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."

Comments

More oblivion

[0racle]

Isn't expanding oblivion just creating more of nothing?

Re:More lore

[Pojut]

That's strange, I feel the opposite...I despised exploring in morrowind yet I LOVE just running around Oblivion's countryside...

If you are looking for more lore, I HIGHLY HIGHLY suggest you turn yourself into a book whore...there are so many hundreds of books to read in Oblivion (as well as in Morrowind) many of which are actual series..."book hunting" can be VERY fun, and some of the books are quite entertaining...

I would actually be willing to PAY for a hardbound book which contained all the stories and writing featured both in morrowind and oblivion (as in, willing to buy each one seperately, one for Morrowind and one for Oblivion)

Seriously, spend some time reading the books ingame....some really really cool stuff can come about.

Looking forward to it

[Sciros]

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.

Hmmm

[Y-Crate]

Does it include an option to disable scaling the environment? Pretty please?

Old News

[jnials]

This was in the print edition of PC Gamer I received in the mail over a week ago. How is this new?

Re:More lore

[Fallingcow]

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 :(

Oblivion already has tons of great content

[Kuciwalker]

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.

Additions and clarifications

[Fallingcow]

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.

Re:Additions and clarifications

[TempeTerra]

I think there was some better voice acting in Morrowind too. Not that Oblivion's was bad, but the voices in Morrowind were more distinctive. The male dunmer in the hold of the ship right at the start of the game was great. I would also say that the main plot in Morrowind was far more inventive. It had the cultists of an insane god spreading a disease that turns its victims into inhumanly strong mutants, or tentacled horrors if they are 'favoured' - plus good political tension between native dunmer and 'outlanders'. Oblivion was more standard high fantasy, and "oh noes the king is dead and demons are everywhere!!oneone".

Oh, and one more thing. In Morrowind there was good loot which was actually placed in the world rather than being a random drop. In oblivion, to get good armour you have to level up until your enemies carry it, and then kill them. In Morrowind you can get a suit of glass armour from Ghostgate, because it's just sitting there. This might sound trivial if you haven't played both games, but in Morrowind it's exciting to enter a new area so you can see what cool things you can steal when their owners' back is turned. In oblivion there aren't even any decent goods to steal in shops.

OK, so even though I bitch about Oblivion I clearly played it to death. It's painful to see a well loved franchise move backwards though.

Re:Theoretically, seek times should be better

[NonSequor]

The Blu-ray drive in the PS3 only spins at 2x speed. Even with the density advantage of Blu-ray it ends up only giving slightly better transfer rates than the 4x DVD drive in the PS2. The 360 uses a 12x DVD drive and I can't find any information on the speed of the Wii's drive, but it's probably also somewhere in the neighborhood of 12x.

The Blu-ray drive's slow transfer rate is only made worse by the fact that high definition games have to pull a lot more data off of the disc and the hack discussed in the article will only improve the seek time. I can't help but think that Sony going with Blu-ray at this point in time was ill-advised. If Blu-ray were a bit more mature they would have faster drives. As it is now, they're trading speed for capacity and games REALLY need speed and if they lack capacity it's generally feasible to spread the game across multiple discs.

This is because of the map and compass

[spun]

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.

Re:Hard Drive?

[Babbster]

I wonder if Bethesda is aware how nice it is to be able to have 10 (or, obviously, more) games ready to play at a moment's notice without first deleting data from the hard drive and then installing another game to be played. I'll bet they are...

I don't know about other console owners, but NOT having to deal with a hard drive installation is one of the [many] things I like about console gaming as opposed to the PC.

Besides, the advantage of Blu-ray over DVD in terms of gaming is its increased capacity (as I recall, 20GB for single-layer and 40GB for double-layer). The most hard drive a PS3 comes with is 60GB and the junior version is 20GB. That means that if developers takes advantage of all that space, and you decide to install games to the hard drive, you have space for at most 1-3 games (forgetting about downloaded games, the space reserved by the OS, music, video, and whatever else one might want on their PS3). In a long session of playing games on the 360 I've played up to 7 different games - if I have to install to hard drive to get "decent" performance, I could spend more time space-juggling on the HD and less time playing.

Then again, maybe Sony has a deal with hard drive manufacturers and we're just supposed to buy huge hard drives in order to enjoy the system.

Re:Theoretically, seek times should be better

[NonSequor]

I'm sure that works great for most games. But if a game exceeds 20GB, you won't be able to copy it onto the 20GB models and it'll still be cumbersome on the 60GB models. I'm guessing that the PS3 version of Oblivion must be large enough that a lot of people wouldn't want to copy it to their hard drive if they're looking for hacks to improve seek time.

Given the amount of money the Blu-ray drive costs, I don't think it sufficiently benefits the gaming capabilities of the PS3. They could have made something clever instead like a DVD drive with two lasers in order to read both sides of a double sided DVD. Then they'd get 17GB per disc and vastly better performance. But instead they foisted an immature technology on the PS3 in order to try to prop up Blu-ray (and I'm not even sure that Blu-ray needed to be propped up in the first place).