Ustwo

I stated it already, modders can NOT add new objects etc into the game like they could in morrowind. They didn't give the modders the 3d exporter tool like they did in morrowind. If you look all the mods are tweeks of whats already in the game, but modders can no build a new zone or city or house or face like they could in Morrowind.

IF Bethesda releases that then ok, Oblivion will have some great mods. If they don't then Oblivion will only have a few game play tweek mods like those that are out there. Now there is one major graphics improvement mod out there for Oblivion, but thats because the textures were allready in the game, but Bethesda disabled them for some reason. Modders turned them back on.

Now if you were Bethesda, would you give modders the ability to COMPETE with you for free, or would you keep releasing stuff $2 at a time and not worry about them?

Finally the new 'mod' from Bethesda is already IN your game, but the door is locked and you can't get in no matter what. Yes they did it before the game was released and you will get to pay to access the orrery after you pay your money.

(oh and UberTuber this WILL make your character more powerful)

This model is god awful really, as it will encourage developers to say 'hey thats a great feature, lets put it out after release and make them pay for it!' instead of just putting it in the game.

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xepherys

They may not be able to make new models, but they can reskin existing models... that's a start at least.

Coppertop

Not many developers release the SDK immediately upon the game shipping. Give it time, it will happen.

CyCo PL

This might be old news, but here's a really nice mod for Oblivion that makes it a little more optimized for PC... larger world map, smaller icons for spells and items so you can see more at one time. Lots of other little useful things that make the game seem like less of a console port and more of an actual PC game.

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.co...s.Detail&id=25

hulk

Contrary to what you might think, most developers aren't out there to screw you over. They have a reputation ya know. Anyway, that model has been out there since the advent of expansion packs, it's nothing new.

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robbdn

Expansion packs are great. And of course the developers don't want to screw us over, they're too busy getting screwed over themselves by publishers. Stunts like this are about creating direct revenue for the developers, so they can actually get some money for the game they worked so hard on. Unfortunately, they have to sell us crap, charge monthly fees, or sell the game over the internet for them to get the chunk of change they want. I guess, if anything, we should all start boycotting publishers and only by direct from developers, like Steam, then we won't get screwed by stupid little micropayment bull crap that sucks my dirty bunghole but also sticks it to the publisher. Dammit.

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Zeraph

You really missed the point. Tell me what the advantage of a monopoly is? Why wouldn't you want to give players the ability to create new things?

Eej

Because then they could make their own horse armour for free.

Zeraph

Not sure if you meant that sarcastically, but I meant advantageous to the players, and why as a player would you support a monopoly that only hurts you?

Eej

From a Developer's standpoint, letting players create their own content means that you will get less money from selling official content, since players can replicate it given enough time.

From a player's standpoint, it's bad news because, although devs may have more incentive to make more content for the game, it allows them to become complacent. Just think about the MMO model: release a game way before it's polished and anywhere near finished, fix bugs and add "new" features that should have been in the game at release and use the monthly subscription to justify it, and then make an expansion pack with features that were promised in release and charge full price on top of subscription!

Instead, they'll just charge you small amounts of money for features that definately should have already been in the game, but they were too lazy/greedy to put it into the original release.

What ever happened to the good old days of Total Annihilation's Weekly Unit?

hulk

Firstly, even releasing the limited tools they have now, Bethesda have gone above and beyond most other developers. Secondly, multi-million dollar budgets and smaller profit margins are what happened to the good old days of free everything. The MMO 'model' you outlined has very little to do with MMOs. Doom (the very first one) was redone as Ultimate Doom, which had a couple of new scenarios. Final Doom followed some time after. Each had an extra price tag for basically what fans had done. Wolfenstein had a similar model.

Patching bugs is an iffy situation. I'd rather put up with a jerky Oblivion in March then having to wait until June for some minor, stubborn bug fixes. On the inverse, I'd rather wait for GR:AW to have decent netcode. It depends on the issues involved. Monthly subscriptions to MMOs originally came round due to the massive costs involved in hosting them. Consumers accepted these and Blizzard et al are just continuing the trend.

