i really dont understand the review that ign and gamespy gave to the game, giving it ratings of 9.3, since that it seems that the game has loads of bugs and glitches like daz stated. and a game that has framerate loss is not fun to play since you dont have control on whats happening...
Hell, I have a medium/low end system and I'm not coming across many bugs.
The only annoying one I did find was that with 4xAA on, everything was still smooth until looking at certain shader effects (like the Oblivion gates), then the whole game goes down to like 1 frame per second until I look away. That said, it's a hardware thing, since that's happened on other games with this card. I guess it's just too taxing with a complex pixel shader then 4xAA.
The video Eld posted has happened to me already, but by accident - a Mythic Dawn person died right under the place where a metal gate comes down - when the gate came down, he went flipping out all over the place and vibrating noisily... then again that can happen to anything with physics really, I remember Max Payne 2 had similar funny stuff
John Warner: Err... are you sure "shit" is really the right word to use? That implies that it's really, really bad. It's actually quite good, dropping to mediocre sometimes. It's a hell of a lot better scripting and voice acting than I've seen in some games. If Oblivion's script is shit, where does that put Doom3? Ultra-mega-super-shit script? You're just being a bit sensationalist.
Heh, yeah, that's true. I guess it's difficult to control that sort of thing given the hundreds of different characters with different lines they have to read.
Oh man, I have to post some of the videos I've recorded inside Oblivion. I've found some really hilarious bugs, like that door clipping bit, and recorded them. I'll convert and upload them tonight.
I finally had a chance to install Oblivion last night, and was greeted with truly despicable framerates at Low Everything.
Then I checked the system requirements on the box and realized ... for the first time since having a job, expendable income and a professional obligation to maintain a bad-ass rig, I, Yo' Daddy, has a Relatively Shitty Machine.
Time for an upgrade, I think. Damn you, Oblivion. Damn you.
MoP- haha it's true, i can be a bit of a sensationalist from time to time, but i'm going to stick with what i said here.
the script is very, very bad. in fact, there are a lot of elements of games like doom 3 and quake 4 that are better, simply because they were so damn stupidly non-existant that there was no room for a mess-up.
you're spawned in a world you're not associated with. there's no motivation to do anything in particular. the introduction to the main plot is (i'm trying to not give any spoilers) rediculous and poorly scripted. patrick stuart can't save a shit script and a flat character. the lines are so flat and the character is so shallow that there's no room to act.
the quests are all disassociative too. a bunch of issues that other people have that are outside of your interest and have nothing to do with you. the lines in a lot of the game are straight out of the-worst-movie-ever-made level cinema. "i understand.. let's do this....... together." like, give me a fuckin break.
i try really, really hard to forgive everything and enjoy the game while i'm playing it, so i'm having a lot of fun, but i really think that games as an entertainment medium are just totally, totally immature in their development. the production values for at least half of their potential, in my opinion, are totaly botched, in the vast majority of cases i've seen.
(Small Spoiler) I love the Dark Brotherhood (assassin) quests, and I kind of think they're the exception to all the disassociative quests you talk about. At first, I kind of laughed when my fellow guild members would say "Spill some blood for me, dear brother" or tell an amusing story about killing a little girl at her birthday party, but as I did more "contracts" I found myself just craving the act of stalking and killing these people. The reward was fairly inconsequential at this stage of the game (500 gold is pocket change!) so really, I just enjoyed hunting down all these people and putting a sword through their back. The whole quest-line had a pretty good plot too, with a few twists and turns that threw me off. It was great.
... Although, I'm totally disinterested in the main quest. I guess it's because they had to design it so it appeals to all sorts of characters, rather than the specialized guild quests. I'm supposed to go to some sort of shrine right now, but I really couldn't care less.
Mal: don't be suprised if you spend a couple of grand on an uber rig and still have performance issues though. The bottom line is that this is a far from optimized game. It's simply not a very good 3D engine I don't think. I've gotten significant fps boosts with tweaking, but not matter what I do, framerates in towns (particularly of the tudor looking variety) are always poor. Looking closely at the houses with the bevelled edged wooden beams all over them, I think they're simply throwing too many shaded polys around. But I'd love to be proven wrong with a patch that fixed some dodgy rendering code or shader error or something.
