Elder Scrolls Panorama Shots

Johnny wrote to mention new images up on the Panogames.com site, for the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Enjoy some late-night images of sprawling countrysides and dank dungeons. They also offer images of Half-Life 2 and Need for Speed : Most Wanted.

QTVR = Slow!

Ironically, these render slower than the actual game.

DON'T SKIP

The second fullscreen pano is simply amazing. I'd buy a plasma and put it in my window to see these shots.

I need to upgrade.

My computer can't even run the panorama at a stable framerate. This doesn't bode well for the actual game.

I'm in love.

I just saw the screenshots, and combined with my experience with the previous game, I can say I'm in love already.

TESIV:O

Oblivion is by far one of the most beautiful games I've ever played. I've never thought about upgrading my gaming rig just for a game, but for Oblivion, I will. I currently have the following.

Athlon XP 3000+ (Barton 333)
Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra
Ati Radeon X850XT
2 Gig PC2700 DDRAM 1x1GB, 2x512GB

Just think...

Just remember that Oblivion is built to scale with your capabilities. As graphics cards and computers keep improving, so will some of the graphics of Oblivion. Draw distance will get longer, texture blending will improve, and the shadows should scale, too.

Gamers on various forums are starting to explore the expansive INI settings available. You can easily crash your game, but there are some promising improvements out there already of things that make the game look even better if you have the equipment to support it.

In case you didn't know, the grass is generated by the game itself based on the climate and terrain type. The floor of a forest will be more sparse and rugged than open expansive plains where there is almost too much grass. When terrain gets too high/steep, the foliage thins.

Dark Brotherhood

After you murder a few people, make sure you don't go to sleep in a dungeon filled with traps... the Dark Brotherhood representative will come to you as you sleep, offer you a position with them, then leave the dungeon-- walking THROUGH all the traps and dying, making it impossible to join the Dark Brotherhood. Bastards!

Even in the most open-ended of games, and this is surely one, you can run into stuff the developers didn't plan for.

I can relate to that, but it's actually good

I can understand your being circumspect in these days of PR hacks, paid-for review scores, astro-turfing and genuine fanboys. And yes, I do realize that you don't really have any guarantee that I'm not either, but I'll throw my 2p in anyway.

"I didn't notice it before hand, but they never show you more than a few meters around you in their screen shots? There's a really good reason for that..."

The biggest slow-down on my machine was the grass, and I suspect that's the really good reason there: grass makes for great screenshots, but really _kills_ frame rates unless you lower the rendering distance. On the bright side, you can turn it off, which helps performance a _lot_. (On the even brighter side, turning it off makes all the alchemy plants much easier visible.)

And that's just one option. There is really plenty of room to tweak the graphics even more than that. You can turn it all down to really low res and polycounts, or play with the render distance, or whatever. Heck, you can easily turn it into something that's lighter on the graphics than Morrowind was. (Not that it'll look much better, but you won't need much better hardware either.)

"I'm not saying it sucks, I've not even played it (I will buy it, eventually). But I did play some of their other games."

I understand why someone would want to extrapolate from previous experience and take (semi)informed guesses when making a personal decision (e.g., buy it or not), and indeed we all do all the time. Unfortunately, that doesn't really offer any guarantees about Oblivion. In the end, it can be good, or it can be bad, or something in between, regardless of what the previous games have been like.

"Morrowind got into a playable "ready for release" state about the time the first expansion came out. "

Morrowind had many problems, yes, but Oblivion isn't Morrowind. It's not just that it doesn't have the same technical problems, it also doesn't have the bland NPCs and generic quests, etc. In other words, if you consider the first expansion what Morrowind should have been, well, then you might actually like Oblivion. It's far closer to Tribunal than to Morrowind in most aspects.

"Daggerfall, never did become a workable title."

Oblivion isn't Daggerfall either. Heck, even Morrowind, for its other problems, wasn't anywhere _near_ the Daggerfall disaster.

"This is, I think, the kind of game Bethesda would release if it weren't for Microsoft's hand in the mix."

I don't know if it's MS's hand or not, but that's OK, because I don't really care. All that matters is whether the game is any good or not. Exactly how much of it is MS's merit and how much is Bethesda's, is a best an academic exercise, but in the end it doesn't really matter. Either the game is fun or it isn't, and in the end that's all that matters.

But if you want to talk about the games Bethesda did release without MS, those include releasing a FPS actually _before_ Wolfenstein 3D. It also featured driving vehicles and outdoors city scenes. Long before the big name FPSes featured any of those. And, yeah, you could run pedestrians down with the car long before GTA2. It just wasn't textured, but it was in every other aspect a better game than Doom or Quake that came _years_ later. Or they include stuff like Terminator: Future Shock, which invented full mouse-look. In effect, they invented the interface every single modern FPS uses. Etc.

