Oblivion Expansion Confirmed

The rumored first 'real' expansion to Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has been confirmed. Shivering Isles will be available for the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game, with the expansion available as a download for 360 owners. In additional Oblivion-related news, GameSetWatch made a point to single out the double-layering of content for the PS3 version of the game. The title (due out next month with all 'add-ons' included) overcomes the slow speed of Blu-ray discs via a simple kludge: putting the content on there twice. From the article: "A perceptive comment from 'Marvin' is worth reprinting: "You'd automate the duplication at the image creation stage to avoid any stale data problems. People have done this on other platforms before for the same reasons - particularly the PSP, with its horrible UMD seek times. However, it does rather negate the whole increased storage capacity advantage."

More oblivion

[0racle]

Isn't expanding oblivion just creating more of nothing?

Re:More lore

[Pojut]

That's strange, I feel the opposite...I despised exploring in morrowind yet I LOVE just running around Oblivion's countryside...

If you are looking for more lore, I HIGHLY HIGHLY suggest you turn yourself into a book whore...there are so many hundreds of books to read in Oblivion (as well as in Morrowind) many of which are actual series..."book hunting" can be VERY fun, and some of the books are quite entertaining...

I would actually be willing to PAY for a hardbound book which contained all the stories and writing featured both in morrowind and oblivion (as in, willing to buy each one seperately, one for Morrowind and one for Oblivion)

Seriously, spend some time reading the books ingame....some really really cool stuff can come about.

Re:

[CaptainPinko]

You missed the joke: it is a pun on the word "oblivion" which means "nothing".

Re:

[Hitto]

Here, I just saved you a few bucks : The Imperial Library [gamingsource.net]

Or just read them at the Imperial Library

[DoctaWatson]

The Imperial Library [gamingsource.net] has the full texts of every book that was ever in an Elder Scrolls game, and plenty of other good reads about the world of Tamriel.

Re:More lore

[Fallingcow]

Each of the Dwemmer ruins in Morrowind had its own character. I can still remember maybe 10 different ones, and where they were on the map. Finding a new one was a treat.

Furthermore, each region of the island felt different, and the archetecture of each region was unique and often grand.

The ruins (I can't even remember the name of the people who built them... "A"-something-or-other) in Oblivion are BORING. I hated having to enter them for quests. Maybe one or two were actually fun. The only end-to-end great dungeon in the game was the one for the last Thieves' Guild quest. Oh, and the last area for the main quest, if you count that as a dungeon.

The Oblivion Gates were cool, and damn scary the first time, but they, too, lacked individuality.

Most of the towns had similar looks. Same buildings, different roof texture. Boring. Even the imperial city somehow didn't feel nearly as grand as that castle to the west of the capitol (man, I have to play it again, I've forgotten all the names!) or a couple of the wizard fortresses in Morrowind. I can't pinpoint exactly why this was the case; it's just how it felt to me.

And it had 3 regions: Marsh, Mountains, and Plains. Morrowind had a much more finely-grained geography; there was a marked difference even between the three major "volcanic" areas (North of the Ghost Gate, inside the Ghost Gate, and South of it all the way down to the coast), and the east and west sides each had at least 3 distinct areas; in fact, the West probably had 5. And that's not counting Solstheim, so they managed that much variety without a single "snowy" region!

Oblivion's people seemed far more "alive" than Morrowind's, but its ruins (and other dungeons), buildings, and land were very bland. The combat was great, though, and sadly may have spoiled me for any future Morrowind replays :(

Additions and clarifications

[Fallingcow]

By "last area of the main quest" I don't mean Imperial City, I mean the part before that. The part in Imperial City--while GREAT--is hardly a dungeon.

And I forgot about two other excellent dungeons: the crazy wizard's castle, and the one inside the dude's dreams.

I mean, there are a lot of great things in Oblivion, and it's one of the best games that I've ever played; it's just that the world itself was, I feel, vastly inferior to that of Morrowind. That, and the reduction of weapon and armor types, are th

Re:

[Aladrin]

I definitely felt the lack of weapons and armor, and the lack of houses and temples for side-quests was missed, but the rest of the game was better in my opinion. Especially the magic system.

My first attempt at Morrowind:

Make a spell caster.
Find a rat.
Try to cast a spell.
Run out of mana in 1 spell.
Die.

