mine runs just fine... hehe no slowdowns or anything with all the features turned on... i do have 4 gigs of ram a 7800gtx ko card and a dual core athlon x2 though... as far as the game goes though i'd have to say it feels quite a bit nicer than morrowind with the basic things like combat etc, and characters and art in general look alot better than they do in alot of trailers etc... its a good looking game.
Aside from some initial worries (the installer froze twice ) I havent had any issues with the game. It has been running fine with Ultra High settings on my computer which is a dual core 3.4 ghz AMD with 1 GB of ram and a Geforce 7800 gt.
The art quality isnt as high as I was looking forward to, especially the faces of the characters. And I've also got some funky stuff going on with super blurry textures in the distance, but I was reading the oblivion forums today and I think there are some settings I can tweak in the .ini to fix the issue.
My BIG beef with the game is the animations. I thought the first person sword swinging looked a bit wonky so I decided to play in third person view. 3rd person looks really nice, and the combat animations work a lot better, but for the love of god, there isn't a jump animation! Literally! Go into 3rd person and jump, and watch the character snap to a rigid pose until they hit the ground There are some other really crappy animation situations, but looking past all of that the gameplay and the world have managed to keep me hyped, and I am enjoying it so far.
That weird 'mip-mapping extreme' in the outdoor areas is crazy. I literally thought something was broken when I first saw it.
Yeah the animation is ropey. Btw, how the HELL do you take a screenshot? Even printscreen doesn't work. There's nothing in the cache when you quit the game, and there's nothing in the manual that shows a screenshot button. Weird.
I'm starting to enjoy the game, but I can't help feeling that I should uninstall it, and dig it out again when I have the system to do it justice. It just looks so ugly on low settings.
*edit* nmind, figured out from the forums how to screenshot
So far it hasn't grab me to the degree Morrowind did. I really hate the fact that they didn't change any UI elements for the pc and just left the big-ass console stuff in place. I feel like I'm playing a console port, which essentially it is, and that is just wrong for an Elder Scrolls game.
The graphics tech is really nice, but the application is just plain sloppy. I just don't think there are that many good artists over there.
That said, even though it feels very dumbed down for 360, the overwhelming nature of the world is certainly still there. I have a feeling that it will be a very long time before I am finished exploring it, I just hope the game remains interesting enough for me to keep playing until the end (I can only steal so much...).
On moderate settings and 1024x768 resolution it's playable for me, most of the time. I'm disappointed, though, that apparently I can't get HDR with a Radeon X700. That was a little unexpected, as I have no problem getting HDR with the Source engine. Seems to me like Bethesda got a little too spoiled with the Xbox360 and didn't bother to put in proper support for older cards. I'm hoping somebody comes up with some tweak to force it on, eventually.
And boy did they ever put in UGLY default faces for all the characters. You really gotta work at it to get nice looking ones. It's possible though.
But the game has been very fun so far and it's definately very massive, so in terms of gameplay I'm happy. So very hard to pull myself away from it...
I've seen so many different responses to this game that it's not even funny, One thing though, I wont let the graphics make or break the game for me.
I expect animations and character to not look amazing after morrowind, but they will certainly look better, and this WILL be the roleplaying game of the year.
I just got an email from bethesda, and confirmed it from several people. THEY REMOVED OBJECT SHADOWS COMPLETELY. What the flying fuck is this garbage? How can you show a video with beautiful shadows, mention that you 'only removed softshadows', and then release the game with no object shadows what-so-ever?
The only things that cast shadows are creatures and tree canopies. There is'nt even anything remotely resembling lightmapping for me. I have a DVD of the E3 demos, i'll show you screenshots when I get home of what I mean.
You seriously would think they would allow this most basic of features as an option.
Also.. Bethsoft needs new modelers. I dont understand how the environments can be so gorgeous, but the character faces look retarded. Not to flame cheap alert or anything, but 10$ says he can model a better kahjit or lizard guy head model and texture.
