Elder Scrolls Oblivion review

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2006-03-23 04:59pm

Only real issue I've seen so far is the lack of LoD scaling on smaller structures, especially ruins. They're either non-existent, or fully-existent, which gets rather distracting when a ruined tower fortress suddenly zorches into view in the middle of a rolling grassland. I've had the occasional crash upon loading a quicksave, but only after extended play and only on load, so no biggie. I've got pretty much every setting rammed to the max, but then again, I JUST built my system last week, so that's to be expected.

I admit to being a bit disappointed at the lack of variety in the spellcasting effects that I've seen so far...some scaling as spells grow more powerful would have been nice.

Seggybop · Post by **Seggybop** » 2006-03-23 06:48pm

Is there a list of console commands available anywhere?

Post by **Mr Bean** » 2006-03-23 06:55pm

Seggybop wrote:Is there a list of console commands available anywhere?

Gamefaqs.com has a partial list up in there forums and the main game forums had one somewhere, still up in the air now.

Darth Quorthon · Post by **Darth Quorthon** » 2006-03-23 09:09pm

Seggybop wrote:Is there a list of console commands available anywhere?

http://www.gamewinners.com/DOSWIN/blelderscrolls4.htm

Brother-Captain Gaius · Post by **Brother-Captain Gaius** » 2006-03-23 11:16pm

Grabbed a public computer to post my impressions (I have my system but no net connection at home):

Good:

Shiny. Runs surprisingly well on medium settings on my system.
Scabbards and sheathes! Woot! It's details like that that really make me love a game.
Shiny.
It's TESIV and a very respectable game thus far. I'm having a ton of fun with it after fiddling around for a day to find the character concept I really wanted to go with.
And the "IV" zoom to "OBLIVION" intro sequence was devilishly clever. Nice theme too.
Horses!

Bad:

It's an incredible pain in the ass to drop items.
As noted by others, a depressing lack of certain weapons, armor, items, and other game elements which gives the game as a whole that icky plastic and fake feel of a console game. (see: Fable). What is there is super polished and great, but I loved Morrowind for the endless stream of character concepts I'd get in my head and want to try out; TESIII provided the means to do so. TESIV, not as much. We'll see.
I don't like the new menus. Again, it reeks of consolitis. Morrowind's menu was much easier to navigate and deal with... if you had a mouse, that is.
It seems to be very hard to create an attractive character. One of Bethesda's weakpoints with TESIII was the ugly heads, making the various head mods practically a necessity. Seems to have carried over, unfortunately the new system will be hard to mod. I think the problem lies in the skin tone; it's hard to make warm and smooth faces. If anyone can make an attractice female human (Nord, Breton, Redguard, Cyrodiil) who does not look like a man in a wig and post a screenshot of their handiwork, I'll give them an Internet Dollar*.
For a game with such an all-star line-up doing the lead roles, Oblivion's got some pretty stale voice-acting. It sounds more like bums reading lines in a studio wondering when they'll get paid than a town watchman recovering from watching a horde of demons consume his home in flames and destruction.
Clothing/equipment is not layered like in Morrowind. I can't wear my monk's habit over my full plate armor anymore. Given the armor in the game (see below), I've simply opted to go for no armor at all in my chief character concept, so I can wear that drab, tattered robe and smite things in it.

The Ugly (not so much flaws as my own aesthetic preferences and preconceptions):

I'm disappointed to see some of the stylistic and conceptual revisions over Morrowind. I loved the Legion troopers in TESIII; very Roman in style, especially the helmets. The weapons were similarly Roman, and in fact everything that could be traced back to Cyrodiil was undeniably inspired by Rome. So you can imagine my excitement when it was announced that TESIV would take place in Cyrodiil. Unfortunately I didn't get my Nova Roma (though there is a shop called that in Bruma, but I digress). While the lorica segmenta of the Blades uniform is awesome, that's just about the only Roman stuff I've seen. The helmets, even the generic ones, all seem to be of Greek/Corinthian inspiration, and the armor is... boring. Granted, it's supposed to be down-to-earth Cyrodiil instead of exotic Morrowind, but even the Cyrodiilic stuff in TESIII was very cool.