After a short while, I totally gave up. A year later, my friend said to just use my fists. So I made a warrior, and had fun. Not as much as I would have as a mage if the magic system was worth a crap, but

Re:

[DrMrLordX]

Unfortunately, anyone smart enough to game the system could use magic to completely dominate Oblivion regardless of the difficulty setting. All you really need is a magicka pool of 400+ and 100+ Willpower for good magicka regen (provided you aren't using uber magicka restoration postions and magicka-leeching spells/items to achieve the same effect). Then you set up custom attack and summon spells that all have a 5-15 second Invisibility (target: self) component. Nothing can ever detect you. You don't ev

Re:

[TempeTerra]

I think there was some better voice acting in Morrowind too. Not that Oblivion's was bad, but the voices in Morrowind were more distinctive. The male dunmer in the hold of the ship right at the start of the game was great. I would also say that the main plot in Morrowind was far more inventive. It had the cultists of an insane god spreading a disease that turns its victims into inhumanly strong mutants, or tentacled horrors if they are 'favoured' - plus good political tension between native dunmer and 'outl

Re:

[Fallingcow]

Also, in Morrowind, all of the really cool loot was hidden; some would be encountered in quests by necessity, some in quests if you did a little looking on the way to your objective, and some was just plain HIDDEN, no where near any quest routes or dungeons (Dragonbone Cuirass, for instance). If I got something that had an enchantment on it beyond maybe a "1-5 fire damage on hit", I actually felt like I'd gotten something cool.

The "good" unique items in Oblivion were rarely worth using, because their power

Re:

[oneils]

The "forbidden grotto?" Is that what you are talking about?

This is because of the map and compass

[spun]

In Morrowind, there was no compass leading you to unknown dungeons with handy icons. There was no overland map with fast travel options. When you found a new location in Morrowind, you felt a sense of accomplishement.

To me, this went well with the mysterious and foreign feel of Morrowind. Cyrodil is supposed to be the heart of the empire, settled for thousands of years. The feeling of familiarity is actually enhanced by the new interface, just as the feeling of foreign mystery was enhanced by the lack of ma

Re:

[popo]

>
Finally, in Morrowind, you basically had the swampy bit, the ashy mountainous bit, and the rest all looked the same. In Oblivion, the different areas look very different. But the map and compass do give a very different experience, and exploration is no longer as important or fulfilling as it was in Morrowind."

Huh? Oblivion is one big forest rendered with SpeedTree. There's one little snowy area up north, and the rest of the game is completely homogenous.

Morrowind had giant mushrooms, floating jellyfi

Re:

[spun]

Maybe it's that I do so much alchemy in Oblivion that I notice all the differences. Different trees and different plants, mostly. There is the Black Forest, with pine trees and swamps. There's the Nibaney Valley, with rolling hills, meadows, bushes and few tall trees. There's the northern and easter forested hills, with fewer herbs and bushes but more mixed deciduous and evergreen trees. There's the gold coast with grassy hills and few trees. Then there's the far northern mountains with mostly evergreens. S

programming waste

[cpearson]

Even with HDDVD and BlueRay game developers are going to have to start writing more elegant games or they will end up using up there new 50+ gig media without adding much real value to the game.

Re:

[smartyknickers]

aw no thats hardly fair - I feel the richness and immersion into Oblivion's environment would be significantly better with some higher-res textures (anything to make the mid-distance terrain look un-lame!) and I don't really mind the footprint growing toward 50Gb to make that happen..

Re:

[Deltaspectre]

Not sure about you, but I'd rather have more content in that extra space than more graphics...

If you're spending a significant portion of the game thinking the graphics could be better, then it needs more and/or better content.

Re:

[ben there...]

Not sure about you, but I'd rather have more content in that extra space than more graphics...

I think the GP was referring to the distant LOD textures in Oblivion, known by modders as "pea soup" because the line between nearby high quality textures and distant low quality textures is so extreme. Also tiling patterns within land textures are a problem with the stock textures. Those are probably the 2 biggest problems with the graphics in the game, likely to accomodate weaker systems, but they really stand ou

Re:

[ivan256]

Ironically, you can make the distance look better by doing less HDR crap in the foreground. The added shininess in the forground draws out the difference between the close stuff and the distant stuff. Besides, once you get over the "Ohh, that's new!" of the HDR lighting, you realize that it actually looks less realistic, and, if you're like me, it starts to piss you off anyway. It's just another hack so we can continue to pay nVidia and ATI for their existing IP that renders flat surfaces really well instea

Re:

[nten]

Suggested solutions have been targeted at procedurally generated models and textures to my knowledge, but the real killer for oblivion was the voices. Convincing text to speech would have halved the size of oblivion at least from what I've read. Even if it wasn't perfectly convincing, something that you could suspend your belief on would be sufficient. Would kinda hurt voice actors a bit.