I'm kinda with John here. I'm having fun with it still, but it's hard to deny the hamminess. Whilst the script and voiceacting is largely poor, I'm more with the implementation and how it's meant to work with the revolutionary (but actually really nothing special at all) RAI. In context, for some reason it makes me immeasurably angry when I've just finished a quest to help someone out, and the milisecond after they've thanked me they shout in a rude angry voice "STOP TALKING!" or some other such 'fuck off and leave me alone' line. Heh. It abruptly yanks me out of the world by the scruff of the neck.
I don't blame Bethseda too much. They've achieved a lot. It simply serves to remind me what an absurdly difficult thing it is to do to create convincing human behaviour in a videogame, and that we are still a very, very long way away from achieving anything close to convincing.
oblivion has lots of flaws, but I can't stop loving it,
A couple of grands for a rig is an overstatement, one grand might be closer :P, there are some cheap 7800gt's around, and those run the game perfectly, 30 fps in full wilderness, 60+ anywhere else. ultra high, 1280x1024, with hdr, no aa/af..
that's with a gig of ram and a 3700+ athlon64.
(and for those with some more cash to spend, a raptor hd is recommended for loadingtimes!)
hhhhmmmm, not so sure that's a truism. I dont think a machine exists that runs Obilivon perfectly. Even the absolute highest end machines (and heck, that includes the xbox360) experience slowdowns related to combat and number of characters.
The only slowdown that is really noticable on the xbox is when opening inventory and such. <shrugs> Everything else seems to be running quite well. I have had a couple of loading lockups and a few in game lockups, but nothing consistent or excessive. Yeah I've started the Dark Brotherhood line and must admit, it's the best questing I've personally done yet.
Oh and the only game killing bug I've experienced is still the stupid mage quest. I cannot finish the last recommendation for the mage guild quests to obtain access to the Arcane University. Many people are having this issue and it sucks because I really want to start enchanting!
Anyhow, sure there are elements to pull you out of the game, and recreating "true" humans is downright a rediculous task. Best attempt in my opinion would be HL:2, but even it wasn't perfect nor trying to handle the scope and breadth that Oblivion is. The game does really pull you in at times though and I'm still enjoying it immensly.
[ QUOTE ]
Oh and the only game killing bug I've experienced is still the stupid mage quest. I cannot finish the last recommendation for the mage guild quests to obtain access to the Arcane University. Many people are having this issue and it sucks because I really want to start enchanting!
[/ QUOTE ]
Weird, I completed that one without a hitch yesterday.
Yeah, probably one of my all time favorite elements of Morrowind was enchanting. Being on the 360, I'm really feeling the first hindrance of the xbox version. I can't just aquire the quest item through a console command.
*Spoiler Alert*
It's the recommendation quest for Chedynhal -sp? Mages Guild. The body just isn't in the well and hasn't been. I've exhausted all efforts in trying to find a workaround for the 360. I'm pretty far in, almost lvl 20, and I really don't want to start over. Looks like I'll be waiting for a patch or cheats.
Been playing it for a week , im level 15, done about 25 quests, and im absolutly loving the game. cant understand why you cant switch pauldrons like you could in morrowind.. but thats a small thing. As for bad scripting, well, like Daz said , theres no way to make such a complex game replicate human behavior and with a little imagination ive found the stories really exciting and interesting. Sword fighting is no longer just a mash the mouse button affair, you have to time your attacks. If you meet a master of blade you know about it ... they attack ultra quick! its alarming if you arnt ready for it.
the only gripe ive got with this game really is the speed... but with some tweeking ive got it to a playable FPS. I guess you have to love open Rpg types but i would give this 9+ / 10 if i was reviewing it.
I agree with John. There is no immersiveness in the game. The oblivion gates are just glorified dungeon runs, and have repeated maps several times.
There is no sense of the world being hostile at all, since everything levels up with you. The battles never get easier, and you never run into things you are worried about. It's very boring. You never stumble across epic loot, and since you are aware of that, you find no point in searching things out.
It's a terrible game, here I am at level 8, doing the same things over and over and over. Find gate/dungeon, raid it, come back at next level, repeat. The quests are MMO grade, and there is no sense of drama.
The story is terrible, and they give you access to too much in the beginning. Fast travel should have been a reward for one of the shrine quests. Also, there is no penalty for being evil aligned. I'm in every guild, doing good and evil things, and none of my actions have affected anything. Also given the nature of morrowind, there wont be an ending at all, so whats the point?
Also I can't tell who has quests or not. My cursor is sometimes a crown, and sometimes a speech icon, wtf is the difference?
