Slashdot Mirror
Elder Scrolls Oblivion Gold
Gamespot has word that Bethesda's upcoming release Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has gone gold. It is due out on the 20th. They also have a rundown on some gameplay. From the article: "In true Elder Scrolls fashion, you start Oblivion rotting in a jail cell. Don't worry--Oblivion plunges you into the action and story faster than any Elder Scrolls game to date. We'll get into some minor spoilers here, though many of the following facts have already been revealed publicly. Once again you'll play as a character burdened by destiny to save the world, this time from a demonic invasion from the hellish plane known as Oblivion. Before you know it, you'll go from the dungeon cell to exploring a dank underground, killing rats and assassins while also getting some welcome introductory exposition from Emperor Uriel Septim VII, voiced by Patrick Stewart himself." I know I don't normally mention gold releases, but I'm really looking forward to this one. You know a guy is committed when he buys new RAM for a game.
I like. Been waiting a good while for this :D
You know a guy is committed when he buys new RAM for a game.
;)
Heh - I'm saving up and planning my entire next computer for when Spore comes out later this year. A few dozen dollars worth of RAM aint a commitment
"This is Zombo Com, and welcome to you who have come to Zombo Com" - www.zombo.com
I've read of many people getting whole new rigs for this one! Personally, I'll be picking it up for the XBOX360, and the street date can not get here any sooner.
Will the game still be trivially easy?
It'll be interesting to see if the game is any better than Morrowind.
Morrowing loaded so horrendously slow, I could decode complex cryptographical messages from zee Germans in between screens. And I don't even know ROT13! Also, the very fact that you could _often_ get stuck in the game was friggen terrible. Not only did you lose your last hours+ of gaming, you had to wait for it to load again after a reboot! By stuck, I mean accidently falling off a mountain and in between a rock and a cottage only to find I couldn't free myself.
Additionally, the AI was terrible and and the game didn't have much diversity - nothing like FF7 or other massive games.
I had to give up about halfway through the game because of these things - it had so much potential too.
....I was going to really get some awesome work done this quarter.
I didn't really want to graduate anyways, I guess.
(You have created a Potion)
(You have created a Potion)
(You have created a Potion)
(You have created a Potion)
(Your Alchemy has increased to 90)
(You should rest and meditate on what you've learned.)
I just blew two grand on a Dell laptop for this game.
I have been playing since elder scrolls 2 (Daggerfall) and I must say the depth and freeness that you experience is awsome. You truly feel that you are apart of a world in itself. Im putting together a new system for this game. roughly 1.5 to 2 grand.
The NPCs in Morrowind are sparse, bland, and they do not engage in typical daily activities, but instead they just wander around the same area doing the same thing no matter what time of day it is. There are a few mods that fix this issue in Morrowind, but does Oblivion fix this? I really hope that Bethesda payed close attention to the popular Morrowind mods, so that the features in those mods could be incorporated into Oblivion, straight out of the box.
More info on Patrick Stewart available here: http://picard.ytmnd.com/
First person games give me motion sickness..:( anyone know if it offers a 3rd person perspective?
Can you download free user-made content for the 360 as easily as you can on a PC?
If not, I plan on advising my fellow TES fans to upgrade their PC for this.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The front page headline for this article says "27 of 18 comments"...
They are totally different beasts. If you like one then you will probably hate the other. To me for instance Final Fantasy isn't even an RPG. Its an adventure on rails with piss poor graphics and lousy combat and ZERO freedom.
On the other hand if you loved it then Morrowind will definitly not be your cup of tea. FF very strong story line with NO choice wich allows for your character to have a very real personilty and interact with his surroundings.
Morrowind, you are pretty much a faceless hero, if your lucky the AI will be intelligent enough to react differently depending on your sex but expecting it to react based on your sex, and skin color and species and combat choice is to much for current tech. Then again, morrowing allows you to play YOUR character and not the character the FF designer decided.
As for the loading times, well it all depends, on a good PC it sufffered because it was crippled (was fixed later with the PC only expansions) to be able to run on a x-box and therefor did not make full use of your memory. But again comparing this to FF7 is insane. Maybe your monitor sucked or you played the games on a console but on the PC the graphics difference between FF7 and Morrowind is several lightyears.
Anyway, for anyone still reading, ALL the Elder Scroll games are open ended, be your own character style games. If you expect Japanese style on rail gameplay look elsewhere. Elder Scrolls makes Baldur Gates look restrictive.