The game, aside from the stupid no-tool-tip having menu system, is great. The dungeons are great, the physics are great, but not having shadows, really really detracts from everything. It feels like i'm playing a morrowind mod, not a next gen title. The AI is also dumb as a brick, and i've tried testing things, like dropping objects in front of people, potions, food etc. They just go about theyre business ignoring it.
Just saw this for any of you who may have bought the 360 version:
[ QUOTE ]
Oblivion uses the Xbox 360 hard drive extensively to cache (copy and reuse) game data. This is done to optimize all loading the game does. It has been found in rare cases on some Xbox 360s that the cached data can get overly fragmented. This exhibits itself by the game taking a long time to load anything from menus, dialogue, sounds, objects, levels, and more.
To solve this problem, reset your Xbox, and hold down the A button as the game is booting up. If any button is held while Oblivion is loading, it will clear its hard drive cache, and create a new one. Once you see the "Bethesda Softworks" logo video, the game is already loaded, and the cache should have been cleared.
Note, this does not effect your game in any way other than loading. You will not lose any saved data.
All this thread is making me glad I purchased mine for my 360...
The near complete loss of shadows is pretty unforgivable though...
Makes me a little worried, as these are the guys with the Fallout License yes?
How is this even ethical or permitted? Would'nt this be considered false advertising? I can understand the removal of softshadows, but it goes back to teh same reason the COD commercials were banned in some nations.
You represent one thing, sell another, and refunds are impossible on open software.
And the new Nvidia oblivion drivers are out, BETA of course, there are mixed results. 4 years for a hacked up game. Sigh.
Well if we're going to compare I say NWN 2 (once the epic level expansion pack comes out) will probably be better.
I wonder if I could make a d20 system mod...
Is any of this really a surprise? I remember Daggerfall being one of the buggiest games of all time (up to that point). When I wasn't busy falling through the floor, the game was crashing or ruining my save files.
Toomas, if HL2's HDR was a hack then perhaps more games should be hacking. After all, that's what real-time graphics are. A bunch of hacks to make things look nice and run fast.
Source has HDR, Oblivion doesn't. That's all it comes down too.
The X700 has shader model 2.0b, according to Wikipedia. That means that Bethesda simply didn't put in support for it and forced everyone to use 3.0. That annoys me a)because it's not necesary and b)because they never bothered to tell anyone that.
Now I'm getting constant crashes in the area around Skingrad. Of course, that happens to be exactly where you're supposed to spend most of 3 in-game days doing quests.
But as negative as I sound the rest of the game has worked flawlessly and is entertaining, and the environments are still very pretty. The characters really aren't that bad aside from the faces as well. I'm just praying the crashing is linked to some very specific issue in that one area because it's so consistent in that spot.
the main reason why the characters faces look so generic is because of all the customization that was put into them. I personally don't know if thats actually a good thing or not because the time it took to implement a system like that could have been spent on making better heads with more character to them, thing is though, they were able to use this system to generate heads for every other character in the game, its mostly the fact that the system is so ambitious and customizable that takes away some of the character from the heads, i don't think it looks bad at all though, it looks very solid and polished and definitely shippable quality.
The faces do indeed look like FaceGen faces. Parametric face generation is really cool, flexible & robust, but probably just doesnt produce the polished results we are all used to as game artists. I, to be honest, have yet to go pickup my pre-order from Gamestop. I just hope that the crashes are isolated to the PC version, and that my 360 version runs fairly crash-free. I've yet to have anything crash my 360, if I recall correctly.
Played for a couple of hours this afternoon; the game was pretty much what I expected. Beautiful environments, cool RPG elements, and boring combat. The first two are pretty damn good, so I'm willing to overlook the third for the most part. The character models aren't quite as nice to look at as the cities/forests. I think I'd rather have gotten some more refined face presets than a deformable facemaker one. I could live without control over the size of my character's nostrils.
