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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."
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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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?
Each of the Dwemmer ruins in Morrowind had its own character. I can still remember maybe 10 different ones, and where they were on the map. Finding a new one was a treat.
:(
Furthermore, each region of the island felt different, and the archetecture of each region was unique and often grand.
The ruins (I can't even remember the name of the people who built them... "A"-something-or-other) in Oblivion are BORING. I hated having to enter them for quests. Maybe one or two were actually fun. The only end-to-end great dungeon in the game was the one for the last Thieves' Guild quest. Oh, and the last area for the main quest, if you count that as a dungeon.
The Oblivion Gates were cool, and damn scary the first time, but they, too, lacked individuality.
Most of the towns had similar looks. Same buildings, different roof texture. Boring. Even the imperial city somehow didn't feel nearly as grand as that castle to the west of the capitol (man, I have to play it again, I've forgotten all the names!) or a couple of the wizard fortresses in Morrowind. I can't pinpoint exactly why this was the case; it's just how it felt to me.
And it had 3 regions: Marsh, Mountains, and Plains. Morrowind had a much more finely-grained geography; there was a marked difference even between the three major "volcanic" areas (North of the Ghost Gate, inside the Ghost Gate, and South of it all the way down to the coast), and the east and west sides each had at least 3 distinct areas; in fact, the West probably had 5. And that's not counting Solstheim, so they managed that much variety without a single "snowy" region!
Oblivion's people seemed far more "alive" than Morrowind's, but its ruins (and other dungeons), buildings, and land were very bland. The combat was great, though, and sadly may have spoiled me for any future Morrowind replays
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.