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.

scaled leveling system, nuff said

[wootywoot]

If he's the one who came up with the crappy enemy scaled leveling system in Oblivion, I hope his new project bombs big time.

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[WinterSolstice]

I actually really liked that, so I hope to play his new project if that's the case

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[BobPaul]

Don't games usually get hard at the end? And shouldn't a failure to train adequately put you at a disadvantage?

Nobody ever said you could enter the game as a mage and completely ignore magic and succeed. Or that you could build all of your abilities equally so you basically don't have shit and you shouldn't have problems beating the game. Welcome to the world of RPGs.

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[Bieeanda]

Sure, but when run of the mill bandits are running around in a king's ransom worth of equipment, and perfectly mundane animals are suddenly a match for an entire conscript army, there's a teensy problem with your design. Welcome to a lazily balanced tabletop D&D game.

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.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Uh. Even Ultima III on Apple ][ was better designed then that. At the beginning, you could be easily killed in a single encounter, if you were going in the wrong place.

But, as you leveled-up, in certain parts of the world, creatures were running scared in front of you. At one point, you could get into any town from the starting area, steal stuff, and kill all the guards that were coming, until you totally controlled the city.

So the inhabitant of the world were not changing with you, and it gave the world a

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[ZombieWomble]

Nobody ever said you could enter the game as a mage and completely ignore magic and succeed

And, ironically, this is almost exactly what you must do in Oblivion to optimise your levelling - If you primarily focus on your "major" skills (that is, those which define your character class at the beginning) you will rapidly end up with a character with high skills, but low stats, and be crushed. A deliberate focus on your secondary skills to the deteriment of these allegedly character-defining skills is necessary for optimal progress. It's a very unintuitive game mechanic until you actually look into

Re:scaled leveling system, nuff said

[friedmud]

You know.... there was a difficultly slider... and since it's a single player game, feel free to make the game as difficult as you like.... you're the only person you have to please.

Seriously, I didn't find it all that hard in the end (but I spent well over 100 hours on the game, so I was pretty trained in most everything), but I ended up turning the difficulty down slightly just so that the actual fighting portion of the game didn't take so long so I would have more time to explore and such.

Oblivion more than any other game is a sandbox, you build the experience you want...

Friedmud

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[feepness]

You know.... there was a difficultly slider... and since it's a single player game, feel free to make the game as difficult as you like.... you're the only person you have to please.

Except that just feels too arbitrary.

I put nearly 200 hours into the game. I really enjoyed the ambience incredibly. But I would have strongly preferred a more rational leveling system. It got very frustrating when I realized I was plaing against my character rather than with them.

I will be paying a LOT more attentio

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[flamearrows]

You might wanna take a look-see at some of the mods that are available for Oblivion. I like Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul for the balancing it does in terms of levelling. The aim is to create a more static game world that provides definite rewards for pushing your characters to higher levels and better skills, and all in all, it succeeds.

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[PoderOmega]

I like the idea of a scaled leveling system, but not the way it was implemented in Oblivion. I already have the leveling mod so I am still playing, but here are my 2 cents.

-There was almost no variation in the enemy's skill. Starting enemies at your level was fine, but after leveling most random enemies stayed at your level. I think it would have worked if when your character was level 30, you could encounter enemies from level 1-30.
-Having non-combat skills as main attributes was suicide. I comment

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[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 ce

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[PoderOmega]

Interesting. I got so pissed off by getting my butt handed to me by goblins I started using a leveling mod around 20. But by this point I had spent at least 20-25 hours or more into the game and the leveling system was making the game less fun. It kind of sucks if you have to play for 20+ hours just to get to a point that combat is fun. I've gotten bored with Oblivion and I think your Chameleon suggestion may breath some life back into the game for me (that sounds fun!).

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[spun]

Hehe, it's fun for about half an hour, until you realize that there is NO challenge. It makes all the thieves guild quests rather unchallenging as well. Higher level goblins are actually surprisingly tough, I would put them on a par with high level daedra. They were still a challenge for me even when I was whipping through bandits and other run of the mill encounters like a hot knife through butter.

One of the things about the Elder Scrolls series, there are many viable strategies and ways of dealing with si

Re:scaled leveling system, nuff said

[Reapy]

If you are a mage, make use of the mages guild to create customized spells that match your abilities.