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Jinn

On the topic of the game itself, is anyone finding it ridiculously hard? Perhaps I missed something, but I thought following the main game "path" would be the easiest way to progress through the game. I was told to destroy the Oblivion gate blocking the main gate, and at level two I'm running around madly shooting arrows and fireballs just to avoid getting hit at all. If I do, those damned scamps will kill me in two or three hits. Seems a bit rough for a level 2, anyway..

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Carno

Yeah, I'm sucking at this game too. It is pretty hard.

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Gabbyness

From what everyone's said, you have to scale back the difficulty. I feel like a total siss doing that, though.

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Destrox

I've yet to do that, and I am using a theif-like character.

Just make sure you upgrade some of your fighting based stats per level and you'll be fine.

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Carno

Man I got that bitch rocked back to the most easy setting ever made.

I suck at blocking though so i always get beat down.

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Destrox

Woo Thats Awesome.

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Zeraph

I've been busy with finals and all that so I still havn't gotten this game and I just realized that I forgot to ask about the combat systrem in Oblivion...That was the huge let down for me in Morrowind, the combat was horrible. The animations...one would swing a staff or two handed sword as fast as a dagger, and because one way on the weapon was most damaging I ended up using that each swing so that it got really silly constantly poking or whatever some mob.

So if someone could give me as detailed description of the combat system as possible I would be highly grateful, especially contrasted with Morrowind since I already have experience with it. Can you target enemies and see their health? Do the swing animations look better? Do the get hit animations look more natural? Etc.

Thanks.

hulk

In essence, if your swing hits a baddie you hit them. If you hold the block when they hit you, you block. The effectiveness is measured by your stats, naturally. Each class of weapon (blade or blunt) swings more or less the same way, ie, a longsword the same as a shortsword but not the same as a two-handed axe. Some neat little combos tie into the system well. The best discriptor for it is solid. It feels very, very solid. Where it balances two handed swords vs daggers is in fatigue. Once your fatigue hits rock bottom your swings don't do very much at all. One can swing a dagger all they like and it'll take much, much longer to tire them out than with a claymore. The health of your foe is shown as a bar over your crosshair, so it's always there in front of you. Hit animations are pretty good, especially at higher levels where a swing from your beastly magic warhammer sends a bear flying into the sky. There's no lock-on targeting but it's rare to lose your bearing thanks to the first person perspective. There are times that you're overwhelmed but that's to be expected - anyone trying to fight six skeletons while being bombarded by fireballs is going to be in trouble

Detailed enough?

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Zeraph

"solid" that sounds promising, good. But what about the way you swing the same type of weapon? In other words is it the same animation each time you hit/swing for a 1 handed longsword? The reptitive nature of combat was one of the worse parts for me.

Oh, and what do you mean by block? Do you raise your weapon to block, or are you talking about shields? If your weapon actually raises and blocks their weapon in a fluid animation that would be so cool... versus (for those who have played) gothic 2 where you block with your weapon, but the animation is not fluid, meaning suddenly your sword is just diagonal/in the same blocking position as everytime you hit the block key, it just sort of jumps there, took the cool factor out of it for me.

Oh and if anyone is wondering why I care so much its that I'm a "poor" college student and limit myself to only a few games a year, so I like to be sure (especially since gaming is a very big hobbie of mine, even though I only get 3-4 games a year, I play those games a lot.)

Oh and are their ragdoll physics? Which basically means if a mob dies over a log, it will conform over it like in real life, bodies roll down hills, etc. rather than just one death animation its like having a unique death animation for each environmental detail.