Even in the "The Elder Scrolls" category, Arena was pretty stable and a fun RPG (plus it had some amazing technical stuff, like having 80 _million_ square km of terrain, not counting the dungeons), and they had stuff in there that debatably wasn't even an RPG. E.g., Redguard or Battlespire. I.e., it included more than Daggerfall and Morrowind to base an extrapolation on.

Heck, they even made at least one Mario game.

So basically it's pretty hard to accurately paint Bethesda with a one-liner wisecrack. The stuff they did was really extremely diverse,

Opinions of Morrowind/Oblivion?

When reading about the immense excitement this game seems to generate among enthusiasts, I'm tempted to go out and purchase it. However, I did try Morrowind for a few hours (PC), and I was never engaged. I've played NWN, the Baldur's Gate series, and KotOR, and enjoyed them all, so perhaps I've been conditioned to expect a Bioware sort of game (although I've played through hack and slash-ish stuff like Diablo and Dungeon Siege, but wasn't really a fan) with the associated linearity. The whole clicking to swing your sword thing, and the washed out color scheme didn't really do it for me, but perhaps I should give it another try.

Also, is a familiarity with Morrowind a pre-requisite to playing Oblivion?

Re:Opinions of Morrowind/Oblivion?

The Elder Scrolls games require a bit more investment from the player to make them work, but if you're willing to put in the effort they are massively rewarding. I started the series with Morrowind, and for the first few hours I thought I had made a mistake in purchasing it... it felt too open-ended, and I was too accustomed to being told what to do (even the BioWare games are more rigid than this). However, once I really started playing it became my favorite game ever. The only reason I'm here typing this right now instead of playing Oblivion is that I can't afford the necessary hardware upgrades.

Familiarity with Morrowind is not necessary for Oblivion. All of the Elder Scrolls games share a common world, but take place in different areas and have independent stories. If you've played the previous games you'll likely get a bit more from the story, but it's not required to enjoy it.

Re:Opinions of Morrowind/Oblivion?

Though I liked what it was trying to do, I hated Morrowind. On the other hand, I got Oblivion a few days ago and love it. Trust me, lack of engagement by Morrowind isn't uncommon, but Obvlivion totally compltetely makes up for it. All you give up is Levetation, Mark, Recall and the ability to twink your charactor to make things too easy (if you do twink your charactor to hell, the enemies will scale up with you and things get very very tough)

Re:Opinions of Morrowind/Oblivion?

If improving your stats improves your enemies proportionally, what's the point of improving your stats?

Serious question, no sarcasm.

You're trying to beat the proportions

In most games, if you could just set all your stats to max you'd be able to beat any creature in the game with a stick. You wouldn't need Fancy Sword of Smiting.

In Oblivion it's different. If you just pimp out your attack stats, your enemies are going to be stronger in proportion. This has to happen because the world is so wide open. They don't know where you're going to go, and they can't put the stronger enemies "later" in the game.

However, as your non-attack stats go up, you have more options open to you. Speechcraft and mercantile make it easier to get potions and equipment. Learning spells opens up new tactics. Most importantly, learning new alchemy recipes allows you to make excellent potions.

The alchemy thing is *huge*. In many games, even if you know the combination for a lock or the recipe for soup, you're not allowed to make the soup or open the lock until a character tells you how. In Oblivion, if you know how you can do it anytime. Your stats will affect how long this takes, but they won't stop you as such.

What's rewarded is therefore learning about the game world, not pimping your stats. Once you've read enough recipe books on people's shelves, learned about the history, figured out the enchantment system, etc, you can really trounce anybody you run into. Put another way, if there were PvP in the game, an educated player with decent stats would win against a novice player with maxed stats every time.

Of course, if you look at a strategy guide this whole progression is toast, because it's inside you rather than enforced by the computer's dice. I like that. It annoys me that even if I know all the answers in Final Fantasy, I have to spend 45 hours pushing buttons. In Oblivion if I know all the answers, I can go straight to the places where the best weapons are stored, brew up potions, go to the master trainers.... It's my competence that determines my fate. So I stay the hell away from forums and strategy guides, and on the official Elder Scrolls forums the admins enforce the separation between the hardware, bug, and story discussion rooms with an iron fist.

It's not perfect, but that's because they really are the only ones out there doing this kind of game. Trying to combine total world freedom with a decent gameplay progression is damn hard. GTA avoids the issue by mostly dumping the idea of progression. Final Fantasy dumps the freedom. Elder Scrolls tries to combine both, and they're getting closer.

Nice while it lasted

Well, at least this time I managed to get to the third panaroma before QuickTime crashed and took Mozilla with it.

Two years ago I couldn't even load a single panormara without QT crashing, so I guess they're making progress...

Re:Nice while it lasted

I didn't have any problems viewing all of them...but then, I'm not the one who spelled "panorama" incorrectly...twice...and different each time.

QuickTime on Windows x64?

