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Oblivion To Be Patched, Sells Well

Posted by Zonk on Mon Apr 10, 2006 12:48 PM
from the still-working-on-the-thieves-guild dept.
Role Playing (Games)
Gamers with Jobs has word that a patch for Oblivion should be expected sometime in the near future. The future official content downloads, at the same time, should be cheaper to obtain. Meanwhile, the game has been burning up the charts, according to Next Generation: "The title has become the fastest-selling Xbox 360 game in North America, and according to The NPD Group, it's currently the best-selling PC game, with the Oblivion Collector's Edition following behind at number 2. NPD also reports that the RPG made up 13 percent of PC game sales during its first week on the market -- more than four times the sales volume of the next best-selling title."
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[+] Frustration With Oblivion Mod Costs on Xbox Live 360 comments
Vizionary wrote to mention the player backlash swelling out of a recent addition to Xbox Live. Major Nelson's blog made the announcement that they'd finally added the (previously announced) barding for the player mount in Oblivion. The catch is that the simple modification costs 200 points, removing a lot of the appeal of the small mods the Elder Scrolls series has thrived on. From commenter 'SW 1540' on that site: "Unquestionably, some downloadable content should cost money/points. Having said that, the cost of that content should be directly proportional to the enhancement it provides to the original game. For example, I would expect to pay $20.00 for the soon to come Perfect Dark Zero maps or new cars for Project Gotham. On the other hand, I would expect any additional costumes for PDZ to be free. I imagine there is good arguments on both sides, but one can see that the potential is there to exploit an eager fan. "
[+] Living In Oblivion 296 comments
The Elder Scrolls series is well known among PC gamers as the high water mark for an open-ended RPG experience. The series, set in the world of Tamriel, has a staggering breadth and depth thanks to the exacting standards of the team at Bethesda Softworks. The newest title in the line brings Tamriel to life in a manner that is renewing the faith of even the most jaded CRPG player. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion may not be the perfect game for everyone. For those willing to give it a shot, Oblivion treats gamers with a level of respect that is unique, uplifting, and (hopefully) inspirational for game developers in all genres. Read on for my impressions of a truly unique game.
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Oblivion To Be Patched, Sells Well 50 Comments More /

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  • "Let's not make it perfect, we can always patch it later!" 3
    • I specifically gave up PC gaming and wen't over to consoles to avoid this. Seems like time has caught up with me.
      • Because when the X-Box 1 was launched, it was stated Live wouldn't be used for patches. And with the exception of one patch for online play on Unreal Tournament, it wasn't. X-Box 1 games were pretty bug free because the makers couldn't patch them later. The 360, on the other hand.. well, Microsoft seems to have ignored what they said and about a third of all 360 games released so far have had big bugs in them. Dead or Alive wiped your save, Call of Duty 2 stopped you progressing and so forth..
    • ... let me be the first to say that this is one of the most trouble-free games I have ever used out-of-the-box. (The sole exception to that was due to an old *.ax codec file on my PC, which caused crashes very often, but was not the developers' fault, and was quickly addressed in a FAQ.) The only bug that I'm aware of is that shopkeepers' gold on-hand doesn't decrease when you sell them things. Whoops!

      I'm aware the parent post was just a quick blurt out to get a comment up, but Oblivion has been a great exa
    • XBox 360 - Bringing the PC gaming experience to your living room!
      • I never early adopt on Elder Scrolls games...They almost always have some issues coming out the gate. Morrowind was a joke, in terms of system stats. If you had the recommended system specs, that meant you could play the game with normal settings at a normal framerate (we're not talking advanced graphics options here). Anything less than the reccommended settings, you were going to have problems, and god help you if you were hovering around the supposed minimum stats. There were a lot of annoying little bug
      • I havn't read the Oblivion manual, but I have an apperent bug dropping things. I get 2 problems regularly.

        1) I get not enough room problems, once I emptied a bookshelf, became over encumbered and couldn't drop anyhting, I reloaded.

