Anyone else playing this?, ok so its a "lame" pointy hatted, pointy eared, orcs and elves RPG game, and yes I am probably too old to play this sort of thing.......
But, I was blown away with Morrowind, and Oblivion is Morrowind and then some, the sheer scope and grandure of it is amazing, heck I could play it for hours just wondering around the countryside and not even touch the quest's, its just got a relaxing, do whatever you want vibe that is great.
Plus the graphics are totally out of this world, don't think I have ever seen a game that looks this good.
Nope, completely single player, no online modes at all, which pleases me.
Yeah, the hardware req's are quite high, but my 2 year old, P4 3.4ghz, 1GB ram and ATI X800pro still cuts a great deal of mustard and can run it at full detail at a good lick.
Noticed I'm not posting as much - because of Oblivion.
I've never liked rpgs or d&d/orcs/elves other than Ultima Underworld II (1994 I think) and the Lord of the Rings books, so I'm shocked I'm so addicted to it...
So many ways of playing it - one of my house mates has it too, and we've only done about two things the same in the entire game so far - he's making a living being a deer hunter, whilst I'm becoming evil and twisted (and powerful), which is also odd, because I'm always a 'goodie' when I play games where there's a choice (say Black and White -although that pesky Scawen Roberts character would always have my monkey set upon him!).
Great game. Even if you don't like rpg's etc, I really suggest you buy it!! Worth every penny/cent/etc.
As Tristan says, its an RPG game even for those who don't like RPG's, its actually all things to all men, and I would'nt mind betting that there is no 2 people who have played the game the same way, you can do pretty much whatever you want, be it a mage, a thief, a fighter, a hunter, a salesman, an explorer, there is simply nothing that you can't really do.
It's a cliche, but its like having a whole living breathing other world, that you can dip in and out of at will.
For £30 its a steal, its not perfect, but its pretty bloody close.
I probably shouldnt admit it, but I have gotten over 10 hours on the game since last Thursday, its one of those "suck you in without even knowing it" type of games.
I end up thinking, right, I'll have 10mins before bed, I'll just visit this dungeon/castle/ruin/church then bed, 2 hours later I am still at it.
As for the specs, my daughter can run it, albeit at lower settings, on her 1.5Ghz Centrino laptop, it only has 512mb of ram and some kind of ATI mobility thing, but it runs fairly well, doesnt look anywhere near as tasty though.
Talking about RPGs I would recommend everyone to try the Fallout series (and maybe Arcanum as well). Especially the Fallouts are pure gold (but shouldn't be tried without a patch - they are terribly terribly buggy). They are not the typical hack'n'slash type of games - you can create a character with good negotiation skills and solve problems by talking your way through (yeah, right ).
Damn, now I must install Fallout 2 again and start playing
EDIT: Ps. it works on Pentium 90MHz, 16MB of ram and should work on win XP as well
Its a fun game, at least until you find out that they ruined it with the automatic "difficulty" thing. That is, all the enemies, merchants, npc's, guards, etc. scale up with you. When you're a level 1 character the world is filled with easy to kill wolves, closing the oblivion gates are very easy, etc. but when you level up suddently there are much harder enemies everywhere. You can forget about ever being a super strong character in it since for example the guards are set to always be 10(?) levels above you so no matter how hard you train yourself you can never beat them unless you exploit the AI's weaknesses (like snipe them from a high position where they cant reach you).
All the items and merchants also scale, so even if you explore the whole world you will never find anything special or good until you level up enough at which point you find better stuff everywhere. The scaling also limits your choices, since the game becomes extremely difficult if you choose a character that isn't into fighting (Like a thief) since the enemies scale up even if you put your experience points to non-combat skills. I'm a level 12 thief now with quite poor combat skills and every time I face some enemy my best choice to survive is to run. When I was at level 1 I could freely explore the world and easily clear any dungeons or the oblivion gate things...
The fast travel and the GPS system that displays exactly where you need to go for the current quest are a bit crappy features too imo... The UI is also directly from the xbox version so it isn't very good to use either (I made a little mod for it to make it a bit better)... But overall it is still a fun game with nice graphics, I just hope there will be a (good) mod made for it that will remove all the dumb design choices they made. And they better not ruin Fallout 3 the same way!
Personally I like the scaling system, although it's not perfect. If I play this game for 100 hours (say) and become god-like, then I still want a challenge. Of course SOME things should stay relatively normal - you SHOULD be able to kill wolves just by looking at them eventually, and guards should just start uber high (say level 50) and not increase. But the main bad guys, necromancers, mages, vampires, Oblivion guys etc SHOULD (imo) stay hard relative to your ingame skills.