Looking forward to it

[Sciros]

Well, given that Bloodmoon was one of my favorite expansions for any game ever, I do have high hopes for this one. Hopefully it will incorporate some of the improvements mods have made, such as the auto-leveling rubbish. I'm assuming this place will be cold as well (yay for being a Nord) but I'm also hoping it will have just a tad more variety in terms of landscape than Cyrodiil did. I mean, good golly, a land mass so big but so homogenous... that's a big part of why Morrowind is liked more by so many. I like how the announcement also takes a stab at PS3 and Blu-ray's read time problems :-) The criticism just never stops. Though I guess that's what happens when you strap a jet engine onto an elephant and call it a sports car.

Re:Theoretically, seek times should be better

[NonSequor]

The Blu-ray drive in the PS3 only spins at 2x speed. Even with the density advantage of Blu-ray it ends up only giving slightly better transfer rates than the 4x DVD drive in the PS2. The 360 uses a 12x DVD drive and I can't find any information on the speed of the Wii's drive, but it's probably also somewhere in the neighborhood of 12x.

The Blu-ray drive's slow transfer rate is only made worse by the fact that high definition games have to pull a lot more data off of the disc and the hack discussed in the article will only improve the seek time. I can't help but think that Sony going with Blu-ray at this point in time was ill-advised. If Blu-ray were a bit more mature they would have faster drives. As it is now, they're trading speed for capacity and games REALLY need speed and if they lack capacity it's generally feasible to spread the game across multiple discs.

Re:

[feepness]

The Blu-ray drive's slow transfer rate is only made worse by the fact that high definition games have to pull a lot more data off of the disc and the hack discussed in the article will only improve the seek time. I can't help but think that Sony going with Blu-ray at this point in time was ill-advised. If Blu-ray were a bit more mature they would have faster drives. As it is now, they're trading speed for capacity and games REALLY need speed and if they lack capacity it's generally feasible to spread the ga

Re:

[NonSequor]

I'm sure that works great for most games. But if a game exceeds 20GB, you won't be able to copy it onto the 20GB models and it'll still be cumbersome on the 60GB models. I'm guessing that the PS3 version of Oblivion must be large enough that a lot of people wouldn't want to copy it to their hard drive if they're looking for hacks to improve seek time.

Given the amount of money the Blu-ray drive costs, I don't think it sufficiently benefits the gaming capabilities of the PS3. They could have made something cl

Re:

[Kjella]

Given the amount of money the Blu-ray drive costs, I don't think it sufficiently benefits the gaming capabilities of the PS3. They could have made something clever instead like a DVD drive with two lasers in order to read both sides of a double sided DVD. Then they'd get 17GB per disc and vastly better performance. But instead they foisted an immature technology on the PS3 in order to try to prop up Blu-ray (and I'm not even sure that Blu-ray needed to be propped up in the first place).

If they would have do

Re:

[Logik9bar]

Some game developers have been doing this for years to speed up load times on ALL consoles that use optical media. Less seeks = more throughput.

Re:

[Panzergheist]

You know, this really needs to be addressed. It's been bothering me just how many people on /. are so misinformed about optical drive speeds. Comparing a "12x" DVD drive to a "2x" Blu-Ray drive is misleading as the uninformed will assume that the former is much faster than the latter. Let's put this into perspective:

A single speed (1x) DVD drive is rated at approximately 1.35 MB/second. That means that a 12x drive will theoretically reach approximately 16.2 MB/second maximum transfer rates.

A single speed Bl

Re:

[Panzergheist]

This is what I get for not previewing my own comment before submitting.

The max drive speed for DVD is NOT 12x.

(I need more coffee now...)

Re:

[NonSequor]

I looked at the same numbers you did before making my post. I did make a miscalculation when I said that the 2x Blu-ray drive is only slightly faster than a 4x drive, but otherwise I stand by my assertion that the Blu-ray drive is underperforming compared to what Sony could have gotten by using DVD.

The 12x DVD drive has 1.8 times the max transfer rate of the 2x Blu-ray drive. I don't see how you can say that isn't a substantial difference. Also, (2*4.5)/1.35=6.67 not 8, so it's a stretch to say that the Blu

Re:

[Panzergheist]

Yes, I miscalculated the speed myself when comparing the two. However, I still don't see it as being as big of a difference as most seem to be making it out to be. Hell, the original Xbox got by with a 2x - 5x DVD-ROM drive. Load times were reduced by caching to the HDD. Which, by the way, is the same way the Xbox360 and PS3 reduce load times.

