Oblivion To Be Patched, Sells Well

Gamers with Jobs has word that a patch for Oblivion should be expected sometime in the near future. The future official content downloads, at the same time, should be cheaper to obtain. Meanwhile, the game has been burning up the charts, according to Next Generation: "The title has become the fastest-selling Xbox 360 game in North America, and according to The NPD Group, it's currently the best-selling PC game, with the Oblivion Collector's Edition following behind at number 2. NPD also reports that the RPG made up 13 percent of PC game sales during its first week on the market -- more than four times the sales volume of the next best-selling title."

Re:The manual was a guide on how to avoid bugs.

[Kjella]

In case someone actually believes that, page 53 would be the last page with ad for the "official game guide and oblivion for mobile phones(!). There's no page in the manual with "known bugs".

Re:Hehe...

[DrMrLordX]

Yeah, the new magicka regenration rates make mages more powerful than they were in Morrowind. In Daggerfall, there was an ugly bug they never quite patched away that allowed you to absorb your own spells at 100% efficiency if you had innate spell absorption, so you could build a ranged AE spell and fire it at the floor at your feet to kill everything at an overall cost of 0 magicka. This made mages tiny gods.

Morrowind had the stupid Breton/Atronach combo that allowed you to cast a spell summoning an ancestor spirit, piss it off, and absorb about 50% of the sleep spells it cast at you for tons of extra magicka. It was convoluted, but it made the Atronach sign work pretty well and kept mages going without excessive potion use. This combo got even uglier using items enchanted with summon spells if you were good at recharging them.

Oblivion has innate magicka regeneration that sort of renders the Atronach sign obsolete unless you can find something like the summoning trick from Morrowind (who knows, maybe there is one). Anyone with sufficient magicka can just build bad-ass spells, cast em, then wait a few seconds to get their magicka back and keep on truckin.

So yeah, magic is kinda overpowered, though it was insanely overpowered in Daggerfall.

Re:oblivion needs to be patched

[DrMrLordX]

The problem is that Elder Scrolls games have had broken levelling systems since Morrowind. They're counter-intuitive. If you level up with your major skills only, you're looking at maybe +7 stat points per level. You don't get much improvement in your other skills, and you're missing out on potential stat points by doing this. The game will still scale up in difficulty, so difficulty scales up quickly while your power scales up slowly.

You gain the most by focusing on skills not in your chosen skill set because you can get up to +15(or more?) stat points per level, and you get a large number of skill increases across the board with a limited number of level-ups. This means difficulty scales up slowly but your power scales up quickly.

example: the best possible mage is set up to be a mage's mage(like High-Elf/Apprentice) but has nothing but combat skills as major skills, and the class is focused on combat. Why? Simple: level up your magic skills so that you get +5 Int and +5 Wil at next level up(say +5 Destruction and +5 Mysticism?) and then level up your main skills in the same stat 7 times or so (let's say +7 Athleticism) and you get

+5 Speed
+5 Intelligence
+5 Willpower

with one level. I think? Do that 10-15 times and you have 100 in all three stats and a ton of skill in Athleticism and all the magical skills, which is very useful to have. After 20-30 levels of this, you should be able to have 100 Speed, Strength, Willpower, and Intelligence easily.

In the end, all the Elder Scrolls games reward you for doing everything with your character while having the highest possible magicka and hitpoints possible (with magicka being more important). Mix and match racial and sign-based bonuses to taste.

Re:oblivion needs to be patched

[ivan256]

I'd love to know why level scaling doesnt suck because I haven't seen any reasons yet.

The concept isn't terrible. It's the ballance that is broken.

You're having trouble because you're not an all-out combat mage. Your magic and magic regeneration scale up when you level, so if you had been using destruction magic all this time you'd still be taking those guys out easy. If you want to be any other type of character, well... Sorry, you're out of luck.

Re:Not surprising

[argStyopa]

As a PC player, I have to say there are some irksome (albeit easily fixed) UI issues which I suppose were a legacy of Xbox360-compatibility decisions.

For example: default to detecting and running joystick. Something like half or more of the people I personally know (me included) started the game, and in the first 'scene' ended up creeping or lunging one way or another, and once you hit a wall (or bars) you were unable to move....until you figured out that it was reading the JOYSTICK input. And no, as far as I know there's no way to turn it off - just unplug the joystick, but still.

Second: the inventory/spell lists, or really any list in game is lowest-common-denominator resolution, probably to make sure people playing on a non-HD TV could still see the details, but the rest of us playing at 1600x1200 on a 24" monitor don't REALLY need to see each icon about 1.5" tall.

Critical? Nope, not at all. Annoying, yeah, until you mod it.

(Oh, and I'd personally be rather ticked if I was a X360 owner, as I understand it unable to download ANY mods for the game without paying for them. Blech.)

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

And no, as far as I know there's no way to turn it off - just unplug the joystick, but still.

open My Documents\My Games\Oblivion\Oblivion.ini

There's a line in there bUseJoystick=1 (or something like that). Change the 1 to a 0.