Otherwise people would just do all the side quests and get more and more powerful then waltz through the main quests in 5 minutes = no fun at all.
Apparently there are mods and scripts that improve balancing, vampirism, wearing robes over cloaks, but all of the are buggy or incomplete at the moment (it's only been out a few days), and most are poorly documented, so I won't install them.
I don't want to lose the challenge (become the head of the DB or Thieves Guild was tough, but brilliant), but I'm open to mods that actively improve the game. Can't wait to see what the community comes up with, and I'd except a patch in the not too distant future too - the TES forums are just as whiney about patches as the LFS forum
Edit: Going to try your UI mod Keg, as I trust your work (from your LFS stuff) to be of a high quality Can't see on the screenshots what the changes are in some bits though
Edit2: Tried it, loved it. Shame about the map having a 'bar' in front of it, but it's 100% useable and much better than before... Any more 'mods' planned?
I can see WHY they did the scaling thing, in morrowind it was quite easy to become god-like in a short amount of time and waltz through the whole game, but its not been done in a very good way, and hopefully they will patch it to make it better in the future.
A Oblivion forum?, blimey, makes this place look positively sane.
On the Jagged Alliance 2-offtopic-bit:
JA2 is one of the best games ever. The campaign is completely unlinear (after 10 or 12 campaigns, ~2 years you might have done most approaches), the characters have a real character, it is challanging yet not over-difficult, it's strategy-elements are plain great and a good strategy actually works out. I recommend it to anyone who can take a look further than fps-games, because it does take brain-work to win a 4 vs 12 fight.
I also want to mention, that there are cheap strategies in the game. But they aren't unlogical. You're not using AI-bugs or so.
If anyone wants to broaden the topic, we should create a new thread for this game.
Been a vampire (through choice, not infection), been cured, and then got infected dammit. And I can't get rid of it by going to church because I've done too many crimes....
So now I've got to find a cure again, which means finding more of those damn stones... Or I could download the vampire mod which makes you more powerful if you drink blood rather than less, which seems better to me. Decisions, decisions...
im loving this game and im just doing missions for the fighters guild and the theifs guild, although i cant find that damn statue thing for the theif quest :@
i have this gme for the 360, are the graphics on PC better?
Definately give it a go Hyper, the graphics are horrible by today's standards of course, but you sort of forget about it after a while
If you like turn-based strategy, it's a must.Someone mentioned Silent Storm, that is highly recommended as well.Stay far away from Hammer & Sickle though.
Closing oblivion gates at lvl 1.. That's just silly if you ask me.I did read that it was possible to start off the main quest that early, but that's a mistake imo.
Anyway, I agree with some of your points.The lvl scaling is not the perfect solution to a common problem in rpg's, but I still think it works fairly well.What bothered me much much more was the silly amount of high end loot avialable once you reach lvl 15 or thereabouts.Even the lowest rabble, common scum like a Bandit, is suddenly wearing Ebony and wielding glass weapons.At that point there is no such thing as hard earned money, and the accumulation of wealth becomes trivial.
I did read that the game can sudddenly become quite difficult if you have mainly focused on your non-combat skills like you seem to have done.Couldn't you simply train your combat skills at one of the trainers to get it up to a sufficient level, supposing you have enough money? And seeing as you're a thief I'd imagine money was not a concern of yours.Ok, hardly an ideal solution, but I'm afraid thats the best I can come up with
I agree that the map and compass markers 'hold your hand' too much.However, after much scouring of the extremely messy official forums, I did find some useful things.I think tristan is correct though that many of them are buggy, but give it a month or so, and I imagine we'll start seeing some really good scaling mods.There is a UI mod out that solves the markers problem, along with some other improvements to the UI.I'm also using the rarity patch, which seems to work well so far (only just installed it yesterday).The scaling mods I've linked, I haven't tried myself since it doesn't bother me that much.
Seems to be loads other useful ones like arrowvelocity mod and such, but I havent bothered to look for them.
Just to round off my post, I'd say that despite it's flaws, I consider Oblivion to be one of the best rpg's ever made.I'm having a great time playing it, and I'm consistently blown away by the sheer size of the world.The quests are almost all entertaining and satisfying to complete..I could go on.Heh..Testify!!
*cough*..Anyway, with the huge mod community supporting it, it probably wont be long before any Oblivion player, regardless of taste, can play the game just as he prefers it to be played.Have fun in Tamriel
).
That's just silly if you ask me.I did read that it was possible to start off the main quest that early, but that's a mistake imo.