        2) Stuff floats around in my crosshair getting generally in the way

        I now only leave things in corpses and chests to make life easier.

        the error could be between chair and keyboard though.
        • Hold down the Shift Key and left click on the item to be droped in your inventory. The Item may act like you threw it hard, but it'll go somewhere other than your inventory.
              I've never got the no room message except when trying to drag it out of my inventory rather than when using shift-click.
              I've found turning in place to drop something elsewhere usually helps with the no-room messqage when dragging items out of my inventory as well.

          Mycroft
      • There is a big reason between releasing a perfect game and releasing a game that is bug-free enough you don't need to release a bug-fix patch a few weeks after initial release.
        • From my experience, this is one of the most bug-free games I've played in a while. The bugs I know of are minor script issues, not serious engine glitches.

          As for patches within weeks, think about it this way: Bethesda's beta testing probably encompassed a few hundred machines at most. Upon release, the game was being run on hundreds of thousands of machines with various hardware and software configurations. Bugs are inevitable which weren't discovered in the testing process. The fact that they responde
        • Name one game as complex as Oblivion that has not needed a patch after release.

          This isn't a case of Q&A being terrible, this is a case of Oblivion being really really big, and not possibly having the time to test EVERYTHING.

  • It's no shocker that Oblivion is selling well for Xbox 360. There hasn't been much else for 360 owners to buy, and I'm sure many 360 owners bot the console for this game in much the same way that PSX owners bought their units for FF7 (albeit Oblivion has probably lead to fewer sales than FF7). The fact that Oblivion is doing well for both 360 and the PC is pretty damn impressive, though. Just goes to show you that not everything has to be a MMOG or have multiplayer features to be fun.
    • I bought the 360 specifically for oblivion. I first bought oblivion for the computer, but my system ran so shitty it brought down the experience (ati 9800 pro, amd 3200+, 1 gig ram. Yah I could have run on medium settings, but that would suck). Also, I could have upgraded my computer, but I'm also going to use it for business, don't want it sounding like a jetliner taking off full throttle, and it is fast enough for business. I don't even want to bother putting a whole new system together, and that would ha
      • Oblivion runs decently on my 3 year old machine with a fairly low end graphics card (radeon 9500). I run it at a mere 800X600 resolution to keep the frame rate decent but it's such an old system. I don't have any hdtv's so it'd be pointless really to have a slightly higher resolution on my xbox.
    • As a PC player, I have to say there are some irksome (albeit easily fixed) UI issues which I suppose were a legacy of Xbox360-compatibility decisions.

      For example: default to detecting and running joystick. Something like half or more of the people I personally know (me included) started the game, and in the first 'scene' ended up creeping or lunging one way or another, and once you hit a wall (or bars) you were unable to move....until you figured out that it was reading the JOYSTICK input. And no, as far
    • I thought that, then I realised that despite buying the console with obliv at least partly in mind, I've pushed buying it back to next month so I can buy Tomb Raider and Football Manager 06 first.
    • That and the fact that it's a lot cheaper for a lot of people to buy oblivion + 360 than it is to upgrade their gaming pc to the point where the game is playble and looks above average.

  • The manual was a guide on how to avoid bugs. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2006, @12:54PM (#15099872)
    The manual was a guide on how to avoid bugs.

    Take this excerpt from page 53:

    You may be tempted to enter the ancestrol tomb of C'Baothag, which holds silks, spices, and unimagineable riches beyond measure. DON'T. Entering this cave will cause the game to crash to your desktop, erasing all your saved games. You have been warned.

  • Sales of items (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lord_Dweomer (648696) on Monday April 10 2006, @12:55PM (#15099877) Homepage
    What I'd love to see are the sales of the horse armor. Something tells me that despite all the backlash and player resentment towards this, they will release a statement along the lines of "Customer feedback has been extremely positive and we've sold tons! Look forward to more content scraped from the original release to be sold to you as we bend you over even further!"

    • I agree that the horse armor thing is pretty stupid, though the 2 up-coming plugins (Orrery & Wizard's Tower) they show look pretty cool, and probably are actually worth the $2, though I'm sure there will be many free plugins that will be pretty similar.

