A few thoughts on Oblivion...

[lowlifecat]

Not sure if you have read about it but the vast majority of enemies scale with the player, including their loot and armour (very strange system and wrong in an rpg). Wait until you come across bandits wearing 30000 worth of armour.

Therefore, if any of your skills are lagging behind you are just going to find the game more and more difficult as you level up.

regarding this being wrong in an RPG. that's absolutly wrong. i guess you've never played a tabletop game with a real DM. any RPG worth it's salt will scale difficulty with your character advancement.

In Oblivion; that works quite well, except it doesn't take into account your equipement and spells, and thus you HAVE TO upgrade as you go up in levels to survive.

BTW: i've finished the main quest with my first char(battlemage) at lvl 6, also became arc-mage of the mages guild and arena grand champion.

started a nightblade char now and have her up to lvl 6 too. haven't gotten far at all with main quest with her, want to see more of the world slowly this time.

i am disappointed by the severe reduction of factions in the game. there are only 5 groups you can join as apposed to 3x that number in morrowind.

despite all the bugs it's still an amazing game. patches should be coming soon.

[Helevitia]

I can't believe how buggy this game is. The oblivion forums are out of control with crashes, myself included. The game crashes once or twice an hour for me. If I turn the grpahics all the way up, it crashes every 5-10 minutes

The game still looks good at lower settings though, so I am not too upset.

[GNEP]

Hmmm maybe I'll wait until the next patch then...

[Paddy]

Works fine on my hardware. I had one crash when saving the game which i then had to delete. But I am a bit trigger happy with quicksave anyway

[Helevitia]

I've played this game for 37 hours now. Life ends until you finish this game. It is evil. It's also highly entertaining and fun!

Thank god for fast travel. I can't even imagine how long it would take without that feature. Somehow I worked out most of my crashes, though I am not really sure what did it *shrugs*. Now it crashes every 4th hour or so. There are so many side quests to this game it is dizzying. My Dark Elf character is getting stronger (Level 12 I think). I've decided to put the game down for a while though because it is overtaking my life. I'll probably give it up for a week or two.

[schmosef]

penny-arcade has been talking about Oblivion quite a bit.

who here has pimped their horse?

have you guys tried the mod that penny-arcade was talking about? it's supposed to make the game less like a console experience and more like a pc experience.

[lowlifecat]

links schmo?

[schmosef]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/05

You'll have to read through the news archive for posts in that last few weeks to find the info on the mod. They say highly recommend it though.

[dbdg]

regarding this being wrong in an RPG. that's absolutly wrong. i guess you've never played a tabletop game with a real DM. any RPG worth it's salt will scale difficulty with your character advancement.

lowlifecat, I play pen n' paper rpgs every week (D&D and other systems), my point is as you get harder so do the majority of the badies, including simple bandits, if you don't have an issue with all bandits suddenly wearing very rare armour, then that is fine but I do.

As for scaling, yes of course in a pen n' paper rpg you are always facing more difficult badies, the point is however that the whole world does not scale with you, it does in Obvlion.

I like Oblivion but they took scaling loot and levels too far, for me to the point of why the hell should I even level.

This has been brought up many times on the Oblivion forums but just to be clear here, I do not have a problem with the difficulty of the game (as is beleived by most that like the scaling) I have a major problem with the lack of immersion it cause.

The fact that you can become Grand Master of the Arena at less then level 10 is a joke, there are rumours it has been done at level 2.

[RichL]

lowlifecat, I play pen n' paper rpgs every week (D&D and other systems), my point is as you get harder so do the majority of the badies, including simple bandits, if you don't have an issue with all bandits suddenly wearing very rare armour, then that is fine but I do.

That's not strictly speaking correct either.
As your tabletop RPG character gets tougher, the GM should throw you on tougher quests against tougher foes, not make the existing foes tougher. A rat should not become a super-rat in plate armour just because your character is level 10 not level 1.

Because of their open ended design, CRPGs like Morrowing and Oblivion generally dont have the luxury of deciding what quests you go on at what level and have to scale the enemies up in toughness according to your level to compensate, and you start getting mugged by bandits wearing enough enchanted mithril to buy them a very nice castle with sea views and en-suite torture chambers. (Kinda makes you wonder why they bother hanging around lonely roads at night ambushing travellers...)

[RichL]

I got a *cough*trial*cough* copy of Oblivion last week and I'm about ready to delete it and count myself up £30.

I'm finding with my system (AMD Barton at 210x9, 512mb 5-2-2-2 ram and 9800Pro AIW) I can make 30fps in the outside in widescreen with AA and most of the eyecandy off. Combat usually becomes a Powerpoint Slideshow with the annoying result that twice now, I've had 'friendly stab' incidents in combat. Of course, that makes you a criminal and the other day a guard caught up with me and demanded 1170gp in fines. I had to go back about four hours in gameplay time before I could get to a part where I hadnt accidently hit a freindly. Fifteen minutes later the game crashed to BSOD. Again.