I play because it's pretty, and that is what bethsoft is banking on. Shame really. On a side note, if they give us more editor tutorials the 60 could be worth the development experience. Speaking of Troika, i've been mucking about with ideas for an Arcanum mod.
Downsizer: If you'd read the manual, you'd know that the crown icon means the character is a quest-centric person and can't be killed. So yeah, RTFM. There's a lot of useful stuff in there.
Also, about battles and stuff levelling up with you - tbh I haven't really noticed this ... there have been a few quests where I've either died fairly rapidly or been bloody close to death and fearing for my life. Also there have been a few where I just breezed through a dungeon. So, uh, yeah. If they do level up with you it's not a perfect 1:1 thing ... I've been in easy caves and difficult dungeons, sometimes even just one NPC is a challenge while other times I can take down 2-3 fairly quickly.
Just something else I've noticed is the sheer amount of design and thought that's gone into the world - I love how different each town's architecture looks, what materials they're made out of (wooden dwellings up in the mountains where there are lots of trees, brightly-painted plaster houses in Leyawiin)... the guards have different uniforms and there are different trades and specialities in each location. Even just the architecture and the way the towns are built shows a lot of thought has gone into it.
I'm only like level 7 or something but now I can enchant my own stuff which is very cool.
I think a lot of the problems raised by this game are due to the scope of it - obviously since there's so much choice, everyone's gaming experience will be different, so maybe that's where the complaints are arising - maybe you guys are choosing the crappy quests
eld: I don't even think its graphics that's slowing things up. Basically I think the code is inefficient.
Sure, static screenshots look sweet, but don't tell me the game runs silky smooth at *all* times, because it doesn't. I've seen it on xbox, high end pc's, mid range pc's. All of the above have a split second (sometimes longer) freeze upon killing an enemy while the game code does an 'if health below>x>then die' check. I've been making games a long time. I can almost hear the c++ grinding away in this game.
As for the other complaints, whilst it's often beautiful and largely fun, there is definitely some controversy obviously. This thread wouldn't be 11 pages long otherwise. There is no doubt that it is extremely bug ridden. But it is fun.
True Daz.
Also I think part of the slowdown problems now and then, are due to it being the Gamebryo engine, not a custom in-house engine ... so they're kinda working around the middleware, rather than being able to entirely customise what they want their engine to do. Well, it's a possibility anyway. I was always a bit suspicious of NetImmerse/Gamebryo personally.
Downsizer : I'm level 20 now, never experienced what you did, maybe because I started with the Dark brotherhood, which quests are really amazing, you start because you know you can get awesome items by completing the quests, then you start liking the characters and getting into the story
only closed 2 oblivion gates so far, have too much fun doing really side quests, investigation and shit, mainly those that can bring me some additionnal powers/enchanted items.
I never noticed that level thing tho, combats were a bit hard around level13, until I found that you have to upgrade weapons aswell, that's why I started looking around for magical items.
dunno if you tried the dark brotherhood yet, but if you didn't, then do it, the plot seems to be way better than the main quest, the rewards are great and the quests are real fun.
I started the mages thing (well I'm evoker actually) and starting training my magic skills, which is quite interesting but not as fun as the dark brotherhood missions are. I'm trying to get into the vampire/vampire killer thing now, although I may try to close more oblivion gates too, as you cn make one very powerful enchanted item with each of the stones you get from here.
I am completing the guilds one at a time, so i dont get kicked out of any for going against thier rules. Dark Brotherhood is next.
I've cleared 10-15 caves, 6 elven ruins, and 10 oblivion gates. And YES you do appreciate the design at first, but the truth is that the dungeons are very lego-y. All the elven ruins have the exact same room level layouts, the same items, the same traps and doors. The caves, are all the same brown caves with the same chest location layouts, except for one underwater cave. Out of the 10 gates i've closed i've only seen 4 oblivion layouts. I liked Morrowind because every town was crafted differently, these are all old english. Also I enjoyed the more fantastical creatures of morrowind as opposed to the uber bears and rats.
I play a stealthy archer, I can take down 95% of all creatures in one hit. Even at the arena when you can use stealth, where i had been re-visiting it between levels, it always took 3 arrows to kill something no matter how strong the opponent was. It's just very bland, no thrill of not being able to pass something and comming back later.
