Living In Oblivion

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.

• Title: Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
• Developer: Bethesda Softworks
• Publisher: 2K
• System:PC (360)

The Computer Roleplaying Game (CRPG) genre consists of two poorly-wed sub-genres. These genres were forced together at gunpoint simply because of some passing similarities. On one hand, you have Japanese RPGs. These linear, turn-based titles are typified by the extremely popular Final Fantasy series. On the other hand you have Western RPGs, which can trace their roots to titles like Wizardry or the 'gold box' SSI games. More recent examples of this genre include the incredibly popular Bioware titles Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic.

This latter category of CRPG is, regrettably, on the wane. The type of gamer who enjoys this genre has been drawn away by the promise of multiplayer interaction, either in MUDS or MOOs or in their more graphically advanced MMORPG offspring. Since the days of Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment fewer and fewer of these non-linear titles, with an emphasis on creating an actual role to play, have been lining shelves. The grandaddy of this genre is the previous chapter in the Elder Scrolls saga. Morrowind let you loose on an island nation with little more than a race, astrological symbol, and some skills. Once you were in the game there wasn't a single constraint on your actions. An advanced world editor ensured that a player who tired of the hundreds of hours of potential gameplay in the shipped title could download content from his fellow gamers. From the smallest item all the way to entire additional continents, this content has kept dedicated players busy since the game's launch in 2002.

These players can move on, finally, as Oblivion steps ably into its older brother's very big shoes. The level of polish this game displays is such that it is hard not to wander into hyperbole when describing what they got right. In point of fact, it's hard to nail down something they got wrong when keeping the genre as a whole in mind.

There are, however, some big obstacles to enjoying the game. The most daunting can be a simple question of technology. A lot of game impressions seem to be based on the Xbox 360 version of the title, and for good reason. The 'recommended specs' on the side of the PC box could make anyone pause. A three gig processor, at least a gig of memory, and (if you're using Nvidia as your yardstick) a 6800 or better graphics card are what they suggest. I'll be honest, I don't reach the recommended specs. I've got a 2 gig processor and a 6600 card. Anticipating the game, I did upgrade to 2 gigs of memory as a stopgap measure, and I really noticed that purchase in the lightning-fast load times. Graphically, though, I know I'm not seeing the full experience. Unless you have a high-end rig, you're probably going to want to go with the 360 version. I'm told it has noticeable load times and some occasional control frustrations, but if your computer can't handle the title at least you can play the game.

The second roadblock potential players might encounter is one of the game's biggest strengths: the open-ended gameplay. Once you've finished the tutorial dungeon you're let loose with absolutely no strings attached. Tamriel is your world to explore, and you can do it however you wish. There is about 100x more direction in Oblivion than there was in Morrowind, and various gameplay elements make it much easier to get where you're going and know what you're doing. Just the same, if you like having a clear goal the freedom of Oblivon may throw you. The entrants in the Final Fantasy series look like barely interactive movies in comparison.

Finally, an aspect of the title that's throwing even dedicated players may prove to be the final straw for folks new to the series. There's no other way to say it: Oblivion is harsh. With freedom comes consequences, and for a certain kind of player Elder Scrolls IV may be a very frustrating experience. The best example of this philosophy is in character creation. It's entirely possible to create a useless character if you make the wrong choices. They give you an array of pre-generated character roles to choose from, and it's hard to go completely wrong if you pick one of those. If you so choose, however, you can roll your own class. If you really want to, you can set off into Tamriel with little or no experience in wielding a weapon. Oblivion is far more than your usual hack-and-slash, but there is still a lot of combat in the game, and such a character will probably have a very hard time of it. That combat, too, can be brutally unforgiving. Enemies throughout the land scale as you gain in strength, so the hope is that you won't ever come up against an opponent that's completely out of your league. Within your 'league', though, you can come up against enemies that are almost impossible to defeat. That can depend on the character just as much as the enemies involved, and either way the game isn't going to sit there and hold your hand.

With those caveats out of the way, I'll engage in just a little bit of hyperbole. Oblivion is the most engaging RPG I have ever played. It captures the essence of what makes tabletop roleplaying so enjoyable, and allows you as the player access to a sprawling and beautifully realized world of possibilities.

From the first moment you enter the world, the occupant of a dank jail cell, you'll be struck by the depth of the experience. A fellow prisoner makes rude comments to you from across the hallway, and the guards which appear at your door make no bones about their willingness to kill you. They're there guarding the emperor, who is fleeing an assassination attempt. Your tutorial for the game has you following the emperor (voiced by Patrick Stewart), and exploring a small cave system beneath the Imperial prison. Game elements are well explained, with numerous opportunities to practice combat tactics, stealth, and spellcasting. By the time you leave the cavern, you'll have chosen your race and class and borne witness to the death of the empire's leader. Blinking in the sudden light, on a grass-covered hill outside the Prison walls, you have a quest in your journal and a million options open before you.

This sense of freedom is Oblivion's most engaging quality. While the emperor asked with his dying breath that you travel to a Priory in the north and find his illegitimate son, you are under no obligation to do so. Ever. There is enough to do in the world of Tamriel that if you so choose you can spend the rest of your play experience happily ignoring the looming threat implied by the main quest. The main quest is well-written, and if you follow through with the line's goals you'll be rewarded through fame and fortune. Unlike other titles with the implication of 'freedom', Oblivion really does offer far more than just the central script. Just walking down a street in one of the many cities of the empire will allow you to overhear the possibility of adventure. The Non-Player Characters (NPCs) of Oblivion are wonderfully written, and all have their own very specific needs. Their AI puts them through a normal routine every in-game day, and causes the characters to interact in very realistic ways. While a peasant's normal day might involve working in a farm outside the city, stopping at a tavern for a meal, and then heading home for bed, it's possible that could be disrupted by the actions of another character. If it is, you can bet that there's a quest waiting for you.

This level of depth is supported by the game's many conveniences. The number of quests the citizens of Tamriel will throw your way would make it impossible to handle if you didn't have a good level of support. The game offers a featureful quest journal, which not only shows what quests you're on, but quests that you've completed and prior steps to ongoing quests. Quest goals are clearly marked on your world map, ensuring that even if you are unsure of what exactly to do you can always know where you're supposed to go. The game features a 'fast travel' system that can take some of the tedium of overland riding out of the game. If you do choose to travel overland, you'll encounter new adventure locales and opportunities for questing, but the option of moving quickly from place to place is really nice.

What you actually do on quest is extremely varied. While there are some quests that fit into the usual 'kill the x for me' or 'deliver this to so-and-so', a surprising number of them substantially differ from the norm. There are diplomatic missions, like the request from the invisible people of Aleswell. An entire village turned translucent by a thoughtless wizard wants you to go talk him into turning them back. The Thieves Guild quests primarily revolve around entering private areas and coming away clean with an item or items. One involved quest line I explored had me following around a merchant, who turned out to be purchasing his wares from a graverobber. While the quest line did end in a confrontation with the scoundrel, there was far more to the quest than simply 'go here and kill the bad guy'. Quests in Oblivion are deeply satisfying in a way that many RPGs (especially MMOGs) can't even approach.

All that said, if you're not in the mood for considered action there's always monster hunting to lighten the mood. Ruins are scattered liberally across the empire, and exploring them will lead you into numerous combat situations. Combat in Oblivion shares the same first-person melee setup that Morrowind used. You hack and slash at your foes from behind your character's eyes, resulting in an immediacy to combat that raises the blood pressure quite effectively. There are several ways to fight, each with its own distinct 'feel'. Melee combat has a great kinesthetic feel, with your character swaying and moving in time to the action. Slashing your weapon across your field of view is enormously satisfying, and creatures bleed profusely when poked. Melee skills have been simplified a great deal, with 'Blade', 'Blunt', and 'Hand-to-Hand' constituting the three main options you have in this field. If ranged combat is your preference, 'Marksman' is the skill you'll want. Drawing an arrow on a bow conveys a real sense of power, and the whistling sound that accompanies a flying projectile imparts your shots with a deadly beauty. Ranged combat is most useful, I've found, to use when stealthing. Entering 'stealth' mode allows you to move quietly and unseen through the halls of the dungeon. If you can get off a shot with your bow or blade while remaining undetected, your initial blow will do far more damage. You'll be doing a lot of combat throughout your adventuring career, so the fact that they just nailed the feel of chaotic encounters makes it hard to get bored while exploring the depths.