Sadly reviewers have to put games in one of a handfull of categories and that makes it very confusing for people who think all RPG's should be alike.
I am not suprised you didn't like morrowind, what is sad that you didn't learn it would not be to your taste before you bought it. Game reviews suck for this reason alone. Stop trying to sell every game to everybody. Make it clear what a game is going to be like.
This gamespot 'preview' again seems to be selling the game as having action and plot and it won't. You will once again be allowed to get totally lost and have to deal witht the fact you can wander into the wrong areas way to early because that is the kind of game Bethseda makes. Some of use love it, but make it clear to the Final Fantasy lovers that they should stay clear. Or at least be prepared for something completly different.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Word from those who have played the preview recently is that the draw distance and popins on the Xbox 360 are horrible.
Perhaps Oblivion is constrained by the enormous cpu/memory costs of having a LOT of Radiant AI characters in the virtual world?
Even with Quake 2 style graphics, I can imagine processing a lot of NPC's would bog down the cpu.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I don't know but so far AI seems to be 'okay' at dodging in a well designed enviroment but coming close to intelligence?
Silent Storm has the AI picking up dropped weapons. Great, so your civilian decides to be a hero, runs out to some dropped weapon, picks a lot of crap up and then gets killed before his next turn.
There are other games too where giving the AI freedom just never pans out. The only game where I seen some 'real' AI behaviour that seemed human was in the original Alien vs Predator. I was an alien hanging from the ceiling and two AI are in a hallway further along, one of them panicks and fires in my general direction and misses killing the other and he panics before being killed by the backblast.
That was not intelligent but it was human like (he missed because the angle was wrong not because he stupidly shot his buddy or the scenery). But then I realised that it wasn't very good AI at all.
The AI enemies would routinely throw explosives at me with no hope of reaching me that would then come back down and kill their own troops. Basically what seemed human ai was just bad projectile path prediction (or as Silent Storm players call it, don't fire your machine gun through your own squad you idiot AI).
I would love to see some decent AI, I really would and maybe this game has it (doubt it since Morrowind didn't have ANY) but some developers wild story doesn't make me hopefull. I could tell you plenty of wild AI stories in game sessions that in the end were just lucky coincedence. Yeah they are great when they happen to you but they are not AI anymore then when the ghosts in pacman happen to completly surround you just as the pill runs out is real AI. Just random luck.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I remember pre-ordering Oblivion in october being told it was going to be released Nov 21 05. Then I cancled the order after recieving the sad news that the game was delayed until march or even later. Now that I have re-pre-ordered it I can rejoice. But I do have some worries about the game running on my computer. I meet the bare minimum requirements for the game (a 9700pro and 2700+). After seeing ever leaked video for the game sience e3 in may 05. I have been trying to get a hold of some $$ to get a new system just for this special game. Well sorry for the rant but may we all be battling the deadra after a very long 18 days wait.
Besides the fact that your comment shows that you have no understanding of what TES games are really about:
"mod me down if you want, but if i wanted to play a game like this i can go next door and play with their kids free of charge."
As opposed to paying to play with the neighbor's kids? I'd rather you didn't play with your neighbors' kids at all.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
so you are equating playing this game to playing with children? and from the tone of it that's a bad thing? i buy games to entertain myself in the precious 'free time' that i have available. if you want to enjoy your erudite, esoteric, frustrating games while patting yourself on the back for being so much cleverer than the rest of us, then be my guest. i plan to have FUN.
The Morrowind Speed Demo.
Everything I've read at the bethesda site about the actual play time is quite ambiguous. Will there be a huge mess of side quests to get into? I really, REALLY loved that aspect in Morrowind. It's nice to know they'll still have guilds.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Check out the posting time of post 14839243 (the one just after yours). That's scary .. and concurrent!
flash required
http://spore.ea.com/
congratulations, you've outgrown children's games
Thanks guys!
Oh can't wait. This game looks really cool.
For such a traditionally innovative game though, starting off in a dungeon and spending the first bit of the game underground is extremely unoriginal. Why is it that so many modern fantasy RPGs start the player in an underground dungeon where it is necessary to navigate numerous monster filled tunnels to get to the surface, can't anyone think of anything else?
One thing I always wonder is how on earth do the respective captors reach their dungeons without constantly having to battle giant bats and rats etc.? And wouldn't a simple staircase coupled with a door and a good padlock be easier and more secure?