As for the manual, I know what it says. Still only 10% of people I talk to with the crown icon ever have quests for me. Does this just indicate that they are involved in other quests? If they are going to use the dumbed down compass markers for quests they may as well use WOW's quest and pending quest icons above the heads.
I have 15 magic weps in my house, only one is a bow. If they are going to scale the game for your character, they may want to, well you know, give the archer some equipment he can actually use? I dunno. I think people are just trying to justify thier spent money. This game was heavily n00bed up for the consoles. In fact, horse armor was released for the 360 version today. Nothing for PC yet. Bethsoft fell into the same trap that all game developers and musicians fall into, they played the largest paying consumer base and churned out a lack-luster eye candy fest. Even tolerating the bugs, it's just not appealing to me, it feels like a bad diablo clone.
I mean seriously, my roomate has a high level character, and the bandits on the road wear deadric armor, as do farmers in town. Kinda silly dont you think. Makes the rare items not so rare, I dont get any enjoyment from my finds.
The story should have been centered around the other kingdoms trying to take the throne, in a political and war like struggle for power, while you either choose a town or restore the rightfull air. Just my 2 cents. Everyone is just sitting around with no emporer, going about happy lives complaining about rats in basements while demon gates are popping up in thier backyards.
DownSizer: For somebody who dislikes it so much, you sure do seem to be playing it a lot.
I played for somewhere around 12 hours yesterday, and had a blast. There were a few graphical glitches, but thankfully I havent noticed any major bugs, have had zero crashes, and while even on my 360 there seems to be a little framerate chugging, Im enjoying myself quite a bit.
I dont hate it, and have been playing it alot. I guess i just want to try to experience the same thing that the positive reviewers say about it. At least i'm giving it a chance. I just hate what they are able to get away with. It's a gleaming example of how game quality declines, doubly dissapointing from the only company i thought had it right. Makes me not really look forward to the next series etc.
I cant return it, and there is nothing else out that keeps my interest. Bethsoft needs to hear this stuff for the supposedly already being worked on TES 5 and Fallout. Could you imagine if they did this to Fallout? It's also supposedly running on the same engine.
[ QUOTE ]
True Daz.
Also I think part of the slowdown problems now and then, are due to it being the Gamebryo engine, not a custom in-house engine ... so they're kinda working around the middleware, rather than being able to entirely customise what they want their engine to do. Well, it's a possibility anyway. I was always a bit suspicious of NetImmerse/Gamebryo personally.
[/ QUOTE ]
Having used it first hand for a PC game I can tell you that it's absolute garbage. We had to make so many compromises on behalf of the thing it was rediculous. I truly hope I never have to develop with Gamebryo ever again.
The core has been proven to be non-multithreaded in the gamebryo engine. Bethsoft allows you to enable some things to be threaded seperately as shown in that article i posted a few back, so kudos for them in making minor work arounds. But yeah, it pretty much gives no advantage to multicore systems.
Good question. They started dev. several years ago, so in the context of 'what would of been a better choice?' Offset doesn't really fit. It certainly looks like a killer *graphics* engine, but it hasn't proven it could handle a vast streaming world like Oblivions.
It's a very tough game to make that's for sure. Middleware hasn't been a good experience for me either. Usually something along the lines of 'oh shit, we need to make this game in less than a year and we have nothing. Lets buy renderware so we at least have something, and then hack it to pieces to fit our needs, instead of concentrating on the game. Im confident this wont be the case with U3, since it appears that the power of its tools were a central philosophy. I actually think the Battlefield engines have always been underrated. I've never had framerate issues with them, and they always seem to be fairly cutting edge, with great ability to handle distance. Flying over the landscape in a chopper is something else. Interior stuff isn't so good though. I don't see why the Crytek engine couldn't depict Oblivion quite well.
Yeah, totally. I hope fallout uses many of the conventions established in Oblivion, but at least improves the engine a bit (performance, bugs, awful skin-shader). I LOVE the Fallout franchise and if they screw it up I'll be pretty dissappointed. This is my first time with the Elder Scrolls franchise.
I dont know if anybody cares/recalls but I was working on a game mod/TC for Freedom Force and the headaches with the Gamebryo engine caused me to give up on that and go back to the drawing board. I've been looking for a suitable engine since.
In the end unfortunately it was probably a tradeoff between getting more stuff in the game, or writing their own engine... I'm sure the scope of the game wouldn't have been nearly as broad if they'd made their own in-house engine that had no bugs or pitfalls, either that or the release date would have been 2008
It's the old thing: "Cheap, fast or quality - pick two."