[ QUOTE ]
Beautiful environments, cool RPG elements, and boring combat. The first two are pretty damn good, so I'm willing to overlook the third for the most part.
[/ QUOTE ]
Yeah, that's pretty much what I thought with Morrowind. Fortunately I enjoyed that, so I'm looking forward to enjoying Oblivion in a similar fashion
I still don't understand why they insist on such mind-numbingly bad combat, though. I quit the game a few times because I got stuck on enemies that were just unbeatable for some reason. When I finally won, I wasn't even sure what I had done better that time around. What a boring clickfest.
Woot. Good to know that drivers fix a lot of the graphics issues. What card do you have, Downsizer? Virdog said earlier in IRC that he was getting object shadows when playing Oblivion.
hhhmm, didn't notice a big increase in performance, maybe slight. Hard to say. Where does it say btw that those nVidia drivers were tweaked specifically for Oblivion?
just played my first 2 hours. It's not bad.... but I still need to get into the plot a little more before I'll be hooked. The world, sadly, feels like morrowind with grass. I was hopin g for lush, thick, forests like some of the screens. Maybe I'll get that later.
It certainly feels like a time sink. First impressions: I hate the dumbed down inventory/menu system....feels too consoley and I get a bad reminder of Deus ex 2.
I also am irked that you can't bind the mouse buttons for some reason... weird.
ANYWAY, those are small gripes. Runs well on my machine (20-30 fps outdoors); 3ghz, 1gb ram, 6800gforce, etc. Maybe I should update to those beta drivers for even more fun.... I'm looking forward to escaping into TES again.
nvidia's new beta drivers fixed my graphical errors for a little while (ya know the random poly's flying off into infinity). but that problem is now back
rawksta: you know I consider you uber talented and a (virtual) mate, so I hope youre not offended by me dissing the game graphically. I dont doubt for one iota that the custom made stuff that you did for the game is killer, but at the same time I think theres a lot of weak stuff in here. I don't doubt that the customisation stuff was a big factor in the state of the characters faces, but I still simply think that it could have been done better. It isn't just Arts fault though, there are some strange technical issues that mar the experience for me. Now maybe I've got a shit grafx card (6800Ultra) I don't know, but with everything up high I still get 'shadow beard syndrome' on the girls, flickery lightmaps or something, but Im most annoyed about the uber mip-mapping
I honestly dont mean to sound like a little bitch, but meh, I just spent 60 green ones (collectors) on this thing and I just find it really sloppy and unfinished. My fault I guess for not owning an uber pc, but stuff like BF2 runs sweet as on my machine and looks a damn sight better than this. So I just find it a bit weird.
Im sure its a rad game, and by all accounts it is awesome on 360 and an absolute top of the range pc. But for now I think I'll uninstall and play it whenever I upgrade next.
one thing I noticed lacking in the characters was emotion. you talk to all these people and their mouths move, but the rest of the face doesn't. maybe hl2 spoiled me a little there. I don't think it should have taken long. since most of the faces seem to be using the same lip snching (could be wrong) other than the non human races, but a simple text file that states the emotion to be shown for each voice clip would really boost the immersiveness.
I could be wrong. i'm fairly tired so correct me if my assumptions were wrong.
ouch, that uber-mip-mapping is horrible, i really hope that's not intentional on Bethesda's part.
likewise the shadow beard is quite hilarious, but obviously some sort of huge bug.
I recall Morrowind having problems like the flickery lightmaps, often the cubemap in the water reflection would change for no apparent reason instantaneously. I think that one might just be a limitation of the engine.
this all makes me think it'll run like crap on my PC, haha... oh well.
[ QUOTE ]
Lets see:
Facegen --- check
Speedtree --- check
Make art button --- ???
[/ QUOTE ]
Complain all you want but thats the future.
And the whole "make art button" thing, i mean come on. Its like you start a game and it renders you pretty pictures, isnt that make art button allready?
You do understand that it takes people to make the program behind the button, right?
