Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Oblivion To Be Patched, Sells Well 93

Posted by Zonk from the still-working-on-the-thieves-guild dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Oblivion To Be Patched, Sells Well More

Oblivion To Be Patched, Sells Well

Comments Filter:
  • "Let's not make it perfect, we can always patch it later!" 3

    • Re:Games.. *sigh* (Score:3, Insightful)

      by /ASCII ( 86998 )
      I specifically gave up PC gaming and wen't over to consoles to avoid this. Seems like time has caught up with me.
      • Because when the X-Box 1 was launched, it was stated Live wouldn't be used for patches. And with the exception of one patch for online play on Unreal Tournament, it wasn't. X-Box 1 games were pretty bug free because the makers couldn't patch them later. The 360, on the other hand.. well, Microsoft seems to have ignored what they said and about a third of all 360 games released so far have had big bugs in them. Dead or Alive wiped your save, Call of Duty 2 stopped you progressing and so forth..
    • You can't make it perfect, and there's considerable difference between "rushing the game out the door" and "developing routine patches after release." Without seeing the release notes for the patch, you can't tell which is the case with Oblivion, but if I had to guess, I'd say that the forthcoming patch is simply routine.
      • I never early adopt on Elder Scrolls games...They almost always have some issues coming out the gate. Morrowind was a joke, in terms of system stats. If you had the recommended system specs, that meant you could play the game with normal settings at a normal framerate (we're not talking advanced graphics options here). Anything less than the reccommended settings, you were going to have problems, and god help you if you were hovering around the supposed minimum stats. There were a lot of annoying little bug
      • I havn't read the Oblivion manual, but I have an apperent bug dropping things. I get 2 problems regularly.

        1) I get not enough room problems, once I emptied a bookshelf, became over encumbered and couldn't drop anyhting, I reloaded.

        2) Stuff floats around in my crosshair getting generally in the way

        I now only leave things in corpses and chests to make life easier.

        the error could be between chair and keyboard though.
        • Hold down the Shift Key and left click on the item to be droped in your inventory. The Item may act like you threw it hard, but it'll go somewhere other than your inventory.
              I've never got the no room message except when trying to drag it out of my inventory rather than when using shift-click.
              I've found turning in place to drop something elsewhere usually helps with the no-room messqage when dragging items out of my inventory as well.

          Mycroft

      • Another note to mention is that even though a developer can have as many combinations of hardware as possible, there's no feasible way for them to have them all.

        Some games are pickier with hardware than others. I seem to remember Command & Conquer Generals being very picky about your memory. If you had any error at all, the game would crash. People that had other games running fine (UT2k4, RTCW) had to get new memory because the old memory was causing C&C Generals to crash. I was one of them.

        • Are you using a Creative soundcard? I solved my Oblivion CTDs by turning audio acceleration down a notch in dxdiag.

          • Nope. I'm using the onboard sound that came with my Abit A7N. It only rarely happens anyway, so its not that big a deal. I played most of Saturday and I only had it crash once in the evening. Since I work M-F, I only have it happen once every couple of days. That isn't too much to worry about, and I can wait for the official patch to come out.

    • ... let me be the first to say that this is one of the most trouble-free games I have ever used out-of-the-box. (The sole exception to that was due to an old *.ax codec file on my PC, which caused crashes very often, but was not the developers' fault, and was quickly addressed in a FAQ.) The only bug that I'm aware of is that shopkeepers' gold on-hand doesn't decrease when you sell them things. Whoops!

      I'm aware the parent post was just a quick blurt out to get a comment up, but Oblivion has been a great exa
      • The only bug that I'm aware of is that shopkeepers' gold on-hand doesn't decrease when you sell them things. Whoops! That's not a bug. That number doesn't represent the merchant's amount of gold; it represents the most he is willing to pay for a single transaction (single item). The number goes up if you reach master level in mercantile. The merchants, like most other games, have an infinite amount of gold. Aside from the fact that it is very unintuitive, I think it's a better system then morrowind.
    • XBox 360 - Bringing the PC gaming experience to your living room!

  • Not surprising (Score:2, Insightful)

    by DrMrLordX ( 559371 )
    It's no shocker that Oblivion is selling well for Xbox 360. There hasn't been much else for 360 owners to buy, and I'm sure many 360 owners bot the console for this game in much the same way that PSX owners bought their units for FF7 (albeit Oblivion has probably lead to fewer sales than FF7). The fact that Oblivion is doing well for both 360 and the PC is pretty damn impressive, though. Just goes to show you that not everything has to be a MMOG or have multiplayer features to be fun.
    • Ugh, "bought" not "bot" grrr rawr.
    • I bought the 360 specifically for oblivion. I first bought oblivion for the computer, but my system ran so shitty it brought down the experience (ati 9800 pro, amd 3200+, 1 gig ram. Yah I could have run on medium settings, but that would suck). Also, I could have upgraded my computer, but I'm also going to use it for business, don't want it sounding like a jetliner taking off full throttle, and it is fast enough for business. I don't even want to bother putting a whole new system together, and that would ha
      • Oblivion runs decently on my 3 year old machine with a fairly low end graphics card (radeon 9500). I run it at a mere 800X600 resolution to keep the frame rate decent but it's such an old system. I don't have any hdtv's so it'd be pointless really to have a slightly higher resolution on my xbox.

