Oblivion Designer Moves To New Company

Gamasutra reports on the new position that former Bethesda designer Ken Rolston has taken with Big Huge Games. The lead designer for Bethesda's hit titles Morrowind and Oblivion, Rolston is now slated to be working on an unnamed title for the Rise of Nations developer. Rolston announced he was planning to retire early last year but ... apparently not. The designer characterizes his new project as 'a strikingly original and cunning concept for a console RPG'. No name or concept was included in the announcement.

Comments

Big Huge Games?

[The Orange Mage]

If this console RPG they're making is as good as Rise of Nations was, then hot damn, should be good. I just wish the rest of the RTS people liked it. :[

Re:scaled leveling system, nuff said

[PoderOmega]

I like the idea of a scaled leveling system, but not the way it was implemented in Oblivion. I already have the leveling mod so I am still playing, but here are my 2 cents.

-There was almost no variation in the enemy's skill. Starting enemies at your level was fine, but after leveling most random enemies stayed at your level. I think it would have worked if when your character was level 30, you could encounter enemies from level 1-30.
-Having non-combat skills as main attributes was suicide. I commented on this before http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=213220&cid=173 42878here

One other small gripe I have with Oblivion and Morrowind is that when you encounter and enemy I wish:
1) The music would fade into the combat music rather than an abrupt change(see Zelda TP and many other games)
2) When combat was over it would fade back into the same tune that was already playing, rather than starting a new one.

Re:scaled leveling system, nuff said

[BobPaul]

Don't games usually get hard at the end? And shouldn't a failure to train adequately put you at a disadvantage?

Nobody ever said you could enter the game as a mage and completely ignore magic and succeed. Or that you could build all of your abilities equally so you basically don't have shit and you shouldn't have problems beating the game. Welcome to the world of RPGs.

Re:scaled leveling system, nuff said

[Bieeanda]

Sure, but when run of the mill bandits are running around in a king's ransom worth of equipment, and perfectly mundane animals are suddenly a match for an entire conscript army, there's a teensy problem with your design. Welcome to a lazily balanced tabletop D&D game.

Re:scaled leveling system, nuff said

[friedmud]

You know.... there was a difficultly slider... and since it's a single player game, feel free to make the game as difficult as you like.... you're the only person you have to please.

Seriously, I didn't find it all that hard in the end (but I spent well over 100 hours on the game, so I was pretty trained in most everything), but I ended up turning the difficulty down slightly just so that the actual fighting portion of the game didn't take so long so I would have more time to explore and such.

Oblivion more than any other game is a sandbox, you build the experience you want...

Friedmud

Re:scaled leveling system, nuff said

[ZombieWomble]

Nobody ever said you could enter the game as a mage and completely ignore magic and succeed And, ironically, this is almost exactly what you must do in Oblivion to optimise your levelling - If you primarily focus on your "major" skills (that is, those which define your character class at the beginning) you will rapidly end up with a character with high skills, but low stats, and be crushed. A deliberate focus on your secondary skills to the deteriment of these allegedly character-defining skills is necessary for optimal progress. It's a very unintuitive game mechanic until you actually look into the nitty gritty of how stat improvements on levelling works, and isn't particularly conducive to just playing the game and having fun.