BTW you can fix the "mip mapping"* issue by increasing the amount of cells loaded through the .ini file (last time i checked it screws up water reflections tho and nobody knew how to fix it).
Also its worth to note that i dont have the game yet and my whole experience comes from reading and looking at screenshots on official elderscrolls boards
*- i dont think its anything to do with mip mapping. It seems like it uses vertext color or uber low res lod textures instead for "far away" terrain.
[ QUOTE ]
(last time i checked it screws up water reflections tho and nobody knew how to fix it).
[/ QUOTE ]
Right, which gets back to my point about sloppiness. Be it code or Art. Yeah, I don't really care what it is, just that I gave 60 bucks to a company that deems it shippable, that's all. Still, karma I guess. Know what I'm sayin'? ;-p
Mip mapping might be LOD texturing but its not the same textures you have on the foreground in this case.
By default it loads 5 cells worth of data and it seems detailed ground textures are part of the cells. Now if it has no cells loaded it will use some "textures" that are part of the terrain file.
The water reflections propably get screwed because they cheat them past the 5 loaded cells but now that you force it to load more it gets confused and screws up.
Yeah I loved Morrowind and played it on the xbox instead of pc. It stole away a lot of my life. Despite the corrupted save files, lacking animation, lack of monster variety, etc., etc. the vast world open to explore was enough the really hook me in. And the enchantable items you could custom make were my favorite (ring of telekinesis with 30-40 yard range). Im really looking forward to Oblivion but haven't made the 360 plunge yet. This may be the push I need.
My pc is only a 2.6 P4, 1 GIG Ram and a 9800pro so... Ill probably be better off with a 360. Plus I liked playing morrowind on the couch!
yeah the mipmaps are ridiculous, like the stuff in the background no matter how high you set your viewdistance to is still not far enough so theres alot of popping no matter what and man the mountains in the back ALWAYs look bad, one thing that threw me off is that once you get outside for the first time you're greeted by a pretty bad sight of this mountain thats all mipped to hell and theres some trees thrown around, and it just doesn't look very good at all, and u're like man... so uhh ... thats the outside eh... but if you're in a fairly well enclosed environment and theres some weather effects going on the environments look pretty awesome. I think the characters are a definite improvement over morrowind, some heads are better than others, theres some that look pretty damn good and theres some that don't really look that great at all, but it seems fairly consistent at least in that. I think the weapons overall look pretty good too, they also totally nailed the looks of certain materials and the whole normal mapped environment thats NOT a space station hehe. combat is alot better as well.
on the criticism side i'd say the one thing that just completely threw me off was... the whole persuasion minigame thing... i think that was a horrible idea... having to joke, boast, coerse, and admire all at the same time in rounds just doesn't sound right to me at all, its like i don't want to coerse, yet i have to to complete "the round". i can live with it now, but initially that just seemed completely and utterly wrong.
another thing is the ai and stuff is cool and all and ok the main characters sound pretty cool, but man those random conversations and people addressing you all over the place are really annoying. then theres the ai conversations that are supposed to help you get quests etc which is supposed to be this really natural way to find out about things, but everyone in the towns just sounds so dead and robotic that it just kills the whole thing. it doesn't really come off as humans talking, like thats how robots would talk, it totally doesn't sell.
All of the NPCs seem very dead and zombie like, not a single NPC so far has evoked any kind of an emotional response from me, you can't really say anything interesting to any of them, all you can do is find out about topics and click the "continue" option, its more of a lecture system than actual dialogue cuz you can't actually say anything back to the npcs.
I also did not expect to get into Oblivion at lvl 1.... lol it doesn't seem like theres any kind of progression going on, and with fast travel i can now "teleport" all over the place so it seems like theres alot of this weird jumping around going on. ok i appreciate the thought cuz in morrowind u just had to run everywhere in a humongous world, but just some kind of a transportation method that didn't take you out of the game would probably work better... oh and the horse is barely faster than you can run, and its not nearly as good as the one in shadow of the colossus or gun.