Except in this case it's more "Soon, massive or bug-free - pick two."
Wow am I glad I asked that question. I'd never heard of the Offset engine and it looks pretty amazing to me (why don't we have a game engine sticky?). Are you saying it couldn't drive oblivion, wasn't around at the start of the project, or that it just isn't proven tech?
[ QUOTE ]
If you own the 360 version of Oblivion, you can now download horse armor for 200 Market points (~$2.50) from Xbox Live. The armor makes your horse a tad stronger. No word yet on if this will be released for the PC Version.
Bethesda has been saying for months that they would be releasing these updates and they are obviously optional, but do you agree with the $2.50 price for Horse Armor? Kameo did this as well with the Winter Fun Pack earlier in December.
Weiser_Cain: We're not sure if it could drive Oblivion. It's unclear from current information how well it would support a huge, progressive and (fairly) seamless world. So in that sense it's not proven tech.
For an FPS engine it looks very nice, but depending on the way it works, it might not be able to handle the huge outdoor environments at all.
Also, since the first news and the website going live happened in mid-2004, it seems unlikely that it would have been in any sort of useable state to be used for Oblivion (even if they were licensing it), since it's still being worked on now.
So yeah, while it's a very nice engine, it's highly unlikely that even had it been available at the time the project started, could it support the type of game that Oblivion is.
Yeah I'd like to add too, just because a company decides to make their own engine, it doesn't mean it will be a good one. I don't know about Bethesda, but some companies are better off using other engines. It's really sad when great games are ruined by poor engines.
Oblivion was started back around 2002, the offset engine was very much non existant at the time. Even as an option today its still completely unproven.
As a side note Bethsoft was way, way too small then to even think about making their own engine.
The core Oblivion team for most of the project was actually very small compared with the size of the game.
I wonder why the dark brotherhood quests are so engaging compared to the rest of the quests. It feels as if they were directed or whatever by someone completely different.
It's strange, I formatted my machine again, reinstalled oblivion, and now it wont start, and I can't uninstall it. Missing dll errors, and i've never seen an installshield error message like that in my 4-5 years of creating install packages with them. It's a bare install, nothing is different, same drivers, same order. I'm an engineer, I do this for a living. I can't honestly find a logical reason why it wont start. I even manually registered the missing dll.
Replies
fan-tastic!
Just think: "I wonder how much they have been paid to ignore the bugs?"
The only annoying one I did find was that with 4xAA on, everything was still smooth until looking at certain shader effects (like the Oblivion gates), then the whole game goes down to like 1 frame per second until I look away. That said, it's a hardware thing, since that's happened on other games with this card. I guess it's just too taxing with a complex pixel shader then 4xAA.
The video Eld posted has happened to me already, but by accident - a Mythic Dawn person died right under the place where a metal gate comes down - when the gate came down, he went flipping out all over the place and vibrating noisily... then again that can happen to anything with physics really, I remember Max Payne 2 had similar funny stuff
John Warner: Err... are you sure "shit" is really the right word to use? That implies that it's really, really bad. It's actually quite good, dropping to mediocre sometimes. It's a hell of a lot better scripting and voice acting than I've seen in some games. If Oblivion's script is shit, where does that put Doom3? Ultra-mega-super-shit script? You're just being a bit sensationalist.
I finally had a chance to install Oblivion last night, and was greeted with truly despicable framerates at Low Everything.
Then I checked the system requirements on the box and realized ... for the first time since having a job, expendable income and a professional obligation to maintain a bad-ass rig, I, Yo' Daddy, has a Relatively Shitty Machine.
Time for an upgrade, I think. Damn you, Oblivion. Damn you.
the script is very, very bad. in fact, there are a lot of elements of games like doom 3 and quake 4 that are better, simply because they were so damn stupidly non-existant that there was no room for a mess-up.
you're spawned in a world you're not associated with. there's no motivation to do anything in particular. the introduction to the main plot is (i'm trying to not give any spoilers) rediculous and poorly scripted. patrick stuart can't save a shit script and a flat character. the lines are so flat and the character is so shallow that there's no room to act.
the quests are all disassociative too. a bunch of issues that other people have that are outside of your interest and have nothing to do with you. the lines in a lot of the game are straight out of the-worst-movie-ever-made level cinema. "i understand.. let's do this....... together." like, give me a fuckin break.
i try really, really hard to forgive everything and enjoy the game while i'm playing it, so i'm having a lot of fun, but i really think that games as an entertainment medium are just totally, totally immature in their development. the production values for at least half of their potential, in my opinion, are totaly botched, in the vast majority of cases i've seen.