Thanks again for answering my questions

robbdn

Well, pretty much any review will tell you this... but anyway... yes, claymores swing slower than longswords, which are slower than short swords, which are slower than daggers, same sort of thing with blunt. Hand-to-hand is actually cool. Block is either a parry or a shield... shield is more effective, obviously. The animations are fairly fluid, but by no means perfect, it is convincing (usually) when you block, if you fail your block you are staggered back and cannot raise your weapon for a second or two, sometimes you even fall over. of course, you can do the same to the enemy. There are ragdoll physics.

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Zeraph

Not true, I checked IGN and they only said, paraphrasing, "like morrowind oblivion has its share of problems with the combat system." They also hinted at ragdoll but didn't confirm. IGN used to be pretty good quality reviews, perhaps it has droped in recent times.

Destrox

Yeah, swing forms dont change much , but there are different types of swings you can do .

Auto blocking is gone, if you plan on blocking somthing you gotta do it your self now.

Yeah, ragdoll exists, and can be quite funny at times. I've had people die leaning against a wall, well that is untill i use the grab key and pull them by their feel off it.

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robbdn

Following up on that last thought... ragdoll is hilarious once you start getting to the extremely high levels... my level 35 thief with 100+ strength (with buffs) sends any NPC sailing 30 feet through the air on a 6x damage sneak attack... it's great... I never used to play my thief as a murderer, but it's so funny that sometimes I just can't resist sneak attacking a random passerby just to watch them sail into other people and objects.

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hulk

It's not one swing over and over, don't get the wrong idea. It does flow pretty well. Think Legend of Zelda kind of variation.

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Moskie

I'm starting to take note of the ragdoll effects too, it's pretty hilarious. Skeletons have a nice way of exploding into a jumbled mess as well.

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hulk

It's even more fun once you start dragging corpses around and tossing them off cliffs. Wheee!

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kutulu

The ragdoll physics are great. You throw a fireball at a dinner table full of stuff and it goes flying all over the place. When people die they can go in one direction while their weapon goes the other way.

Fighting is much better than MW. There are more animations for fighting as well. You have attacks that disarm enemies. Once you do that, grab their weapon and they are fucked and will often run away.

The radiant AI is cool also. I was running around and found an ogre. Normally I can go toe to toe with one of them but at the time I wanted to practice marksman on him. They are strong, heal themselves, and take lots of damage so in the process of using a bow on them you can gain a good amount of skill. Well as I backpedaled and sprayed him with arrows, a second comes running along. Then I see this guy following us attacking the second ogre. Once we finish off the Ogres, he starts beating on me! It turns out he was a bandit but hates Ogres more than me.

From what I've heard there is a lot of fun to be had with command humanoid and frenzy. You can get massive brawls started that way.

I do have an odd problem, I'm at lvl 21 now and my acrobatics haven't gained any points since about level 10. It doesn't matter how much I jump around or how high I fall from, I don't gain anything. It's a major skill so I kind of need it to raise. I resorted to adding 10 points via the console commands giving me 50 points in acrobatics. Since there are like 50 levels or so, I'll just add 2 points with each level up. I figure that will distribute it evenly.

kutulu

One other thing, with alchemy equipment, it is supposed to be leveled. ie, a journeyman can't use expert or master equipment. Well, I was exploring and found a master mortar and pestle and a master calcinator. Right afterwards I was able to buy the rest of the equipment at the expert level. My character had a 68 skill level and was still able to use it.

I make some bad ass potions now. I made two that doe the following:
damage health 7pts for 34 sec
damage magika 8 pts for about 30 sec
silence 20 sec
fire (or frost, depending on 4th ingredient) 7 pts for 30 seconds.

The potion with fire damage should waste vamps. I have a bow of flames (15 pts fire damage) and some blazing arrows (40 pts fire damage). One attack has a base of over 500 damage before you add in a vamps weakness to fire. How would a sneak attack work with that? Is only the physical damage tripled?

Eej

Just to further elaborate on these questions.