Every system, in fact, has the mark of quality stamped upon it. Magic is just as engaging as the combat elements, with different schools covering a wide variety of spell effects. Spells are broken out into separate schools, which don't directly tie together. You can choose, for example, to improve your ability to cast healing spells and ignore other spellcasting elements. If you want to broaden your scope, the different schools can be used in synergy to create excellent effects. Magic schools, sneaking, bladework, and shield blocking are all covered by skills which improve as you use them. 'Leveling up' occurs when you've crossed a certain threshold of skills points acquired. Your increase in power (both via level and skill increase) is visible and enjoyable, with benefits to your prowess in battle immediately apparent during gameplay. There are also non-combat skills, which are just as well thought out as the more violent sort. Lockpicking and Speechcraft are mini-games, and both allow access to secrets you might not otherwise ever see. You can repair your armor or brew potions, as you'd like. You can leap from rooftop to rooftop to improve your Acrobatics, and haggle with merchants to improve Mercantile. The tapestry of skills works so well because not only do they hang well separately, they mesh together into a cohesive whole. Your character, as your window into Tamriel, manages to be just as interesting as the NPCs around you. You can actually find that you surprise yourself with what you can do, a truly rare treat for any game.

All of these well-crafted systems would be fun even if the game only looked 'okay.' What makes Oblivion so easy to lose yourself in, though, is the visual quality and audio presence the designers have lovingly applied to the entire experience. NPCs look at you with expressive eyes and delicate features. Enemy creatures attack with movement appropriate to their style of combat, and light winds stir the grasses around you while you sit and stare up at the beautiful sky. Tamriel is a gorgeous world, and the visual experience completes the powerful force pulling you into the gameworld. There are a lot of 'wow' moments, but what I enjoyed most about the graphical presentation is that after a time you just stop noticing it. Everything looks just right, and makes it easy to slip into your alternate persona.

There's just so much right about this game, it makes me actually a little sad. The strong statements made by the developers are entirely admirable: a harsh and open world where the player is empowered. Those same statements will put off a lot of gamers because we are just not taught to expect much of ourselves when we game. The power, beauty, and depth of this gameworld should be experienced by as many people as possible, and because of the bad lessons taught by other games there are a lot of people that are going to say 'that's not for me'. Oblivion is a game that forces you to make decisions with real consequences, a game that plays out those consequences on the world, and teaches you as the player to think fast and play for keeps. It's real life, packaged into a fantasy format and with a handy quest journal that I constantly find myself missing as I do chores around the house. It does what other games are afraid to do: it respects you. The finest compliment for a game that allows you to fill a role is to find yourself actually believing the role, and Bethesda has given you every tool you need to go off and be your very own hero. In an escapist niche of an escapist hobby, there's not much more you can ask for than that.

Truly Great

A truly great game. I've been playing an awful lot since it came out a few days ago. I think the reviewer was spot on when he said that the player is given respect in the game. Theres no other way to describe it.

Oh, and this wouldn't be a game review without some tips!

Go find Dorian's house in the Tolas district of Imperial City. Kill him, and you can take an unlimited supply of money off of him. As much as your willing to take at 8gp per button press.

Tons of technical problems

Before buying the game, see if there is a demo available. Right now the game has a decent amount of bugs, and it has problems running on alot of systems, including xbox360s. Some people with cutting edge hardware are having low fps issues whilesome people with lower end video cards are running fine. The xbox360 is having harddrive cache problems, ruining saved games, while alot of people on PCs are crashing to desktop.

I'm enjoying the game, but it is frustrating. however, I would advise others to wait for a patch, unless you can't restrain yourselves.

Here is the technical board for those interested:
http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?s=9df 99cc632d35dd16ee09edf8a56b38a&showforum=23 [elderscrolls.com]

Small performance hint

"ome people with cutting edge hardware are having low fps issues whilesome people with lower end video cards are running fine."

As someone who actually has Oblivion and a pretty high end system, including a 7800 GTX, I can also tell you why: because us with high-end bastards pull the graphics details sliders to the max, while those low-end guys know how to be sane and tweak it.

Yeah, I've had performance problems too, because of too much grass. "Auugh! The game stutters on my high-end system! It must be buggy!" Not so. It was just that my settings made it draw half a million grass sprites, with transparency anti-aliasing at that, 16x aniso, and v-sync. Turning grass off made the game play smooth as silk even at maximum visual settings otherwise, and as an added bonus, it also made alchemy plants easier to spot.

And the funny thing is, I could swear that it actually looks better this way. All the flowers and rocks and mushrooms and fallen logs, actually look better and more diverse than a fairly uniform sea of grass.

So basically, the hint is: even if you have a top-end system, do take the time to experiment with the quality settings. Most games nowadays allow for detail levels that would need at least top-end SLI, the latest Athlon 64 FX and 2-4 GB RAM. But just because it's there, doesn't mean you _must_ use it. Unless you actually have that kind of overkill hardware, well, settle for something more suitable to what you actually have. Chances are it won't look that much worse anyway.

Before you Buy!

Before you buy, check the forums(which are completely negative with people convined no one ever, anywhere, has gotten the game to work, ignore thoses posts). Look for stuff on your video card. What runs Doom3 in High may only run Oblivion on Low, and what runs Doom3 on med may not even run it(or it may). My ATI 9800 Pro was nothing to it, barely ran, slowly, and very low framerate. I should have bought a 360 and the game on 360 but I want to be avail for plugins. Now I'm sli geforce 6800gs w/ 1gb ram and it runs high quality, but just barely, and slows down sometimes. But, it's incredibly beautiful, and very worth it. I think the 360 version will do plugins with the hard drive though, but I'm not sure, and I'm not much of a console gamer to begin with.

So, check your stuff out, but it's completely worth it. It requires Shader 3, so half life w/ HDR doesn't mean Oblivion w/ HDR. It's an intensive game, well worth it, but intensive. Your once top of the line comp is obsoleted by this next generation game.

And I hear GeForce FX series support is bad, ultra-low quality, etc... So 6000/7000 series, ATI 9500 or up to run, but my 9800 Pro was low quality, so be prepared.

But definately worth it. Man, pushes the limits of gaming.

Re:You don't need a monster video card

Actually, a monster video card (http://www.dealtime.com/xPF-Sonic_Blue_Diamond_Mo nster_3D [dealtime.com]) probably wouldn't be a very good choice for oblivion.

Nicely polished game

There's a lot of little things I really enjoy:

• The quick travel option on the map.
• The ability to see your quest history and make a quest your active one.
• For your active quest, it generally shows you where to go next. While this may seem like "spoonfeeding" the player, in a huge world like this it saves tons of wandering around.

That's not to say there's no issues. I succumbed to weighing down the C key and leveling up my various magic skills by casting spells repeatedly. The game balance is also occasionally off, with encounters not always scaling to my current skill level. Early on, combat and enemies seemed easy. Now that I'm at level 22, each encounter takes a long time and is extremely challenging.

Still, hats off to Bethesda to making an incredible game.

Sir Sleepington

I think Penny Arcade [penny-arcade.com] sums up Oblivion and its predecessors well.

if only

If only Bethesda would do Fallout3

the AI

Now i must be the only person that hates that the shops are closed at night. Who thought of making something that would inconvenience people? I just hate it when I can't make a beer run at midnight because things are closed!

