The Gamer's Quarter

[dhex]

quotidian?
joan didion?

not quite.

it's quite excellent, at least interface-wise. i shall post screenshots when i find something worth shooting. can't run antialiasing too well, though.
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[Shapermc]

Did you get that email I sent you?
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dhex]

yes. it's why i went out and bought it on tuesday.
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[dessgeega]

bolivian?
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[Scratchmonkey]

You could try and work in Mike Tyson's quote about "fading into Bolivian" for a larf.

Screenshots: si!

Also: Thank you Gamer's Quarter Forums, for thus far being largely free of knuckleheads.

[dhex]

i'll get better ones in a bit. fraps is my new friend.





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[Scratchmonkey]

I will now allow myself to regret getting a computer that I fully well knew would not be able to handle Oblivion.

And you know what does it? The trees! Running over scores of hills with actual trees and bushes?

Keep the 'shots and impressions coming, if you would.

[dhex]

very early impression #1: combat feels right. the bounce, the blocking, the rhythm. it's not like hitting a tree trunk anymore. skeletons are great, though how do they snarl? the crabs, man.

they move like crabs.

very early impression #2: yeah, it more or less looks ridiculously good. character models are somewhat creepy in a good way. the customization at the beginning was a bit daunting, even. somehow i ended up with blue-black skin. and no baldness! what the fiddle faddle is that about?

very early impression #3: the voice acting will get on my nerves soon, i think. too much spoils my soup.

very early impression #4: i regret not having taken this week off from work.
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[Szczepaniak]

[Lackey]

I have had a few moments of actual wonder in this game. Stumbling upon some of the strange things you find in dungeons was actually awe inspiring.

Speaking of the dungeons, the traps are great! I can't go down a hallway without worrying about being peppered with darts, dashed against spikes on the ceiling or floor, crushed with boulders, smashed with spiked weights or giant swinging blades...etc. Plus every dungeon I've been in has seemed like a completely unique place. It gets the adventurer spirit in me excited.

Also, I can't tell you how happy I was to find myself in the middle of a birch forest when I emerged from a ruined fort just as the sun was rising. It was a moment, man.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[Tablesaw]

Also, Maldivian and subnivean.
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It's the saw of the table!

[Scratchmonkey]

So, I picked it up anyway, even if I barely sneak in under the minimum requirements. I can play it on Low settings on the lowest widescreen and it works pretty well. I'm not even having the "slideshow" effects that others are claiming to when things are moving around or when I'm outside.

Of course, everything looks vaguely like a cinematic from Diablo II. I'm pretty okay with that, I don't really play these games for the graphics in any case.

[dessgeega]

[dhex]

[Shapermc]

[dhex]

as far as i know there is no demo.

http://media.putfile.com/ESIV-Oblivion---Woolen-Encounter

there's some good stuff in the elderscrolls forum, even if there's a calvacade of jackassery afoot.

the sheep coming round the bend to avenge their fallen king are kinda creepy, then the guards pull a fast one, unfortunately. it would have been cool to see this army of angry sheep chasing you around.

edit: i promise to start using fraps to make small clips of ridiculousness.
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[Shapermc]

Here are my specs. I ... don't think they will work even though I have my RAM upgraded to 1gb. Any help here from the mor technically inclined would be awesome.

[dhex]

yeah, you don't have enough vid ram.

sorry.

you can come to my house and play it if you want.

edit: i've already given up on the official oblivion forums. the tard factor is too great.

doubledit: this thread is cool though. the face modeling is nutzoid to the max.
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[Shapermc]

[Lackey]

Apparently the forums are closed for maintinence now.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[Scratchmonkey]

I'm barely getting by with:

1.7 Ghz Pentium M
1 GB RAM
ATI Mobility x300 128 mb video card

I actually bumped it up to the second-lowest widescreen resolution last night and it works pretty well. It can get choppy and a little disorienting if things are happening fast; it doesn't bug me too much though.

I stole a horse and went to jail. I couldn't figure out how to get my stuff back, so I wound up reloading. I kind of wish that somebody would make a Passive Healthy wildlife mod for Oblivion so that I can wander around without being constantly assaulted by crabs.

I'm an Imperial majoring in Stealth with a specialization in hitting people with arrows when they don't know I'm there. I hit level 2 really quickly because I Sneak 90% of the time.

I completely agree with dhex re: the voice acting. It gets grating pretty quickly, especially since the speaking animations for the faces are pretty meh. I used to work for a company that worked exclusively on facial animations and it continually surprises me to see stuff in games that's remarkably worse than stuff I was working on 6 years ago. (And what we were working on was low-tech enough that it worked as a IM plug-in on sub-500 Mhz Pentium IIs and ran like butter.)

[dhex]

http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=290633

huh.
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[Scratchmonkey]

So what're people's thoughts on the mechanics so far?

I've found myself somewhat annoyed by the "mini-games" that they added for lockpicking and persuasion. The lockpicking isn't so bad because it actually somewhat represents the actual mechanics of lockpicking, it just annoys me because I'm no good at it and have to use the auto attempt.