... Although, I'm totally disinterested in the main quest. I guess it's because they had to design it so it appeals to all sorts of characters, rather than the specialized guild quests. I'm supposed to go to some sort of shrine right now, but I really couldn't care less.
I'm kinda with John here. I'm having fun with it still, but it's hard to deny the hamminess. Whilst the script and voiceacting is largely poor, I'm more
I don't blame Bethseda too much. They've achieved a lot. It simply serves to remind me what an absurdly difficult thing it is to do to create convincing human behaviour in a videogame, and that we are still a very, very long way away from achieving anything close to convincing.
A couple of grands for a rig is an overstatement, one grand might be closer :P, there are some cheap 7800gt's around, and those run the game perfectly, 30 fps in full wilderness, 60+ anywhere else. ultra high, 1280x1024, with hdr, no aa/af..
that's with a gig of ram and a 3700+ athlon64.
(and for those with some more cash to spend, a raptor hd is recommended for loadingtimes!)
hhhhmmmm, not so sure that's a truism. I dont think a machine exists that runs Obilivon perfectly. Even the absolute highest end machines (and heck, that includes the xbox360) experience slowdowns related to combat and number of characters.
Oh and the only game killing bug I've experienced is still the stupid mage quest. I cannot finish the last recommendation for the mage guild quests to obtain access to the Arcane University. Many people are having this issue and it sucks because I really want to start enchanting!
Anyhow, sure there are elements to pull you out of the game, and recreating "true" humans is downright a rediculous task. Best attempt in my opinion would be HL:2, but even it wasn't perfect nor trying to handle the scope and breadth that Oblivion is. The game does really pull you in at times though and I'm still enjoying it immensly.
Oh and the only game killing bug I've experienced is still the stupid mage quest. I cannot finish the last recommendation for the mage guild quests to obtain access to the Arcane University. Many people are having this issue and it sucks because I really want to start enchanting!
[/ QUOTE ]
Weird, I completed that one without a hitch yesterday.
*Spoiler Alert*
It's the recommendation quest for Chedynhal -sp? Mages Guild. The body just isn't in the well and hasn't been. I've exhausted all efforts in trying to find a workaround for the 360. I'm pretty far in, almost lvl 20, and I really don't want to start over. Looks like I'll be waiting for a patch or cheats.
it runs the game silky smooth.
I recommend some stuff though, any shadows, especially outdoors are extremely demanding.
Download the special oblivion optimized nvidia drivers.
If one has not set amount of frames to be prerendered to 0, do so now, or suffer.
After those I did some extra tweaking on the grass, moving it back tiny bit, and it does run perfectly now.
downsized from 1280x1024.
the only gripe ive got with this game really is the speed... but with some tweeking ive got it to a playable FPS. I guess you have to love open Rpg types but i would give this 9+ / 10 if i was reviewing it.
Your face in the game. Or Chuck Norris's...
at least there is a dark brotherhood armour set...
There is no sense of the world being hostile at all, since everything levels up with you. The battles never get easier, and you never run into things you are worried about. It's very boring. You never stumble across epic loot, and since you are aware of that, you find no point in searching things out.
It's a terrible game, here I am at level 8, doing the same things over and over and over. Find gate/dungeon, raid it, come back at next level, repeat. The quests are MMO grade, and there is no sense of drama.
The story is terrible, and they give you access to too much in the beginning. Fast travel should have been a reward for one of the shrine quests. Also, there is no penalty for being evil aligned. I'm in every guild, doing good and evil things, and none of my actions have affected anything. Also given the nature of morrowind, there wont be an ending at all, so whats the point?
Also I can't tell who has quests or not. My cursor is sometimes a crown, and sometimes a speech icon, wtf is the difference?
I play because it's pretty, and that is what bethsoft is banking on. Shame really. On a side note, if they give us more editor tutorials the 60 could be worth the development experience. Speaking of Troika, i've been mucking about with ideas for an Arcanum mod.
And. http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?CIID=36222 for tweaks.