Is that something like Fish Brain Robot? Or Purple Monkey Dishwasher?
I don't know if you've ever been bush walking at all, but the last time I used a compass I had to think....
hellboy1975 http://www.foutheye.net
Just yesterday my Morrowind map fell off my wall, all on its own.. I think it knows Oblivion is coming.
I'm ready to never sleep again.
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
Press tilde.
Type tcl.
Press enter.
Unstuck.
And that's assuming you didn't use any of the ubiquitous teleportation methods to get yourself out of there...
i think you'll be fine, but then again i'm hoping my athlon 64 3000, 1gb ram, geforce 6600gt 128mb will run it nicely :P
"After that you can spend the rest of the level sneaking around like solid snake while wearing full plate mail."
The devs have repeatedly stated that the armor you wear will negatively affect your ability to sneak.
Think my Athlon64 3800, 7800 GTX, 2 gig ram system will be able to handle it? Yeah, it sure costs more than a 360, but it sure has more games for it.
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is rated T for Teen and will retail for $59.99 on the Xbox 360 and $49.99 on the PC.
See!!! It is cheaper to play games on the PC.
Are they going to balance and playtest this one? I played Morrowind and... Well... *sigh* And it had so much potential too.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Did you even play any of the previous TES games?
it being a game which is to date the best example of being made for the dumbest person possible.
Seems right up your ally so far.
don't worry about running out of magic, which would prevent you from casting your uber spells. your mana regenerates like wolverine's skin.
Last time I play Morrowind, mana didn't regenerate. It has been some time since I played, but I'm pretty sure it didn't regenerate in Daggerfall either.
i can go next door and play with their kids free of charge.
Offtopic and I think there's a law against that.
Maybe someone can help me out with this question:
Why does the Elder Scrolls series get so little attention? Everytime I read or hear talk of an RPG, a big single player game, detailed games, whatever these games have, Morrowind NEVER gets mentioned. It's like outside of a select set of RPG enthusiasts, nobody has ever heard of Morrowind (or Oblivion for that matter).
What gives?
They have to figure out a way to make the game fun as opposed to just plopping the player down in a vast world and expecting him to be happy to wander around awestruck by the environments they're surrounded by.
This is one of the things I liked most about Morrowind. I never even bothered to complete the main quest, I just had fun running around and finding new and very cool things. To each their type of play, I guess. For playing them since the old 'Arena' days, that's what always did it for me.
Mind the frickin' laser...
You were right to strike down the trolling moron, but I thought I'd just correct you in that in Oblivion your magicka does actually regenerate over time. It's one of the changes they've made for the game.
Does anyone know if the 360 version will support a USB Keyboard/Mouse?
...and a wise one.
In Morrowind magic-casting characters were vastly underpowered, primarily due to limited magicka. A custom fireball doing about 50 damage, for an average character mid-mainquest would eat up 70% magicka, fizzle some 30% of the time, get reflected/absorbed/resisted by 60% of harder enemies, wouldn't kill anything stronger than a guar, and you'd likely miss hitting the enemy altogether. Potions of regenerating magicka were weak, heavy, expensive and making them required exotic, rare components. Generally all offensive magic sucked a big time - studying "Destruction" was wasting money and time. Of course support magic like mark/recall, chameleon, all the kinds of healing etc was quite decent, and enchanting items and alchemy were the most ultimately ridiculously overpowered domains (potion of restore health 300[per second] for 5000 seconds, from common cheapest components, making you completely invulnerable for hours, or a ring of restore health, constant enchantment - regenerating health faster than enemies can take it), but still taking the strongest magic-caster possible, with all the kickass signs and races made you weaker than a half-assed fighter-thief mix.
Also note the regeneration of health werewolves had was one of the poorest bonuses in the game. You get whacked by the enemy twice and you're down to half the health, you wait half the night to regenerate back, you get whacked twice again and you won't heal until morning. The goddamn first werewolf quest was nearly impossible. Regeneration of magic may still be less than needed to give battlemage characters due power.
In the meantime "alchemy skill" limiting amount of potions in effect should efficiently put an end to boosting parameters to levels like 15000 current out of 100 max.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Yeah, that's what I was thinking too when I read that tall tale. I can't exactly remember the games where I've read that (B&W has been mentioned already, but there were more than 1), but yes, there was this deja-vu sensation. I had read the exact same bullshit a couple dozen times before, for more than one game.