Is anyone else running Windows XP 64-bit and able to run the iTunesSetup.exe? I'm getting the error: "The image file iTunesSetup.exe is valid, but is for a machine type other than the current machine."

play it on linux

This game doesn't yet work with cedega [transgaming.com] (a commercially developed fork of wine for gaming), but it's now the #1 game voted for by subscribers so the folk at transgaming will be working on it.

Beautiful crates!

As technology continues to improve, crates and boxes in video games keep looking better and better. I can't wait to pick up this game so that I can go through it and break dozens of those gorgeous crates.

Whoohoo! Crates!

Sure wish I could play

I liked Morrowind and the advance shots of Oblivion looked great, so I picked it up the other day. Now I just wish I could play. My system's a little behind the curve, but it runs stuff like WoW and HL2 on around medium settings with no problems at all. However, I can't even get through the character generator in Oblivion on absolutely minimal graphics settings without crashing.

Athlon XP 3200+
1 Gig DDR RAM
GeForce FX 5700 w/ 256 RAM
etc and sundry.

The worst part is my motherboard was of the last generation before PCI Express became standard, so all I've got is AGP. My CPU should still be able to handle it, but going to a GeForce 6800 on AGP seems like a waste of time.

Gamespot

Gamespot gave this game an astounding 9.6 for the 360. Amazing game with no frame rate/performance issues at all 10 hours in.

Heck no.

I'd buy a brand new PC for this game. At least I can use the PC for something else after. ;-)

Re:The cat ruined it for me....

Hmm, lots of staples definitely but the game more then makes up for them with the huge detailed environment and the voluntary nature of all the quests. Sure lots of people want to give you all kinds of quests, but they are totally optionally.

I'd say that there is nothing vague about the quests. So far they've all been totally sensical and a decent number of them had some kind plot turn or something unexpected.

It definitely feels like it's own genre of game. The way all enemies scale up their power based on yours (which some RPG fans totally despise) makes it feel more like a classic action game where things just keep getting harder, but your own skills and the tools at your disposal keep improving.

Re:Go Out And Waste 400+ Bucks For This???

They're getting better. Daggerfall was essentially unplayable when it shipped. Morrowind was at least playable. Having said that, I loved Daggerfall but just couldn't get into Morrowind.

Re:Go Out And Waste 400+ Bucks For This???

yeah, that explains the huge stacks of 360's I see in all the stores. What was M$ thinking?

Re:The cat ruined it for me....

or she might just tell you to fuck off and leave her alone.

One of the main things they've promised with Oblivion is that the NPCs have their own lives and go about their business - they're not just placed somewhere for the sole purpose of meeting you.

Even morrowind wasn't really like that - NPCs didn't move much like they're supposed to in Oblivion, but they also weren't all there to give you a quest. Quite a lot of them just told you to get the hell out of their way, or would just say "hi" pleasantly as you passed. Just like real life.

It's also worth noting that Morrowind was very low on side quests handed out by random NPCs - most of the quests in the game were quests for the guilds you chose to join. I think that was one of the great things about it - you knew where you could go if you wanted something to do, but you weren't forced to go through the story if you didn't want to. I don't imagine Oblivion will be any different there.

I think too many people manage to raise their expectations way beyond what was ever promised for some games - they just assume it'll be exactly the game they want it to be, and are then horribly disappointed when its not.
I expect it to be like Morrowind, with better graphics, and slightly better NPCs. That's all I ever expected. Even if it's just like morrowind, but with better graphics I'll be perfectly happy.

Re:Nice game, Dumbed down Interface

It gets worse, even the loot is scaled to fit your level. So no finding phat loot in dungeons that will yield some awesome sword that you can hold onto until your big and strong enough to wield it.

I really love the game, but it has some fucking annoying issues. The game levelling as you go is the major one. Gothic 1 and 2 (and hopefully 3) had no qualms about making all areas accesible but many suicidal until you were sufficently strong enough to tackle the creatures in that region. As it stands at the moment, apparently you can finish Oblivion at level 1, because the game is scaled to your level and never gets insanely hard ... UNLESS you don't level up the right things, and suddenly find your sweet-talking stealth character who can't fight his way out of a paper bag has to suddenly take out half a dozen daedra because he is level 15 and the game decides that means that you can oppose armies singlehandedly

Psychic guards is another one. If you steal something from someone in their own home, and then go find a guard, they will instantly arrest you. Even if that NPC that saw you never moved from their postion. Do anything wrong in view of anyone, and the entire world knows of your misdeeds, regardless of any other factors such as being out in the middle of nowhere. I haven't tested the 'kill someone out in the wilderness by themselves' situation, although you'd hope that doesn't alert the guards either. If nothing else it means you have to be a really careful thief/assassin, which while lending that extra challenge, can get annoying in those times when no one really had a chance to tell the guards but they arrest you anyway. Still, stealing a horse and running away under a volley of arrows is fun too :)