Downsizer: If you'd read the manual, you'd know that the crown icon means the character is a quest-centric person and can't be killed. So yeah, RTFM. There's a lot of useful stuff in there.
Also, about battles and stuff levelling up with you - tbh I haven't really noticed this ... there have been a few quests where I've either died fairly rapidly or been bloody close to death and fearing for my life. Also there have been a few where I just breezed through a dungeon. So, uh, yeah. If they do level up with you it's not a perfect 1:1 thing ... I've been in easy caves and difficult dungeons, sometimes even just one NPC is a challenge while other times I can take down 2-3 fairly quickly.
Just something else I've noticed is the sheer amount of design and thought that's gone into the world - I love how different each town's architecture looks, what materials they're made out of (wooden dwellings up in the mountains where there are lots of trees, brightly-painted plaster houses in Leyawiin)... the guards have different uniforms and there are different trades and specialities in each location. Even just the architecture and the way the towns are built shows a lot of thought has gone into it.
I'm only like level 7 or something but now I can enchant my own stuff which is very cool.
I think a lot of the problems raised by this game are due to the scope of it - obviously since there's so much choice, everyone's gaming experience will be different, so maybe that's where the complaints are arising - maybe you guys are choosing the crappy quests
Sure, static screenshots look sweet, but don't tell me the game runs silky smooth at *all* times, because it doesn't. I've seen it on xbox, high end pc's, mid range pc's. All of the above have a split second (sometimes longer) freeze upon killing an enemy while the game code does an 'if health below>x>then die' check. I've been making games a long time. I can almost hear the c++ grinding away in this game.
As for the other complaints, whilst it's often beautiful and largely fun, there is definitely some controversy obviously. This thread wouldn't be 11 pages long otherwise. There is no doubt that it is extremely bug ridden. But it is fun.
Also I think part of the slowdown problems now and then, are due to it being the Gamebryo engine, not a custom in-house engine ... so they're kinda working around the middleware, rather than being able to entirely customise what they want their engine to do. Well, it's a possibility anyway. I was always a bit suspicious of NetImmerse/Gamebryo personally.
Downsizer : I'm level 20 now, never experienced what you did, maybe because I started with the Dark brotherhood, which quests are really amazing, you start because you know you can get awesome items by completing the quests, then you start liking the characters and getting into the story
only closed 2 oblivion gates so far, have too much fun doing really side quests, investigation and shit, mainly those that can bring me some additionnal powers/enchanted items.
I never noticed that level thing tho, combats were a bit hard around level13, until I found that you have to upgrade weapons aswell, that's why I started looking around for magical items.
dunno if you tried the dark brotherhood yet, but if you didn't, then do it, the plot seems to be way better than the main quest, the rewards are great and the quests are real fun.
I started the mages thing (well I'm evoker actually) and starting training my magic skills, which is quite interesting but not as fun as the dark brotherhood missions are. I'm trying to get into the vampire/vampire killer thing now, although I may try to close more oblivion gates too, as you cn make one very powerful enchanted item with each of the stones you get from here.
I've cleared 10-15 caves, 6 elven ruins, and 10 oblivion gates. And YES you do appreciate the design at first, but the truth is that the dungeons are very lego-y. All the elven ruins have the exact same room level layouts, the same items, the same traps and doors. The caves, are all the same brown caves with the same chest location layouts, except for one underwater cave. Out of the 10 gates i've closed i've only seen 4 oblivion layouts. I liked Morrowind because every town was crafted differently, these are all old english. Also I enjoyed the more fantastical creatures of morrowind as opposed to the uber bears and rats.
I play a stealthy archer, I can take down 95% of all creatures in one hit. Even at the arena when you can use stealth, where i had been re-visiting it between levels, it always took 3 arrows to kill something no matter how strong the opponent was. It's just very bland, no thrill of not being able to pass something and comming back later.
As for the manual, I know what it says. Still only 10% of people I talk to with the crown icon ever have quests for me. Does this just indicate that they are involved in other quests? If they are going to use the dumbed down compass markers for quests they may as well use WOW's quest and pending quest icons above the heads.
I have 15 magic weps in my house, only one is a bow. If they are going to scale the game for your character, they may want to, well you know, give the archer some equipment he can actually use? I dunno. I think people are just trying to justify thier spent money. This game was heavily n00bed up for the consoles. In fact, horse armor was released for the 360 version today. Nothing for PC yet. Bethsoft fell into the same trap that all game developers and musicians fall into, they played the largest paying consumer base and churned out a lack-luster eye candy fest. Even tolerating the bugs, it's just not appealing to me, it feels like a bad diablo clone.