I think overall Oblivion is kind of the complete and total opposite of Shadow of the Colossus, shadow tried to do only a few things but make them all really badass, whereas oblivion is just a humongous game that has alot of stuff in it but it comes off as sort of a diluted experience because of it. Its really impressive what they've been able to pull off, but just like with morrowind the gameworld just doesn't seem very exciting. But thats just my opinion, and i'm still playing the game hehe
Replies
PC was certainly not the lead sku. PC cant run HDR and AA at the same time, but xbox360 can. I picked this up on xbox360.
-R
[/ QUOTE ]
nVidia cards cant do AA and HDR at the same time in a lot of apps.
ATI can and i hope i can select AA and HDR with my shiny yummy awesome x1900xt
The art quality isnt as high as I was looking forward to, especially the faces of the characters. And I've also got some funky stuff going on with super blurry textures in the distance, but I was reading the oblivion forums today and I think there are some settings I can tweak in the .ini to fix the issue.
My BIG beef with the game is the animations. I thought the first person sword swinging looked a bit wonky so I decided to play in third person view. 3rd person looks really nice, and the combat animations work a lot better, but for the love of god, there isn't a jump animation! Literally! Go into 3rd person and jump, and watch the character snap to a rigid pose until they hit the ground
Yeah the animation is ropey. Btw, how the HELL do you take a screenshot? Even printscreen doesn't work. There's nothing in the cache when you quit the game, and there's nothing in the manual that shows a screenshot button. Weird.
I'm starting to enjoy the game, but I can't help feeling that I should uninstall it, and dig it out again when I have the system to do it justice. It just looks so ugly on low settings.
*edit* nmind, figured out from the forums how to screenshot
The graphics tech is really nice, but the application is just plain sloppy. I just don't think there are that many good artists over there.
That said, even though it feels very dumbed down for 360, the overwhelming nature of the world is certainly still there. I have a feeling that it will be a very long time before I am finished exploring it, I just hope the game remains interesting enough for me to keep playing until the end (I can only steal so much...).
And boy did they ever put in UGLY default faces for all the characters. You really gotta work at it to get nice looking ones. It's possible though.
But the game has been very fun so far and it's definately very massive, so in terms of gameplay I'm happy. So very hard to pull myself away from it...
I expect animations and character to not look amazing after morrowind, but they will certainly look better, and this WILL be the roleplaying game of the year.
And X700 is shader model 2.0, isnt it?
[...] and this WILL be the roleplaying game of the year.
[/ QUOTE ]
I'll make my mind up on that after I've played through both Oblivion and Gothic3.
BTW, why isn't the Nvidia Oblivion Driver online yet...?
I just got an email from bethesda, and confirmed it from several people. THEY REMOVED OBJECT SHADOWS COMPLETELY. What the flying fuck is this garbage? How can you show a video with beautiful shadows, mention that you 'only removed softshadows', and then release the game with no object shadows what-so-ever?
The only things that cast shadows are creatures and tree canopies. There is'nt even anything remotely resembling lightmapping for me. I have a DVD of the E3 demos, i'll show you screenshots when I get home of what I mean.
You seriously would think they would allow this most basic of features as an option.
Also.. Bethsoft needs new modelers. I dont understand how the environments can be so gorgeous, but the character faces look retarded. Not to flame cheap alert or anything, but 10$ says he can model a better kahjit or lizard guy head model and texture.
The game, aside from the stupid no-tool-tip having menu system, is great. The dungeons are great, the physics are great, but not having shadows, really really detracts from everything. It feels like i'm playing a morrowind mod, not a next gen title. The AI is also dumb as a brick, and i've tried testing things, like dropping objects in front of people, potions, food etc. They just go about theyre business ignoring it.
