Elder Scrolls Panorama Shots 99
Johnny wrote to mention new images up on the Panogames.com site, for the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Enjoy some late-night images of sprawling countrysides and dank dungeons. They also offer images of Half-Life 2 and Need for Speed : Most Wanted.
I'm in love. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice while it lasted (Score:2, Insightful)
Two years ago I couldn't even load a single panormara without QT crashing, so I guess they're making progress...
Re:Opinions of Morrowind/Oblivion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The cat ruined it for me.... (Score:1, Insightful)
I'd say that there is nothing vague about the quests. So far they've all been totally sensical and a decent number of them had some kind plot turn or something unexpected.
It definitely feels like it's own genre of game. The way all enemies scale up their power based on yours (which some RPG fans totally despise) makes it feel more like a classic action game where things just keep getting harder, but your own skills and the tools at your disposal keep improving.
I can relate to that, but it's actually good (Score:4, Insightful)
"I didn't notice it before hand, but they never show you more than a few meters around you in their screen shots? There's a really good reason for that..."
The biggest slow-down on my machine was the grass, and I suspect that's the really good reason there: grass makes for great screenshots, but really _kills_ frame rates unless you lower the rendering distance. On the bright side, you can turn it off, which helps performance a _lot_. (On the even brighter side, turning it off makes all the alchemy plants much easier visible.)
And that's just one option. There is really plenty of room to tweak the graphics even more than that. You can turn it all down to really low res and polycounts, or play with the render distance, or whatever. Heck, you can easily turn it into something that's lighter on the graphics than Morrowind was. (Not that it'll look much better, but you won't need much better hardware either.)
"I'm not saying it sucks, I've not even played it (I will buy it, eventually). But I did play some of their other games."
I understand why someone would want to extrapolate from previous experience and take (semi)informed guesses when making a personal decision (e.g., buy it or not), and indeed we all do all the time. Unfortunately, that doesn't really offer any guarantees about Oblivion. In the end, it can be good, or it can be bad, or something in between, regardless of what the previous games have been like.
"Morrowind got into a playable "ready for release" state about the time the first expansion came out. "
Morrowind had many problems, yes, but Oblivion isn't Morrowind. It's not just that it doesn't have the same technical problems, it also doesn't have the bland NPCs and generic quests, etc. In other words, if you consider the first expansion what Morrowind should have been, well, then you might actually like Oblivion. It's far closer to Tribunal than to Morrowind in most aspects.
"Daggerfall, never did become a workable title."
Oblivion isn't Daggerfall either. Heck, even Morrowind, for its other problems, wasn't anywhere _near_ the Daggerfall disaster.
"This is, I think, the kind of game Bethesda would release if it weren't for Microsoft's hand in the mix."
I don't know if it's MS's hand or not, but that's OK, because I don't really care. All that matters is whether the game is any good or not. Exactly how much of it is MS's merit and how much is Bethesda's, is a best an academic exercise, but in the end it doesn't really matter. Either the game is fun or it isn't, and in the end that's all that matters.
But if you want to talk about the games Bethesda did release without MS, those include releasing a FPS actually _before_ Wolfenstein 3D. It also featured driving vehicles and outdoors city scenes. Long before the big name FPSes featured any of those. And, yeah, you could run pedestrians down with the car long before GTA2. It just wasn't textured, but it was in every other aspect a better game than Doom or Quake that came _years_ later. Or they include stuff like Terminator: Future Shock, which invented full mouse-look. In effect, they invented the interface every single modern FPS uses. Etc.
Even in the "The Elder Scrolls" category, Arena was pretty stable and a fun RPG (plus it had some amazing technical stuff, like having 80 _million_ square km of terrain, not counting the dungeons), and they had stuff in there that debatably wasn't even an RPG. E.g., Redguard or Battlespire. I.e., it included more than Daggerfall and Morrowind to base an extrapolation on.
Heck, they even made at least one Mario game.
So basically it's pretty hard to accurately paint Bethesda with a one-liner wisecrack. The stuff they did was really extremely diverse,
NPCs (Score:3, Insightful)
So it's only taken them fourteen years to catch up with Ultima VII [wikipedia.org]?