BRRRRRRRRING!

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 06 Apr 2006, 08:43

I just literally played oblivion for two days straight, about 14 hours each day. I only completed about the first 3 parts of the main quest (I haven't found the heir yet)... I've been basically just running around raising hell, saving money, doing side-quests, massacring the deer population, robbing houses, and so on...

Have to say, character creation is a really neat experience. Facial customization is unmatched in anything I've seen, and it makes KOTOR look laughable.

I'm about a level 20 now. My opinion is that this is one of the best-looking games I've ever played. The use of bump mapping is incredible. The game has a lot of touches (not just graphically) that seem very impressive and lifelike at first, until you've played it for a few hours and you start hearing/seeing the same thing that seemed so impressive before for the nth time and it starts to irritate more than anything.

After all this time, I find that rather than rewarding me for the extra legwork I've done (ie, raiding difficult locations for rares), the game just makes things more difficult for me. Sure, I can understand that if the game continued to throw giant rats and unarmed goblins at me it would get boring, but other games have managed this problem much better IMO. I'll give some examples:

Metroid Prime - hunting around for 5% missile expansions doesn't simultaneously also increase the HP of all monsters by 5%. It just makes it so that you can go longer without having to retreat, hide, or go hunting for ammo.

Deus Ex - the enemies you face get stronger and have better weapons, but ultimately if you do something stupid like run headlong into a firefight, you're dead whether they're unatco troopers or assault bots. What changes is that you're placed in situations where maintaining your cover, keeping a supply of ammunition, avoiding cameras, etc, becomes more difficult. A headshot is a headshot, regardless of the difficulty setting or how skilled you are with a weapon. It doesn't matter whether you're up against 30 soldiers or 300, all it takes is for them to catch sight of you and have an instant to aim, and it's game over. In Oblivion, to avoid any fight all you have to do is run as fast as you can in any random direction. A headshot (or in this case, a sneak-shot) just gives you a mild advantage that doesn't really matter. Your cover being blown doesn't matter much since you can just run away. Everything is based on a roll of dice.

Dungeon Siege 2 - Hunt for a rare and if you manage to live long enough to find it, you'll have an advantage - not a game-breaking one, but just a sort of pat-on-the-back - for a while at least. In Oblivion, you find a rare and... well... whatever. As long as you don't stand still and get mauled it doesn't really matter. I also enjoyed item crafting a lot more in DS2 than in Oblivion - you can make items that are really tailored to what you need them for - like you can make an entire assortment of armor and accessories with massive dexterity boosts so that your archer can kick some massive ass. Maybe I just haven't gotten to that point in Oblivion yet.

Also a couple of other things are bothering me. Firstly, I've run into some pretty awful speed issues. Outdoors, loading segments are virtually unnoticable, save for a slightly decreased framerate if anything. But inside city walls is a completely different matter. Constant load times of between 15 and 30 seconds just because I entered a shop or went upstairs or something is unacceptable in my book, considering how tiny these environments are and how frequently you'll be moving between them. Next severe performance problem arises from a miniquest where a guy in a mage guild is missing. Well he's just invisible, hope I didn't ruin that for you. You can tell exactly where he is because if you look in that direction, your framerate is reduced to 1 frame per 5 seconds, even with all settings minimum/off. Ridiculous. Also, many spell effects drop my framerate almost as badly - especially summon spells.

Something I really liked in DS2 was that even if you were a level 50 or something, the level 2 creatures would still be around if you go to early-game areas again. Not like in Oblivion, where if you go up one particular magic "level", the entire forest has been depopulated of wolves and is now full of bears instead. For all the strides this game takes in terms of immersion, this is just lames it all up.

And finally, 2 more complaints. One is that everything is capped. WoW players are probably familiar with this. In other words, once you reach rank 100 in a skill, that's all there is to it. You can't spend the entire game becoming an uber-archer-of-hell that can snipe an ogre from half a mile away with a single shot (which would kick ass). No, you just have slowly increasing damage until finally no more. Woo. Exciting. This was the case in Deus Ex, except that you could actually be that badass sniper-from-hell and kill virtually anything with a single shot if you really concentrated on building your gun skills. In fact, you could do that to the exclusion of all else and be this uber-sniper by like the third level or something, although you'd be severely impaired if you came up against a locked door, robot, or pretty much anything that can't be shot, really... Artificial caps are teh suck.

My very last complaint, and the one that's made me decide I've got better things to do with my time is this: There is one "best" combination for everything. There's no reason to use anything but that combination during character creation or when deciding that to equip, etc. There's no... throw gas grenade and then hack people up with a knife.... there's no tactics, really, besides this one gem I learned one crisp morning: lure things near a cliff, then make them lunge at you. Then climb down the mountain and collect anything of value on the corpse. Wolves, bears, goblins, brigands... they'll all do it.

Oh hell with it. Something else that bugs me is that it's so simple to exploit almost every means of upgrading a skill. To become more athletic, just dive into a body of water, bind your "move forward" key to a button on your mouse. Then place a slightly heavy object (don't wanna damage the mouse) on the bound button and get your guy to try and swim into a solid object. Come back in 3 hours and you've got 100 athletic skill. To get 100 of any other skill, it's the same process. I haven't done any of these, but just the fact that they're possible makes the whole game feel like such a fraud.