Worst part:

The dumb "level matching" feature between your level and the enemies you encounter. It seems like a decent idea on paper but in practice it results in some bafflingly stupid situations. You'll run across bandits that are geared to the teeth with rare magical stuff, despite the fact you killed them 5-10 levels ago and all they dropped was leather. You never get the feeling that you "found" something, because in the corner of your brain you'll know that with your most recent level you triggered a loot upgrade and the game dutifully dispensed some +1 trinket to you.

Fights never get easier, or harder, as you level. Everything becomes more powerful as you become more powerful, ensuring you come out of a fight exactly the way you did in earlier levels. Good for balance, extremely poor decision for conveying to the player that they are getting stronger.

Thankfully there are mods out that fix this. It truly is a spectacular game, the current pinnacle of the genre. The downside is that this perfection only causes the poorly made decisions to sting stronger.

Re:Worst part:

I don't own the game yet, but I've been reading the elderscrolls.com forum threads on the level scaling issue and I think I've got a pretty good grasp of why people find it nasty... I am getting worried myself too, as this is exactly the kind of stuff that will break my immersion in a game.

Also, if you're looking for a challenge - turn the difficulty meter up.

This is the standard suggestion from the pro-scaling crowd that seem to believe that the issue is only a matter of powergamers wanting to become überstrong in the game à la Morrowind. However, the issue of level scaling has absolutely nothing to do with the difficulty of fights in general.

The issue is more about the consistency, logic and existence of the gameworld on its own, irrespective of the player. I find it extremely disturbing if the world magically alters itself depending on who I am, and more importantly, seems to be always distributed along a gaussian around me, no matter how much I've "advanced" in the game. There is no consistent measuring stick, and working on your character is penalized.

This enforced, narrowed-down distribution also removes variability from the game. I am definitely not a powergamer and actually like spending time in the low levels when mages that I tend to play are supposed to be fodder and very challenging to play. I enjoy the thought that there are humongous monsters that will bash my skull in if I should be stupid enough to wander into their vicinity. It also makes it all the more satisfying to eventually be able to take them on.

This leads to an issue with the risks and rewards of exploring: much has been made about how Oblivion makes all content immediately available despite a player's level. Well... yeah, you can, from what I have heard, go all the way into Oblivion at level 1. You won't get totally annihilated if you stick your nose into the wrong place too early. You also won't get something REALLY cool if you do dare to, and by some stroke of luck or by your own cunning and capability manage to obtain the loot "before your time". You'll just get an "appropriate" reward whatever you do, where-ever you go! This global averageness gives you a very strong impression that the world doesn't exist regardless of the player!

Apologists state that this helps make the game more friendly to free-form roleplaying. Well... there are limits to how much freedom is good in a game. Sometimes, in a game just like in the real world, there are places and things you quite simply won't get to do if you're a lame n00b. It does not neccessarily enforce a linear content progression either, if stuff is placed variably enough.

Then there are the obvious ridiculous outcomes which sound quite outrageous... at high levels, bandits everywhere wearing full sets of ebony and daedric and blackmailing you for 50gp. The explanation that they also went off and leveled and got stuff won't cut it... it is not credible that everyone gets rich and better just as the player does, in particular because the player is supposed to be the hero and actually see himself advancing beyond the usual trash roadside bandit!

I have a really bad feeling about this aspect of Oblivion, which makes it all the more sad because I really have been waiting for it since playing Morrowind obsessively and actually loving to just get to explore after becoming an über-god-character as the fights no longer were an issue -- I am not really into this for the fights. It was a nice reward to be able to dispatch anything quickly and to get the fighting over with, after having done it enough. Despite the loud proclamations of the pro-scalers on the elderscrolls.com forums that they are the torch-bearers of "true roleplaying" and that anti-scalers just want to feel powerful and need to turn down the difficulty to get that fix, I feel that they are the ones in it for the fighting, as it they are willing to accept glaring inconsistencies in the gameworld in order to

Gauging your playstyle

One thing Zonk didn't mention is that as you go through the initial dungeon, your character is "classless". At the end, the game suggests in a clever fashion what class might be well-suited for you based on your actions up to that point. I've only played through the starting dungeon once, but it guessed closely enough that I went ahead and took its suggestion. You can choose a different class or create a custom class, though, just like in Morrowind.

Another thing Zonk didn't mention is that the official forums are rife with reports of crash bugs. While the gameplay is relatively low on bugs, the game itself is prone to dropping some people to the desktop, apparently dependent on other unrelated software they may have installed, such as third-party codec collections or certain printer drivers (though in some cases, it's nigh impossible to track down the problem). One hopes that Bethesda is diligently working to resolve these issues, but they've been notably silent on the situation so far.

Nothing revolutionary here

I purchased Oblivion a few days ago, and while I have enjoyed it, I find it disappointingly similar to its predecessor, Morrowind. I enjoyed Morrowind a great deal, and love the open-ended nature of the series, but other than the improvements in graphics (and the introduction of a few changes, like the "fast travel" option), Oblivion seems to be a carbon copy of Morrowind. All in all, Oblivion is still a fine game, but I expected a step forward in more than the cosmetic sense.

Fatally flawed

This game is fatally flawed. It is a good game, however, there is one aspect which this series of games had, up until now, managed to capture - The sense of increasing your power. As almost all enemies scale along with you, get the same armor you do, etc, there is absolutely NO sense of becoming more powerful. Additionally, what was in previous elder scrolls games extremely RARE items and equipment, such as daedra and ebony, is now the norm for ALL npc combatants. That is, you are fighting enemies who now have the same equipment as you, and there are no *rare* armor sets, just magic armor that has been dumbed down from previous versions. It gets a bit ridiculous when you walk into a tavern and four farmers there are wearing glass (top light) and one is wearing daedra (top heavy).. So Bethesda leaves it to the fan base to balance this. Um kk thx. This game is made for consoles, it is not a RPG, it is a first person shooter.

Re:Fatally flawed

Basically, there are two scenarios -

1) Outdoor combat - These creatures/monsters are by default the same level as your person. That is, after you hit level 20 the likelihood of finding a troll (lvl 12 or so) out in the wilderness is 0. Therefore, after a certain point in the game you no longer find ANY low to mid-game creatures other than basic rats and crabs which do not progress.

    - There is a modder who has reintroduced all varieties of npcs to the game in outdoor regions, and made multiples spawn. Which means, you have a larger range of critters you will encounter now. This should have been in the game in the first place.

2) Indoor combat - These, so far, are all scaled to your level. So if you go in a dungeon, it is always going to be your same level. This begs the question, what if I go in a dungeon, find it too hard, can I come back later and try that dungeon and clear it out? No, if you come back, the monsters have accordingly been scaled to your level again. So, the dungeons are static, but the critters are always dynamic for dungeons. This means that you are "supposed" to get better skillz in the game to take down those creatures, instead of levelling.

    - There is no point to levelling then, because the traditional view of "What is a level?" means your character grows stronger, gains new abilities, etc. You may gain new abilities, but since the enemy strength always will be the same as your own, there is no notion of advancement, it is entirely constant.

    - There are mods to improve indoor and outdoor combat indirectly, which modify the armor that npcs wear. This means that non-monster types will not be wearing the most uber gear. However, the top tiered enemies in other monster groups will always level with you, and chances are they do not wear armor. What the equipment mods do do though is make sure that there aren't poor villages equipped with the phat loot that should have been impossible for them to get. You go to a village in the north, you expect people to be wearing fur armor, etc. Instead they are wearing heavy daedric (enchanted plate) armor, yea that is cool.

So Realistic

Watch Out, It's a Trap - Ackbar

On AI

From [wikipedia.org]

The following are examples of unexpected behavior discovered during early testing:

One character was given a rake and the goal "rake leaves"; another was given a broom and the goal "sweep paths," and this worked smoothly. Then they swapped the items, so that the raker was given a broom and the sweeper was given the rake. In the end, one of them killed the other so he could get the proper item.