    • Re:Not surprising (Score:3, Informative)

      by argStyopa ( 232550 )
      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

      • Re:Not surprising (Score:1, Informative)

        by 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.
    • I thought that, then I realised that despite buying the console with obliv at least partly in mind, I've pushed buying it back to next month so I can buy Tomb Raider and Football Manager 06 first.
    • That and the fact that it's a lot cheaper for a lot of people to buy oblivion + 360 than it is to upgrade their gaming pc to the point where the game is playble and looks above average.

  • The manual was a guide on how to avoid bugs. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10, 2006 @01:54PM (#15099872)
    The manual was a guide on how to avoid bugs.

    Take this excerpt from page 53:

    You may be tempted to enter the ancestrol tomb of C'Baothag, which holds silks, spices, and unimagineable riches beyond measure. DON'T. Entering this cave will cause the game to crash to your desktop, erasing all your saved games. You have been warned.

  • Sales of items (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Monday April 10, 2006 @01:55PM (#15099877) Homepage
    What I'd love to see are the sales of the horse armor. Something tells me that despite all the backlash and player resentment towards this, they will release a statement along the lines of "Customer feedback has been extremely positive and we've sold tons! Look forward to more content scraped from the original release to be sold to you as we bend you over even further!"

    • I agree that the horse armor thing is pretty stupid, though the 2 up-coming plugins (Orrery & Wizard's Tower) they show look pretty cool, and probably are actually worth the $2, though I'm sure there will be many free plugins that will be pretty similar.

      I doubt I will buy any of the plugins from obliviondownloads.com, though hopefully they will release expansion packs for Oblivion (like they did for Morrowind) and I already expect to be buying all of them this time around (unfortunately I had bought the
      • Xbox GOTY edition got you both expansions and cost less than the original game, or those with a proper Xbox could just FTP over the files from the PC expansions and they worked.
    • Surely you read the fine article?
      The Horse Armor Pack has been very popular, and exceeded what we thought it would sell. Despite that, we're still trying to find the right spot, so we're putting a much larger plugin out for less than the last one and we'll see what happens.
      I wouldn't pay for the horse armor personally, but I might pay for quest content.
    • http://www.majornelson.com/2006/04/09/show-170-the -one-about-accessories/#comments [majornelson.com]

      Exact figures about how well it sold weren't stated, but the tone leads me to believe that it sold way more than he thought it should have.
  • Wow, that's pretty impressive. All I can say is: "Away from me, housecat! Look at that fur, what a disgrace!"

    Hehehe.
  • I wonder if their future patch plans include the creation of a sort of online marketplace for paid add-on content for the PC similar to what is offered via Xbox Live.

    Now granted this may not appeal strongly to those of us in the community that can go out and get our own free content, it could certainly be of some benefit to a standard, non-power user.

    Anyway, I'd be interested to see what this company may try and do to bridge the gap and bring in additional incremental revenue.
    • That would be great to see a semi-Second life model come about. People with PCs can create mods, which everyone, including XBox owners, can buy with in-game gold. Of course XBox owners would complain, but I guess paying 'so much more' for my PC was worth it after all!
  • Just exited Oblivion now, the game is very good but it's too easy in the endgame. I've made myself a spell called "Death Incarnate" which gives:

    100/1 Fire damage
    100/1 Shock damage
    100/1 Frost damage
    100/1 Drain Health (will return if it doesn't kill the creature)

    Almost anything falls to the first hit of that combo, which eats 250 of my 340 SP. Then wait for me to recharge, spot the next enemy on the horizon, BAM! I finished all the Arena quests today without breaking a sweat. Did Necromancer's Amulet and Bloo

    • Re:Hehe... (Score:3, Informative)

      by DrMrLordX ( 559371 )
      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 ances
      • Last I checked, high level mages are supposed to be overpowering.

        Seriously, despite how easy it might make the game if you level your character a lot, don't you think a high-level wizard /should/ be able to lay waste to an entire army?

        This is fantasy people ...

        And if you don't like the role, play a thief or fighter. Its a single player game, its not like there's balance needed like in MMORPGs.
    • Too easy? Turn the difficulty slider up all the way. Your "death blossom" won't be so cool anymore.
  • too bad for the XBOX owners

    ***Is there anyone here playing Oblivion that can tell me why level scaling doesn't suck???***

    i went through the first 'main' mission with a level 1 fighter with no problem. level 9 thief and i cant get past the first guy. its even that much more impossible with my level 33 mage.

    i did find a mod that tries to remove the traditional RPG where gaining a level will help you rather than hurt you (oscuro), but its not perfect and i'd rather have an official fix from bethesda, cause a
    • 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
      • 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).

