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Oblivion Headed to PSP & PS3
errorjustin writes "More Pre-E3 news is coming out - Bethesda's 2006 line-up has been revealed, and on the list is are PS3 and PSP ports of Oblivion. Both are currently slated for a November release, which further backs up Sony's insistence that the PS3 will launch in November. A formal announcement is expected in a couple weeks at E3."
If Oblivion chugs my AMD Socket 939 2ghz system with a 6800GTX a 1GB of RAM, I can't wait to see what it'll do to a PSP :P
with Oblivion no longer exclusive to the xbox360, the Console Wars are totally going to be a dogfight. However, they should have done the PS3 version first, so that the xbox version could get parallelized better (and make a better use of the power triple core)...
Jesus said to his disciples: "If you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one" - Luke 22:36
My PSP will potentially run Oblivion better than my current rig. I cry.
"Both are currently slated for a November release, which further backs up Sony's insistence that the PS3 will launch in November"
Yea, and Oblivion was originally slated for release on the 360 for LAST November, but we all know how that ended up.
It's up a LOT more than any MMO and you aren't being griefed by the admins like in EQ, or the techs, like with WoW. I like that...
I really want to get excited about the idea of Oblivion on a portable console. I've come to a point where I enjoy handheld gaming just as much, and sometimes more, than I do gaming on either my monitor or console. That said, it's really hard to get excited about such a big game being ported to the PSP given that the thing tends to get bogged down by disk access. If it weren't for that issue, I might own one already because, damn, the graphics on the PSP look great. :)
Horrible loading times.
Maybe by the time Oblivion comes out on the PS3 all the bugs will be fixed.
And hey, Oblivion makes perfect sense for the PSP, becuase Oblivion is chock-full of the one thing the PSP really excels at-- load screens!
Anyway, things are looking really, really bad for the 360 on the exclusives front, honestly. The 360 had what looked like an impressive or at least sizable runup of coming games a year ago, but it's now looking like basically everything the 360 has either has a PC release already, is getting a PC release eventually, or is getting a PS3 release eventually. It looks like pretty much all the 360 has left for exclusives is Halo 3 and Gears of War. And as Halo 1 and 2 show us, all we have to do is wait a year or two and Halo 3 will come out on the PC as well. After the number of exclusives which have jumped ship already, the exclusivity of the ones that are left is in serious doubt. For example I wonder how long Gears of War will stay exclusive..?
This is a problem, because the 360 can't fall back on being "the multiplatform games system" as easily this time. Almost none of the really important XBox 1 games were exclusives. But that was okay, because whenever a game came out for multiple systems, the XBox 1 version was invariably the best; so the XBox formed this nice little niche where it had a variety of standout versions of the best games for the PC and PS3 of the time. The 360, though, will be either matched or surpassed in power by the PS3, so the 360 won't have this advantage that the XBox had. The 360 version of [insert game here] will vaguely lag the PS3 version in quality, instead of the other way around. Microsoft has abandoned the niche they held last time. Instead the 360 is basically settling into the niche of, it's the system for the hardcore PC gamer who doesn't want to bother maintaining a PC. I'm certain the 360 will serve this niche very well, but I somehow doubt this is a niche likely to grow much over the next 3-4 years...
You must have something wrong...I run Oblivion on a 939 3000+ with a 256 meg 6800 with a gig of ram at 1280 x 1024 and it runs like a charm. I work in a computer repair center and have for the last 11 years. Most of the time when a game runs poorly on a system that it should run fine on. It's alot of crap running in the background. If you have more than 3-4 icons down in the bottom right hand side, next to your clock you've got too many. (and they should be things like a speaker icon, not messagers or hp allinone helper programs) I also my wireless card also...Oblivion it's networkable to why waste the resorces?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Ben
I hope Oblivion on a PSP is hugely reworked to just preserve the essentials (like the Oblivion mobile phone game). Otherwise, mostly due to the excruciatingly slow access times, I view jamming Oblivion into a PSP much as I view cramming a an entire magnum bottle of fine wine up my ass.
Indeed, same here - curiously I've found turning off the (very poor quality) "long distance" scenery completely resolves this - which is boggling, as it's such starkly low quality in the first place. The foliage is also something of an issue (even with 2 x 7800's and an AMD FX), but I don't mind playing with that turned off (it is quite overbearing). The downside of turning off distance draw is of course it stops drawing things at highly unrealistically short distance, which is about as equally distracting.
