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Elder Scrolls Panorama Shots
Johnny wrote to mention new images up on the Panogames.com site, for the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Enjoy some late-night images of sprawling countrysides and dank dungeons. They also offer images of Half-Life 2 and Need for Speed : Most Wanted.
Ironically, these render slower than the actual game.
The second fullscreen pano is simply amazing. I'd buy a plasma and put it in my window to see these shots.
My computer can't even run the panorama at a stable framerate. This doesn't bode well for the actual game.
I just saw the screenshots, and combined with my experience with the previous game, I can say I'm in love already.
Just remember that Oblivion is built to scale with your capabilities. As graphics cards and computers keep improving, so will some of the graphics of Oblivion. Draw distance will get longer, texture blending will improve, and the shadows should scale, too.
Gamers on various forums are starting to explore the expansive INI settings available. You can easily crash your game, but there are some promising improvements out there already of things that make the game look even better if you have the equipment to support it.
In case you didn't know, the grass is generated by the game itself based on the climate and terrain type. The floor of a forest will be more sparse and rugged than open expansive plains where there is almost too much grass. When terrain gets too high/steep, the foliage thins.
After you murder a few people, make sure you don't go to sleep in a dungeon filled with traps... the Dark Brotherhood representative will come to you as you sleep, offer you a position with them, then leave the dungeon-- walking THROUGH all the traps and dying, making it impossible to join the Dark Brotherhood. Bastards!
Even in the most open-ended of games, and this is surely one, you can run into stuff the developers didn't plan for.
Comment of the year
Also, is a familiarity with Morrowind a pre-requisite to playing Oblivion?
"The slave who knows his master's will and does not get ready...will be be beaten with many blows."Luke 12:47-48
I didn't have any problems viewing all of them...but then, I'm not the one who spelled "panorama" incorrectly...twice...and different each time.
They're getting better. Daggerfall was essentially unplayable when it shipped. Morrowind was at least playable. Having said that, I loved Daggerfall but just couldn't get into Morrowind.
Make cheese not war 8:)
All sorts of little things that never made sense in Morrowind are fixed here. You can tell which of your goods are stolen.
When i got Morrowind and played for a few hours i thought i'd gonna love that game but all that stupidity about stealing totally ruined it for me. Add to that all those crates in open places, you could legally take stuff from most of these, but take from some others and you had someone shouting 'Thief'. Yuck! If they fixed that i might give it a try. Hmm, maybe i should try a pirated version first...
In most games, if you could just set all your stats to max you'd be able to beat any creature in the game with a stick. You wouldn't need Fancy Sword of Smiting.
In Oblivion it's different. If you just pimp out your attack stats, your enemies are going to be stronger in proportion. This has to happen because the world is so wide open. They don't know where you're going to go, and they can't put the stronger enemies "later" in the game.
However, as your non-attack stats go up, you have more options open to you. Speechcraft and mercantile make it easier to get potions and equipment. Learning spells opens up new tactics. Most importantly, learning new alchemy recipes allows you to make excellent potions.
The alchemy thing is *huge*. In many games, even if you know the combination for a lock or the recipe for soup, you're not allowed to make the soup or open the lock until a character tells you how. In Oblivion, if you know how you can do it anytime. Your stats will affect how long this takes, but they won't stop you as such.
What's rewarded is therefore learning about the game world, not pimping your stats. Once you've read enough recipe books on people's shelves, learned about the history, figured out the enchantment system, etc, you can really trounce anybody you run into. Put another way, if there were PvP in the game, an educated player with decent stats would win against a novice player with maxed stats every time.
Of course, if you look at a strategy guide this whole progression is toast, because it's inside you rather than enforced by the computer's dice. I like that. It annoys me that even if I know all the answers in Final Fantasy, I have to spend 45 hours pushing buttons. In Oblivion if I know all the answers, I can go straight to the places where the best weapons are stored, brew up potions, go to the master trainers.... It's my competence that determines my fate. So I stay the hell away from forums and strategy guides, and on the official Elder Scrolls forums the admins enforce the separation between the hardware, bug, and story discussion rooms with an iron fist.
It's not perfect, but that's because they really are the only ones out there doing this kind of game. Trying to combine total world freedom with a decent gameplay progression is damn hard. GTA avoids the issue by mostly dumping the idea of progression. Final Fantasy dumps the freedom. Elder Scrolls tries to combine both, and they're getting closer.
I can understand your being circumspect in these days of PR hacks, paid-for review scores, astro-turfing and genuine fanboys. And yes, I do realize that you don't really have any guarantee that I'm not either, but I'll throw my 2p in anyway.
"I didn't notice it before hand, but they never show you more than a few meters around you in their screen shots? There's a really good reason for that..."