The persuasion thing is just weird though. It's kind of like how Farenheit used Simon as a way of testing your ability to get through a conversation. If you're going to be completely abstract, why use a reaction-based system of this nature? It's this kind of thing that gets people up in arms about the "consolization" of multi-platform PC titles.

The other thing that is really bugging me was the crown icon. I couldn't figure out what it could possibly mean until I read the manual and found out that it signifies

[dhex]

yeah.

a slight case of invisible war.
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[Roam Unit]

The lock picking minigame is actually really clever, once you figure out the trick to it. You need to click the mouse when the tumbler hits the top of the lock, which is pretty obvious from the get-go. Less obvious is that there are two possible outcomes when you push a tumbler up: one is a failure, and is signified by a single clicking sound, while a success is followed by a double click. You have a short period of time after hearing the double click to click the mouse, somewhere around half a second. Also, tumblers seem to have timing patterns associated with them; while picking some "very hard" locks I noticed certain sequences popping up frequently based on my timing (e.g. two failures, one success, one failure, one success, repeat).

On the one hand, it feels a lot more immersive when you get used to it. On the other hand, it completely breaks the security skill, as you can pick pretty much any lock with ease if you've got decent rhythm... except for the doors which require a specific key, but those are irritating for an entirely different reason. I'm generally enjoying Oblivion, but those little details - the un-pickable doors, the way available equipment seems to be strongly tied to character level - just sort of jolt me out of it every now and then and give me a little pang of desire for Morrowind. Not enough to switch back, mind you, but still. It's there!

[DonMarco]

[simplicio]

[Scratchmonkey]

Warning: large filezzzzz. Tell me if I should reduce their size.

A ruin/dungeon that I found southwest of the Priory:



The dungeon underneath this ruin is quite extensive and full of traps, the undead and one unfortunate rat. I almost got knocked off by the ghosts until I remembered that you could damage them with magic. Magicka regen is fairly rapid in this game, so running and hiding is quite a viable tactic, especially if your sneak skill is pretty good.

One of the traps was particularly nasty, consisting of a red gem that levitates above a stone tower and casts the same spell that a ghost does, making it seem like there's some ghost somewhere you can't see attacking you, especially since the stone itself is quite small and you really have to be looking directly at it to figure out what's going on.

A statue outside of the same ruin:



It's a frigging big statue. I am continually surprised by the scale of the buildings and the sheer amount of greenery.

"Me":



Shown in standard adventuring pose, i.e. sneaking with my bow. At one point in the dungeon I was sniping skeletons who were only just inside my draw distance. The new physics engine really makes a difference, as I never used a bow in Morrowind and now it's my primary weapon.

[dessgeega]

norrathian staring contests are vicious!
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[Tablesaw]

[Lackey]

I wasn't bothered by the nature of the speechcraft minigame so much as I was by the way it means you have to boast, admire, tell a joke, and coerce the person in one round of conversation. Can you think of how crazy that would sound?

Also, in case you didn't know the quest important people thing was sort of there in Morrowind too, it just didn't tell you until after you killed them. Although I guess it did only do it for a select few NPCs critical to the main plot, and you could still play with them murdered.

By the way, how are you taking screenshots? I'd like to make a few.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[simplicio]

[dhex]

[Scratchmonkey]

Yeah, fraps is pretty neat. Just be careful which keys it's bound to. For instance, the "record movie" key is F9, which also happens to be the Quick Load key in Oblivion.

I was a screwup and assigned "screenshot" to F9 as well since F10 (the default) does something wacky on my laptop. So I failed completely as when I hit F9, it immediately loaded my last Quicksave, took a picture of what I was looking at then and recorded a movie of me being extremely confused.

[dhex]

take me down to imperial city
where the grass is green and the bloom is pretty




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[Scratchmonkey]

I just turned Bloom On in my game. It actually doesn't seem to affect performance much and it makes a lot of things prettier, especially the NPC faces. There's a way to change the face-zoom-in that you get during conversations, I think that's going to be my next modifcation, even if being zoomed-in probably makes the persuasion mini-game easier.

Latest exploits: I found a ruined fort not far from the dungeon that I explored yesterday. It appeared abandoned until I noticed that there were two decomposing corpses lashed to either side of the entrance. That probably should have been a tip-off for what was to follow.

After find a dead body and looting it, I was set upon by two vampires. Luckily, one of them got stuck behind a pillar, allowing me to finish off the other. Afterwards, I was in no shape to tangle with a Vampire Mage and her zombie cohort, so I ran for the entrance. I'd heard that it worked this way; however, I was still surprised when both the zombie and the vampire came out of the fort to pursue me. Panicking, I raced north to the nearest town, where I waited for 12 hours to see if they would follow me and get cut down by the town guards. They did not.

Now I'm debating as to whether I should head back to the fort, to see if they're still hanging around outside, where it would be much easier for me to pick them off at my leisure by sneak-attacking them with my bow.

