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Oblivion Expansion Confirmed
The rumored first 'real' expansion to Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has been confirmed. Shivering Isles will be available for the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game, with the expansion available as a download for 360 owners. In additional Oblivion-related news, GameSetWatch made a point to single out the double-layering of content for the PS3 version of the game. The title (due out next month with all 'add-ons' included) overcomes the slow speed of Blu-ray discs via a simple kludge: putting the content on there twice. From the article: "A perceptive comment from 'Marvin' is worth reprinting: "You'd automate the duplication at the image creation stage to avoid any stale data problems. People have done this on other platforms before for the same reasons - particularly the PSP, with its horrible UMD seek times. However, it does rather negate the whole increased storage capacity advantage."
Isn't expanding oblivion just creating more of nothing?
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I really wish they would bring more "Lore" into the game. Just like in Morrowind it was fun exploring dungeons and what not., but in Oblivion it's like...the same thing. I don't get the thrill out of explorering the world like I did with Morrowind.
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Even with HDDVD and BlueRay game developers are going to have to start writing more elegant games or they will end up using up there new 50+ gig media without adding much real value to the game.
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Well, given that Bloodmoon was one of my favorite expansions for any game ever, I do have high hopes for this one. Hopefully it will incorporate some of the improvements mods have made, such as the auto-leveling rubbish. I'm assuming this place will be cold as well (yay for being a Nord) but I'm also hoping it will have just a tad more variety in terms of landscape than Cyrodiil did. I mean, good golly, a land mass so big but so homogenous... that's a big part of why Morrowind is liked more by so many. I like how the announcement also takes a stab at PS3 and Blu-ray's read time problems :-) The criticism just never stops. Though I guess that's what happens when you strap a jet engine onto an elephant and call it a sports car.
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Theoretically, seek times should be better with Blu-Ray because the data is packed on a layer more densely than with a DVD. So moving a 1GB forward should involve less physical movement with a Blu-Ray disc than with a DVD.
The fact that Sony managed to make it so that this ISN'T true with Blu-Ray somehow fails to surprise me. It seems like everything they did to the PS3 to try and make it "more powerful" winds up making it slower.
Does it include an option to disable scaling the environment? Pretty please?
This was in the print edition of PC Gamer I received in the mail over a week ago. How is this new?
The problem is that content is crippled by a shitty combat system and a completely ass-backwards levelling system (it practically requires min-maxing). Oblivion is a beautiful but broken game.
By "last area of the main quest" I don't mean Imperial City, I mean the part before that. The part in Imperial City--while GREAT--is hardly a dungeon.
And I forgot about two other excellent dungeons: the crazy wizard's castle, and the one inside the dude's dreams.
I mean, there are a lot of great things in Oblivion, and it's one of the best games that I've ever played; it's just that the world itself was, I feel, vastly inferior to that of Morrowind. That, and the reduction of weapon and armor types, are the only two things (well, the only two that aren't fixed by trivial-to-make and thus quick-to-appear-online mods) that bothered me. They just bother me a lot because they're things that they got right in Morrowind, so it seems like such a let-down for them to screw that up, rather than building upon it.
In Morrowind, there was no compass leading you to unknown dungeons with handy icons. There was no overland map with fast travel options. When you found a new location in Morrowind, you felt a sense of accomplishement.
To me, this went well with the mysterious and foreign feel of Morrowind. Cyrodil is supposed to be the heart of the empire, settled for thousands of years. The feeling of familiarity is actually enhanced by the new interface, just as the feeling of foreign mystery was enhanced by the lack of map and compass in Morrowind.
That said, I've still enjoyed exploring in Oblivion. It's just a bit different. First, you do need to get close to a location before your compass tells you about it, unless you learn of it through a quest or the like. Second, there are still interesting and important places that aren't ever indicated on the map. The doomstones, or the back doors of most dungeons, for instance.
Finally, in Morrowind, you basically had the swampy bit, the ashy mountainous bit, and the rest all looked the same. In Oblivion, the different areas look very different. But the map and compass do give a very different experience, and exploration is no longer as important or fulfilling as it was in Morrowind.
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"A perceptive comment from 'Marvin' is worth reprinting: "You'd automate the duplication at the image creation stage to avoid any stale data problems. People have done this on other platforms before for the same reasons - particularly the PSP, with its horrible UMD seek times. However, it does rather negate the whole increased storage capacity advantage."
I wonder if Bethseda is aware there is a harddrive on all PS3's that games can be installed to?
Bethesda should remake Morrowind with the enhancements from Oblivion. If you combined the tech in Oblivion into Morrowind, that game would be phenomenal. Don't get me wrong, Oblivion is good, but it lacks key things that made Morrowind a truly epic game.
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The Imperial Library has the full texts of every book that was ever in an Elder Scrolls game, and plenty of other good reads about the world of Tamriel.
but it doesn't. According to info, even weak buggers like liches (HP wise) get 15 HP per level. Best Uber-fighter gets 10 per level (but a boost at first level). So if you level up, the monsters overtake you. Min-maxing helps delay this but makes the middle game too easy. Especially for fighter classes.
Reduce the magica renewal rate and make top spells (that use most of you magica bar) good enough to take someone out of your level or a little over and the magic is better balanced. Else you need to have either conjuration or destruction in a minor skill so you can spam it up to 75% while still 10 level. That balances out the mage class.
Drop the thief, unless you can work out a way to allow the user through in a "thiefly way" as much (or better) than DX1 allowed you to find sneak ways. Too often you MUST whack to get on. That turns a thief in to a sneak fighter.
Then either remove or bump up useless abilities like "athletics" or "acrobatics". Have them do SOMETHING worthwhile. As it is it isn't worth training them so the thief class is even more hosed.
You should find that as you level up, you meet more big baddies, but you should still be allowed the option of lording it over the wusses who stayed as guards in town. Give them levels high up, captains more so, but don't level them. The wilderness shouldn't be randomly populated with Xivilia or vampires, etc just because you're 20th level: who would survive?
It may mean that entering an area where you're too weak to survive gets you a message "Don't bother run away now" but that is less of a break from immersion than finding Ogres all over the shop when you've bumped up a lot.