Comments on: To Oblivion, And Beyond!

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sat, 06 May 2006 00:05:23 +0000

Hi there, after reading all your posts im somewhat surprised to see how you have been looking at the game!
BTW Doug – u can create ur own windows install CD with the RAID or SATA controller drivers on it and even automate the install proceedure completely search web for a guide i swear by this as i have no floppy.
I bought a dual core 4200+ for oblivion and have a 7800GTX extreme 256MB and just 1GB of performance ram. Oblivion as I’d found has an engine written for multithreading (aimed at xbox 360) so it does take advantage of DUAL CORE YES!
and yeah i did upgrade basically for this game alone to dual core coz on max detail settings casting spells has awesome lighting HDR effects which were a bit too much for my old 64bit3200+
u were bitching about how the monsters lvl up as u do (i think it ads challenge) however they have level caps.. for example 30-40 or something so if u hit 50 u can own them all.. BUT i found a way to win through this! simply never sleep to level up, when u start pick conjure magic and choose breton or high elf (so u got enough magicka) pick the spell which costs the least in conjure magic (something like sum. skeleton) cast till ur dry then press T to wait an hour then u have full MP cast away again it wont be long till u have incredibly high skill level (its out of 100 max) go steal stuff or whatever for cash and buy best summon spell u can find. u can get a summon lvl 27 daedra thingo from mages guild or so.. then sleep once or twice to get + stats in int and such. then u can be lvl 2 or 3 or so and have all monsters that lvl while summoning lvl 27 thing to assrape any enemy.
YES its an incredible game, i’ve completed every guild quest for highest rank and played it 30 hours at a time!! anyone who says otherwise hasnt played it or doesnt know how to as far as im concerned. Another thing get natural environments mod to improve the games graphics and arena loot mod so you can claim whats rightfully yours when u win a battle in the arena.

By: Doug

Doug — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 01:41:55 +0000

The other difference is they didn’t try to make all the women beautiful and give you the ability to undress your female elf warrior maiden like previous elder scrolls games. But being an archer isn’t so impossible anymore.

Getting your butt kicked by a couple of rats or goblins when you are high level is annoying. If the world keeps up with you there is less of a feeling of personal growth. I’ve always counted on being able to make up for my lack of FPS skills with my enjoyment of carefully handling the advance of my character and getting him higher level than was intended for a section.

By: daw

daw — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 10:08:40 +0000

It is, actually, a tarted up morrowind, but there is a much higher density of content and hand holding so it plays a lot more like, well, a game. Little things like voiced npcs and map pointers to tell you where to go next on a quest make all the difference. There’s lots of stuff to do, most of it fun, and the whole thing comes across as less empty and less like you have to feel bad for not being able to entertain yourself, more like, wow I can’t believe that hunting deer is so fun that I got sucked into it when I should be saving the world. One review said — and this is true — that the big difference from morrowind is that the various subsystems (combat, stealth, magic, etc.) are well enough implemented that they would actually be fun in another more specialized game.

The main concern (I’m not far enough along to judge) is global encounter and treasure scaling — apparently as you grow strong, so does every two-bit rat and bandit, every dungeon, every treasure chest. Which seems like it might get kind of frustrating.

By: Lorien

Lorien — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 05:59:25 +0000

I don’t consider myself a fan of the “fantasy” genre, but Oblivion has proven that a well executed game can appeal to a larger crowd.

To the detriment of my work, I’ve clocked 40+ hours playing this rediculous game in the past three days.

By: peterb

peterb — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 02:51:56 +0000

That’s actually what I spent most of my time doing in Morrowind.

You thought I was speaking metaphorically when I said “watching grass grow?”

By: Doug

Doug — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 02:45:37 +0000

I mean how can you not love running around for hours picking various plants?

By: Eric Tilton

Eric Tilton — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 19:44:15 +0000

Man, how many glowing posts do I have to write until I can finally trick you into buying this game?

JESUS.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 17:53:23 +0000

Well no problems with the new system. I am sure you are right though, I was pretty confident the problem was with the video card and also the system ram. It screams on high quality graphics settings now. I was testing it out and before I new it, bam! 4am.

I’ve found drivers for most of my hardware, and the windows 64 bit edition is faster than 32 bit edition on my machine. Still slower than Ubuntu Linux. But I can’t run code composer studio or oblivion on linux.

So far the game rocks!

By: Greg Williams

Greg Williams — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 16:49:13 +0000

Doug, I’m sure your 5200 was holding you back, but I thought that I read that XP 64-bit edition was generally slower because of poor 64 bit driver support?

Btw, Oblivion supposedly makes full use of dual core cpu’s, it was after all designed to run on the 360 which is a multi core architecture.

By: Adam Rixey

Adam Rixey — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 23:29:18 +0000

I finally picked up a 360 and Oblivion last weekend. While I haven’t had as much time to play as I’d like, I’m enjoying the heck out of both the game and the system. It may well meet my desire to play something like World of Warcraft without having to deal with other people running around whacking the rats I want to whack.