      I doubt I will buy any of the plugins from obliviondownloads.com, though hopefully they will release expansion packs for Oblivion (like they did for Morrowind) and I already expect to be buying all of them this time around (unfortunately I had bought the
      • Xbox GOTY edition got you both expansions and cost less than the original game, or those with a proper Xbox could just FTP over the files from the PC expansions and they worked.
    • Surely you read the fine article?
      The Horse Armor Pack has been very popular, and exceeded what we thought it would sell. Despite that, we're still trying to find the right spot, so we're putting a much larger plugin out for less than the last one and we'll see what happens.
      I wouldn't pay for the horse armor personally, but I might pay for quest content.
  • Wow, that's pretty impressive. All I can say is: "Away from me, housecat! Look at that fur, what a disgrace!"

    Hehehe.
  • Just exited Oblivion now, the game is very good but it's too easy in the endgame. I've made myself a spell called "Death Incarnate" which gives:

    100/1 Fire damage
    100/1 Shock damage
    100/1 Frost damage
    100/1 Drain Health (will return if it doesn't kill the creature)

    Almost anything falls to the first hit of that combo, which eats 250 of my 340 SP. Then wait for me to recharge, spot the next enemy on the horizon, BAM! I finished all the Arena quests today without breaking a sweat. Did Necromancer's Amulet and Bloo
    • Yeah, the new magicka regenration rates make mages more powerful than they were in Morrowind. In Daggerfall, there was an ugly bug they never quite patched away that allowed you to absorb your own spells at 100% efficiency if you had innate spell absorption, so you could build a ranged AE spell and fire it at the floor at your feet to kill everything at an overall cost of 0 magicka. This made mages tiny gods.

      Morrowind had the stupid Breton/Atronach combo that allowed you to cast a spell summoning an ances
      • Last I checked, high level mages are supposed to be overpowering.

        Seriously, despite how easy it might make the game if you level your character a lot, don't you think a high-level wizard /should/ be able to lay waste to an entire army?

        This is fantasy people ...

        And if you don't like the role, play a thief or fighter. Its a single player game, its not like there's balance needed like in MMORPGs.
    • Too easy? Turn the difficulty slider up all the way. Your "death blossom" won't be so cool anymore.
  • Who are these people that find that Oblivion just does not have enough content and they must buy even more addons? From my view, it looks like you'd never even, in imaginable life, even if you were playing hours upon hours a day, really come across everything in Oblivion it is so big, and you need more? Then you wanna complain about high prices? Anyone dumb enough to need more content in that game deserves to pay.
    • I beg to differ. It only took me ~140 hours to get all 1000 points on XBOX Live and a fame rating of 160 on my primary character. Granted, I used three different characters for the different factions. It is true that Oblivion is much larger and more open-ended than most (if not all) CRPGS, but I still think Oblivion could have used some more polish. In Morrowind, in addition to the normal mages and fighters guilds, there was a temple faction and 4 or 5 house factions that kept me busy for well over 400 hour
  • Put off doing the main quest until you are a few levels up, then go into "hellish" area.

    The monsters have scaled up to match your level.

    Your allies have NOT!!!!

    Allies die quickly, you are stuck alone fighting the hordes.

    (of course if you decide to play the game casually, do a bit of thief, do a bit of combat, do some magic, you know... have fun..... then you will be screwed as you level up! Exploring the average dungeon soon becomes a massive chore of running and healing from every single creature.. UNFUN)
    • "Personally as a big fan of Morrowind, I wouldn't be caught dead with anything other then the PC version simply for the mods. Don't know why any Elder Scrolls fan could do without the mods."

      Speaking as one of the people that bought Morrowind for the XBox, I'll tell you why I did that: I had no clue about the plugins on the PC version, I didn't even know there was a PC version. Morrowind was the first time I had ever heard of the Elder Scrolls.
    • I bought the PC version myself, but heres why my friends with 360s (I have one as well, so it was an option should I have taken it) got the 360 version:

      1. Playing it on a 40, 50, or in one case, 60" TV, on their couch.
      2. Running it at excellent graphical settings, in HD, on a video game system that costs about as much as a graphics card that can match the performance.
        • Except that the PC can use the wired Xbox360 controller (it's standard USB; Windows XP recognizes it as "Xbox360 Wired Controller for Windows")... so the 360 version doesn't even win the controller aspect :)
    • I am a big fan of the Elder Scrolls series as well. I have a computer that is more than powerful enough to run Oblivion with most of the bells and whistles turned on, but I bought the XBOX 360 version because I wanted to play it on my beautiful SONY HDTV from my bed. I do not care about user created modules because the public modules for Morrowind all sucked; perhaps that changed at some point, but I stopped paying attention to user modules rather quickly. I think that Bethesda ought to offer a system to co
    • Theres a few community made plugins out that remove the level scaling for monsters (so at any level you can find any level monster), and also ones that make it so that higher level bandits will still have more common armor and stuff, and the 'überloot' will be much rarer.
    • The level scaling isn't as bad as all those internet threads have lead you to believe. The only thing wrong with Oblivion is the UI, which is terrible, and made only slightly less so by the UI mod. Bartering just isn't implemented. Everything takes way more clicks then it needs to, etc...

      BUy it. It's worth it, even if it doesn't live up to Morrowind.
        • Brilliant. Why don't you go over to the BMW forums and tell them all how you can't buy the sweet new set of 3rd party tires for them because you won't buy a German made car. I'm sure they'll all be interested in that insightful comment.
    • The problem is that Elder Scrolls games have had broken levelling systems since Morrowind. They're counter-intuitive. If you level up with your major skills only, you're looking at maybe +7 stat points per level. You don't get much improvement in your other skills, and you're missing out on potential stat points by doing this. The game will still scale up in difficulty, so difficulty scales up quickly while your power scales up slowly.

      You gain the most by focusing on skills not in your chosen skill set
      • In the end, all the Elder Scrolls games reward you for doing everything with your character while having the highest possible magicka and hitpoints possible (with magicka being more important).

        Sure if you like being a magic/alchemy nerd that can barely hold all of his potions let alone armor and a weapon.

        The leveling system in the Elder Scroll games were always 'OK' as long as you didn't try making a 'jack-of-all-trades master-of-none' character. Try creating a character class with athletics, acrobatics,

    • I'd love to know why level scaling doesnt suck because I haven't seen any reasons yet.

      The concept isn't terrible. It's the ballance that is broken.

      You're having trouble because you're not an all-out combat mage. Your magic and magic regeneration scale up when you level, so if you had been using destruction magic all this time you'd still be taking those guys out easy. If you want to be any other type of character, well... Sorry, you're out of luck.
    • "again, I'd love to know why level scaling doesnt suck because I haven't seen any reasons yet."

      One reason is something you touched on - because leveling in Oblivion is as easy as holding down the "C" button, there would be no challenge to the game if you could beat everything just by gaining more levels. It would add a "grind" aspect to the game that many people feel detracts from the fun.
      • Theres several cheat plugins already out there, and also theres the console to change all the settings while in the game!

        On the other hand theres also plugins that slow level so it takes longer to level up, and many other things to make the game harder (great if you find Oblivion to be too easy).
      • I'm around level 28 or so, and have very high marks for blade, marksman, and sneak and moderate marks for security, block and restoration. My strength, agility, and speed are all very high

        The level scaling does work well in your scenario. If you play a bard, for example, or your major skills are non-combat you can easily get killed by a mountain lion. If you level as a result of mercantile, alchemy, and speechcraft, this does not help much in combat (the alchemy helps a little). Those 3 skills don't
          • Morrowind had a couple NPCs that would join you (if you knew where to find them). I never used them, but it was build into the game. I'd be suprised if they didn't do the same for Oblivion. It's probably just a matter of finding them (before something kills you).
      • The second and third plugin looks to be a lot better than the horse armor (one of them is a new quest, and the other is a pretty neat sounding wizard's tower). Don't forget that it also costs them money to make the plugins (its not like it magically appears), so there is a certain amount of sells that would be a break even point (though for the horse armor I doubt its too high).
    • So you'd be interested to know about the 360 and you don't already know because your NOT interested in the 360? ;-)

      Here [xbox.com] is a pretty complete list of all the announced 360 games and release dates (if they haven't already been released).
    • That would be great to see a semi-Second life model come about. People with PCs can create mods, which everyone, including XBox owners, can buy with in-game gold. Of course XBox owners would complain, but I guess paying 'so much more' for my PC was worth it after all!

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