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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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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.
Living With a Nerd
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.
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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.
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.
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