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Elder Scrolls Panorama Shots
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Mar 25, 2006 09:58 PM
from the soo-pretty dept.
from the soo-pretty dept.
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.
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QTVR = Slow! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:QTVR = Slow! (Score:2)
That's not ironic, it's just mean!
DON'T SKIP (Score:3, Interesting)
I need to upgrade. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I need to upgrade. (Score:2)
At least yours runs them. Both IE6 and Firefox crashed as soon as I try and pan around them. Click-scroll-crash. Fun!
In any case, these are simply amazing. I recommend everyone who likes these take a look at some videos of the game [elderscrolls.com]. They have some new ones on there I haven't seen yet, but I've watched all the E3 Demo videos and those are amazing.
This game truly blows everything else out of the water in terms of sheer scope and graphical achievem
I'm in love. (Score:3, Insightful)
TESIV:O (Score:2)
Athlon XP 3000+ (Barton 333)
Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra
Ati Radeon X850XT
2 Gig PC2700 DDRAM 1x1GB, 2x512GB
Re:TESIV:O (Score:2)
Here's a good question: anybody played Oblivion on a dual-core system yet? Oblivion was supposed to be the first game to natively support dual-core at launch. I want to know if a dual-core system k
Just think... (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
"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,
Parent
Re:Game Reviews (Score:3, Informative)
Opinions of Morrowind/Oblivion? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, is a familiarity with Morrowind a pre-requisite to playing Oblivion?
Re:Opinions of Morrowind/Oblivion? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Opinions of Morrowind/Oblivion? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Opinions of Morrowind/Oblivion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Opinions of Morrowind/Oblivion? (Score:4, Interesting)
Serious question, no sarcasm.
Parent
You're trying to beat the proportions (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Nice while it lasted (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Heck no. (Score:2)
Re:Go Out And Waste 400+ Bucks For This??? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Beautiful crates! (Score:2)
I know this is terribly disapointing, but I thoguht I should tell you before you ruin your weekend.
Re:Beautiful crates! (Score:2)
NPCs (Score:3, Insightful)
So it's only taken them fourteen years to catch up with Ultima VII [wikipedia.org]?