Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Discussion Thread

I was thinking maybe a confirmation screen, as if your conscience was giving you one last chance. "Are you SURE you want to steal this pewter spoon?"
 
Mav23 said:
I was thinking maybe a confirmation screen, as if your conscience was giving you one last chance. "Are you SURE you want to steal this pewter spoon?"
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Oh, wow, that would be unimaginably awful.
 
Mav23 said:
I was thinking maybe a confirmation screen, as if your conscience was giving you one last chance. "Are you SURE you want to steal this pewter spoon?"
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I accidently stole a few things during my first few hours of playing... but I soon learned to not take things that didn't belong to me unless the owners of the house were gone or asleep.
 
PeteyG said:
I accidently stole a few things during my first few hours of playing... but I soon learned to not take things that didn't belong to me unless the owners of the house were gone or asleep.
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My dad (who doesn't get hints easily) started bothering me when the guards kept on trying to arrest him. Turns out he had accrued a bounty of 10,000 gold!!!
 
Quarto said:
Oh, wow, that would be unimaginably awful.
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No, it wouldn't.









Actually, you may be right, but next time please at least tell me why you feel that way instead of just stating your opinion as fact. To be honest it's insulting.
 
Really? You don't understand why a confirmation for picking up every item you try to pick up would be awful? Because if you don't, you won't understand an explanation.

Now *that* was insulting. :D
 
Haha, indeed. On second thought I actually agree. On third thought, my post before was pretty childish in of itself. Sorry Quarto.
 
meisdavidp said:
"Is that your FINAL answer?"
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"Are you absolutely, positively certain that you want to do this, even though this prompt breaks the immersion the game otherwise is trying to give you?"
 
Got my Oblivion today, played it for about two and a half hours. Nowhere near enough to be able to really have an opinion about the game as a whole, but I do have a few comments so far...

- In general, it feels great. Yes, the interface is evil and I want my Morrowind interface back, but other than that, the game feels like an upgraded Morrowind, and that's good. The combat is nice and dynamic, the sneaking is good.

- Physics. Still waiting to be impressed... but maybe that's a good thing. So far, there's only been two or three situations where physics was actually used, and each of those felt really tacked on (why is there a pile of logs in a deep cave? And why are there two goblins standing directly under that pile, just waiting for me to push it?) - so maybe the best thing for physics to do is to sit there quietly in the background and give me fun little moments of glee when I hit dead rats to make them twitch.

- Graphics. The graphics are... ugly? Ok, yes - I'm not playing on anything close to the highest detail level, I don't have anti-aliasing turned on, and the resolution is only 800x600, because my graphics card is a mere 6600. But what I don't quite understand is how in spite of all the effects that are turned on, the game somehow seems uglier than Morrowind. It's like, you see that everything around you is bump-mapped and specular-mapped and so on... but when you get too close, you get the impression that all the textures are 64x64 or some other impossibly low resolution. I guess that's Bethesda's equivalent of the "get a 486" sign you had in Doom when you reduced your screen size too much :p. That's just the textures, though - the dungeons themselves are nice, and the exteriors, from what I've seen so far, are also quite pretty... I just hope they're not all forest.

- Patrick Stewart. Meh. Worst gimmick ever. How many movies have you seen that have a cast of complete unknowns plus one great star... and cast that star as someone who dies after about ten minutes of screen time?

- Sound. WTF? The creature sounds are terrible... they're quite simply not there. A rat might squeak every once in a while, but what happened to them squealing in agony when you kill them? Why don't they react vocally to damage? Honestly, when I killed my first rat, I hacked away at it for another twenty seconds before I realised that I'd actually killed it with the first blow and it only kept moving because of the physics. At the moment, I'm having a hard time understanding how this game managed to get higher than 50% for sound in any review.

- Lockpicking. I get the feeling this one might get a little tiresome eventually... but for now, it's pretty neat. It really does make it feel like you're doing more than just rolling a die for every lockpick attempt, and that's great.

Most of the comments, you'll notice, are pretty negative. I figure, all the positive stuff has been said already, so no point repeating it. And besides, "upgraded Morrowind" says it all already ;).
 
I thought the lockpicking would get old too... but it hasn't.
Oh and you might be completely right about the texture sizes. most of the face textures are hideously low-res. It's definately worth getting yourself the Natural Faces mod that's on TESSource.

Oh, and I'm glad Patrick Stewart died. Uriel Septim was an ugly old dude and his voice wasn't helping too much.

Still, I can't wait to actually SEE the trees and stuff from more than 10 feet away. Getting myself a GeForce 7600GS over the summer. Life shall be good.
 
I think the lockpicking would probably fun if I were any good at it, but sadly that is not the case. The graphics are pretty perfect in my opinion (I'm playing on 360 so I can't really compare specs), the only thing graphics wise I have a problem with is the faces of people. Almost every human in the game is ugly, and I don't like seeing every vein in their face.
 