I do own both the Xbox360 and the PS3, and the load times for each appear almost the same. Albeit, this is my own opinion of the matter. Without getting further into v

Hmmm

[Y-Crate]

Does it include an option to disable scaling the environment? Pretty please?

Re:

[Danse]

Does it include an option to disable scaling the environment? Pretty please?

Already have mods for this. FranOOOMMM makes Oblivion about 10 times more enjoyable. I feel sorry for XBox players... naah.. not really... :)

Re:

[AlexMax2742]

I hated the game when it came out. However, I just recently reinstalled, and now I can't be happer thanks to two plugins. Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul [tescreens.be] and AF Leveling Mod [tescreens.be]. The former balances content by reassigning level ranges for all NPC's, and also changes treasure chests to give out neat static rewards, which brings back "lucky finds" of Morrowind (just tonight I found an awesome two-handed electrified sword two levels down in a dungeon, and I had to stop there because I ran into one thug who was kicki

Re:

[default luser]

I have to agree, OOO re-defined Oblivion and made it fun. Without mods, random mobs were leveled based on your character level, so you're not really challenged early on in the game. The problem is, unless you level perfectly, as you gain levels the random enemies get tougher and tougher. I ended up giving up after level 20, I just couldn't keep up.

But OOO is really all you need. Here's why:

OOO brings a bit of randomness back into the game: monsters are generated on a random level scale with a maximum ca

Old News

[jnials]

This was in the print edition of PC Gamer I received in the mail over a week ago. How is this new?

Oblivion already has tons of great content

[Kuciwalker]

The problem is that content is crippled by a shitty combat system and a completely ass-backwards levelling system (it practically requires min-maxing). Oblivion is a beautiful but broken game.

Re:

[spun]

Meh. To each his own. I like the combat system. The leveling system has problems, but it doesn't require you to min-max anything. I think what your really trying to say is, the levelling system makes creating uber-characters too much like work. You can get through the story just fine without ever getting a +5 on any stat.

These issues existed in Morrowind, too. Mods to fix these perceived slights have been released for Oblivion just as quickly. Can't name them off the bat, as I just got the game for Christma

Re:

[Prien715]

I think what he's saying about min-maxing is that it's actually easiest to play through the game tagging all the skill you don't use as your primary ones. That way, you can still get better at them relative to enemies since you're no longer gaining levels.

Re:

[AlexMax2742]

As mentioned in an earlier post, it's quite fixable using AF Leveling mod, and scaling enemies and lack of 'lucky finds' are fixable with Oscuro's Overhaul. I bought the game at release, played it for a few days, saw the shitty leveling and scaling problems and put it way. I reinstalled it a couple of days ago, downloaded those two (and BTMod), and I'm having an absolute blast.

Only problem is that it's taking me a while to level. I'm using 'one level up for every 10 major skills practiced) and I'm still

Re:

[LurkerXXX]

I think a few of the UI mods are worth doing, even for your first pass. The keychain and the small-icon inventory mods let you concentrate on playing the game, and spend less time scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling through your inventory and maps to manage things.

Hard Drive?

[feepness]

"A perceptive comment from 'Marvin' is worth reprinting: "You'd automate the duplication at the image creation stage to avoid any stale data problems. People have done this on other platforms before for the same reasons - particularly the PSP, with its horrible UMD seek times. However, it does rather negate the whole increased storage capacity advantage."

I wonder if Bethseda is aware there is a harddrive on all PS3's that games can be installed to?

Re:

[Babbster]

I wonder if Bethesda is aware how nice it is to be able to have 10 (or, obviously, more) games ready to play at a moment's notice without first deleting data from the hard drive and then installing another game to be played. I'll bet they are...

I don't know about other console owners, but NOT having to deal with a hard drive installation is one of the [many] things I like about console gaming as opposed to the PC.

Besides, the advantage of Blu-ray over DVD in terms of gaming is its increased capacity

Re:

[gmb61]

You can buy a 300GB drive for under $100. I've seen 500GB drives for as low as $140. With that much space you could easily store over 100 games with room to spare. If you are like me and use No-CD cracks on all of your games, then you don't even need to put the game disc in the drive to play any of those 100 games. Just click and go. You can put all the discs away in a safe place and just run completely off the hard drive. IMO, this puts the PC way ahead of consoles.

Re:

[kbolino]

Small correction: 25GB for single layer and 50GB for double layer (see Wikipedia [wikipedia.org])