In fact, the first time I've heard that kind of a claims was in the early 80's, about some program in a book where a dot would randomly bounce around a box or maze until it found the way out. I don't even mean backtrack around a maze, like for example in the Linux screensaver. Just bounce around until it eventually find the exit. Apparently that counted as life-like AI. Adding a few more tweaks to that program (like weighting the probabilities for the direction to bounce in) apparently made it incredibly life-like AI. Needless to say, once you actually saw it in action, it still was just a stupid bouncing dot.
It never worked that way. It's usually either shameless PR bullshit, or some wishful-thinking designer letting his imagination run amok.
The problem is that it doesn't have to even be an outright lie. (Did I mention PR?) It's easy to script an NPC to do something like that on a one-off basis for a rigged demo. Whether it's a classic procedural script ("if x has broom, then call murder_script(x), else...") or an Prolog-style inference engine, it's still just a script. If you give an AI the exact rules to arrive at the "I must murder X" conclusion, it will predictably commit it, because you've just scripted to do that.
Or in B&Ws case it's easy to add a piece of script saying, basically, "if X is a football, and zone is flagged as a football field, then kick(X)". It doesn't make those villagers intelligent, it just runs a script.
It's in the end no different from writing a "Hello World" program in whatever language that AI takes. Except instead of 'printf("Hello world!");' it calls the function to attack that NPC. It's easy.
The problem is that it doesn't work that way in the actual game. And here's why: giving an inference engine 5 rules to come to a prescribed result in a prescribed situation is a whole different proposition from giving it 100,000 rules to act intelligently in any situation.
When you just need to trigger one prescribed action it's easy, and you're freed from concerning yourself with any other considerations or priorities. The NPC just has to murder the baker. That's it. That's all.
But when you put it in a game where 1000 other courses of action are possible, now you have to also choose which is the right one. When the player steals some NPCs broom, you don't want it to trigger a chain reaction where every NPC in town murders everyone else. (If nothing else, because it screws up all quests in that town.) So should the NPC murder major quest NPCs too, for example?
What about the rest of the daily schedule for that NPC? How far it will go in its quest for a broom? What else will it neglect? What side-effects will it trigger in other NPCs? Can you even predict all those and their effects on the game? What if noone else has a broom, because a bored player stole all the brooms in the game? Will the whole town be stuck running around scanning everyone else for a broom? Etc.
Make no mistake, the NPC cannot improvise, it can only execute the rules and scripts it was given. So if you want complete realism there, it balloons into a _monster_ of a giant script, covering all possible combinations of tens of thousands of possibilities.
_That's_ the real problem with making a realistic life-like AI. It all balloons into something that's many orders of magnitude more complex and more work than making one NPC do one action for a rigged demo.
And that's basically why we keep reading about how someone amazingly solved the token problem (making one NPC do one thing), but you don't see the final game actually solving the _real_ problem.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Is there any latest word on whether this game will work on windows 2k? And if not, why not?
Your system won't have any problems, I think...
I just upgraded for this game: X2 4200 (OCed @ 2400Mhz), 7800GT (OCed 420/1240Mhz) and 1Gig ram
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away
I know I don't normally mention gold releases,
Yeah because you are too busy pimping obscure Japanese games no one gives a shit about!
I am looking forward to this game too, so thanks in that regard!
"Everytime I read or hear talk of an RPG, a big single player game, detailed games, whatever these games have, Morrowind NEVER gets mentioned."
Well, we could mention it, in the form of "Well, and then there's Morrowind which sucks in every single aspect compared to these other games I've mentioned. In fact, it's the prime example of how _not_ to make a big game: having barely enough material for a small game, and dilluting it to cover a hundred square miles of computer-generated terrain and copy-and-pasted dungeons, and a gazillion NPCs, all saying the same generic things. And oh, if you can only afford one FMV sequence in the _main_ story line, don't use it for something that matters. Have a FMV of a statue which _doesn't_ move as the only animated or voiced part of the whole main quest. And tell the player that he's on a non-important, non-urgent quest, that doesn't really affect anyone anyway, much less save them."
Because that's what Morrowind was. A computer-generated island, filled with jaded non-descript NPCs saying the exact same things and giving you the same UPS quests. ("Find NPC X with only vague and occasionally wrong directions, give him item Y, return.") For something that claimed to be a step up from Daggerfall's random computer-generated UPS quests, it sure wasn't a big step up. A human doing a copy-and-paste job to get quantity instead of quality in there, sure doesn't produce a better experience.