I could possibly get around the FPS issue by lowering my screen resolution and turning off the last of the eye candy, but I cant see the point in playing with stick figures at 320x200.
With Morrowind I could run 1600x1050 with just about everything maxed and 99% of the time didnt have a problem. It crashed a lot less too.

[lowlifecat]

That's not strictly speaking correct either.
As your tabletop RPG character gets tougher, the GM should throw you on tougher quests against tougher foes, not make the existing foes tougher. A rat should not become a super-rat in plate armour just because your character is level 10 not level 1.

Because of their open ended design, CRPGs like Morrowing and Oblivion generally dont have the luxury of deciding what quests you go on at what level and have to scale the enemies up in toughness according to your level to compensate, and you start getting mugged by bandits wearing enough enchanted mithril to buy them a very nice castle with sea views and en-suite torture chambers. (Kinda makes you wonder why they bother hanging around lonely roads at night ambushing travellers...)

That isn't exactly correct either because it really depends on the game style of your DM/GM. It's very possible to 'upgrade' rats up to the point where they can challenge a 10th level char; example: Fiendish Direrats (with extra HD) would be good to through in a demon princes' dungeon... or you could play regular rats with upgraded inteligence and swarm tactics and wipe out the party before they can even get to the demon princes' minions.

It depends on how the scenario is presented, a 10th level armor plated rat isn't far fetched.

To give a better example; say you are playing D&D at level 18. your GM throws you against an evil druid (L20) with a rat as an animal companion. That rat will be a lvl 20 creature with lotsa upgrades from his Druid master.

Most RPGs these days (even the open ended ones) scale difficulty according to whatever region you are in. The farther you are from the start of the game the more new difficult monsters and challenges you have to face.

This aproach might be feasible with WOW and Guild Wars, but wouldn't work with Oblivion or Morrowind.

RichL> Morrowind will run fine on anything faster than a ATI 8500 (way back!). I think your game of obliv is choking on your GPU.

[leech]

I actually upgraded to 3gb of ram for Oblivion, and it does help quite a bit, as well as helping in a few other games. Oblivion is a system hog, that's for sure, but I do know that it is VERY tweakable. For example, if you have a Geforce 6+ series, you can enable SM 3.0 in it. I think it also even supports multi-threaded processors. Of course it's always a question of how much eye candy can your system handle before it starts to crawl.

Before getting more RAM I would play it for a few hours and then it would start to run like ass. I'd have that same problem of a slideshow during fights, and I have an AMD64 3200+ with an nvidia 6800GT and 1GB of ram (before).

Damn fun game, in fact I think I'll play a little more then go to sleep

Leech

[RichL]

That isn't exactly correct either because it really depends on the game style of your DM/GM. It's very possible to 'upgrade' rats up to the point where they can challenge a 10th level char; example: Fiendish Direrats (with extra HD) would be good to through in a demon princes' dungeon... or you could play regular rats with upgraded inteligence and swarm tactics and wipe out the party before they can even get to the demon princes' minions.

In the case of the former, if your GM does that then he needs to have the entire range of Gurps 3e compatible sourcebooks dropped on his head from a significant height.
In the case of the latter, I've heard tales of a GM who ran a dungeon with standard kobolds using ambush tactics, sniping and traps. His players gave kobolds a wide berth after that.

RichL> Morrowind will run fine on anything faster than a ATI 8500 (way back!). I think your game of obliv is choking on your GPU.

Not any more it wont. I tried to drop the resolution and eyecandy and got down to 640x480. The graphics looked like something out of Wolfenstien 3d and it ran for all of 2 seconds before crashing the whole PC. A couple of dozen fiddles and crashes later and the game was uninstalled and the dvd destroyed so I wouldnt get tempted to try installing it again. By the time I next upgrade my graphics card, it'll probably be in the bargain bucket.

[Helevitia]

Wow, destroying the DVD? You should have atleast sold it on ebay or given it to a feloow MURCer.

For someone that never liked RPG's before, I really like this game. It is truly a fun game even if you don't agree with the leveling issue. There are tons of mods out there that help correct that as Schmosef has pointed out. I can't imagine how anyone could not atleast enjoy this game to some degree. It really caters to every crowd in my opinion. I would have hated this game if it wasn't for fast traveling. That would have literally stopped me from playing. The in depth story and complex NPC setup is fantastic. Sure, the game isn't perfect, but it is a refreshing change of pace from the norm of FPS and racing games that seem to come out every month. I don't efven play this game in FPS mode except when I use my staff or want to pinpoint an item. I plan to go through all of the mods soon and install the ones that look appealing, then start a new character

I also upgrade to 2GB of RAM and it made a good amount of difference. Oh and RichL, I don't think this game will be in the bargain bin anytime soon. I think it will stay at ~$50 for atleast a year and maybe drop to ~$40 after that. It has way too much replay value because of the modding to lose interest anytime soon.