Can't thing of anything else at the moment. All in all very pleased so far.

*Not redeemable in any way shape or form for actual currency.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2006-03-23 11:19pm

Holy crap. I just had a good run through one of the Oblivion Gates. The realm I entered had several towers, connected by several telescopic bridges. I fought my way through the first towers, with numerous daedra wearing down my equipment. As I make my way into the last tower, I'm out of health potions and hammers, most of my equipment is useless, and my reserve sword has taken a beating. I manage to fight off two more daedra, only to attract the attention of a few more. So I did the only thing I could do - ran my ass off. I made it the Gate's power source and killed it before they could kill me. About five more seconds and I would had been fucked!

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-03-23 11:24pm

AI scripting is leaving a little to be desired. I just took two NPCs across the map by horseback. They kept not remounting their horses after we fought bandits along the way. I ended up having to reload and fast travel to the destination, and even then it was a feat trying to get them to realise, "Hey, we're here!".

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-03-24 01:21am

Well fine. If everyone's going to whine about insignificant things, I'm going to complain about the non-resizable, non-zoomable map. It's like viewing the map on a microfiche machine, but THEY had zoom!

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-03-24 01:33am

Having to reload your game because of poor quest scripting is hardly insignificant.

Seggybop · Post by **Seggybop** » 2006-03-24 01:53am

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote: [*]It seems to be very hard to create an attractive character. One of Bethesda's weakpoints with TESIII was the ugly heads, making the various head mods practically a necessity. Seems to have carried over, unfortunately the new system will be hard to mod. I think the problem lies in the skin tone; it's hard to make warm and smooth faces. If anyone can make an attractice female human (Nord, Breton, Redguard, Cyrodiil) who does not look like a man in a wig and post a screenshot of their handiwork, I'll give them an Internet Dollar*.

Would you consider that acceptable?

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2006-03-24 05:09am

Thats pretty good. My main beef with the system is that it doesn't have a preference for age and the age scale goes into old man and hags very quickly. As a result, randoming the faces until you get something you can work with takes ages since 75% or so of the faces are decrepidly old and useless. I guess someone might want to play a character which is about to keel over any moment now, and should be left with the option but the game should default to a young zone of the scale for randoms (a pretty young face is a somewhat pretty older anyway) or simply not randomise the age and complexion sliders.

My other beef with the system is difficulty of making an "royal" or refined looking face. There are quite a few of them on the NPCs so I don't get why it's a problem, but every good random default looks like a pesant, and even manualy editing from that never seems to completly take it out. Maybe it's just a lack of skill on my part.

Like pretty much every game thats had a similar system up until now (except maybe EVE, there I've managed to make some good ones), I'm hating that they didn't include some good looking defaults which could then be edited to match my exact wishes. I would actualy prefere to have a selection of faces, all of which are good/decent plus can be augmented by mods then this geewiz system.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-03-24 05:22am

GuppyShark wrote:Having to reload your game because of poor quest scripting is hardly insignificant.

I think it's funny you trusted the scripting that much. If I'm travelling with someone, I always quick-travel. I've played too many RPGs to put too much strain on quest progression.

I've broken several quests myself. The triggers are *extremely* poorly placed: the 'get staff wood' quest is retarded. I returned, with my staff, having found the corpses, but nobody would recognise that I'd done it until I tracked down the ONE bad guy that'd fallen off a cliff. Basing the quest on NPCs killed and not items recovered is just stupid.

