous the sewers are, for example. Or keep them locked until the player reaches a certain level in a certain skill - if anything, that'd surely increase the realism.

Or have some sort of auto-balancing, adaptive difficulty level in there.

Your example of the Ordinators: that'd break my immersion, compeltely and utterly. Id' expect there to be some kind of chance that I'd be able to get away with a disguise. It doesn't seem like particularly deep AI to me - it's more like a binary kill/ignore thing, with nothing inbetween.

Back to the guy in the sewer, stood dead still and staring into space. This is another failing of the game, imo - that NPCs never interact with each other in any meaningful way. It's where all the hard work of trying to create a believable world falls apart
 
 
*
22:32 / 05.03.06
You know you don't have to wait for save points in this one, right?

Back to the guy in the sewer, stood dead still and staring into space. This is another failing of the game, imo - that NPCs never interact with each other in any meaningful way. It's where all the hard work of trying to create a believable world falls apart

Yeah, that bugged me too. One of the reasons I'm pleased about Oblivion; I hear they've done more with this.
 
 
*
22:43 / 05.03.06
Oh, and please feel free to begin ignoring me. I did quite like Morrowind and I expect to love Oblivion. I despise MMORPGs on general principle, can't play FPS and am bored stiff by RTS, and there are very few other modern games I've even tried to play. My opinion about which games are good and which are shite is, to say the least, poorly informed.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
11:33 / 06.03.06
That doesn't invalidate your opinion.
 
 
T Blixius
13:03 / 06.03.06
Uh, i would like to point out it's been 5 years since Morrowind was released. Don't any of you think that the experience of creating Morrowind, the user plugins they saw developed, and the questions they have had about how could they improve the game in that time made a difference ? I think instead of dwelling on Morrowind's shortcomings we should be talking about features in Oblivion that rectify these issues. Head over to the site and view some of the trailers and you'll see what I mean.
 
 
Tezcatlipoca
17:16 / 06.03.06
I'm not sure if I've said this here before, but what you've described there isn't a great game. It's a great engine for a game.

What I've described in my first post is neither, and actually points out that - IMO - Morrowind required lots of tweaking before being the kind of world I wanted to play, and assumes the same will hold true (but hopefully to a much lesser extent) with Oblivion.

I think we've been through this before, and - IIRC - eventually agreed to disagree (weren't we talking about the latest Thief, or something?). As I've said before, the game engine is an integral part of the game, built - in most cases - specifically to realise the design of the gameworld, such that the two are inextricably linked factors. Obviously, tweaking the game with plugins is about changing the gameplay as much as it is about physically altering the code behind.

On an unrelated note, I'd be curious to see how it performs on the XBox, since Morrowind was - even for its time - a resource hog, and I can't see Oblivion being any less harsh on the old specs.
 
 
T Blixius
18:31 / 06.03.06
It's not an xbox game; it's only for the XBOX 360.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:27 / 06.03.06
weren't we talking about the latest Thief, or something?

Heh, yeah. I knew we'd had a similar discussion some time ago, but couldn't remember which game it was over.

The vids I've seen of the 360 game stutter in places. I'm not sure if that's representative of how the game performs on the hardware or just a result of crappy video encoding.
 
 
rising and revolving
12:43 / 07.03.06
I think the stutters are encode issues. Even so, I'm not expecting this to run like, say, COD - it's an RPG with a focus on visual quality. Which means speed is an issue.

I'm really excited about this, and I didn't play Morrowind much. Mainly because it did something stupid within the first 10 minutes and I died. Or maybe I did something stupid. That's probably it - but I'm more accustomed to being hand-held in early game.

That said, talking to blokes over at Bethesda, it sounds like they've been polishing the hell out of this. It really was very, very, close to being ready for launch - and the time inbetween has been used for polish. That, plus the fact that things are a bit dry right now on the 360 front, means I'll be giving this some serious attention.
 
 
rising and revolving
12:47 / 08.03.06
Oh, and another update on the video courtesy of Bethes-folks.

Apparently, the video was produced at E3 last year - and that's the last video release they've done since. So it's had nearly a full year of development since then.

I want this to be good SO BADLY.
 
 
c0nstant
22:54 / 09.03.06
it may not be the video encoding. A friend of mine picked up perect dark and a 360 not long ago and the frame rate is dreadful. sometimes the game stops entirely for a few seconds :S
 
 
*
17:43 / 10.03.06
Why would you not play this on a PC? I mean, Construction Set!
 
