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.

Comments

Will Oblivion fix Morrowind's bland NPCs?

[Jagasian]

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.

Re:Will Oblivion fix Morrowind's bland NPCs?

[tukkayoot]

This is one thing they are definitely addressing in Oblivion, with their vaunted Radiant AI. To summarize, NPCs will have goals and will have various means of achieving those goals. The most often mentioned example is that of an NPC getting hungry, and going to the store and buying some food. Or they might steal it, or go hunting for it.

It sounds promising. In the official Oblivion forums I read one of the anecdotes shared by the developers while testing/tinkering with NPCs. They created some NPC that had it as part of his daily schedule to sweep his porch (or something like that), the problem is they didn't give him a broom. So what does this enterprising NPC do? He goes inside his house, gets his trusty axe, and murders a fellow townsperson who happens to have a broom, takes the broom and proceeds to sweep his front porch.

Obviously at that point the AI required a bit of tweaking, but even in this "blooper" it demonstrates some of the game's promise in the area of NPC intelligence and behaviors.

I don't think there's much doubt that this is going to be a good game that many people will become obsessed with. The question is, will it live up to the hype? Arguably, Morrowind did not, due to a laundry list of deep flaws, not the least or greatest of which (in my opinion) were the bland NPCs. 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.

The main issue I had with Morrowind is that it was too easy, and seemed almost designed to be exploited. I suppose this is a difficult problem to avoid in an open ended game where the player is supposed to be empowered to do any number of things any number of different ways, but it really weaken the entire game experience. I really hope they fix this in Oblivion.

Re:RAM = commitment?

[Ryosen]

For those of you not familiar with Spore, here is a 35-minute videoor Will Wright demoing the game.

Re:Don't believe the hype

[SharpFang]

The silly thing is that you ended up with lots and lots of valuable items and nothing to do with them. Daedric equipment is so goddamn expensive nobody can buy it, and you accumulate tons of this stuff. You need hard GOLD, not expensive items for enchanting, training etc. And at 3000 gold per day it will take you two months or more to sell enough stuff to afford making a single "constant enchantment" item. All these tricks how to get ultra-expensive stuff easy are worthless. With some skill and some up-front investment you get 20 scrolls of Summon Golden Saint, prepare 20 grand gemstones, kill each of summoned golden saints while soultrapping them (boosting the price of the soulgem about 300x), then before the body vanishes, pillage it getting some piece of glass, ebony or daedric equipment, each worth WELL above 500 gold (some like 35000). You need enough power to kick the golder saint's ass but in 15 minutes you have a good pile of the best stuff available in the game and enough soulgems to enchant every piece of equipment you have with constant enchantments. Just add some 130000 gold for every CE service and you're done. Just.

Re:Just New Ram?

[Schitzoflink]

Yes and if you had waited like me (cuz I'm poor, not cuz any planning) then you could get the new Gforce 7900 series of Video Cards, or at least the 7800 will be cheeper because of it.

Oh and for all you "Xbox is cheeper" it aint, to get the HD resolution that you'll be getting on a computer, you need to buy the X360 and an HD tv.

Because bashing it gets old

[Moraelin]

"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.