Oblivion Designer Moves To New Company

Gamasutra reports on the new position that former Bethesda designer Ken Rolston has taken with Big Huge Games. The lead designer for Bethesda's hit titles Morrowind and Oblivion, Rolston is now slated to be working on an unnamed title for the Rise of Nations developer. Rolston announced he was planning to retire early last year but ... apparently not. The designer characterizes his new project as 'a strikingly original and cunning concept for a console RPG'. No name or concept was included in the announcement.

Re:scaled leveling system, nuff said

[spun]

By level 30, even if you have been getting +2 stat increases the whole time rather than +5, assuming you have some halfway decent armor and weapons, you should be able to stroll through the toughest enemies blindfolded with one arm and one leg tied behind your back. At level 33, I can take on 5-6 of the toughest enemies at the same time, and dispatch them all within 30 seconds using at most one potion.

Actually, having all combat skills as main is suicide. To get the best character, you do need to level a certain way. In order to do that, you need to control when you level. In order to do that, you need some combat skills that are not main skills, so you can switch to those when you don't want to level. It also helps to have a few skills that you can use in the opposite fashion, for quickly gaining a level after you have advanced your skills enough to get the bonuses you want.

I didn't powerlevel much, getting three +3 stat increases per level on average. By level 25, nothing could come close to killing me. Levels 2-20 were kind of frustrating though, as it really didn't feel like I was getting any better. After level 20, things started to get easier, then as I said, by level 25 they were a cakewalk.

I will also say, there are some cheapskate techniques one can use to kick ass any time things get hard. Do the mages guild quests to the point where you can enchant. Run around collecting grapes and tomatos near Skingraad. Make and sell restore fatigue potions until you can afford to enchant five things with chameleon 20%. You are now permanently invisble, nothing can see you to hit you, and you always get sneak attack bonuses. 10 hours into the game and you are invincible.

I dind't find that trick until level 25 or so, but there's no reason you couldn't use it much, much earlier.

Re:Ehh..

[Anonymous Coward]

While I cannot separate out the numbers, according to the sources cited by wikipedia (and yes sources are cited), ESIV: Oblivion has sold over 3 million units. Now, granted many of those will be XBox, but that is higher then the numbers for ChronoTrigger and a lot of ChronoTriggers numbers seem to be for Japan sales, which probably explains something...

It has nothing to do with that

[Rob Simpson]

Enter a gate of Oblivion at level 1 and this terrible threat consists of a bunch of puny weaklings. Walk down a road just outside of a peaceful town at level 20 and you get attacked by bandits with godlike strength, wielding ancient weapons of power.