Now I'm on a roll. I know I'm sort of pressing it here, but it's just too easy to quicksave/do-near-impossible-action/fail/quickload/repeat-until-desired-outcome-occurs. Ultimately you need one lockpick and you're set for the rest of the game. Also, it doesn't matter if your stealth skill is 5 or 50, all you need in order to guarantee a succeeding pickpocket attempt is constantly pushing the quickload button after each failed attempt. Hell, I've stolen the weapons and armour (INCLUDING THE HELMIT!!) off a guard who's walking down a crowded street - that's how exploitable this is. He just keeps on walking, has a quick chat with a passerby, talks to his guard captain, and everything ship-shape. This is during a blizzard, btw. Apparently northern men are immune to drafts.

After all this, you must think I hate the game. Far from it. I found it very enjoyable for the last two days (or obviously I would have stopped playing sooner) but the aforementioned failings have led me to decide that I just have better, more permanently rewarding things to do. I mean, now that I know I've got a permanently nerfed character because I didn't train on every level-up, or because I chose certain starting skills/abilities/race/whatever that aren't the "right" combination, in order to really enjoy the game I'd have to start again. Another 28 hours to get where I already am? It's just not as fun the second time around, when you already know the outcome of all the early side-quests.

NOiZE · Post by **NOiZE** » 06 Apr 2006, 09:08

That's why we are still stuck with an badly balanced AA

maverick256 · Post by **maverick256** » 06 Apr 2006, 15:07

the engine used on this game brought my friend's 7800 gtx almost to its knees, doing 25 fps. Frankly i would be a lot happier if they just use the half life 2 engine (much better physics too).

Zoombie · Post by **Zoombie** » 07 Apr 2006, 00:39

Am i the ONLY one who actually LIKES the atouleveling system? I like getting chalanged everywere i go. Sure you don'y get to go back and gibb monsters that are still level two, but at least your always haveing a good time eh? As to the loading times...well loading times never really bothered me all that much. I enjoyed Vampires: Bloodlines to hell and back, even though it had even MORE problems then Oblivion, was less deep and huge, and was riddled with almost as many bugs as Daggerfall. If a loade time is long, i just read a book for a few pages.

Oblivion is fun, exiting, looks cooll and sounds better, so i'm happy.

Zoombie · Post by **Zoombie** » 07 Apr 2006, 00:53

Oh and if you ABSOULTLY CANT STAND leveled cretures, there is already a mod out that fixes it.

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/V ... ail&id=321

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 07 Apr 2006, 03:43

maverick256 wrote:the engine used on this game brought my friend's 7800 gtx almost to its knees, doing 25 fps. Frankly i would be a lot happier if they just use the half life 2 engine (much better physics too).

Have to strongly disagree on that one. HL2's engine could never render scenes like this:

At the rate that hardware and engines and stuff like that is advancing, the HL2 engine will be completely out-of-date pretty soon, if Oblivion is any indicator. HL2 was released only... what, a year ago or something?

Zoombie · Post by **Zoombie** » 07 Apr 2006, 06:33

I have to agree with that. The view distances in Oblivion are INSANE!
INSSSSSSSSSSSAAAAAANE!

Oh and I'm playing the game, and it STILL feels as much fun as it was when I first started. Three...weeks LATER!

NOiZE · Post by **NOiZE** » 07 Apr 2006, 10:45

SPRING FTW

Dr.InfernO · Post by **Dr.InfernO** » 07 Apr 2006, 10:49

when i look at those screenshots I feel bashed with my 6800GT!

maverick256 · Post by **maverick256** » 07 Apr 2006, 14:08

I see. Just wondering, what about HL2 with HDR? how capable is that?

.funkymp · Post by **.funkymp** » 07 Apr 2006, 16:40

wahey, just done the main quest

now to finish mages/thieves quests off

Zoombie · Post by **Zoombie** » 07 Apr 2006, 16:42

That ending was AWSOME!

SwiftSpear · Post by **SwiftSpear** » 08 Apr 2006, 10:06

Caydr: Yes it can.

That's all just modeling tricks, all you'd need is a good world modeler to make HL2 render scenes like that. I've seen some astonishing things done with the HL2 engine when proper world model useage is applied.

Cabbage · Post by **Cabbage** » 08 Apr 2006, 18:13

maverick256 wrote:the engine used on this game brought my friend's 7800 gtx almost to its knees, doing 25 fps. Frankly i would be a lot happier if they just use the half life 2 engine (much better physics too).

I've got a 7800 GTX, and i've finished the game, everything on full, and highest resolution my monitor can support (1280x1024 - LCD) - and it usually runs perfectly. Try turning the V synch option off, it should improve your fps alot with no noticable change in appearence.

Also, there is a way to dramaticly improve performance when you edit a certain file - can't remember details, should be easy to find on the TES forums.

And also, someone mentioned slow loading times - mine are always fast (unless the game has been running for several hours in one stint) regardless of where im zoning - i usualy dont have enough time to read the little hints on the screen

One other thing, if you haven't got Oblivion yet and are planning too, if you have the option between xbox and PC, definately go for PC (assuming you can run it) as you'll be stuck with a lot of the bugs that came out when it was released, and be unable to utalise any of the scores of custom mods that are coming out all the time

And i also think you get better performance with a high end PC than with xbox

I'll go away now...

Spring RTS Engine

BRRRRRRRRING!