Another test had an on-duty NPC guard become hungry. The guard went into the forest to hunt for food. The other guards also left to arrest the truant guard, leaving the town unprotected. The villager NPCs then looted all of the shops, due to the lack of law enforcement.

In another test a minotaur was given a task of protecting a unicorn. However, the minotaur repeatedly tried to kill the unicorn because he was set to be an aggressive creature.

In one Dark Brotherhood quest, the player can meet up with a shady merchant who sells skooma, an in-game drug. During testing, the NPC would be dead when the player got to him. The reason was that NPCs from the local skooma den were trying to get their fix, didn't have any money, and so were killing the merchant to get it.

While testing to confirm that the physics models for a magical item known as the "Skull of Corruption," which creates an evil copy of the character/monster it is used on, were working properly, a tester dropped the item on the ground. An NPC immediately picked it up and used it on the player character, creating a copy of him that proceeded to kill every NPC in sight.

Again with the western vs easten

Get off your high horse already, Zonk, there's no such distionction, and you mentioning Torment, a game heavily inspired by Final Fantasy (and my favourite game ever) as a western example proves this.

360 vs PC

"Unless you have a high-end rig, you're probably going to want to go with the 360 version."

I disagree...you overlooked one of the greatest parts of the Oblivion experience...the mods. These are user created changes to the game that enhance, alter, add to, or "fix" the game as it came out of the box.

Already there are over 100 mods available that do things from altering the leveling of the npcs, adding battles to the arena, and changing the UI to be less "console'ish"

That is one of the great reasons for going for the PC. The 360 will only have official patches or updates and will miss out on this entire wonderful area of the game.

Good Review

Good review for a great game. I thought the author did Oblivion justice. Oblivion is just as good if not better than Morrowind which was a spectacular game. It is truly as expansive and consuming as the reviewer stated.

The Mods Shall Set Ye Free

I bought this the day it arrived in stores without hesitation, being a major fan of Morrowind and its expansions and have not stopped playing it since. There is one, MAJOR thing the author forgot in his piece: mods. While the Xbox360 version will ensure that you can play the game smoothly at high graphical settings, the PC version will ensure that you can play the game the way you prefer through mods, which is something pretty major. A couple things I do not like about Oblivion:

1. Interface is gigantic (as it was made for both console & PC but no effort was made to make a smaller interface for PC) and the world map forces you to view it through a keyhole.
2. Magic users imo get too little mana to work with, this is especially fustrating in combat situations
3. Wild life attacks you for no reason; when you (IRL) walk through the forest, rats do not attack you unless theyre rabid or some shit. Same for crabs and such. In Oblivion, all animals harbor an extreme hatred towards people apparently and attack on sight regardless of their place on the food chain. Kinda dumb.

You know whats great about these annoyances? The game has been out for almost 2 weeks and mods have fixed each of these annoyances; theres a mod that makes the interface a nice size for PCs as well as making the map fullscreen, makes wild life act like real animals, and I personally made a mod that gives characters more mana per levels of intelligence (the games mana equation works as such: mana = Intelligence x 2, my mod just changes that multiplier; its a simple fix until I can make a script that involves the actual character level). And these are mostly just tweaks, give it another six months to a year and we'll have some original user content as well; quests, new lands, you name it. This is what made Morrowind go from a game I played for a month to a game I played for atleast 6 months, since I could go online and find new ways to enhance the game when I got bored.

This is a great game and it will only get better with time.

For those looking for mods, the two main sites I know of right now are:
Tes Source [tessource.net]
PlanetElderscrolls [gamespy.com]

I will buy the game if and only if...

...the emperor says "make it so" and "engage"!

A couple of problems

I've had a few problems with Oblivion. The worst is a "design feature". In my case, I wanted to create a new character, so I just went to Memory in the Dashboard and removed all the files under Oblivion. Go back into the game to create a new character and adjust my brightness settings, and the options were already set. Even though I deleted every file related to Oblivion, there was no way to get rid of the settings file. Turns out on the Xbox 360 version, settings are saved within the user profile, instead of with the rest of the save game files. Meaning there's no way to delete the settings (in other words, if the file gets corrupted you're screwed). I talked to Take 2, and the only recourse if that happens is to delete your profile/Xbox Live account. I'm hoping it'll never come to that.

As for the game, it runs pretty well. I've seen some strange slowdown on horseback and occasionally the framerate takes a nosedive in seemingly random environments. Most of that is fixed by holding down the A button while starting up the game (it clears the HD cache).

The biggest problem, though, is that the game is just sort of... boring. The characters seem to have been purposely lifted directly from a Generic Fantasy (tm) mold. I'm sure there's an underlying story in there unique to the genre, but I can't get past the character design. When you start up a "lesser" RPG, like Final Fantasy, you're at least given some character personalities to hook into. Here you get a bunch of blank slates -- not just for you but everyone in the game.

I'm going to give it time, but I do yawn on occasion while playing it, which is a bad sign.

No going back to RPG?

Does anyone else suffer from "Once you go MMORPG you can never go back" syndrome? I used to LOVE regular RPGS...grew up on the ones where you spent endless hours mapping on graph paper (Bard's Tale, Wizardry)...but after years of EQ, AO, DAoC, etc....I've found it hard to sit and play regular RPGs for for very long.

This game sounds very intriguing and when I update my machine I'll probably pick it up, but I'm afraid I'll feel the same way I did with Morrowind and other RPG titles...after the relentless treadmill of obsessive leveling filled with fun and hilarious conversations with friends and guildies, how do i go back to a world where I can't send a real person a tell, or feel the utter joy of having JUST the perfect group deep in the dankest dungeon and FINALLY getting the rarest of rare drops?

Regular RPG games hold my interest for merely dozens of hours AT BEST (and lately not even that), instead of hundreds of dozens of hours like an MMORPG...which for me is probably their only major selling point now, since I wouldn't feel like I was wasting as much of my life! But still...such a vast, open ended world without REAL people behind the characters running around feels a little stale, yeah?

From the review though, it does sound fun though...for a little while.

Random_Amber

Re:No going back to RPG?

I've seen a number of people asking how a single-player RPG can be as compelling or as fun as an MMO, and wanted to take a second to address that. I played WoW -- my first MMO -- for over 9 months, levelling my priest to 60 and various alts to mid-40s. I played every instance in the game (at the time), and had some epics. All told, I had a relatively enjoyable experience. But there were a number of factors that pushed me away from WoW, and whose absences I consider to be very compelling advantages for single player RPGs.

1) The time commitment became unreasonable. I got married, and found myself unable (and unwilling) to devote 3+ contiguous hours per night on raids. (I felt that it was more important for me to spend time with my wife.) Single player RPGs, on the other hand, provide instant-action, and allow you to save the game, turn the computer off, and come back to it at a more convenient time.

2) MMOs become quite reptitious. After 6+ months at level 60, in WoW, having run {Scholo,Strat,ZG,MC,etc.} for the umpteenth time, the game becomes a little long in the tooth. Moddable RPGs, on the other hand, can be enhanced with new scenarios that keep things fresh and entertaining. And, if the single player game becomes boring, it tends to be a lot easier to "walk away" from; after all, you're only "out" the cost of the boxed game -- you don't have a "built up" investment in months' worth of online play that keeps sucking you back into playing.

3) Guild drama, in an MMO, can become annoying. Having to deal with people whining about small things (loot, class roles [feral druids, shadow priests *gasp*], and so forth) can be amusing in small doses, but it can also eat away at you. The only drama in single player games is created by you. (Or, conversely, your spouse, if she sees you playing when you should be cleaning the dishes. :) )

4) MMOs tend to offer worse (possibly less immersive) story lines than single player RPGs. Some single player RPGs, including Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate 2, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, have fantastic stories which will leave you feeling happy and satisfied by the end.

