Gold: The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion

[SubZero]

I agree.. LOL... playing for hours and only at level 2 but then again, I never played morrow wind. I'm starting to find my way though...

BTW: there is a nice mod available that allows for 12 items in you inventory.

http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/i...owtopic=295081

[toomuchcaffeine]

Anyone here experiencing problems with stability. I was getting intermittent crashing back to the desktop initially, but now, it crashes as soon as I load my save game.

My system is overclocked as per my signature, however, it is Prime95 stable, superpi32m stable, 3dmark2001 stable and I've never experienced problems with any other games including FEAR, Quake IV and UT2K4.

Thoughts?

[SubZero]

Yup... it just now crashed with an application error... Fortunately my last save wasn't too old.

Not OC'ed here BTW because when I used a slight overclock yesterday it crashed very quickly.

[mindx2]

Everyone is correct that this is a very pretty game.... however I have one MAJOR problem with the game that has made me stop it until either Bethesda or the mod community fixes it.

The entire game levels with you! Monsters, NPCs, and treasure all levels about the same time you do. At 1st level you fight lvl 1 rats then at 5th lvl you are fighting 5th lvl rats, etc.!!! I have been reading on the Oblivion boards about how people have become Arena Champion at 1st level because all the contestants were at their level! Some have even gone into the Oblivion Gates at first level and met no more than 1st lvl scamps. That is because the ENTIRE game world level with you... and that is just poor design.

The whole idea of leveling is to reward the player for their adventure but where is the accomplishment when you finally reach that new level and everything around you levels up immediately!

Where is the sense of accomplishment when you find that hidden cave with the powerful "monster' in it that you know will own your *** if you fight him at your current level. You just know it must be keeping some awsome treasure in it's locked chest. You go out and hone your skills by finding things that you can tackle knowing your going to come back and take on that thing in the cave. Once you can face the "monster", whether it be through stealth, combat, or magic, and you defeat it you have that sense of "YES I DID IT! I have earned that shiny new (insert sword, armor, magical item, or gold here)".

This to me not having that sense of adventure and accomplishment is a gamebreaker until it is somehow fixed. This could become a great game when the modders finally start improving upon what I consider poor design choices. Morrowind became a much better game after some quality mods came out so I have high hopes that the same will happen here.

[TQ]

Originally Posted by toomuchcaffeine

Anyone here experiencing problems with stability. I was getting intermittent crashing back to the desktop initially, but now, it crashes as soon as I load my save game.

My system is overclocked as per my signature, however, it is Prime95 stable, superpi32m stable, 3dmark2001 stable and I've never experienced problems with any other games including FEAR, Quake IV and UT2K4.

Thoughts?

We don't overclock, yet we've had some stability issues with the game that have manifested themselves as game freezes, which require a reboot to unlock and we've had one crash to the desktop as of last night.
However, 99% of the time the game is stable.

If you're having crashes as bad as you describe that first thing I would think of is data corruption from overclocking. If the game was installed while your system was o/c'd it may be so corrupt that your only recourse is to take your system back to defaults, uninstall the game, then reinstall it. And leave your system at defaults.
I have long advocated the stance that overclocking one's CPU is snake oil and it's only effect besides meaningless benchmark scores is to make a system unstable.

[TQ]

Originally Posted by Kimbo

isn't there a very simple and 100% way of konwing that ? reset the overclocking and see if it still crashes. then you'll know if it's that. also such a game needs 6 months worth of patches at least. so i'll wait.
also you all know there's a nvidia driver just for this game, yeah ?

Bethesda doesn't release games that require patches just to get them to work properly. While Morrowind did have one major patch after its release it still worked and played just fine without the patch.
Oh, that "Oblivion" driver - ostensibly beta 84.25 - had NO mention of specific Oblivion support in the release notes. In fact, we thought that Oblivion ran poorer with the 84.25 driver so we returned to the WHQL 81.98 drivers and it's our experience that the game runs more smoothly and stably with the 81.98's.