        Sure if you like being a magic/alchemy nerd that can barely hold all of his potions let alone armor and a weapon.

        The leveling system in the Elder Scroll games were always 'OK' as long as you didn't try making a 'jack-of-all-trades master-of-none' character. Try creating a character class with athletics, acrobatics,

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

      One reason is something you touched on - because leveling in Oblivion is as easy as holding down the "C" button, there would be no challenge to the game if you could beat everything just by gaining more levels. It would add a "grind" aspect to the game that many people feel detracts from the fun.
    • I think any open game like Oblivion MUST have level scaling. If the monsters did not scale, then you'd have areas with hard enemies that are effectively out of bounds to low level characters, which would pretty much force linearity into the game. With level scaling, you can travel anywhere at any time, and always encounter monsters that are both not too hard or too easy to kill (provided you built your character by playing and not holding down the 'c' button for a day, of course).
  • In regards to the horse patch..."selling well" without stating a number is a marketspeak trap. For example, if they only expected to sell 2 and they sold 3, then the product is selling well. It doesn't really MEAN anything....The fact they are releasing the second pack at a lower cost would lead me to believe that "well" in this case = not well enough.
    • The fact they are releasing the second pack at a lower cost would lead me to believe that "well" in this case = not well enough.

      Any sells would be "well" since it only costs, what, the player and MS for the bandwidth? They got all the suckers for that price range so they're lowering it to get all the suckers who held out because they thought buying content for their game (which they bought too) was stupid but hey, now that it's cheaper....
      • The second and third plugin looks to be a lot better than the horse armor (one of them is a new quest, and the other is a pretty neat sounding wizard's tower). Don't forget that it also costs them money to make the plugins (its not like it magically appears), so there is a certain amount of sells that would be a break even point (though for the horse armor I doubt its too high).
        • True enough but the costs of making and getting the new content to players is far less than that of making an expansion pack (no need for advertisments, pressing CDs, shipping CDs...). This just rubs me the wrong way when companies like Epic make a game then follow it up with maps, mods, and skins/models.
  • Does anyone know what this patch is going to fix/alter? Is there going to be at least an option to get rid of the weirdness caused by the level scaling monsters and in particular the scaled stuff that causes roadside mobs to be equipped with überloot while they're still blackmailing you for 50gp?

    If the patch fixes this (or makes it optional) I might actually consider buying Oblivion...
    • Theres a few community made plugins out that remove the level scaling for monsters (so at any level you can find any level monster), and also ones that make it so that higher level bandits will still have more common armor and stuff, and the 'überloot' will be much rarer.
    • The level scaling isn't as bad as all those internet threads have lead you to believe. The only thing wrong with Oblivion is the UI, which is terrible, and made only slightly less so by the UI mod. Bartering just isn't implemented. Everything takes way more clicks then it needs to, etc...

      BUy it. It's worth it, even if it doesn't live up to Morrowind.
  • Who are these people that find that Oblivion just does not have enough content and they must buy even more addons? From my view, it looks like you'd never even, in imaginable life, even if you were playing hours upon hours a day, really come across everything in Oblivion it is so big, and you need more? Then you wanna complain about high prices? Anyone dumb enough to need more content in that game deserves to pay.

    • According to my Xfire profile [xfire.com], I've been playing for 28 hours. Already, I'm finished with the thieves', assassins' and mages' guilds, and completed every random quest I could find inside of all the major settlements.

      Next in line is the closing of the random Oblivion gates. They're annoyingly redundant, but luckily, nothing can stop the 'Fox. This should be finished soon, considering that I can close a gate in about five minutes if I try hard enough.

      So in conclusion, while Oblivion may be large, it is

    • I beg to differ. It only took me ~140 hours to get all 1000 points on XBOX Live and a fame rating of 160 on my primary character. Granted, I used three different characters for the different factions. It is true that Oblivion is much larger and more open-ended than most (if not all) CRPGS, but I still think Oblivion could have used some more polish. In Morrowind, in addition to the normal mages and fighters guilds, there was a temple faction and 4 or 5 house factions that kept me busy for well over 400 hour
  • I hope they fix the slowdown in the Hackdirt/Weynon Priory area....
  • I really enjoyed this game and the previous game "Morrowind".

    That said, the biggest annoyance was the lack of decisions you can make during a quest. The quests and dialog choices are on rails. If a quest has an objective, often you have to perform that objective to the letter. There were many times during the game where I would have liked to betray someone, perform a quest in a different manner or just flat out refuse to do something. Each time I found the game pushing me down a specific path. While I love
  • Put off doing the main quest until you are a few levels up, then go into "hellish" area.

    The monsters have scaled up to match your level.

    Your allies have NOT!!!!

    Allies die quickly, you are stuck alone fighting the hordes.

    (of course if you decide to play the game casually, do a bit of thief, do a bit of combat, do some magic, you know... have fun..... then you will be screwed as you level up! Exploring the average dungeon soon becomes a massive chore of running and healing from every single creature.. UNFUN)

Slashdot Top Deals

The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.

Close