5) There are a slew of other issues in MMOs that don't usually affect single player RPGs, such as prolonged server downtimes, long queue times, class imbalances, "griefers", and so on. These issues can build up over time and ultimately serve to turn people off.

Real consequences? Play for keeps?

Very nice review, and I can hardly disagree with any of it. However....

Oblivion is a game that forces you to make decisions with real consequences, a game that plays out those consequences on the world, and teaches you as the player to think fast and play for keeps.

That would be so if save games were disabled. But they are not. You don't have to play for keeps.

Max specs required

I have a Shuttle SN25P, PCI-X 7800OCT 256MB (7800 GT with a slightly higher clock speed and overclocking capability), 2 Gig of RAM (2-4-8), 2 78Gig 10k WD Raptors striped with 128k stripe size (defragged of course), with an Athlon 64 3200+ runing Windows XP x64 Edition. Oblivion detected on installation that I was capable of running at 1024x768 with HDR. Dungeons were normally fine, walking/running outside was fine, but any kind of battles even with rats were a major slowdown outside as well as some slow down in dungeons at times. I used Perfmon and monitored CPU, memory, and disk utilization and I found that my CPU was sustained at 70% though not necessarily peaking. I ended up dishing out the cash for an Athlon X2 4400+ (dual-core with 2x1MB cache) and everything is smooth as silk with a sustained utilization of about 50% per core. I find that a little bit interesting since according to this article about optimizing Oblivion [atomicmpc.com.au] the Oblivion core engine components are not multithreaded. There must be a lot of AI intensive things going on since I really don't see a lot of disk activity for texture retrieval.

Thoughts

That combat, too, can be brutally unforgiving.

It's worth noting that the combat, especially at the beginning, is much softer than in Morrowind. For the first few levels in Morrowind, there were very few things you could kill. Go near a cave? Guy kills you. Go near a tree? You're dead, bird eats you. Go in a lake? You're dead, fish eats you. See a rat? Make sure you have health potions.

My first time playing Oblivion I ran into a human who was angry - and so I ran away. In Morrowind, a similar human caster would eat any new player. When I finally gave up running in Oblivion, buddy died in a few hits. It was kind of shocking. Another good tip for new Oblivion players is that if you have any acrobatics skill you can kill a lot of enemies by running them off cliffs.

The only brutal combat thusfar in Oblivion (level 15 or so) has been the hero-level guy in the Arena with (what seems like) 100% magical resistance. He's proving hard for me to kill as a pure magic user.

Morrowind

I'm getting the impression from all these reviews that most journalists have either forgotten or never played Morrowind. All this raving on and on about this new freedom is redundant. You were all saying the exact same things about Morrowind a few years back.

Not only that, but the exact same problems are still present. People are still resorting to leveling by just standing there and repeating actions. Crashing is still a huge problem. Balance is still screwed, only now, you don't have the respite of becoming more powerful than your enemies.

It sounds like they've only fixed one or two of the issues with Morrowind: rigid NPCs, annoying travelling, and underpowered magic spring to mind.

I loved Morrowind. Spent months in it. I might do the same with Oblivion in a few years, late to the party just like with Morrowind, after they've patched all the needless crashing, and the hardware requirements become realistic to the current generation. And once the community has stepped in with mods to literally finish the game on Bethesda's behalf.

But I'm not buying a 360, and I don't run Windows, so maybe I'll just continue to run Morrowind on my Xbox. You can have mods on Xbox if you want to badly enough, by the way. Not likely to happen on thge 360.

Complaints about Bugs and Flaws

Granted - there are several bugs and flaws in the design of the game. These, left unfixed, do take away from the gameplay. However, Bethesda did the same thing in Oblivion that they did with Morrowind, and offered a full Construction Set.

There are already several mods and plugins out there that serve to make the game a lot more fun and more well balanced:

BTMod - improves the UI dramatically.
Better Water - makes the water more realistic
VA's Better Coins - gives a nice high res texture to the coins
Rare Items - improves the item rarity and economy
Lighter Alechemy - alchemy items weigh less, allowing the alchemy portion to be more fun


I'm also looking forward to improved mini-gams for the Personality and Haggle interfaces, as those games aren't nearly as fun as I'd hoped.


But back to my point - Bethesda has done a marvelous job getting us 85% of the way to an perfect RPG. The mod community, without a doubt, will get us the other 15% with the great power of the Construction Set that Bethesda has offered.

Fun game demands big hardware

I've been enjoying the game a lot over the past week, but to be honest, I've probably spent as much time looking for performance tweaks as I have playing it.

The graphics are incredibly ambitious, especially outdoors in heavy forest, as a result, even relatively high end hardware (7800GT) can suffer from low FPS in spots, and that's not even with all the graphics settings pushed to the max.

I'm seriously considering selling my card (which I bought primarily for this game) and getting a 1900xt (with its massive pixel shader power avantage over the NVidia offerings). I never thought I'd spend $400+ on a graphics card, but having already committed almost $300 it seems silly not to pay a bit more to get the experience I was hoping for. If I do though, I'll have to get more games to amortize the expense over.

If you are intrigued by this game, but haven't been eagerly awaiting it, I'd suggest waiting a few months before picking it up. That'll give the developer a chance to fix bugs. It'll give the gaming community time to figure out how to get the best peformance, and it'll give a little more time for price/performance on graphics card to improve.

This game is ruining my life

Every time I think that I should do something productive in real life, I'm thinking that it wouldn't hurt to complete just one or two missions in the game. Damn, it's really good. It's the closest thing to a pen and paper RPG that I've seen on a PC.

Not sure I'm a fan of it...

To me, it feels too much like a well made, but single-player MMORPG. I think a good MMORPG rich in things to do and with a large gaming population is more appealing to me. These often have a disadvantage in storyline though, but actually an upper hand in immersion. Immersion on a different scale than what you get from experiencing a story; immersion through socializing with other actual people playing the game, laughing with you on TeamSpeak and talking about what they did today while we're relaxing in a mission outpost.

I also often feel like I'm wasting huge amounts of time playing games like these, with nothing good coming from it. One may say that a hardcore gamer is wasting "his" ( because women never play games right? ;) ) life regardless game played because after all you aren't on a pub trying to get dates, which is of course what life must really be about, but I have lost count of how many likeminded people I've met in all ages and both genders while playing online multiplayer games with social factors besides the escape from reality with the epic quests.

I didn't feel like this before when I was younger, maybe because massive online games weren't even an option back then. But now I feel I wish to do something more with my interest than dig myself into a world resulting on a savegame on my computer. :-/

Nothing about Oblivion per se though; I'm sure it's a great game for its genre as a single player RPG. And maybe I just feel like this because I suck a bit at socializing in real life, and don't want to make it even worse by shielding myself from others when I'm on the computer as well.

Two Words: Level Scaling

Level scaling (and loot scaling) as implemented in Oblivion detracts from an otherwise outstanding game.

For those of you that haven't played oblivion yet, level scaling is a balancing mechanism where the game world adapts to your character's level. The enemies are replaced by more powerful ones as you level up. Bears instead of wolves for instance, or mob characters that level up and get better equipment when you do.

This has many players asking, "So what's the point in advancing my character?".

The idea of level scaling the monsters is generally a good idea for a game of Oblivion's size, but in this case the balancing is way off. The problem is that the level scaling can get coupled with some odd bugs, which can easily make your life miserable.

For instance, at the beginning of the game, if you follow the main plotline, you will get to Kvatch which has been overrun by demons. If you postpone this quest and return when you're level, say, 10 or 15, you will have the unpleasant surprise of seeing that all your NPC allies get owned in the first 30 seconds of the battle, leaving you with 6, 7 or more enemies to handle. Enemies which are of course as powerful as you are, because of the level scaling.