 
Spatula Clarke
18:47 / 10.03.06
c0ncept> That means nothing, really. It could just be that PD's engine is particularly bad (and, after so many years in development hell and so many changes of platform, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if that were the fact). It could also - and this, to me, sounds far more likely - be the result of mid-level loads. Unless you're exaggerating ("a few seconds"? Really?)

id> Money. This is likely to start an entirely different argument, but enabling yr PC to play the latest games properly means constant upgrading of the hardware, whereas purchase of a console guarantees you the ability to play all games released for that console. Theoretically, at any rate - I realise that situation changes as the odd hardware add-on comes around, but they're few, far between and tend not to be commercially successful.

That, plus I never bothered using the construction kit in Morrowind. I'm just not that sort of player, so the additional hardware cost it'd take for me to be able to play the PC version of Oblivion would be a waste of my cash.
 
 
T Blixius
19:10 / 10.03.06
Latest pics have been leaked from some source. Looks awesome.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
20:48 / 10.03.06
That can't be right, surely? Look at the nastiness that is the obvious (lack of) join between bare arms and hands - I thought we'd sorted that out years ago? There also looks to be a lack of any shadowing in some of them - the one with the wood elf is the best example of that. Sure these are the newest shots out there?
 
 
T Blixius
00:57 / 11.03.06
They're leaked pics. Probably from someone who has a copy and is running them on a less than top end card. Still, it gives an idea of what the game will look like, especially on crappier cards.
 
 
rising and revolving
16:55 / 11.03.06
Again, I think those leaked pics are nearly a year old - leaked from a Russian mag, from memory.
 
 
*
17:43 / 23.03.06
Wait until it's patched, from what I hear. It's just a straight port of the 360 game, it looks like, which is leading to some compatibility issues. Don't try to run it on min system requirements; it will laugh at you. Me, I'm waiting.

Doggonit Bethsoft. It's not enough to get the game out on time, you have to also get the game out as a finished product on time. Your business != my schoolwork.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
18:37 / 23.03.06
I got the 360 version today. I know, I know. I have no defense.

Anyway. First impressions are mixed. Frame rate is *far* smoother than Morrowind, although not locked down - it did chug right at the beginning when there were four characters on the screen, but I'm prepared to accept that this might have been linked to a couple of jumps that I was getting as it decided it was supposed to have cached the attack sound effects for my character around the same point.

Looks gorgeous in high def, but has the exact same fault as PGR3 - it doesn't display in the correct ratio on a 4:3 monitor through a VGA cable unless you turn the res all the way down to 640x480, which rather defeats the purpose of playing it on a high def monitor in the first place. As a result, I'll be playing it on my old portable CRT until I can afford a new telly.

Character creation seems stunted. It's all about changing the proportions of your chracter's face and not at all about distributing their stats. However, I've still only played about 40 minutes or so, so maybe that's still to come. I've only just been asked to select my star sign, for instance.

Those snazzy physics are as pointless as everybody suspected, being nothing more than window-dressing (and scruffy window-dressing at that - piles of items on the floor go a bit hyperactive when you walk over them).

Introductory section is uninspiring, being a trudge through a sewer. Yes, it's a nice-looking sewer. It's still a sewer. Each time I've come to a door I've held my breath on the loading screen, waiting for the apparently gorgeous outdoors to arrive. More sewer. Again, this is only 40 minutes in, but still...

Terrible lip-synching spoils the good work on character faces.

Sounds nice. Is that Patrick Stewart? Bit of a shame that he's not putting the emphasis in his lines in the same places that the subtitles seem to think it should be.

Combat is altered on a pretty fundamental level. No longer just a matter of pressing a button to intiate it and then sitting back, you now take an active role in fights - if not, then the illusion of doing so is far more successful than previously.

Can't form much of an opinion yet, based on the tiny amount I've played, other than that I wish it'd hurry up and start properly already.
 
 
*
19:25 / 23.03.06
Oh, yeah. My post, previous, obv. in reference to the PC version.

Glad it plays well in 360, but how irking that the "tutorial" section goes so damn long. That bugged me in Morrowind and it'll bug me more in Oblivion, I'm sure.
 
 
rising and revolving
14:18 / 27.03.06
Okay, this game is amazing.

There is a LOT of stuff here, and presented so gracefully. You can literally fall into adventure and mayhem without even trying, and every step you take offers more options without becoming too overwhelming.

I never liked Morrowind. Actually, that's not true - I never really played Morrowind. It pissed me off too much in the first 1/2 hour for me to want to play anymore. Option overload and no idea what I was really supposed to be doing.

Oblivion seems to avoid all of that - the initial sewer bit does suck a bit, true. I understand why they had it there, it just seemed a little long and a little boring. Crates and rats, you know? Just like everything else.