If you keep tapping your attack key, you'll swing your sword back and forth (you don't get the "hammering" effect of single animation attacks). You also have access to various power attacks, normal ones do extra damage, sideways ones have a chance to disarm, backwards ones can knockback and forward ones can paralyze. Mind you, your opponents can do this as well.

Hand to Hand has been improved because now it also does damage to your opponent's fatigue, so if you can hit your opponent with a few arrows with Drain Fatigue on them, you can run up to them and start hammering away with your fists. When they hit zero fatigue, they fall down and are even more susceptible to blows.

You hit the block key and it raises your shield or your two handed weapon to block. Obviously less damage is taken if you use a shield instead of a weapon to block. If you are hit particularly hard, you might be knocked back and take a second to recover, giving your opponent a few seconds to get a free hit in. This also works against your opponents as well.

It seems the main problem is that for the first few times you play through the game, sometimes fights become obscenely hard, then the game because ridiculously easy because every bandit on the road is toting full Daedric or Glass. There are many mods out there that attempt to fix these shortcomings, by limiting the min and max level of your enemies (most monsters scale with you in the game, making it feel like you haven't gotten more powerful at all) as well as increasing the rarity of the best types of gear in the game, altering the leveling system slightly and improving monster AI.

Zeraph

Thanks a ton for describing the combat system in detail guys.

Sigh, I just found out, this is DVD ROM only? I have a computer with a dvdrom but its not the one I play games on...I may have to do some switching. Why in the world would they not release it on a normal CDs as well? Is this the first game to only release it on DVDs?

EDIT: Well this sucks, my dvd rom isn't working, its a samsung SD 608. I googled it and other people have the same problem. I tried changing the IDE controller from DMA to PIO cause someone said that helped them but nothin here. Guess I'll have to wait a year or two before I get to play...though by then I'm sure I'll have forgotten about it heh.

kutulu

hell just get a new dvd player. they are what, $20 now? Also, you can always get a no-dvd patch.

Zeraph

No DvD patch? What's that?

As far as buying one I think theyre more like $40 and I already said I am on an extremely limited budget and will likely upgrade my computer next year so I don't want to put money in it that will be a waste next year. Especially since I'd likely need more RAM too...

robbdn

Umm... buy the game and then emulate an image with Daemon-Tools... there are legitimate uses for these things, you know.

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hulk

It's 1 dvd vs like 10 CDs... The market has moved on, man

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Coppertop

I bought my HP DVD/CDR for about $20 on newegg. Really, they're that cheap now. There's no reason not to have one on every system. I believe Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory also came out on DVD only. As hulk stated, the market has moved on.

portwineboy

Dude download it from Fileplanet on www.direct2drive.com

No DVD, no worries. Be advised my d/l took overnight and I have a fast connection...their server was the suck.

Edit to say I've used D2D for quite a few games lately and have been mostly pleased with the service. The slow Oblivion d/l was unusual.

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kutulu

That's a nice solution. I had no idea there was a way to d/l full games legally

portwineboy

I remember getting some RPG onces that came on 24 floppies. Then they issues a patch via snail mail that came on 8 floppies. I went to the next KGP show and bought a CD ROM drive.

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Redjake

I'm trying to find a reason to keep playing this game. I REALLY don't like the level-scaling system. I want the old Morrowind system back. What's the point of doing ANYTHING in the game, really? Everything will be just as powerful as you are (to a certain extent). The beauty of Morrowind was becoming a demigod, and in Oblivion, it seems you can't do it. So far anyway.

Also, I was searching online for where I can find the marksman trainer, and I found a whole boatload of cheats that are just literally one-line console commands to give you as much gold as you want and as many levels, skills, attributes, items, whatever. All the spells in one command. Stuff like that. This, combined with no personal satisfaction of being a GOD among insects (I can't even go back to the first dungeon and farm it), makes me want to stop playing. You have a level 30 mage? So what, I can make it in 5 seconds. Level 30 isn't anything anyway, considering the enemies are still hard to kill. Anyone have any suggestions?

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