The immediate result of this will be a swift death on your part, or a prolonged one, depending on how many health potions you have. If, by some Godly miracle, you manage to retreat and run for it, the stated policy would be to try and bait one enemy at a time, fight him for some obscene amounts of time, heal and spend a fortune on repairing your equipment (if you want to save a lot of money, the Armorer skill is your friend) and then do it all over again.

In my experieince with the game, the balancing issues with the level scaling system created some embarrassing moments. I couldn't actually believe that they were happening. Situations in which I, Dragonheart, Champion of the Imperial Arena, the greatest fighter in history, having defeated the previous Grand Champion and all gladiators in-between, with a Light Raiment of Valor as armor, is almost killed by a wolf in the forest.

This happened when I was level 6. You wonder how I got to be Champion of the Arena at level 6? Well, let's just say that the Arena is not all that it's cranked up to be because of the balancing.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the monster level scaling isn't an issue. That it makes the game challenging long after you're done with the main quest, which is true. But the same principle applies to the loot and equipment that you find or steal, which is scaled according to your level. You've defeated a mighty Minotaur? Very good, you can sell his weapon and armor without remorse, because it won't be any better than yours.

You managed to lockpick a "5 tumbler" lock, which rates "Very Hard" on the difficulty scale while being level 2? Congratulations, you've found 20 septims and a carrot.

Basically, even if you do manage to pull of an incredible feat in the game, like breaking a "5 tumbler" lockpick, you'll never get something spectacular as a reward, or at least something that would justify the effort.

So this leads back to the grueling question: So what's the point in advancing your character?. Why keep improving your character? Why explore the world, all the dungeons, catacombs and forts? For what? So that when you buy a new weapon or a set of armor, everyone else would automatically get something that's equally good? To level up and see that all the enemies are suddenly just as good you?

I don't get it...

Every time a new game like this comes out, I hear people gush about how fantastic the graphics are. Then when they look back at older games and compare them to what they have now, they say they're ugly and how they're glad they have good graphics now. I say if they're ugly now, they were ugly then.

Take a look at the screenshots. Oblivion doesn't look fantastic now. It's starting to get to the point of looking decent, and actually looks fairly good on a couple points, but overall it's still the same ugly 3d graphics games always run. The shadows and lighting are all wrong. The characters still have textures that are all muddled, unrealistic and ugly.. they seem to ignore fine detail and just make crude smudges in a lot of places.. hair is particularly bad. Many edges and creases, mainly in armor, look painted on, badly, rather than actually creased. There are still many angular and blocky 3d bits in there.

Morrowind had problems with clipping, the characters were angular and blocky, the textures were a horrible blur, the shading and lighting were all wrong, and hard things like armor would flex and move like a second skin. All I heard at first was how fantastic and wonderful the graphics were. Then I looked into visual mods and found folks that agreed that it was ugly. They put out mods that improved it, in some cases a lot, but it was still ugly.

The gameplay was something I heard everyone raving about as well. I loved the mechanic of use it to gain in skill, and the flexibility of character development and creation. That was great. I loath with an undying passion the fact that the world is so static. Nothing your character does seems to matter. Kill a god? So? Take over as head of a guild? So? You don't get into any secret meetings with the big powers, you don't get any political intrugue and planning, you can't make choices that shape and direct others and reshape the land. What can you do? Kill stuff, steal stuff, and play fetch. Good dog.

Take for example a minor side quest of saving someone from a bunch of slavers. You rescue them and reunite them with their husband. Great, a nice quest. Quest over, go away now. Wait.. what? Where do they live? Do they need an escort home? Once there, will they be greatful and help you out in some way, information or gold, or perhaps just a place to crash away from the inn? Interaction and consequenses.. these are the heart and soul of an RPG. Morrowind had next to none of these.

The sound I loved. The background music was enjoyable, and it added a lot to the game. Except for the winds. I wanted to icepick my ears so I wouldn't have to listen to that annoying wistle in the winds anymore.

Ups and downs

I just bought an nVidia 7800, the AGP version because I don't have a PCI-X motherboard, and the -game- runs amazingly. 1280x1024 w/4x AA and all that, and -very- nice framerates, considering. However, the cutscenes are barely intelligible, apparently thanks to my mobo not supporting 'AGP fast write' which is something I hadn't even -heard- of prior to getting Oblivion. Now, I bought that video card -solely- so that I could have a great gaming experience with Oblivion, and now it looks like I'm gonna be either trading it in, or trading it -and- my mobo in so I can go PCI-X. It's a pain in the ass... but I've played the earlier games in the series, and I'll do what's necessary without blinking an eye. I think the game is worth it.

The question is, do you? Ask yourself how much you're willing to put up with before investing in this title. Maybe just head over to your favorite torrent site and download it first, make sure it runs.

But pay for it after you download it. This is one of the few games that is worth far more than they charge for it, imho.

Dave

Dropped the ball

Bethesda unfortunately dropped the ball on the construction set for Oblivion. Morrowind's set had quite a few features that Oblivion is just plain lacking. They can't even release their 3d exporter due to the crappy Havok license they bought.

Some of the features are pretty cool, like the worldspaces and mass-land editing through RAW and bitmap files. Spell effects are hard coded, containers are hard to open from the script, and too much of the game relies on voice files... for instance, adding a birthsign requires dialogue editing. If two mods add a birthsign, they both have to edit the same dialog point. Thus those two addons conflict and won't run together.

Even the render window is a pain in the ass. Even with maximum clipping distance small objects fade out at a tiny distance. I was trying to use a set of tiles to make a raised floor but couldn't zoom out to check my work because they disappeared at anything more than a few feet despite their scale being set as 3.0.

I'm shocked, really. I'm sure the mod community of Morrowind spurred many, many sales. I know at least a few people that bought the XBox AND PC versions (just for the mods).

Anyway, my best "WTF?" moment was the Imperial city guards killing each other for food after I stole all the food from their garrison tower. Free armor! >:)

what would be nice...

The number of quests the citizens of Tamriel will throw your way would make it impossible to handle if you didn't have a good level of support. The game offers a featureful quest journal, which not only shows what quests you're on, but quests that you've completed and prior steps to ongoing quests. Quest goals are clearly marked on your world map, ensuring that even if you are unsure of what exactly to do you can always know where you're supposed to go.

Seriously - screw the game, I could use this at work!

Although I'd probably settle for being able to use a mace on annoying managers - or, as I like to call them, "boss monsters."

9700 Pro running...decently

I would certainly echo the sentiments made by several users here. If you're planning to run this on your PC, you might want to take some inventory as to what you've got. I personally am running on a AMD Athlon 3500+ with an ATI 9700 at 1024 x 768 resolution. Yes, it needs to be that low. The game still looks phenominal, but I would sure love to be able to crank it a little higher. I used to run at 1152 x 864, but close combat yielded around 4 FPS - not the greatest time for slowdowns.

However, there are a number of little tweaks you can do to get the game running a bit better. The following is a link to 5 pages of optimization techniques specifically for Oblivion, and largely revolve around editing an .ini file the game uses for its settings. They're quite simple, and yield good results.

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?CIID=36222 [atomicmpc.com.au]

Oh, now for a note of realism

The reviewer notes the game called "Planescape: Torment" [wikipedia.org]. Now Oblivion is an RPG and a good game but it belongs not in the same class as that game. Very little can compare to that game. To be fair, Oblivion does beat it in the graphics terms but then so does pong.

The reviewer is gushing with love for Oblivion and that compels me to counter with a harsher review.

First the hardware requirements. I got 2.6 HT P4 overclocked to 3.1 and a Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb and 1 gig of mem and a fast HD. The game is certainly playable although it helps a lot if you turn grass off. Not all of the settings can be maxed BUT you can leave the land distance maxed AND have distant buildings drawns. So the outside still looks damn fucking big with trees all the way to the horizon and that distant city clearly visible.