[TQ]

Originally Posted by mindx2

The whole idea of leveling is to reward the player for their adventure but where is the accomplishment when you finally reach that new level and everything around you levels up immediately!

Well, for us a game gets kind of boring when you become so powerful that you can just gaze at a bad guy and he withers away.
As much as I loved Morrowind once I became that powerful much of the fun went out of it.
Now I doubt if you'll be fighting level 25 rats but other characters, perhaps, will be more of a challenge when they become stronger as you become stronger.
I'd also suggest holding off on getting to ticked off about it until you get deeper into the game to see how Bethesda implements their new leveling up strategy.
I've been playing for a couple of days now and I'm only up to level 3, so I'll wait awhile before forming any hard and fast opinions...well, other than Mrs. TQ and I are both already incredibly addicted to Oblivion.
Dang fine game so far.

[Kimbo]

what's the consensus for average total gametime ?
50 - 100 hours ?

[SubZero]

I'd say 100 or more but that all depends on how much time you take exploring non-quest places.

Spoiler:

LOL... actually leveled up twice when I got some vamparic touch in the basement of kavatch or something.... so now at level 4.... no clue what to do with the gate but I'll find out.

[zapionics<alt>]

Originally Posted by TQ

..., we thought that Oblivion ran poorer with the 84.25 driver so we returned to the WHQL 81.98 drivers and it's our experience that the game runs more smoothly and stably with the 81.98's.

I found that the internal shadows didnt render properly until I ran with the 84.21 driver, but it could be system dependant.

[edit- internal shadows]

[Kimbo]

oh and it's amazingly ignorant that i can NOT remap the walk keys to my mouse...

[zapionics<alt>]

Originally Posted by mindx2

Everyone is correct that this is a very pretty game.... however I have one MAJOR problem with the game that has made me stop it until either Bethesda or the mod community fixes it.

The entire game levels with you! Monsters, NPCs, and treasure all levels about the same time you do. ...

This is actually pretty scary IMO. I expect that they would have put caps on this so you dont end up with lvl 25 rats! but time will tell... unfortunately I'm only lvl 2 now as I'm just not able to put enough time into the game so far (been ill).

One of the biggest game play issues I can see is that you can strengthen up your secondary abilities while leaving your primary ones neglected. This means u dont level up and neither do the monsters, so you do become a quite efficient killing machine just based on your secondary abilities.

Presumably different treasure and items become available at different levels so I wouldnt be advocating u dont level up! Plus, as TQ said, it would be a bit boring and pointless if there was no challenge.

[sorrow]

As for the levling world. It hasn't bothered me yet. I'm lvl 7 mage now and if i encounter a special bad guy, i won't mention the name, but he was harder then normal. It wasn't just like fighting a rat. Oh and i even countered some ghosts taht were freakin harde for me.. I kept running out of mana.

I'm loving the game though. I've kinda held off on the main quest, i'm not sure how that will effect things. But sheesh there is so much to do and explore.

[SupDawg]

I just bought the game today. Wish me luck!

[mindx2]

Originally Posted by zapionics<alt>

Presumably different treasure and items become available at different levels so I wouldnt be advocating u dont level up! Plus, as TQ said, it would be a bit boring and pointless if there was no challenge.

That is MY point. The game does NOT offer any real challenge because everything is around your level. By having everything at or around the same level you are means you can go anywhere in the world right away without any fear that there might be something around the next corner that will wipe the floor with you.

Take the GOTHIC series as a good design. When you start the game you have real dread venturing out very far from the roads or cities because you are NOT uber-powerful and many terrifying things in the world will get you. However, as a reward for leveling up (as the game goes on) you are able to venture further out and find that hidden cave holding great treasure but also a real challenging creature. Sure, you can run into that cave at an early level but you would most likely die. In Oblivion, you enter that cave and monsters, NPCs, and treasure all levels to or around where you are now. Where is the "challenge" in that? Why level at all... just go through the game as a 1st level PC since you can pretty much feel safe that you won't run into anything very difficult. This totally takes me out of the immersion that Bethesda touted so much.