Decent engine performance makes all the difference to how immersive the experience is for me, it's a shame they didn't manage to get the engine right with Morrowind or Oblivion, which are otherwise the most immersive games I've ever played. On the plus side, great 3D model quality and very impressive indoor environments (and short to middle distance). drawing Just a shame about the poor quality / poor performance of the long-distance scenery. Still, having not even had the option in Morrowind, I suppose having the option is an improvement!
I think I preferred Morrowind though, the world seemed a lot more varied and the quests far more epic and I liked not having the main quest hand holding (though equally I realise a lot of people didn't like that about it). I'd buy it again if they released it with a better engine - not even having an option to set the draw distance at whatever you like (rather than some imposed overly short distance) is something I find very bemusing and frustrating.
I like the long-distance scenery (it's a big thing I missed in Morrowind -- what's with this haze that prevents me from seeing entire cities directly below me when I'm levitating??), so I've solved all my Oblivion problems by turning off the grass. Runs fine and looks nice on a 6600GT at 800x600 with 2x AA (though I must say I never thought I'd be going back to 800x600).
I agree about your preference for Morrowind, though. I find dungeon design, especially, a lot less interesting in Oblivion. Morrowind has some fantastic dungeons. In fact I think I'll go back to it after I finish playing through Oblivion.
Exactly. It's sort of like the whole debate about whether The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess should have been moved to be a Revolution-only title; by making it a GameCube title, they get something that can be sold to existing GC owners and Revolution owners.
With all due respect to Bethesda (Oblivion's the best thing to hit 360), they are quite known for their delays. From the complete Elder Scrolls series, to even Pirates of the Carribean on the standard Xbox; they never make their proposed date, and it's usually months, not weeks before the product sees the light of day. If a PS3 version becomes a reality, my guess is first quarter of 2007 -- oh, and hopefully there will be a PS3 to play it on by that time.
I don't mean this as flamebait but what do you mean by this:
"PC developers appear to have almost zero confidence in the 360."
I don't understand that in the context of either the article or your post.
Decent engine performance makes all the difference to how immersive the experience is for me, it's a shame they didn't manage to get the engine right with Morrowind or Oblivion, which are otherwise the most immersive games I've ever played.
:)
This is where patient PC gamers can really win out in the end. Folks who are willing to shift their gaming timetables by a year or two will much more easily be able to play Oblivion at its maximum settings with good resolution. They will also have the advantage of getting all of the "bonus" content and bug fixes before they even load up the game.
Don't get me wrong. For some games, I'm not in the above group. I bought an Xbox to play Morrowind (didn't want to deal with PC upgrading) and I might just buy a 360 to play Oblivion (my PC is dead). Someday, I'll learn to follow my own advice but for now waiting a year or more probably isn't in the cards.
That's strange -- the occasional chunkouts -- that is. It's not like a game developer would release half-complete stuff, right?
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excerpt: The unconfirmed but authentic-looking release list...
translation: gamasutra got played.
Sure, about 50% of the people trying to play Oblivion on the PC report problems. (Just read the thread you are in now...and any other source)
But you've heard 'reports' of problems on the Xbox- and there is that one guy with the Orc problem.
So are you saying the 360 version sucks?
No reason to lie.
50% chance on exit.
100% chance when looking at certain objects while Specular lighting is disabled.
10% chance of freezing indefinitely while loading certain areas.
3% chance to have the quest phase not acknowledged by essential NPC, making it impossible to proceed with the quest. (with the number of quests, and their phases, that's a lot!)
70% chance for friendly NPC to do something terribly dumb during a battle.
5% chance to get kicked out of all guilds whenever fighting near a horse.
1% chance to get stuck inside the rock, wall, etc whenever you knock against it at high speed.
0.3% chance to fall through the floor after a jump.
90% to open any lock with one lockpick, no matter what your character level/skill.
100% chance there won't be any worthwhile loot until you're a character of level 15 with world so full of powerful levelled creatures that you'll have your butt kicked no matter what wonders the chest contains.