[ QUOTE ]
Oblivion uses the Xbox 360 hard drive extensively to cache (copy and reuse) game data. This is done to optimize all loading the game does. It has been found in rare cases on some Xbox 360s that the cached data can get overly fragmented. This exhibits itself by the game taking a long time to load anything from menus, dialogue, sounds, objects, levels, and more.
To solve this problem, reset your Xbox, and hold down the A button as the game is booting up. If any button is held while Oblivion is loading, it will clear its hard drive cache, and create a new one. Once you see the "Bethesda Softworks" logo video, the game is already loaded, and the cache should have been cleared.
Note, this does not effect your game in any way other than loading. You will not lose any saved data.
[/ QUOTE ]
- http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=273721
The near complete loss of shadows is pretty unforgivable though...
Makes me a little worried, as these are the guys with the Fallout License yes?
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1011766
How is this even ethical or permitted? Would'nt this be considered false advertising? I can understand the removal of softshadows, but it goes back to teh same reason the COD commercials were banned in some nations.
You represent one thing, sell another, and refunds are impossible on open software.
And the new Nvidia oblivion drivers are out, BETA of course, there are mixed results. 4 years for a hacked up game. Sigh.
Eat that Oblivion
Gothic3 for teh w1n
I wonder if I could make a d20 system mod...
Chances are they were told the final hardware was 'this', then, they recieved 'that', and had to make cuts.
it's an issue of getting final hardware extremely late in the development cycle.
Chances are they were told the final hardware was 'this', then, they recieved 'that', and had to make cuts.
[/ QUOTE ]
But that shouldn't effect the PC version... but it seems like they didn't really bother with the PC version by all what I have read so far
Source has HDR, Oblivion doesn't. That's all it comes down too.
The X700 has shader model 2.0b, according to Wikipedia. That means that Bethesda simply didn't put in support for it and forced everyone to use 3.0. That annoys me a)because it's not necesary and b)because they never bothered to tell anyone that.
Now I'm getting constant crashes in the area around Skingrad. Of course, that happens to be exactly where you're supposed to spend most of 3 in-game days doing quests.
But as negative as I sound the rest of the game has worked flawlessly and is entertaining, and the environments are still very pretty. The characters really aren't that bad aside from the faces as well. I'm just praying the crashing is linked to some very specific issue in that one area because it's so consistent in that spot.
Facegen --- check
Speedtree --- check
Make art button --- ???
All in all it's quite impressive.
Beautiful environments, cool RPG elements, and boring combat. The first two are pretty damn good, so I'm willing to overlook the third for the most part.
[/ QUOTE ]
Yeah, that's pretty much what I thought with Morrowind. Fortunately I enjoyed that, so I'm looking forward to enjoying Oblivion in a similar fashion
I'm at 25fps outside at 1024x768, HDR, high detail, extra tree/grass distance etc.
But the lack of object shadows is still irking me. I'm checking the .inf for extra settings and such.
It certainly feels like a time sink. First impressions: I hate the dumbed down inventory/menu system....feels too consoley and I get a bad reminder of Deus ex 2.
I also am irked that you can't bind the mouse buttons for some reason... weird.
ANYWAY, those are small gripes. Runs well on my machine (20-30 fps outdoors); 3ghz, 1gb ram, 6800gforce, etc. Maybe I should update to those beta drivers for even more fun.... I'm looking forward to escaping into TES again.
I honestly dont mean to sound like a little bitch, but meh, I just spent 60 green ones (collectors) on this thing and I just find it really sloppy and unfinished. My fault I guess for not owning an uber pc, but stuff like BF2 runs sweet as on my machine and looks a damn sight better than this. So I just find it a bit weird.
Im sure its a rad game, and by all accounts it is awesome on 360 and an absolute top of the range pc. But for now I think I'll uninstall and play it whenever I upgrade next.
I could be wrong. i'm fairly tired so correct me if my assumptions were wrong.
likewise the shadow beard is quite hilarious, but obviously some sort of huge bug.