I upgraded to a ATI X1600 Pro 512MB (agp version because I don't want to upgrade a complete PC until AMD upgrades memory) and the difference is noticiable.

BUT not staggering. The CPU is the limiter it seems and you notice it when panning outside that it is still not fluid. But it looks beautifull, I never worry to much about high frame rates in non-shooters and I wouldn't buy a 360 if it came with Brooke Shields (Blue lagoon edition).

For those who care about fps, you need a state of the art machine. For the rest, a quality machine of the last 2 years is passable.

Frankly the game to me seems to a mismatched bundle of ideas. It marries FPS with Melee. It has stealth ALA Thief but no instant kills. It has lots of potions and spells but only 8 slots to quickly use them in. It has friendlies wich conflicts with lots of friendly fire.

RPG's are pretty rare and everyone that is not crap is welcome and Oblivion is not crap. It just isn't a Baldur Gate either.

The combat is boring and confusing with more time spend running after your opponent the actually doing battle. I want to re-enact the scene from the Princess Bride ontop the cliffs of despair. Oblivion gives me a drunken scuffle.

Worse is that when you finally get people/horses to help you out you more often end up hitting them then the enemy causing them to attack you. Was this playtested or did the designers really enjoy beating up their own horse instead of the clanfear lizard thingy?

The magic is boring. None of the spells do it for me. Yeah you can combine some but whoopee. 3 boring spells in one is not 3 times the fun. Oh and you can't be a true mage when you got only 8 hot slots for your weapons spells and potions.

Alchemy is very detailed. NOT. Sure sure you got loads and loads of ingredients BUT they do not make sense. Each item just got 4 effects attached seemingly at random and you combine two or more to get a potion with 1 or more effects. Yet it is not logical. You do not combine grapes with yeast for instance to get wine to give you a confidence boost.

Everquest 2 at least did associate some logic behind wich foods give wich effects. Not Oblivion.

Since I need my hot slots for weapons and spells I do not bother with potions.

Then there is the sneaking. The stupid placing of the light gem thingy is indeed truly stupid. In the center of the screen. Probably afraid you would miss it. It has none of the shading of thief. you seem to be either invisible (you can hit an enemy with a sword and they won't see you), sorta invisible until you hit someone and fully visible. At least your state of visibilty is related to the darkness of your surroundings.

The bad thing however is that you do not have an instant kill. So if your sneaking up to an old harmless woman sleeping peacefully and whack her with a deadric (big sword) long sword be prepared for a long fight.

A bit of background banter in the Dark Brotherhood (assasin guild) has an NPC saying how he had to keep hacking and sawing at a woman's neck, I know what he is talking about.

A silent assasin only works if he/she can kill with one blow. What i

Level Scaling

The problem a lot of people are going to run into playing this game is the level scaling and the way in which your character levels up.

Enemies increase in difficulty as you gain levels. This is good because you can go anywhere at any level and have challenging fights. The problem arises when you end up gaining levels due to actions that are not combat related. You don't get physically stronger, bur your opponents do. If you do this enough you will basically come to a point where you cannot kill anything without a huge amount of trouble.

The way a lot of us are getting around this is to set our major skills to actions we can control, so that we don't level up because we were sneaking around picking locks for 2 days. If you can control when you level, you can make sure your combat and defensive skills have gone up as well. This method is a real pain though.

There are a few mods in the works that fix this problem, as well as some loot problems due to the level scaling (if you explore certain dungeons at low lvls they will not have the great items they would if you had explored them at higher levels).

All in all it is a fantastic game, it just takes some strategy and patience to make sure you don't royally screw up your character.

Just wanted to give the link to the tweak guide.

I'm using a 9600 and have some issues with warpping effects like stealth and illusion. I'm going to try this guide out tonight, just sharing the link.
http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?SCID=27&CI ID=36222&p=4/ [atomicmpc.com.au]
All sorts of options to mess with.

Some questions

I'm a bit confused about certain elements of the game..perhaps someone can explain.

First...magic items. There's a stat for charges and a stat for uses...when I run out of uses it stops working...so what is the charge thing for? How do I refill a magic item so I can use it again?

Lockpicking...why is it so damned hard to control? And why with sufficient stats in the skill is it still impossible to do more than 1 tumbler...yet when I click the autopick button several times, it works fine?

And finally, can someone please recommend a mod that fixes the level balancing crap? When I go up in level, I don't want to go back to a dungeon full of goblins to find that they all have upgraded equipment and are just as hard to kill. Screw that...I want to SLAUGHTER them. Part of the fun of leveling up is going back to those frustrating encounters where you got your ass handed to you and spanking them like a red-headed stepchild.

Great game...

While I couldn't ever get Morrowind to run without crashing every hour or so of gameplay, I've found Oblivion to be rock-solid. (System specs: 2.8ghz P4, 1gb RAM, Radeon X800GT). While I can only get playable framerates at 1024x768 with relatively medium settings, I still find the game visually enthralling and immersive. I've also noticed that people who don't have problems with running the game don't comment in the forums. So I'd think it seems like more people are having problems than really are. As for the complaints about gameplay, balance, etc... I guess I can see that. I'm not overfond of the large-size interface, though it does remind me a bit of old adventure games... 2pts for nostalgia. I would've preferred that enemies scaled up more based on area and less by player level. I've felt that they fixed much of the issues with Morrowind by the revised travel system, the better radar and quest log and the simplified skills system. You also get the feeling that there's replayability; there are decisions you can make now that will open up or cut off whole worlds of possibilities. I also like the improved theft system. In Morrowind, you could (and would) steal anything that wasn't bolted down. In this game the penalties for crime are more harsh. People will recognize stolen goods in your inventory and you will get in trouble. Stealing from your guild can quickly get you booted out (or force you to do agonizingly difficult side-quests to get back in their good graces). Frequently you'll have trouble selling off your ill-gotten goods. I really like that the NPCs have their own motivations. I've watched them interact with each other, one individual in a tavern I was hanging out in was apparently on a quest to get smashed. He kept walking back to the bartender, buying a bottle, heading back to drink it for a while and then repeating the process. I've seen imperial hunsmen have pitched battles in the wilderness with bands of robbers, then unceremoniously loot the bodies when they're done. I think we'll see a lot of user-created modifications and improvements that will help to obtain the changes and balance that people are wanting.

Psycadellic references

Has anyone else noticed the abundance of psychedelic drugs in this game? It makes me wonder (did it have an influence on the graphics?)....I find these all over the place..

"amanita mascara" - psychedelic mushroom

"ginko leaves" - psychedelic plant (in amazon)

"morning glory seeds" -psychedelic seeds

there are many more, but I can't remeber the names. Any other references?

the future

All those people bitching about interface & graphics issues on the PC version had better get used to it, this is the future of gaming.

The hardware required for mid-high end gaming is now so many orders of magnitude beyond what is required for even fairly intensive everyday computing that it is becoming unrealistic. The 360 & PS3 (I assume) will fill this gap by still being pricey but at least realistic for a much larger audience to buy.

As a result you are going to see more & more titles like Oblivion being designed first & foremost for consoles. The content creation tools can just as easily create content for the console versions you just need the game to be able too look for content on the harddrive or other attached media (USB stick etc).

I for one welcome our new console overlords. As an already proud owner of a 360 I could be useful in rounding up recalcitrant PCgamers for toiling in your underground content studios. ;-)

The world should keep spinning

This looks great, but like most open-ended RPGs, Oblivion still puts the main mission on hold while the player moseys around. What I want to see is a game where everything starts to fall apart, precisely because the player is cutting trees instead of saving the princess. Sure, it would be a very slow decay, so as to give the player the same feeling of open-endedness. But the more time you spent fishing, the less villages you'll have to trade with as they become overrun with evil.