The biggest slow-down on my machine was the grass, and I suspect that's the really good reason there: grass makes for great screenshots, but really _kills_ frame rates unless you lower the rendering distance. On the bright side, you can turn it off, which helps performance a _lot_. (On the even brighter side, turning it off makes all the alchemy plants much easier visible.)
And that's just one option. There is really plenty of room to tweak the graphics even more than that. You can turn it all down to really low res and polycounts, or play with the render distance, or whatever. Heck, you can easily turn it into something that's lighter on the graphics than Morrowind was. (Not that it'll look much better, but you won't need much better hardware either.)
"I'm not saying it sucks, I've not even played it (I will buy it, eventually). But I did play some of their other games."
I understand why someone would want to extrapolate from previous experience and take (semi)informed guesses when making a personal decision (e.g., buy it or not), and indeed we all do all the time. Unfortunately, that doesn't really offer any guarantees about Oblivion. In the end, it can be good, or it can be bad, or something in between, regardless of what the previous games have been like.
"Morrowind got into a playable "ready for release" state about the time the first expansion came out. "
Morrowind had many problems, yes, but Oblivion isn't Morrowind. It's not just that it doesn't have the same technical problems, it also doesn't have the bland NPCs and generic quests, etc. In other words, if you consider the first expansion what Morrowind should have been, well, then you might actually like Oblivion. It's far closer to Tribunal than to Morrowind in most aspects.
"Daggerfall, never did become a workable title."
Oblivion isn't Daggerfall either. Heck, even Morrowind, for its other problems, wasn't anywhere _near_ the Daggerfall disaster.
"This is, I think, the kind of game Bethesda would release if it weren't for Microsoft's hand in the mix."
I don't know if it's MS's hand or not, but that's OK, because I don't really care. All that matters is whether the game is any good or not. Exactly how much of it is MS's merit and how much is Bethesda's, is a best an academic exercise, but in the end it doesn't really matter. Either the game is fun or it isn't, and in the end that's all that matters.
But if you want to talk about the games Bethesda did release without MS, those include releasing a FPS actually _before_ Wolfenstein 3D. It also featured driving vehicles and outdoors city scenes. Long before the big name FPSes featured any of those. And, yeah, you could run pedestrians down with the car long before GTA2. It just wasn't textured, but it was in every other aspect a better game than Doom or Quake that came _years_ later. Or they include stuff like Terminator: Future Shock, which invented full mouse-look. In effect, they invented the interface every single modern FPS uses. Etc.
Even in the "The Elder Scrolls" category, Arena was pretty stable and a fun RPG (plus it had some amazing technical stuff, like having 80 _million_ square km of terrain, not counting the dungeons), and they had stuff in there that debatably wasn't even an RPG. E.g., Redguard or Battlespire. I.e., it included more than Daggerfall and Morrowind to base an extrapolation on.
Heck, they even made at least one Mario game.
So basically it's pretty hard to accurately paint Bethesda with a one-liner wisecrack. The stuff they did was really extremely diverse,
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
or she might just tell you to fuck off and leave her alone.
One of the main things they've promised with Oblivion is that the NPCs have their own lives and go about their business - they're not just placed somewhere for the sole purpose of meeting you.
Even morrowind wasn't really like that - NPCs didn't move much like they're supposed to in Oblivion, but they also weren't all there to give you a quest. Quite a lot of them just told you to get the hell out of their way, or would just say "hi" pleasantly as you passed. Just like real life.
It's also worth noting that Morrowind was very low on side quests handed out by random NPCs - most of the quests in the game were quests for the guilds you chose to join. I think that was one of the great things about it - you knew where you could go if you wanted something to do, but you weren't forced to go through the story if you didn't want to. I don't imagine Oblivion will be any different there.
I think too many people manage to raise their expectations way beyond what was ever promised for some games - they just assume it'll be exactly the game they want it to be, and are then horribly disappointed when its not.
I expect it to be like Morrowind, with better graphics, and slightly better NPCs. That's all I ever expected. Even if it's just like morrowind, but with better graphics I'll be perfectly happy.
Advanced users are users too!
So it's only taken them fourteen years to catch up with Ultima VII?
Go to My Documents\My Games\Oblivion and edit oblivion.ini. Search for [grass]. The first parameter (on mine) is grass density, defaults to 80. Knock that up a bit. The higher the number, the sparser the grass. You can find a nice balance between performance and looks that way, and the sparseness of it improves the visibility as you say. I like "160" myself.
So, you are saying that this kind of bug only is found when porting to another platform? That's intresting. I thought you'd find bugs by testing the software, no matter what platform you are developing for.
Okay, stuff like memory corruption can sometimes be found more easily when porting, but this is clearly a logic bug that doesn't have to do anything with the platform it runs on.
Yes I would like to have the game on Linux too. But it honestly, it would be just as buggy there as it is on Windows.