I recall Morrowind having problems like the flickery lightmaps, often the cubemap in the water reflection would change for no apparent reason instantaneously. I think that one might just be a limitation of the engine.
this all makes me think it'll run like crap on my PC, haha... oh well.
Lets see:
Facegen --- check
Speedtree --- check
Make art button --- ???
[/ QUOTE ]
Complain all you want but thats the future.
And the whole "make art button" thing, i mean come on. Its like you start a game and it renders you pretty pictures, isnt that make art button allready?
You do understand that it takes people to make the program behind the button, right?
Also its worth to note that i dont have the game yet and my whole experience comes from reading and looking at screenshots on official elderscrolls boards
*- i dont think its anything to do with mip mapping. It seems like it uses vertext color or uber low res lod textures instead for "far away" terrain.
(last time i checked it screws up water reflections tho and nobody knew how to fix it).
[/ QUOTE ]
Right, which gets back to my point about sloppiness. Be it code or Art. Yeah, I don't really care what it is, just that I gave 60 bucks to a company that deems it shippable, that's all. Still, karma I guess. Know what I'm sayin'? ;-p
btw, mip-mapping *IS* LOD texturing.
By default it loads 5 cells worth of data and it seems detailed ground textures are part of the cells. Now if it has no cells loaded it will use some "textures" that are part of the terrain file.
The water reflections propably get screwed because they cheat them past the 5 loaded cells but now that you force it to load more it gets confused and screws up.
What goes around comes around, i guess
My pc is only a 2.6 P4, 1 GIG Ram and a 9800pro so... Ill probably be better off with a 360. Plus I liked playing morrowind on the couch!
yeah the mipmaps are ridiculous, like the stuff in the background no matter how high you set your viewdistance to is still not far enough so theres alot of popping no matter what and man the mountains in the back ALWAYs look bad, one thing that threw me off is that once you get outside for the first time you're greeted by a pretty bad sight of this mountain thats all mipped to hell and theres some trees thrown around, and it just doesn't look very good at all, and u're like man... so uhh ... thats the outside eh... but if you're in a fairly well enclosed environment and theres some weather effects going on the environments look pretty awesome. I think the characters are a definite improvement over morrowind, some heads are better than others, theres some that look pretty damn good and theres some that don't really look that great at all, but it seems fairly consistent at least in that. I think the weapons overall look pretty good too, they also totally nailed the looks of certain materials and the whole normal mapped environment thats NOT a space station hehe. combat is alot better as well.
on the criticism side i'd say the one thing that just completely threw me off was... the whole persuasion minigame thing... i think that was a horrible idea... having to joke, boast, coerse, and admire all at the same time in rounds just doesn't sound right to me at all, its like i don't want to coerse, yet i have to to complete "the round". i can live with it now, but initially that just seemed completely and utterly wrong.
another thing is the ai and stuff is cool and all and ok the main characters sound pretty cool, but man those random conversations and people addressing you all over the place are really annoying. then theres the ai conversations that are supposed to help you get quests etc which is supposed to be this really natural way to find out about things, but everyone in the towns just sounds so dead and robotic that it just kills the whole thing. it doesn't really come off as humans talking, like thats how robots would talk, it totally doesn't sell.
All of the NPCs seem very dead and zombie like, not a single NPC so far has evoked any kind of an emotional response from me, you can't really say anything interesting to any of them, all you can do is find out about topics and click the "continue" option, its more of a lecture system than actual dialogue cuz you can't actually say anything back to the npcs.
I also did not expect to get into Oblivion at lvl 1.... lol
I think overall Oblivion is kind of the complete and total opposite of Shadow of the Colossus, shadow tried to do only a few things but make them all really badass, whereas oblivion is just a humongous game that has alot of stuff in it but it comes off as sort of a diluted experience because of it. Its really impressive what they've been able to pull off, but just like with morrowind the gameworld just doesn't seem very exciting. But thats just my opinion, and i'm still playing the game hehe