That's one place where the PC wins. There's an INI tweak that (while really reducing some of the nicer parts of the Facemaker system) cleans up the faces a lot, leaving with faces that looks a lot more smooth and cgi. And then there's the part where the textures for the faces are just tiny. On the other hand... Having a system that can play Oblivion perfectly out of box is a very happy thing. I'd be willing to bet that the lock picking is harder on the 360. Seems like it was made for a mouse. Also, having some skill with rhythm games (DDR, Beatmania, etc...) might help as the lock picking is all about timing and coordination. On the other hand, we have here a system that allows lvl one charas with security as a minor skill to open very hard locks if they're proficient. I like the dynamic that brings to the world.
 
Quarto said:
How many movies have you seen that have a cast of complete unknowns plus one great star... and cast that star as someone who dies after about ten minutes of screen time?
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At least one.:)
 
Graphics. The graphics are... ugly? Ok, yes - I'm not playing on anything close to the highest detail level, I don't have anti-aliasing turned on, and the resolution is only 800x600, because my graphics card is a mere 6600. But what I don't quite understand is how in spite of all the effects that are turned on, the game somehow seems uglier than Morrowind. It's like, you see that everything around you is bump-mapped and specular-mapped and so on... but when you get too close, you get the impression that all the textures are 64x64 or some other impossibly low resolution. I guess that's Bethesda's equivalent of the "get a 486" sign you had in Doom when you reduced your screen size too much . That's just the textures, though - the dungeons themselves are nice, and the exteriors, from what I've seen so far, are also quite pretty... I just hope they're not all forest.
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Well, that's no shock. If your graphics card isn't very good, the game will look crappy, that's not Oblivion's problem, that's your's. I have their recommended specs, and the game looks incredible. As for Patrick Stewart, he did a good job, and one of the other main characters is voiced by Sean Bean.
 
Lt.Death100 said:
No sounds?:confused: They seem just fine to me.
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I didn't say that. The sounds are there, but some things are very conspicuously missing - creatures make all sorts of sounds while they're alive, but they don't have any death sounds, and many of them don't even react vocally to any hit.

After playing the game for about ten hours this weekend, I guess I was too harsh in my original assessment of the sounds - certainly, the ambient sounds are as fantastic as they were in Morrowind. Still, the lack of death sounds is a huge bother for me. I keep finding myself shooting at dead creatures because I didn't notice they're dead already.

Fatcat said:
Well, that's no shock. If your graphics card isn't very good, the game will look crappy, that's not Oblivion's problem, that's your's. I have their recommended specs, and the game looks incredible. As for Patrick Stewart, he did a good job, and one of the other main characters is voiced by Sean Bean.
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Perhaps you need to re-read what I wrote. I'm not complaining that the game doesn't look as good on my machine as it does on their screenshots... I am, however, rather surprised that the game at times looks worse than Morrowind ever did. When I first got Morrowind, my machine was also far below Morrowind's recommended specs, but the graphics still blew me away. In Oblivion, the graphics... well, yeah, they're incredibly impressive most of the time, but sometimes, you'll notice textures so pixellated that you'll wonder if you're playing Oblivion or... Arena.

About the voiceovers - the more I play this game, the less impressed I am in that regard. The voiceovers just plain suck. The acting is non-existent. Patrick Steward, Sean Bean... who cares? If these names weren't all over the Oblivion website, I seriously wouldn't notice - there is no qualitative difference between their acting and the acting of the average race voiceover actors... who are also pretty lousy. I don't get it - this was one of Morrowind's strengths, so how could they screw up this badly in the sequel? There are very few voiceovers that get the emotion right - it seems like most of them are expressionless.

There is definitely a problem in that regard. I guess they were simply overwhelmed by the sheer amount of voiceovers to be done - clearly, whoever was in charge of the voiceovers failed in regards to quality control. You know you've got a problem when you can't get any manner of decent acting out of people like Patrick Steward. Don't get me wrong, the voiceovers aren't awful. This isn't Freelancer... but it's no Morrowind, either.

The strangest thing in regards to voiceovers, though, is the way they made them all so generic. What's the point of having different actors for all the races when they all sound the same? Again, what happened to all the neat nuances of Morrowind? Why do Dunmer sound like normal people all of a sudden? When you combine this with a face generation system (I'll write more about the face generation some other time) that lets you make a Dunmer with the skin-tone of a human being, you wind up with a world far, far less diverse than what you had in Morrowind.

I love Oblivion. Hopefully, I'll get several hundred hours of gameplay out of it, like I did with Morrowind. But when it comes to style, the game has surpassed my worst fears - I was afraid we'd end up with a generic fantasy world full of deer and pumpkins, so the game didn't surprise me there... but I never, ever anticipated that it would be populated with such generic people.
 
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