Like my favorite spell, "Camp Fire". This little gem consisted of a long duration firespell that did a few points of damage. It also did some fatigue damage as well. This kept the mana cost somewhat low. When you encounter a bad guy, the first trick would be to hit him with some powerful fatigue drain effects, until he hits the ground, passed out. Then, run close and drop the camp fire on him. He will lay on the ground, unmoving, happily toasting away to his death. Sometimes it takes a while, so feel free to pull out marshmallows and toast accordingly.

Oh, should fire not get the job done, you could try the sister spell to Camp Fire, entitled, "Electric Chair". :)

Reapy

Are you a goblin or bandit? The you need LifeAlert

[spun]

"Help! I'm on fire and I can't get up!"

I'm going to try that tonight, that's hilarious.

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[Specter]

"Having non-combat skills as main attributes was suicide..."

So totally not true. I always play on the hardest difficulty setting now and I rarely put any skill I plan on using very much as major attribute.

I've played through the main quest and the Mages and Thieves guild quest lines with a character who did not ever once use offensive magic or wield a weapon herself. She did _no_ offensive damage herself to anyone/anything and did not loot corpses/chests/etc.

I played another character most of the way thro

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[nuzak]

Go grab Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. It makes combat punishingly hard at first (it's supposed to be -- run away!), but does remove the obnoxiousness of the leveled lists without doing away with them completely.

Get the right economy mods (starting and perhaps ending with Living Economy) and you can ply your own trade routes. You're still going to have to fight, a lot, since there aren't any well-developed hireling mods (and in most games, typical friendly AI is still dumb as a brick)

It's still a combat-cent

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[Is0m0rph]

Maybe I'm not high enough level yet (16) but I really haven't had a problem with this auto leveling. Buy the Wizard's Tower add on (or use the Arcane University) and you can easily create weapons and spells that will level the playing field if the leveled up creatures are too tough. I just got done creating a couple game breaking weapons for my current level. 1-2 dagger strikes takes out anything at this point of the game.

Big Huge Games?

[The Orange Mage]

If this console RPG they're making is as good as Rise of Nations was, then hot damn, should be good. I just wish the rest of the RTS people liked it. :[

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[EveryNickIsTaken]

No one cares. Console RPGs direly lack in comparison to their PC counterparts.

Of course. Since the top selling and top rated RPG's of all time were either only on consoles, or were on consoles first before being ported to PC. (i.e. Final Fantasy 7, Chrono Trigger, etc.)

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[UnknownSoldier]

Exactly, whether the console RPGs are good are not*, is entirely different story as to the testament that the console RPGs sold very well. So if Console RPGs are lacking, it sure isn't in the financial / selling area.

* Depends if you like the open Western style, or the game-on-rails Eastern style

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[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...

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[MemoryDragon]

None of those games came even close to the standards Ultima 7 or Fallout have layed out. Sorry to say that, but I am in both worlds, gameplaywise console games on the average still use game mechanics of 1982 while the PC games have evolved. Only one thing has been improved over the decades in console gaming, that is the graphics.

Will ES go the way of BG

[Sciros]

I wonder if this means that Elder Scrolls games will go the way of Baldur's Gate (aspired to but never reached by subsequent games by the developer (or, rather, what's left of the developer)). I'm curious about Fallout 3, but ES matters more to me, and I'm hoping the rest of Bethesda's designers will be able to determine what worked about those games and what didn't.

Anyway, he was planning on retiring after Oblivion anyway, so it's only a good thing he's staying in the industry to help on another RPG. Aut

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[chrish]

Huh, what?

Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II (and the expansions for both) were all written at BioWare [bioware.com], by generally the same folks... you can see how they progress in their craft (game design, writing, and programming) between the two.

The Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic situation (BioWare did the good/excellent originals, shifted the sequels to Obsidian where they were rushed out the door by the publisher before they were even close to ready) on the other hand...

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[Sciros]

Hmmm well I was under the impression that after Black Isle fell apart the dev team had changed somewhat, but you're right, it barely did! I guess there was no excuse for NWN to be as rubbish as it was compared to BG II, haha. (BG I and II are some of my favorite RPGs)

Well, I'm still worried the ES series will suffer the same fate in terms of going from good to mediocre. That is, ES 5 will be on the level of NWN or something.

Interestingly...

[drsquare]

Even though he's been given a large pay rise, he's found that everyone else has also received the same raise and all the prices have gone up accordingly, leaving him wondering why he bothered.