Topic: Oblivion

[ahluka]

I finally got Oblivion yesterday - WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?!?!

It's surprisingly playable even at 800x600, medium sized textures and HDR. I've had to turn the draw / fade distances quite a way down, but it's worth it.

Amazing game except I had a false start; not really happy with my chosen race / class / birthsign thingy. Been thrown in prison twice for sword raping and theiving. Won my first Arena battle last night (who doesn't, right?). I can't believe I haven't played these games more before.

Anyways I'm off to start again. Think I'll try and squeeze my way into the theives guild.

[Govtcheez]

> Haven't seen any cliff racers yet which is an unexpected bonus.

And you won't see any at all   Don't worry, there are still plenty of annoying things in the forest to attack you while you're just trying to walk somewhere.  Fast Travel alleviates this a bit, but when you're walking somewhere you've never been before, it can be a pain.

I've got 3 characters, which I play depending on my mood - two are thief/assassin types, and my orc fighter, whom I've named "Phil".  He is murder with a warhammer, having dispatched the entire arena without much trouble.  The gameplay is way overbalanced towards fighters, IMO, but that's to be expected.

[ahluka]

I've got two characters right now. One theif / contract killer type - member of the theives guild and dark brotherhood. I've just started a new game with an Orc to see how different the game is with a bit more up close and personal type fighting.

How did you guys find the bows at first - aiming wise? It lands nowhere near the center of the crosshair and changes depending on whether you're sneaking or not. Nice little challenge in itself at first.

The physics are pretty neat too. I love it when you neck someone with an arrow as they're running towards you and their momentum throws them forwards as they get knocked off their feet. Gives you that really satisfying "you know he's dead!" feeling . Sometimes it goes a bit haywire though, like if you down a timber wolf with an arrow and it goes flying and sort of gets wrapped up in it's own feet - legs flailing.

I think I'll start another character in a while. Sort of an outcast hunter type which should be easy - get my bounty up in the 1000's so I can't go near a city. Should be quite different having to pretty much constantly grapple with the environment.

Oh and this might be something you want to know: Hit ~ to bring down the console and type in "tdt" to get an FPS reading. Scrolllock scrolls through various (detailed) debug info too.

[Ken Fitlike]

>>And you won't see any at all<<

Oh, joy!

>>I've got 3 characters<<

Haven't thought about more than one; perhaps if/when time permits....

>>whom I've named "Phil"<<

Any particular reason?

[Govtcheez]

>  It lands nowhere near the center of the crosshair and changes depending on whether you're sneaking or not. Nice little challenge in itself at first.

With the exception of gravity, I haven't noticed that at all?  It's certainly better than Morrowind, where you could nail someone dead center with an arrow and not hit them because you marksmanship was too low.

[ahluka]

It's only off a little bit:


         |
         |
   ----O----
         | X         <-- like there when standing
         |
          X          <-- crouching

It's no big deal and yeah it's miles better than Morrowind. I'll try and take a screen shot tomorrow.

[Govtcheez]

I guess I've never paid that much attention to it.  I've done a bit of archery, but that's not the focus of any of my guys.

[Bassy]

I got Oblivion a while ago and am just enjoying wandering around - done some quests in the capital city bit then explored the countryside.
I am running at pretty high res as on a 24" widescreen lcd monitor running it at 800x600 looks rather awful. My spec is a 3.4 gHz Northbridge cpu, 2 GB ram, Geforce 6600 gt (pci express) card and so far it only got rather slow whilst in an elven ruin.

Again my character is a magic user (as are all my characters)

[Steve]

My laptop surpasses the requirements since the upgrades i did : )

Downloading it now

[PJYelton]

Anybody want a mod I created that adds a bunch of new spells to the game?  Lots of cool ones like allowing you to fly or summon earthquakes and acid rain.  Oh, and a Jedi-esque force push spell. Nothing game breaking, its all balanced so that it costs a crap load to cast the powerful ones.  The one thing that always bugged me about Morrowind and seems even worse in Oblivion is the spell selection, god bless mods.

[ahluka]

Acid rain sounds hawt.

[PJYelton]

Demo videos found here:

Youtube playlist

Pictures here, first one is a spell that calls lightning from the sky to repeatedly hit the target, second and third are from a spell that creates mini clones of your target that attack for you.

Lightning
Clone1
Clone2

[PJYelton]

No, just gives the players more options.  The spells are balanced so only a powerful character can cast the powerful versions of the spells.

[Govtcheez]

This is kind of a silly suggestion, but make sure your drivers are up to date if you're getting performance issues; I updated mine and was able to increase my detail and resolution, and the game still performs better than it was before.

[Ken Fitlike]

It's not a silly suggestion. I downloaded new ati drivers a while ago but have been reluctant to install them in case it made things worse.

I'm having to restart because my character killed some villagers in what I believed at the time to be self-defence but resulted in an unpayable bounty on his head. I tried to move him to Buna(?) where there's a quest that requires a little jail-time but he got waylaid by a guardsman, a hunter and this nasty green, 4-nostriled beastie. After killing the guardsman and hunter he's stuck on top of a rock unreachable by the beastie but, despite firing 150+ arrows into it, whacking it with several swords until they were unusable and using every one of his tiny spells, the thing still lives.

Seems like a good time to try those new drivers.