Then you step out in to the world, with an epic quest to fulfil ... or not. I've been pretty apathetic about it - followed the first couple of pointers then got distracted. Found a dungeon and plunged in. Fought some new monsters, found some items. Found a note indicating a greater plot. Killed someone accidently. Got contacted by the Assasins guild because they thought I was hardcore. Got asked to find out why someone had a doppleganger in another town. Tried to be Robin Hood for the poor of the waterfront. Found artefacts from an ancient race. Got struck by lightning trying to harness magical power that was well beyond me. Uncovered a necromancer in his lair and his plot with a guardsman. Got barred from the fighters guild for killing one of their members. Had an evil mage try to kill me - by sending me down a well with a ring of burden, just for kicks.

And that's just the start. Everywhere I turn there's something new to do - and this is the thing, it all *feels* new. People have called Morrowind a single player MMORPG, and that's a fair way of looking at it, in terms of the size and scope. But the thing is there aren't any fed-ex quests, or samey feeling missions. Everyone feels like they belong - and you're helping (or hindering, or stealing from, or assasinating) them do real things. There's a remarkable lack of "go kill 20 blargbeasts and come back" quests - most of them are rich and interesting.

Just riding across the landscape is a call to adventure.

And that's not even getting in to the different ways you can do things - want to stealth? Go for it. Want to charge in and hack things up with an axe? No problem. Want to spellcast? Tonnes of options.

Best RPG ever? Almost certainly.

Best looking RPG ever? For now. Sure, there's some pop in, and loading times are a bit of a drag whenever you enter a building or city (they're not *super* long, they're just long enough to be annoying) - there's the occasional bit of jerky framerate when there's a lot happening (I'm on the 360), and I've even had a crash or two.

None of that matters a jot, though - there's nothing else that holds a candle to it. If you've got the gear (either a jazzed up PC or a 360) you need to play this.

I've sunk 16 hours into this baby already - and I'm only beginning to scratch the surface. Value for money? Possibly not if you need to upgrade your PC or buy a 360 to play it, but otherwise - 100%
 
 
Spatula Clarke
15:07 / 27.03.06
Best RPG ever? Almost certainly.

Something I've been thinking about a lot for a while now is how European and American RPGs differ from Japanese ones (and possibly Korean, although from what I've seen they're a strange hybrid of western settings with eastern rulesets and structure). I'm fairly sure that both Morrowind and Oblivion take those differences to the extreme - they're the ultimate destination of that Euro/US design.

It's all in the lack of visible structure. That can be a structured storyline or it can be a structured ruleset, because both are things that different types of JPN RPGs pride themselves on - the Final Fantasy school for the former, the Nippon Ichi strat games for the latter - and both are things that Euro/US RPGs seem to attempt to make invisible or, to a large extent, optional.

How much you appreciate Oblivion has a great deal to do with which of the two styles you prefer. I think it's alright, as far as these things go, but the lack of drive of any sort means that I've already found it remarkably easy to put down and forget about, then not want to bother playing again. It seems like a huge amount of work for very little reward, and that's quite possibly because I *want* some clear and obvious objectives from my RPGs.

But it's also because of the setting. This po-faced Warhammer/LOTR stuff has never really appealed to me. If I don't click with the world, it doesn't matter *how* expansive or pretty it is - I'm not going to feel any great drive to explore.

It fixes a lot of what was wrong with Morrowind, for sure, but in the process it makes it a lot clearer that it wasn't just the endless list of bugs and silly gameplay decisions that led to my dislike of that game.
 
 
EvskiG
15:22 / 27.03.06
I'm loving this game, but I'm one of those folks who will have to upgrade his computer to really enjoy the graphics.

Can anyone recommend a good half-size/low profile video card? My Dell won't take anything too big.
 
 
rising and revolving
16:02 / 27.03.06
It fixes a lot of what was wrong with Morrowind, for sure, but in the process it makes it a lot clearer that it wasn't just the endless list of bugs and silly gameplay decisions that led to my dislike of that game.

Give it some time. I could be wrong, but I don't think you're into the "good bit" yet. There's a nice linear path if you want to follow it - it's just getting caught up in the peripheral stuff is so much fun. You don't have to do any of it, but it sucks you in.

You're only just out of the sewers, right? Give it another couple of hours, and see if it doesn't grab you. I found it put-downable until about 2.5 hours in. Now I'm hooked - now, it does do a much better job than Morrowind of getting you there, but you still have to stick with it a bit.

And yeah, it's definately western. Which is my general preference ...
 
 
*
17:20 / 27.03.06
I hate feeling coerced in games and that's always what I've loved about Morrowind— sure, some things felt artificial and led-by-the-noseish, but vastly fewer than in most other games I've played.
 
  

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