cornelius

that'll do just fine , dude, more than fine it will!

Jason_Taverner

cheers I'll buy it then thanks for the help hope its a good game looks quailty

Jason_Taverner

got it class game but overwhelming just so big

Denie Alconn

This game is absolutely gorgeouss!!!!!!
The graphics are absolutely stunning and ...... heck! The whole gaming experience is just first class!!!!!

cornelius

it rocks indeed! can't wait to get it on my notebook...

Brys

I'm pretty impressed with Oblivion - it roughly equalled my expectations, which were astoundingly high. In most areas, there's a lot of improvement from Morrowind - it now has excellent combat, magic and stealth systems. They said they wanted to create the ultimate warrior, mage and thief game. And they did. Each system alone could have a game based entirely around it. And the world is huge - especially when you turn off the invisible walls. Radiant AI is impressive (if perhaps not quite as complex as we were led to believe), but still revolutionary in terms of AI in games. And of course, the graphics are some of the best in any game, and add to that they're very scaleable, and the game and loading times are remarkably fast.

Those are the positives (well, all the ones that have improved from Morrowind), but there are a couple of flaws. Most of them though were ones I've known about for months now and fortunately didn't come as any surprise.
- the lack of mounted combat. I could go on about this for a long time, but frankly I don't see the point any more. I think the devs realised their mistake in not including it, but hopefully it'll be modded into the game soon.
- the factions - there are so few! Just 4 real factions, and they don't even have many quests for each one. There aren't many quests as a whole, either: only a couple per city, and they aren't so long or spectacular that they compensate for it. There aren't anything like as many as there were in Morrowind, and I think that's going to affect the length of the game without mods or expansion packs. This is probably the area which I think they could have done a lot more on.
- weapons/armours not included in the game - the lack of spears, crossbows and thrown weapons is a little disappointing, but expected. Not a terrible loss, but it would have been nice to have them in. I'm not sure about the combining of the two blade skills into one was such a good idea either, but it isn't anything major.
- the world. What? I hear you ask. It's not the size that gets at me, but the atmosphere. Technically, Oblivion is much bigger than Morrowind. But it doesn't feel it. Oblivion has a much more traditional and repetitive atmosphere - some bits are really interesting to explore. But there are lots of aspects which show one of the key themes of Oblivion - moving back to a more randomly generated world, a la Daggerfall. It means that the Imperial City is a really boring place - identical structures literally everywhere, and while there are lots of houses and NPCs in it, they just aren't individual. Which brings me on to my next point - there aren't enough NPCs, and the ones that are there aren't nearly in depth enough. There are only 1000 NPCs, and it feels like Cyrodiil is underpopulated. You're unlikely to find more than one person (usually a guard) on any road you travel on. There are no other adventurers, explorers, merchants, whatever except for bandits, which just doesn't make sense to me. They created this excellent AI system, but then seem to confine it entirely to within cities. People just don't move between cities unless it's scripted, which seems a waste to me. And partly for me it's just that the environment you explore in Oblivion (game, not place) is very traditional and predictable - it lacks the alien quality that helped to make Morrowind such an interesting atmosphere.

Despite all that, it's an excellent game, and I can only see it improving as time goes on. Another concern of mine is that they didn't reform the levelling system - but that's already been addressed by an excellent mod. I can only hope that someone now comes up with an equivalent to the Daily Vivec (hilarious pseudo-newspaper about Morrowind - unfortunately it has now disappeared).

Jason_Taverner

well I am really enjoying myself so far with the game having a few problems but thats just becasue I not a massive gamer i think. The main one is how hard it is in combat with more than one enemy. If its one on one its pretty straight forward block attack, repeat all about timing, when you up against more than one I just end up failing around and hoping for the best. Also have you been on the offical forums its full of turdy people, so I don't post there. There is no community at all check it out for entertainment value.

purple_kathryn

I;m a bit worried about playing it - I was playing Morrowind for like a month and that was with some serious (and I mean serious) cheating.

Jason_Taverner

I don't think you need to cheat but if u want to what stopping u its only u that plays

purple_kathryn

oh I need to cheat - I'd be playing morrowind for years otherwise. It's just that even with cheating it took like 2 months to play! and if oblivion is much bigger - eek!

CharlieMcW

is my computer fast enough with a radeon 9550 graphics card? i have a large enough free memory and other stuff like that, please help me as i dotn know wether to splash out on the game.

Mayhs

well you would be able to run it but not that well...imo i think it would be best to post the other specs of your computer and then maybe i could give you the best new graphics card to upgrade too?

unfortunately oblivion is extremely reliant on the GPU and CPU so overclocking helps A LOT

Esioul

I might consider buying this... once I've finally finished Morrowind! (Which I've been playing for about 2 years...)

Brys

I've been on the forums for a while, since October 2004 in fact, when Oblivion was announced. Unfortunately it seems that the developers pretty much ignored everything the fans said after they announced the game.

I visit the official forums less now because it seems to be full of extremes - if you criticise the game on any aspect, you're branded a "whiner" and ignored at best, insulted at worst, while a lot of those who criticise the game now give up trying to be civil and just return the insult with describing others as "fanboys" and portraying them all as idiots. There are some intelligent threads here and there, but I think that it was a lot more constructive when the Oblivion general forum was first created, when people tried to come up with ideas of how to make it a better game and to civily discuss certain aspects that we found out from interviews (it also helped that there weren't nearly as many active members).

Get Morrowind instead - IMO its a better game, but it's also cheaper and will run on the computer you already have. Oblivion has nicer graphics and a better combat and stealth system than Morrowind, but Morrowind's a more interesting atmosphere and should give you hundreds of hours of entertainment. Oblivion's still great, but more of an action type game than an RPG type, and it doesn't last as long.

I'd add to my list of concerns above one issue which now takes precedence:
Scaling - almost all creatures, NPCs and loot items are scaled. So by the time you're level 30, almost every bandit you meet will be fully equipped in glass armour or daedric armour. It kind of hurts the immersion for hundreds of people to be wearing this incredibly rare, expensive armour. It also is a disincentive to exploration, but I've heard that mods do address the scaling.

Technically Oblivion is bigger, but it doesn't feel it at all. Morrowind involved a lot more exploring - in Oblivion you can fast travel to any location you've visited before. There's also not much of a reason to explore - all the dungeons, ruins, forts etc are very similar, and there's very little worth seeing outside of the cities.

When you've finished Morrowind there's still the expansion packs and mods - which might add up to another 2 years total. Oblivion doesn't last as long as Morrowind, but from my experience, you can never "finish" Morrowind, and I've been playing it and the expansion packs and mods for about 4 years now, and there's still loads I haven't yet done on it (eg the entire House Redoran and House Telvanni questlines)

Esioul

I think I accidently killed some Redoran people, agh, so I might not be able to do those quests now.