Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Discussion Thread

oooooooblivioooooooooooon
Anyone else order the Collector's? how cool are the extra thingies?
BTW, there are a few very small mods that add a crosshair to 3rd person view. And remove the stupi interface.
Gotta LOVE pc gaming...
 
Edfilho said:
oooooooblivioooooooooooon
Anyone else order the Collector's? how cool are the extra thingies?
BTW, there are a few very small mods that add a crosshair to 3rd person view. And remove the stupi interface.
Gotta LOVE pc gaming...
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1. Really cool if you like reading about the history of gameworlds.
2. Mods are one of the main reasons PCs are better than consoles. What comes in the box isn't the limit. You can freely download lots of additional content online (so long as the game is mod-friendly).
 
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.
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Yes, the random pixely texture is due to your graphics card. Texture quality scales based on what your graphics card can handle.
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.
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Now this complaint caught me totally off guard. If anything, Morrowind has been universally criticized for its lousy voiceovers. There were only two voices for each race, and after a while I got kinda tired of every Argonian saying "You want something....?" This is looking aside from the fact that Morrowind had very few voiceovers, only conversation pieces and full voice acting for important characters like Vivec. Oblivion is a big step up from that, and IMHO the voice acting for Oblivion is better than the average game (The highest-quality being those in Crimson Skies) Also, the Dunmer had accents in Morrowind because it was their home country, this is Cyrrodil.
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.
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I'm not following you. Morrowind had only a set face selection, while Oblivion lets you hand-craft your face. How does having more freedom of design make something less diverse?
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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I remember your last argument, where you said you much preferred the giant mushrooms and crab shell houses in Morrowind. Morrowind was different, but i've always thought that Morrowind was less diverse, it was either ash or swamp for most of the land, with no real forests anywhere but Solthsheim. Don't get me wrong, Morrowind was a work of art, but it has been surpassed in every way by Oblivion.
 
Fatcat said:
Yes, the random pixely texture is due to your graphics card. Texture quality scales based on what your graphics card can handle.
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Texture quality (or rather, texture size) is indeed a setting you can change - and I have it set to the highest, so it's not an issue.

Now this complaint caught me totally off guard. If anything, Morrowind has been universally criticized for its lousy voiceovers. There were only two voices for each race, and after a while I got kinda tired of every Argonian saying "You want something....?"
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Morrowind had few voiceovers, but they were all well-acted, and each race sounded different. In Oblivion, everybody has lots of voiceovers, and most of them are not acted as well as in Morrowind, either emotionless or with the wrong emphasis.

This is looking aside from the fact that Morrowind had very few voiceovers, only conversation pieces and full voice acting for important characters like Vivec.
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...And that's another thing worth noting. In Morrowind, most people had more than two topics to talk about. I'm still trying to decide if Oblivion is truly worse in this regard (after all, no matter how many topics people had in Morrowind, ultimately the responses to most topics were identical throughout the world), but right now it does seem a bit pointless to talk to the generic NPCs.

Also, the Dunmer had accents in Morrowind because it was their home country, this is Cyrrodil.
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Oh, ok, you mean like the Russians, who only speak with a Russian accent when in Russia, and start speaking normally the moment they step outside their country?

I'm not following you. Morrowind had only a set face selection, while Oblivion lets you hand-craft your face. How does having more freedom of design make something less diverse?
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First up, because you can now make a Dunmer that looks like a Nord (minus the eyes), and there's more than a few characters in the game whose race is hard to even determine. Secondly, because the face design doesn't allow you to give your character any distinctive facial features... which was easily doable in Morrowind. You want a scar or a tattoo on your character's face? Go back to Morrowind, in Oblivion everybody looks like everybody.

I remember your last argument, where you said you much preferred the giant mushrooms and crab shell houses in Morrowind. Morrowind was different, but i've always thought that Morrowind was less diverse, it was either ash or swamp for most of the land, with no real forests anywhere but Solthsheim. Don't get me wrong, Morrowind was a work of art, but it has been surpassed in every way by Oblivion.
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Sure - if you like to make pumpkin-and-potato potions. I don't really have time to respond to this right now (writing this from work :p), but Oblivion is annoyingly realistic. That having been said, it is a little better than I had expected from screenshots - there is a bit of landscape diversity, and even the architecture isn't as boring as I thought it would be. I probably won't have an opinion about this until I've had a chance to explore the east, though (so far, I've mainly been running around in the Colovian west).
 
Quarto said:
Oh, ok, you mean like the Russians, who only speak with a Russian accent when in Russia, and start speaking normally the moment they step outside their country?
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Ahahahahahahahahahahahaha
 
Quarto said:
Oh, ok, you mean like the Russians, who only speak with a Russian accent when in Russia, and start speaking normally the moment they step outside their country?
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I can understand his reasoning only if the dunmer was born or raised in Cyrodil.
 
I think the point that needs to be made is that for Cyrodil to be as dynamic as advertised, not everyone in it would have been born there. While I don't think having dunmer who sound like they come from Cyrodil is in and of itself a bad thing, I think variations in all the voices are very necessary. And thankfully, that should be very possible thanks to the construction set. The thing that buggers me is the difficulty of using the fagegen as implemented in the game. They cut a lot of corners with it compared to even the demo version of the program. This isn't to say that making nice faces is impossible, but I think there were things they could have done better.
 
Oh, ok, you mean like the Russians, who only speak with a Russian accent when in Russia, and start speaking normally the moment they step outside their country?
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I can understand his reasoning only if the dunmer was born or raised in Cyrodil.
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In case you didn't notice, the Dunmer in Morrowind were mostly Ashlanders. Ashlanders for the most part don't travel to the Imperial city very often. The Dunmer in Cyrrodil were most likely born there, not all Dunmer are from Morrowind. I happen to have a friend who is Polish, but he doesn't speak with an accent because he was born here.
 
And yet, every polish person in the US wasn't actually born here.
And even between the various cities you would see differences in the way they speak.
Or hell, most big cities have several different accents associated with them.
 
Fatcat said:
In case you didn't notice, the Dunmer in Morrowind were mostly Ashlanders.
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What are you talking about? Most Dunmer in Morrowind were in the cities, and there were virtually no Ashlanders at all in the cities. Besides, even in Mournhold the Dunmer had an accent... and a different-sounding voice, which is what I was talking about.
 
There were a few Ashlanders - one was a merchant who'd basically left his tribe in Ald'ruhn; his son was in one of the Sixth House caves you would clear out, and you could rescue him if you so chose to... but there weren't many Ashlanders in towns at all, no.
 
Someone should design new laser effects for Vision Engine and charge $2.00 for them. YEAH!
 
Lt.Death100 said:
Damn I'm glad I didn't get this for the Xbox 360.
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Eh, they're selling the same plugins for the PC too... although the fact that they're adding some more content in future plugins is heartening. If the plugin's good, and adds a lot, then I'll pay for it - but if there are others making plugins for free, I'll happily grab those too.
 
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