Problem with FFDShow

One of the biggest problem is with FFDShow. It seems to launch a new instance of the audio codec everytime an audio file is played and after a couple hours of playtime, I ende up with 20+ FFDShow audio codec icons on my system tray. People have suggested to uninstall FFDShow to stop this behavior, but I'd rather keep FFDShow than to play Oblivion. I ended up compromising and unregistering ffdshow when I play Oblivion and reregistering the codec when I exit the game.

One of the early problems I noticed was a horrible frame rate. Even at the lowest settings and resolution, I was getting horrible results. My system is actually pretty decent imo. I mean, I got Fable to run at 1280x720 w/o any problems. Turns out that it must've been a driver issue and upgrading from ATI Calatyst 5.8 to 6.3 fixed this problem.

You can get a more detailed description on my fixes at:
http://www.krunk4ever.com/blog/?p=434 [krunk4ever.com]

Regarding level scaling complaints

I enjoy the level scaling, but it gave me quite a shock at first. I realized quickly that I was leveling too fast without sharpening my toon's combat-related skills. To avoid scaling problems, only level up when you have seen gains in those skills. Just because it says you can level up does not mean that you should go ahead and do it. Usually, I resist the urge to rest my toon until I have seen significant gains in the skills that will allow it to complete with the leveled-up critters out there. As long as I level up in a balanced fashion, most of the fights stay challanging regardless of my level. I have enjoyed the scaling so far, but it is drastically different from the way Morrowind worked. IMO, that is a good thing because in that game, my toons were demingods before too long and the game became boring.

Respect for the gamer? No.

Sorry to say that. I find this game a bad step back from Morrowind in that respect.

*SPOILERS* (well, not big ones, or not that it matters in this respect here.)

I just played the quest in bloated float (or was it floated bloat?) - the tavern on the ship which is being hijacked while you sleep.
And I hated it.

I rode my horse to the district, all fun and pretty 'cause you have to make the horse swim there, but ok, fun. Then I left the horse to graze and decided to travel away from the Imperial City next day at last, as it was evening. So I went into the tavern, talked to all the people there, rented a room, went to sleep.

I wake up. Noise of sea, skreetching, seems the boat departed the port! Whoa, I'm on full sea! And then a bigass requester "It seems the ship has departed the port while I was sleeping. I should investigate what is going on and how to get the ship back to port. Blah blah blah." I perceive this as offense to my intelligence but I click OK and proceed to open the door. I see the rogue. Cool, I start running ready to charge (the run-hit attack does extra damage) when suddenly I'm forced into dialogue with the bandit. So I'm given some very narrow choices and end up with the obvious, kill the bastard. At least I learn there's 4 of them total. But as the dialogue is closed, I'm no longer running and he gets the first hit. Ok, a bit of fighting, I get wounded but I win and some spellcasting later I'm as good as new. Of course right as the enemy falls I get a huge bigass requester summarizing everything he said and instructing me to proceed to release the bouncer locked in the storage room etc.

The bouncer is free, I talk to him for a moment and he tells me he's too cowardly to help me killing the rest, okay, the usual stuff. Then a bigass requester repeating everything he said.

I proceed to the main tavern deck. I see another bandit. I sneak, but I fail, the bandit turns and sees me before I manage to turn around. Happens. And then instead of attacking she proceeds asking me how I got there, where's the other guy and a bunch of other dumb questions. Finally we get to the obvious conclusion and I finally kill her. And get another huge requester telling me all she said, that there's a guy at the rudder and I should kill him. Whoa, I didn't know one of them would take the wheel!

So I try the smart approach. I open the back door of the ship instead of the front door, then try to jump on top of the roof of the tavern to snipe the helmsman with my bow. (I've examined the tavern pretty thoroughly before going to sleep, so I know the layout). So ok, I jump on that pole thing, then from top on the roof. Cool. I risk falling in water, so save. But as a khajit acrobat, this is easy. At least should be. After first few tries I fail to jump on top of the pole. So I try jumping on the barrier. No way. So I finally deliberately try jumping into the sea. Sorry, invisible wall. So now shamelessly pushing against the invisible wall I manage to stay on the barrier long enough to jump onto the roof. And now what? Another goddamn invisible wall! Right across the roof, through the middle of the ship! Across the most obvious "smart" route!

No way to get a clean shot, I see some of the guy from behind the mast, a step further and I'd have him, but no. All I can do is jump back and head inside. So I do head inside and to the other door, to the front deck. This time in sneak mode. I approach the helmsman carefully, then BASH! x6 damage! Yay! He doesn't die at once but a few more hits and I have him.
And then a goddamn requester telling me that before he attacked, he was talking about some "Golden Galleon". WTF? We didn't talk! I backstabbed him!

Then I get the key to the captain cabin from the corpse, replace my own already seriously damaged armour and sword with the one from the corpse (just the same, leather, only his is less damaged) and head to the captain chamber. Sneak, open the door, and ok, sneak failure, the boss looks directly at me. T

Lets see

Has Bethesda learned that having a large open world does not equal good game unless there is stuff to do all over the place?

Have the learned that falling through walls is not enjoyable?

Will they figure out that there are other ways to begin an adventure besides the 'man with no country' scenerio?

Maybe I'm just annoyed at the SPOILER IN THE REVIEW!

3 gigs of memory? what a hog.

Hope for lessor machines...

Oblivion is a rather demanding game...but with some work even my machine can play it well:

2.2ghz processor, 1gig of ram, and an nvidia FX5500 video card.

not a hope of it running faster than about 4FPS in the beginning...but scouring the Oblivion.ini file i found a *wonderful* setting:

bForce1XShaders

with some searching, and some additional tweaking i've compiled this (still a work in progress):

http://daze.deymos.com/oblivion/ [deymos.com]

a small site with information for tweaking the FX5500 (and likely others have had success with other cards) so hopefully this will help those who don't have UBER hardware play the game at a higher FPS even on older hardware (I currently get 20-30 FPS for exterior locations, and 60 FPS for interior)

Re:Too Much Oblivion

But since when does a video game on a "Stuff that matters" site deserves two headlines?

When it defines a genre for both the PC and the console gamer. Perhaps this is an experience the "Revolution" can't deliver.

Re:Difficult opponents

"b) real humans take turns playing key "NPCs", perhaps in exchange for their monthly online fee." Hmm. ShinyArmor559: "Princess, I'm here to save you!" Princess Princess: "LAWLZ I 4m 4 dude f001" ShinyArmor559: "... ok then. This way, sir princess, to safety!" Princess Princess: "4hhh m1n0t4rz!!!1!" ShinyArmor559: "Nooo, you fool! Not that way!" Princess Princess: "1 4m und3r 4tt4ckz h341z m3!" ShinyArmor559: "You had all the time to translate that into your leet giberish, but not enough to hit the 'w' key to run my way?" Princess Princess: "U suk." Check please!

Re:Difficult opponents

Holy paragraph batman! Why not try to break up your sentences in the future to actually convey different major thoughts in your post, somewhat like a paragraph? I never read it, and few others will. This is how -not- to write a post, even if the data within is meaningful.

PS: If you have HTML rendering selected and you did add new lines, you need to switch it to "plain old text" to make the new lines show.

Re:not worth the 50 bucks.

Why be wrong for so long, when you can join the throng and I can finish my song?

Re:not worth the 50 bucks.

the game feels like they spent 90% of it's dev time making it look pretty and threw the rest in at the last minute.

Where did you come up with this?!?!? So far while playing, I've got several characters and most of them are not following the primary story line at all... but everything I've chosen to pursue so far has turned out to have a story to go with it. The depth of what you can do with your character is just flat out amazing.

The graphics are indeed pretty, but to say that it's the only thing they spent time on suggests that you have not actually seen the game at all.

Re:Nice review!

there a a lot of bugs being reported right now.

I will be getting it in a few months, after some patches come out, and it is 20 bucks cheaper... and spend 1000 bucks to upgrade my machine.