[Scratchmonkey]

I went back to the fort and snuck around a bit. Couldn't find the vampire, so I gave up and continued vaguely in the direction of the next main quest, heading cross-country. I ran into a number of Daedric shrines, ruins, caves, bandit camps and a town of what I believe are Daedra worshippers, which was kind of fun.

Oh, and a house where everything was in shambles, there was a body in the oven and there were bones scattered everywhere, including quite a number of them in the attic. Very creepy and I kept expecting something nasty to jump out at me. In the end, nothing happened, although I hope something happens with it in the future (as well as with the town of Daedra worshippers).

Heading through some rocky outcroppings quite a distance away from my original encounter with her, I found the vampire again. Racing across the field of my vision, she appeared running from south to north, viciously torching a herd of deer with some kind of heat ray. I chased after her and after some doing, I found her running in circles, pounding a wolf with ice projectiles.

I quicksaved and attacked. She shrugged off my sneak attack and then proceeded to kill me fairly rapidly. I quickloaded and ran off south. Maybe somebody our paths will cross again.

[dhex]

i've been tweaking the engine a bit, and am now getting 75-100fps inside and 25-40 outside, which is perfectly playable near as i can tell.

the traps are excellent, despite having been whacked in the face a few too many times with spiked balls.

so yeah, they fixed some stuff, fucked up some stuff, and basically took things in a slightly different direction. the one big good thing in all of this is that the mods are coming, the mods are coming.

unrelated: the offical forum has a 7 to 1 fuckface to normal ratio. that's an impressive margin.

related: fucking vampires! goddamn fucking vampires!

i do die a lot more than i ever did in other elder scrolls games. i think that's a positive, sort of.
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[dark steve]

[dhex]

yeah, there are some serious moments of beauty not found before in other TES games - it's a tradeoff between being super open ended (earlier titles) and having more awareness/engagement/scripting from npc's.

a further revelation: a lot of people were introduced to the series with morrowind have no idea how close oblivion is to daggerfall in some ways (in feel and especially the fast travel map, which i think is a fucking blessing, thank you very much).

edit: because i am feckin' off something serious here, i'm going to post some choice tes forum quotes:

[SuperWes]

[dhex]

this isn't as good as the realisms of thievery, but:

[dessgeega]

[Scratchmonkey]

[dhex]

this, however, is one of the better threadjacks in history:

http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=303434
(it only starts getting good on page 2)

and this made me laugh.

[Lackey]

You might not like it Wes. It is more videogamey than Morrowind, but all of the Elderscrolls games expect you to go to them, not the other way around. I don't think they're very enjoyable unless you're willing to get involved with the world.

I was recently wandering through the great forest on my horse when I saw a deer dart through the bushes, completely riddled with arrows. I thought that was strange so I stopped, and then a moment later I saw a huntsman run out of the wilderness after it. I didn't realize that the NPCs actually went hunting in their spare time.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[Scratchmonkey]

***POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHOY***

***SERIOUSLY***

***YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED***

***THIS IS GETTING RATHER TEDIOUS, SORRY***

***SORRY***

Ahem.

So I'd done the main quest up to giving the Star of the Kings or whatever the hell it was called to the Priory north of the Imperial City. After bumming around in the woods/ruins around that area, I decided that it was time to head south and continue with the main arc of the game.

Heading south actually took place over three separate play-sessions, as I kept running off to investigate whenever something new popped up nearby. This led to a number of locations being added to my map and some entertaining battles, including one with a zombie of freakish strength (I ran away).

Rather than circle around to the south and approach the city the natural way, I freescaled from the north and looped around the city. Those of you who have done this portion of the game know what I ran into.

In a way, not having the build-up to the Oblivion Gate was even more effective. I can see how the eldritch warnings and the gradual change of the sky and ground would be eerie when doing it the right way; however, I found it incredibly creepy to gradually notice: "hey, the trees are all dead...the ground looks scorched...shit, what's happening to the sky...what the fuck is that?!?"

So now my character is saved in Oblivion, hoping that rescuing whoever and closing the game will not prove to be incredibly overpowered for my poor lvl 3 thief-type. This would probably be much more of a worry in Morrowind, where the game had absolutely no compunction about snapping you in half if you happened to wander into the wrong situation. Oblivion seems marginally friendlier in this regard, especially in terms of quests related to the main plot arch.

I'm imagining that after this, the Oblivion gates will start appearing with great frequency around the kingdom. I can see the advantage to not having this happen if you're interested in the "muck around" approach of exploring the game and if I have a saved game that isn't horribly out of date, I'll consider splitting my saves down the middle and having a story game and "muck around" game.

I'd create another character except that I'm really not too interested in going through the opening section of the game again. It seems to me that that was an iffy design decision, especially when put in contrast with Morrowind, where character creation only took longer than 5 minutes if you spent a lot of time agonizing over choices.

[Lackey]

[Shapermc]

[dhex]

http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=309538

i am officially dropping the hammer of pop sociology on these fuckers. join in!
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