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2006-03-24 09:18am

After some more extensive play, I've run into a problem that I consider a good dela more serious, from a caster's point of view. At level...16-17ish, with 98 Intelligence, my Mage has almost enough of a Magicka pool to kill a single, lone Daedroth, and that's using Touch attacks, never mind the atrocious mana-efficiency of ranged spells. Either I'm doing something amazingly wrong, or mana efficency and/or Magicka-per-intelligence needs some serious looking at.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-03-24 05:39pm

If you haven't taken mana buffs from starsign or race, you'll always have fuck-all mana.

Post by **Mr Bean** » 2006-03-24 06:32pm

Stark wrote:If you haven't taken mana buffs from starsign or race, you'll always have fuck-all mana.

Yes anyone can get good in spells but only High Elves, Bretons and those who got the right star-sights will be able to have the 1.5x, 2x, or even 5x manapools you need to cast the big-old nukes.

Also try hitting them with a resistance debuff first then nuking away, more efficent that way.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2006-03-24 11:36pm

Investing in items of magic buffing and making potions of magic buffing help too.

Here are some tweaks I found which should make a difference for the PC version;

Some tweaks which get the game to use more memory to cache areas rather than limiting itself to ~512mb.

In the MyDocs there will be a "My Games\Oblivion" folder. Open the Oblivion.ini file & search for "[OPENMP]" then add the line
"iPreloadSizeLimit=<number>"

<number> is the number of bytes of ram to use to cache area data in. About 80% of your physical ram should be a good bet

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-03-25 12:35am

http://www.tessource.net/files/file.php?id=1825

UI mod, makes the inventory screen a lot better.

DPDarkPrimus · Post by **DPDarkPrimus** » 2006-03-25 12:43am

I was in a city way down to the South, doing some odd quests, when I noticed someone familar... it was a fellow Dark Brotherhood member, disguised and off on some contract! I walk up to them, and they say "Not here! We can never communicate in public!" This game is so awesome.

Oh, yes, screenshots... I won't post a picture of Doe in armor, since it's horribly out-dated by now, but I'll show you a few of her in various outfits for when she's out gathering intelligence. (She's an Assassin, y'know.)

Her "normal" clothes, for most everyday visits to town:

Her reagal attire, for when she is in the company of Counts or Countesses. Recently upgraded to a magical version of the same, which gives me extra bonuses to my Speechcraft and Personality.

And finally... a shot of Doe showing off her ninja-like climbing skills. Yes, she can actually jump from rooftop to rooftop, although the roofs she can jump onto are limited by the angle of the roof itself.

EDIT: Gimme an Internet Dollar.

DPDarkPrimus · Post by **DPDarkPrimus** » 2006-03-25 12:47am

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:It's an incredible pain in the ass to drop items.

Shift+Left Click.

A good third of the complaints people have about the UI would not even happen if they RTFM.

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2006-03-25 03:15am

Yeah, went and restarted, going for an earlier-int build with both High Elf and Apprentice. Course that means that hostile casters are a big 'FUCK YOU,' but that was intentional, this should be...entertaining. I'm dreading flame atronachs.

Edit: Anyone else notice that enemies seem to have a Speed of 'faster than you, fucker?' My old char was toolin around with roughlt 90 or so speed and still couldn't keep distance from shit, was getting silly.

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2006-03-25 04:48am

Erm, no? When running my char can keep distance quite well, but it has to be running and not walking. Then again, I'm playing a variant of a battlemage so I have armor in place in case they catch up so it might not be as noticable to me.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-03-25 04:53am

Yeah, I've got speed/50 and athletics/25, and I can run *backwards* and *shoot arrows* while outpacing most armoured guys on foot. Civilians seem to go faster, and of course wolves are fast as all shit.

Tiger Ace · Post by **Tiger Ace** » 2006-03-25 06:45am

I've noticed the first usful mod is out there, to display 12 instead of 6 items in the inventory screen.

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-03-25 07:39am

Yep, already posted, scroll up.

Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba · Post by **Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba** » 2006-03-25 08:42am

I adore this game. I'm running it around High Quality(plus anti-aliasing and shadows, though these look bad on faces) and it's fucking beautiful, as is the music and everything else.