I mean seriously, my roomate has a high level character, and the bandits on the road wear deadric armor, as do farmers in town. Kinda silly dont you think. Makes the rare items not so rare, I dont get any enjoyment from my finds.
The story should have been centered around the other kingdoms trying to take the throne, in a political and war like struggle for power, while you either choose a town or restore the rightfull air. Just my 2 cents. Everyone is just sitting around with no emporer, going about happy lives complaining about rats in basements while demon gates are popping up in thier backyards.
I played for somewhere around 12 hours yesterday, and had a blast. There were a few graphical glitches, but thankfully I havent noticed any major bugs, have had zero crashes, and while even on my 360 there seems to be a little framerate chugging, Im enjoying myself quite a bit.
I cant return it, and there is nothing else out that keeps my interest. Bethsoft needs to hear this stuff for the supposedly already being worked on TES 5 and Fallout. Could you imagine if they did this to Fallout? It's also supposedly running on the same engine.
True Daz.
Also I think part of the slowdown problems now and then, are due to it being the Gamebryo engine, not a custom in-house engine ... so they're kinda working around the middleware, rather than being able to entirely customise what they want their engine to do. Well, it's a possibility anyway. I was always a bit suspicious of NetImmerse/Gamebryo personally.
[/ QUOTE ]
Having used it first hand for a PC game I can tell you that it's absolute garbage. We had to make so many compromises on behalf of the thing it was rediculous. I truly hope I never have to develop with Gamebryo ever again.
What do you think would be a better engine for this game?
[/ QUOTE ]
Offset Engine
It's a very tough game to make that's for sure. Middleware hasn't been a good experience for me either. Usually something along the lines of 'oh shit, we need to make this game in less than a year and we have nothing. Lets buy renderware so we at least have something, and then hack it to pieces to fit our needs, instead of concentrating on the game. Im confident this wont be the case with U3, since it appears that the power of its tools were a central philosophy. I actually think the Battlefield engines have always been underrated. I've never had framerate issues with them, and they always seem to be fairly cutting edge, with great ability to handle distance. Flying over the landscape in a chopper is something else. Interior stuff isn't so good though. I don't see why the Crytek engine couldn't depict Oblivion quite well.
Yeah, totally. I hope fallout uses many of the conventions established in Oblivion, but at least improves the engine a bit (performance, bugs, awful skin-shader). I LOVE the Fallout franchise and if they screw it up I'll be pretty dissappointed. This is my first time with the Elder Scrolls franchise.
I dont know if anybody cares/recalls but I was working on a game mod/TC for Freedom Force and the headaches with the Gamebryo engine caused me to give up on that and go back to the drawing board. I've been looking for a suitable engine since.
It's the old thing: "Cheap, fast or quality - pick two."
Except in this case it's more "Soon, massive or bug-free - pick two."
If you own the 360 version of Oblivion, you can now download horse armor for 200 Market points (~$2.50) from Xbox Live. The armor makes your horse a tad stronger. No word yet on if this will be released for the PC Version.
Bethesda has been saying for months that they would be releasing these updates and they are obviously optional, but do you agree with the $2.50 price for Horse Armor? Kameo did this as well with the Winter Fun Pack earlier in December.
[/ QUOTE ]
from voodooextreme...
For an FPS engine it looks very nice, but depending on the way it works, it might not be able to handle the huge outdoor environments at all.
Also, since the first news and the website going live happened in mid-2004, it seems unlikely that it would have been in any sort of useable state to be used for Oblivion (even if they were licensing it), since it's still being worked on now.
So yeah, while it's a very nice engine, it's highly unlikely that even had it been available at the time the project started, could it support the type of game that Oblivion is.
As a side note Bethsoft was way, way too small then to even think about making their own engine.
The core Oblivion team for most of the project was actually very small compared with the size of the game.
It's strange, I formatted my machine again, reinstalled oblivion, and now it wont start, and I can't uninstall it. Missing dll errors, and i've never seen an installshield error message like that in my 4-5 years of creating install packages with them. It's a bare install, nothing is different, same drivers, same order. I'm an engineer, I do this for a living. I can't honestly find a logical reason why it wont start. I even manually registered the missing dll.
Sigh.