The game is easiest to finish for a level 1 character. Then it only gets harder and the more levels you gain, the harder to do anything, bandits you kicked around at level 3 will kill you in matter of seconds at level 20. The only way to get through the game is to pick a heavyweight barbarian and play it as a strictly pure mage, or get a pure mage and use only heavy armour and heavy weapons and no spells... this way you buff up the character and don't level up. If that's not a bug....
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Because they want to sell it to more than 3 people.
Agree with your comments regarding levelling. I played with a character class that matched my game preferences and got up to level 20, although any fighting was extremely difficult due to the NPCs levelling up alongside my character.
I've created a new character, with a custom class, with all my frequently used skills in the Minor class, and have found that it balances the game quite a bit better.
Had a couple of saved games go corrupt, and frequently experience the crash on exit but otherwise quite happy with the game.
It's not Morrowind, but that's not necessarily a criticism. There seems much more variety in Oblivion with regard to the creatures you encounter (admittedly, there are several skins applied to standard models) but at least you're not having to batter cliff racers every two minutes.
And, I laughed like a drain on finding the exploded Alchemist's shop.
Personally, it took me until a couple of weeks ago (and all this Oblivion hype) to get Morrowind.
I added a bunch of the 3rd-party mods around to make it a touch more nice to look at, and it still runs nice and smoothly on my thoroughly ancient overclocked 9550. Plus, the game itself cost me less than three quid, rather than fifty.
So yes, I'm pretty happy with getting older games...
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
You'll be glad to know that there are several mods for Oblivion that enhance the distant land textures with higher-resolution ones. They make a big difference. You might want to check them out:
Landscape LOD Replacement (21MB) - This mod replaces all the distant blurry LOD landscapes with better looking higher resolution textures. This means you don't have to use the uGridsToLoad command, and hence you won't experience any major performance reductions or visual glitches. More details here.
Landscape LOD Replacement (Border Regions) (42MB) - By the same author as the mod above, this mod fixes all the blurry landscapes from the border regions as well. More details here.
Normal Map LOD Replacement (16.5MB) - This mod replaces all the normal maps for distant land - basically it improves the shadows in all distant terrain, and is a great complement to the Landscape LOD Replacement mods further above.
http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_4.html
Yeppers... :)
:)
The simple answer is that Bethesda set our expectations too high with Morrowind.
The game isn't all that bad. But it's way worse than Morrowind. And it reeks with bad management decisions. The world, the general idea, plot, background, the part that belonged strictly to developers and designers is great. But then you see a lot of shit tacked on top of it, that looks like a manager sat for 5 minutes to the play, got some idea and told people to implement it. It stinks, it spoils the fun. Minigames, levelled everything, dumbed down enchanting system, fast travel, compass. This junk is a crime against the idea of RPG.
And of course it traditionally contains its gallery of bugs
As for cliff racers, there were some "obligatory" mods for Morrowind, I preferred Passive Healthy Wildlife (keeping most of cliff racers in air, never bothering the player), though played some with the anti-cliffracer belt too (zap any cliff racer that gets closer), and it was fun. Extremists would use "no cliffracers" which would leave just one cliffracer in the game, hanging from the roof of Skaal village hall in Solstheim
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Oooh awesome, thanks for that. It never occurred to me to look for any mods that might do that (especially as it's such a new title).
Yeah, in such a short time there have been released a whole slew of mods for Oblivion. The Natural Environments mod tries to adjust lighting and settings to make everything look more natural (but personally I don't like it), there's one that makes the UI fill your screen so it's bigger, a coloured map, small mods that get rid of the "Loading Area..." message (this is a must!) and a lot of .ini tweaks that improve performance and graphics a lot. Search around and improve your game...
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/703/703224p1.html
Basically:
"At present we have no announced plans to bring Oblivion to any platforms other than PC or Xbox 360." - Bethesda staff Let's wait before "official" news come in before we get hyped about Oblivion on PS3.
Oh, awesome - an excellent excuse to dig it out again (been wanting to re-play it for ages). Thanks!
Fully patched, ready-for-release, version of Oblivion heading to PS3!
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
(from Alienware) with 4 gigs of RAM and a nVidia Quadro 3450.
Now, granted, the Quadro is a top of the line CAD card, and not a gaming card
but still you'l think that my setup would be able to handle Oblivion without
hurling.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Particularly stuffed chest? I think you're getting confused with Tomb Raider.