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.
DON'T SKIP (Score:3, Interesting)
Opinions of Morrowind/Oblivion? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, is a familiarity with Morrowind a pre-requisite to playing Oblivion?
play it on linux (Score:1, Interesting)
It's brilliant (Score:1, Interesting)
Unlike Morrowind, it also actually has gameplay. All sorts of little things that never made sense in Morrowind are fixed here. You can tell which of your goods are stolen. You can tell which things you're not legally allowed to touch, so that when you go for them, you at least sneak first. There's a visibility meter. The speechcraft and lockpicking interfaces are great. Haggling is no longer insanely tedious, but almost invisible.
I haven't run into one noticeable bug, either.
Go ahead and pick it up. It's not the usual Bethesda production.
Re:Opinions of Morrowind/Oblivion? (Score:4, Interesting)
Serious question, no sarcasm.
You're trying to beat the proportions (Score:5, Interesting)
In Oblivion it's different. If you just pimp out your attack stats, your enemies are going to be stronger in proportion. This has to happen because the world is so wide open. They don't know where you're going to go, and they can't put the stronger enemies "later" in the game.
However, as your non-attack stats go up, you have more options open to you. Speechcraft and mercantile make it easier to get potions and equipment. Learning spells opens up new tactics. Most importantly, learning new alchemy recipes allows you to make excellent potions.
The alchemy thing is *huge*. In many games, even if you know the combination for a lock or the recipe for soup, you're not allowed to make the soup or open the lock until a character tells you how. In Oblivion, if you know how you can do it anytime. Your stats will affect how long this takes, but they won't stop you as such.
What's rewarded is therefore learning about the game world, not pimping your stats. Once you've read enough recipe books on people's shelves, learned about the history, figured out the enchantment system, etc, you can really trounce anybody you run into. Put another way, if there were PvP in the game, an educated player with decent stats would win against a novice player with maxed stats every time.
Of course, if you look at a strategy guide this whole progression is toast, because it's inside you rather than enforced by the computer's dice. I like that. It annoys me that even if I know all the answers in Final Fantasy, I have to spend 45 hours pushing buttons. In Oblivion if I know all the answers, I can go straight to the places where the best weapons are stored, brew up potions, go to the master trainers.... It's my competence that determines my fate. So I stay the hell away from forums and strategy guides, and on the official Elder Scrolls forums the admins enforce the separation between the hardware, bug, and story discussion rooms with an iron fist.
It's not perfect, but that's because they really are the only ones out there doing this kind of game. Trying to combine total world freedom with a decent gameplay progression is damn hard. GTA avoids the issue by mostly dumping the idea of progression. Final Fantasy dumps the freedom. Elder Scrolls tries to combine both, and they're getting closer.
Re:The cat ruined it for me.... (Score:2, Interesting)
One of the main things they've promised with Oblivion is that the NPCs have their own lives and go about their business - they're not just placed somewhere for the sole purpose of meeting you.
Even morrowind wasn't really like that - NPCs didn't move much like they're supposed to in Oblivion, but they also weren't all there to give you a quest. Quite a lot of them just told you to get the hell out of their way, or would just say "hi" pleasantly as you passed. Just like real life.
It's also worth noting that Morrowind was very low on side quests handed out by random NPCs - most of the quests in the game were quests for the guilds you chose to join. I think that was one of the great things about it - you knew where you could go if you wanted something to do, but you weren't forced to go through the story if you didn't want to. I don't imagine Oblivion will be any different there.
I think too many people manage to raise their expectations way beyond what was ever promised for some games - they just assume it'll be exactly the game they want it to be, and are then horribly disappointed when its not.
I expect it to be like Morrowind, with better graphics, and slightly better NPCs. That's all I ever expected. Even if it's just like morrowind, but with better graphics I'll be perfectly happy.
Re:You're trying to beat the proportions (Score:1, Interesting)
This is kind of how I feel. It is obvious that the key to success and enjoyment of this game is to interact with the characters to collect knowledge of the game world. But to me, the characters are not appealing and the game world is straight off the cover art of some cheap fantasy novel. Since I'm not into reading cheap fantasy novels, I'm left with trying to enjoy the other aspects of the game. But there's not much else to enjoy: hack, slash, drink potion, repeat.