And again, everyone said the same generic things. Since every single line of text could be said by a hundred different NPCs, every one of them was vague and generic enough so it can be said by everyone. Even NPCs which you'd expect to have a different opinion about something (e.g., a city guard and a thieves guild member should have more extremely different views about theft or about each other), still spewed the same jaded vague one-size-fits all text.
That might have been enough in the age of NES, but nowadays... compare it to a _good_ RPG like KOTOR, where NPCs all have their own personalities and a handful (the team members) even have their own story to discover and tie the knots of. In KOTOR even shopkeepers had their quirks, preferences, personalities and unique dialogue lines that reflected that. None of that was to be found anywhere in Morrowind.
But what really took the cake was the main quest. I had happily accepted the running around like an idiot, doing generic quests in generic dungeons for generic people, in the thought that it would all eventually come together and serve some epic purpose. (Lots of games start with the hero doing unimportant stuff, just to show that he's, you know, just an ordinary guy like you. Just following the already cliched Hero's Journey recipe, and all that.)
And what was it for? For something that even tried to look mundane, non-interesting and pointless. No, seriously. Both the NPCs and the books, and even the lone FMV sequence, did their best to hammer it into your head that... nah, it's not important. There's no real urgency, you know. It might be several thousand years before that final evil actually does anything, and even then maybe it will or maybe it won't. And if you fail? Don't worry, it's not like we're in a hurry or like you're that important. Someone else will drop by and save the world in all that time. Oh, you actually want to go and end it now? You sure you don't want to wait another 1000 years? You know, maybe some other idiot will do the job by then? Well, sure, knock yourself out. It's not like we give a damn.
It was as anti-climactic as it can possibly go. It was like watching a movie where the grand climax is the hero's going to the supermarket to buy a can of soda, except even less important than that in the grand scheme of things.
I could go on and on, but chances are I wrote too much text already and you've read all that already.
At any rate, that's why you don't hear people mentioning Morrowind in every single discussion about RPGs. Because in the end we all have better stuff to do than reminisce about how bad Morrowind was. We've all moved on to playing other games, and discussing more pleasant stuff, e.g., discussing games which were actually fun to play.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You should have looked on line for the cheat codes. One allowed you to reposition yourself. That doesn't mean the game didn't have problems but the ones you mention were easily fixed. Oh yes and save save save. Hopefully they'll have a better auto save mechanism in this game.
"See!!! It is cheaper to play games on the PC."
Too bad building a PC with 3 3.2ghz processors and an equivilent ATI video card would be pushing 2 grand.
Morrowind was a phenomenal game. The game had the vastness of an MMO without the problems of the genre. It did get lonely at times, but at least the world really did shape itself around my character.
Hopefully Oblivion feels more alive, and they've significantly improved the combat system.
I also hope we see more variety with enemies, and they show a bit more intelligence. Those Cliff Racers got extremely annoying after dealing with them for the hundred thousanth time.
The later in the game that you install Tribunal, the better that armor is. The assassin is always a bitch to kill, no matter your level. They do that by giving him better equipment later on.
If you're already at an insanely high level when he shows up, the armor isn't just "better than anything else you find". It's *enormously* better. The major problem is that it doesn't hold enchantments at all well, though.
Heh. Magic casting characters were weak? Adding an area-effect to touch spells was amazingly cheap, so killing everyone in a 50 foot radius simply required finding one puny guy. And an "open lock 100" with a high fizzle chance was an easy way for a very low level character to steal nearly anything...
Well, as I said, "support magic" was kickass. But enchanting even more so: an enchanted item of open lock 100-100 for 1s on touch was quite cheap and recharged by itself. And no fizzle chance. Alchemy was ridiculously overpowered. But as for any offensive magic, including the "area effect" spells, sorry. 50ft radius was cool for killing hundreds of rats, maybe a few Kagouti if you were lucky. But if you got three Golden Saints in range of your spell, you simply died, as the spell was reflected 3 times into you. Magic was nearly useless against Daedras and they were the only kind of enemies to be concerned with. Unless you mean nice healthy cliffracer sweeping, 50ft radius boom of fire would be indeed nice against them - but still you'd need to carry tons of magicka potions, and still you'd need a bow and something to get you to levitate or a big bunch of restore health potions and a good sword to kill Umbra.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2