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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.
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
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....I was going to really get some awesome work done this quarter.
I didn't really want to graduate anyways, I guess.
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(You should rest and meditate on what you've learned.)
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.
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.
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.
The Morrowind Speed Demo.
I've read in an interview or something somewhere that had a dev quoted as saying it's still a game that's measured in the hundreds of hours rather than the tens of hours (with 200 hours being the most often quoted figure, and about 20 hours for the main quest I believe).
Tradition. All the Elder Scrolls games start like that. And I don't think in this particular game you're fighting the giant bats and rats in the normal prison, but in a secret passage that Patrick Stewart shows you.
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Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
>>You're better off on the PC. Not much more money, and you can use it for other stuff too.
Not that much more money?!? A PC with the recommended specs will easily cost you twice as much as a 360. I hate it when people talk about PC gaming like it's cheaper than console, because it it quite clearly is not. And yes, while you can use the PC for other stuff, you could also use a much cheaper PC that you don't have to upgrade every year for all that other stuff. Sure, gaming PCs do have benefits over consoles, but don't try to pretend they aren't a lot more money.
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What you missed is that much of the fun of the game is, IMO, in just EXPLORING the world. It took me 4-5 attempts at starting the game to actually get into it. For the first few ones, I always tried to powergame it, find an edge I could use, whatever. Then I just decided to see what the game had to offer. I walked about, found a lake, dove right in, swam about and found some underwater caves. Intrigued, I decided to explore. In there, I hunted about for some oysters, yielding some pearls, and a few more things, of the sunken treasure variety. Then I took to the hills around, and found all sorts of creatures. I probably spent many more hours in-game just walking/flying/jumping about and exploring than actually doing quests as such. Even then, it was more doing side quests than doing the main story line. Just let the world take you in!
I hate it when people talk about PC gaming like it's cheaper than console
Good for you.
you could also use a much cheaper PC
My video card cost less than a 360, and is faster than the 360's video. It's the only difference between my machine and a machine I would use for work. Again, not saying it's cheaper...Just smarter unless you play a lot of games and don't do much work. (Personally, I buy the consoles too)
that you don't have to upgrade every year
I hate when console gamers talk about how PC games have to upgrade all the damned time. If you buy smart you don't have to upgrade more than once every 3 years or so. Maybe you won't get the latest graphical features enabled in the latest games after a little while, but you don't get 'em on your non upgraded console either. Not only that, but how long did that original Xbox last you before it was obsolete?
but don't try to pretend they aren't a lot more money.
They're not a lot more money. They're more money, sure. But they're not a *lot* more money.
The good news is the got rid of clif-racers in oblivion (almost certainly that flying thing, most players found them anoying).
As far as ugly, I'd have to agree, the npc's were definately that. However the really good thing about Morrowind was the modding potential. I downloaded some mods that fixed that right up. Some of the modders out there (look for red's heads astar's replaces) made some really amazingly good looking npc meshes and textures, many with very compareable complexity so they won't slow down the game on older computers.
Once you get used to the game (and grab a few mod's to make the npc's look good) it's a very good rpg for those that prefer not being railroaded down a set storyline (though there is one to follow if and when and how you choose).
Mycroft
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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.
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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.
Mr. T carries a postage stamp in his wallet at all times on the back is a list of all the fools he doesn't pity
"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.
Yes you do. The reason is that in the elder scrolls games you can pick up everything, so there can't really be just a hotkey to pick up nearby loot or pick it up when you run over it. If that were the case, you'd soon have your bags full of candles, bowls, spoons, knives, forks, bottles, plates, baskets... etc. You'll find you actually have to determine what's of value rather than assuming everything is and picking it up.
It's a bit interesting, as in a lot of other RPGs if you can pick it up, it's either important or valuable. If you do the same in an Elder Scrolls game, you'll find that like in real life, picking up everything not nailed down isn't very helpful, and often quite a burden.
That's frequently true, but in a lot of cases it is more economical to buy a PC to suit your serious needs as well as your recreational needs. For example, my classes require that I use programs like MatLab, Cadence/OrCad, and Maple. In order to use these programs, a powerful computer is a virtual must, as the processing times on slower processors are unbearable.
So, the coincidental benefit of having a powerful PC to play games on is definitely there.
Also, were I to want the same picture experience on a console as I get from my PC, it would cost me an arm and a leg - I play games at 1600x1200 on a 21" monitor that cost me $75. Achieving even a similar experience with a television would be stupendously expensive. Adjusting for viewing distance, I'd need a much bigger TV, not to mention all the assorted hardware to get the HD signal to it.
Plus, the mouse-keyboard combo can't be beat for many of the games I play - UT2K4, Far Cry, etc... the experience is simply not the same with a clunky analog stick.