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Oblivion To Be Patched, Sells Well
Gamers with Jobs has word that a patch for Oblivion should be expected sometime in the near future. The future official content downloads, at the same time, should be cheaper to obtain. Meanwhile, the game has been burning up the charts, according to Next Generation: "The title has become the fastest-selling Xbox 360 game in North America, and according to The NPD Group, it's currently the best-selling PC game, with the Oblivion Collector's Edition following behind at number 2. NPD also reports that the RPG made up 13 percent of PC game sales during its first week on the market -- more than four times the sales volume of the next best-selling title."
It's no shocker that Oblivion is selling well for Xbox 360. There hasn't been much else for 360 owners to buy, and I'm sure many 360 owners bot the console for this game in much the same way that PSX owners bought their units for FF7 (albeit Oblivion has probably lead to fewer sales than FF7). The fact that Oblivion is doing well for both 360 and the PC is pretty damn impressive, though. Just goes to show you that not everything has to be a MMOG or have multiplayer features to be fun.
The manual was a guide on how to avoid bugs.
Take this excerpt from page 53:
You may be tempted to enter the ancestrol tomb of C'Baothag, which holds silks, spices, and unimagineable riches beyond measure. DON'T. Entering this cave will cause the game to crash to your desktop, erasing all your saved games. You have been warned.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I specifically gave up PC gaming and wen't over to consoles to avoid this. Seems like time has caught up with me.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
"Personally as a big fan of Morrowind, I wouldn't be caught dead with anything other then the PC version simply for the mods. Don't know why any Elder Scrolls fan could do without the mods."
Speaking as one of the people that bought Morrowind for the XBox, I'll tell you why I did that: I had no clue about the plugins on the PC version, I didn't even know there was a PC version. Morrowind was the first time I had ever heard of the Elder Scrolls.
Yeah, the new magicka regenration rates make mages more powerful than they were in Morrowind. In Daggerfall, there was an ugly bug they never quite patched away that allowed you to absorb your own spells at 100% efficiency if you had innate spell absorption, so you could build a ranged AE spell and fire it at the floor at your feet to kill everything at an overall cost of 0 magicka. This made mages tiny gods.
Morrowind had the stupid Breton/Atronach combo that allowed you to cast a spell summoning an ancestor spirit, piss it off, and absorb about 50% of the sleep spells it cast at you for tons of extra magicka. It was convoluted, but it made the Atronach sign work pretty well and kept mages going without excessive potion use. This combo got even uglier using items enchanted with summon spells if you were good at recharging them.
Oblivion has innate magicka regeneration that sort of renders the Atronach sign obsolete unless you can find something like the summoning trick from Morrowind (who knows, maybe there is one). Anyone with sufficient magicka can just build bad-ass spells, cast em, then wait a few seconds to get their magicka back and keep on truckin.
So yeah, magic is kinda overpowered, though it was insanely overpowered in Daggerfall.
The problem is that Elder Scrolls games have had broken levelling systems since Morrowind. They're counter-intuitive. If you level up with your major skills only, you're looking at maybe +7 stat points per level. You don't get much improvement in your other skills, and you're missing out on potential stat points by doing this. The game will still scale up in difficulty, so difficulty scales up quickly while your power scales up slowly.
You gain the most by focusing on skills not in your chosen skill set because you can get up to +15(or more?) stat points per level, and you get a large number of skill increases across the board with a limited number of level-ups. This means difficulty scales up slowly but your power scales up quickly.
example: the best possible mage is set up to be a mage's mage(like High-Elf/Apprentice) but has nothing but combat skills as major skills, and the class is focused on combat. Why? Simple: level up your magic skills so that you get +5 Int and +5 Wil at next level up(say +5 Destruction and +5 Mysticism?) and then level up your main skills in the same stat 7 times or so (let's say +7 Athleticism) and you get
+5 Speed
+5 Intelligence
+5 Willpower
with one level. I think? Do that 10-15 times and you have 100 in all three stats and a ton of skill in Athleticism and all the magical skills, which is very useful to have. After 20-30 levels of this, you should be able to have 100 Speed, Strength, Willpower, and Intelligence easily.
In the end, all the Elder Scrolls games reward you for doing everything with your character while having the highest possible magicka and hitpoints possible (with magicka being more important). Mix and match racial and sign-based bonuses to taste.
I'd love to know why level scaling doesnt suck because I haven't seen any reasons yet.
The concept isn't terrible. It's the ballance that is broken.
You're having trouble because you're not an all-out combat mage. Your magic and magic regeneration scale up when you level, so if you had been using destruction magic all this time you'd still be taking those guys out easy. If you want to be any other type of character, well... Sorry, you're out of luck.
... let me be the first to say that this is one of the most trouble-free games I have ever used out-of-the-box. (The sole exception to that was due to an old *.ax codec file on my PC, which caused crashes very often, but was not the developers' fault, and was quickly addressed in a FAQ.) The only bug that I'm aware of is that shopkeepers' gold on-hand doesn't decrease when you sell them things. Whoops!
:) I use a tweak which speeds up magical projectiles to provide a bit more of a challenge, and a mod to make the zero-mana cost Night Eye "power" available to the Khajit an on/off item rather than a free "spell" with a set duration.
I'm aware the parent post was just a quick blurt out to get a comment up, but Oblivion has been a great example of what a PC game should be.
Additionally, good luck getting all the free, fan-made content on your XBOX!
Sure if you like being a magic/alchemy nerd that can barely hold all of his potions let alone armor and a weapon.
The leveling system in the Elder Scroll games were always 'OK' as long as you didn't try making a 'jack-of-all-trades master-of-none' character. Try creating a character class with athletics, acrobatics, sneak, security, illusion, restoration and marksman (half of those skills are useless in combat and the other half causes your levels to skyrocket since they're so useful/easy to skill up) and watch as you get creamed by daedra, vampires and anything that uses a shield.
On the other hand, create a class with block, blade/blunt/hand-to-hand, heavy/light armor and any other skills of your choice and you can plow through the entire game with the expection of the Thieves Guild quests. (The first three skills turn you into the perfect Warrior and the Thieves Guild penalizes you for unauthorized murder on the job.)
I am a big fan of the Elder Scrolls series as well. I have a computer that is more than powerful enough to run Oblivion with most of the bells and whistles turned on, but I bought the XBOX 360 version because I wanted to play it on my beautiful SONY HDTV from my bed. I do not care about user created modules because the public modules for Morrowind all sucked; perhaps that changed at some point, but I stopped paying attention to user modules rather quickly. I think that Bethesda ought to offer a system to copy modules onto a USB storage device from the computer and transfer them onto the XBOX 360; Microsoft would probably have a tizzy though, since this would essentially penetrate their XBOX Live Marketplace only distribution system.
From my experience, this is one of the most bug-free games I've played in a while. The bugs I know of are minor script issues, not serious engine glitches.
As for patches within weeks, think about it this way: Bethesda's beta testing probably encompassed a few hundred machines at most. Upon release, the game was being run on hundreds of thousands of machines with various hardware and software configurations. Bugs are inevitable which weren't discovered in the testing process. The fact that they responded this quickly with a patch is a good thing.
I'm totally against shipping a known broken game where you have to patch it to play in the first place, but so far I have heard of no showstopper bugs in Oblivion, just minor issues and a few hardware conflicts which could just as well be bad drivers. There's a big difference between "we can always patch it later" and "oh, we didn't know about that, here's a patch".
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.