Oblivion Hands-On

@Guden....

i wasn't commenting on the map size. just the author's idea about having to walk 16 miles to get anywhere.


well i loved boiling point even with stutters. and my new rig will be a quantum leap over the 1.4G i have now.

i think boiling point was larger? i now it was more than 17km to get from PS to PF towns on roughly opposite ends of the map. but you had cars and planes of course.

i have to admit i'll be disappointed if i can't maxify everything on oblivion and it plays like BP on my new rig.

 

Yes, I understand that. I just tried to put things in perspective (but of course unfortunately had my conversion factors off by, well, half a mile almost! )

There are horses in oblivion, not quite as high-tech. And I guess they made the world larger by making the roads wind around the terrain a lot too.

The world being less than 6.5 km to the side assuming a perfect square is a bit disappointing, that's definitely smaller than "the original" morrowind I'd think, and that's only supposed to be an island off of the mainland. Still, there's always future expansions to, well, expand things I guess...

 

hey is it possible it is 16 miles on a side? 256 sq miles?

and the previewers just aren't too apt at the whole math thinkage?

4 miles on a side does seem not as good as morrowind to me. and they did claim 3 times the size?

 

Well, a fast walk / slow jogging speed of 4 mph would mean that the minimum time to cross the continent would be an hour. Much longer if you have to go around obstacles and up and down hills. I remember crossing the morrowind continent somewhat faster than this. Maybe more like 30-45mins. I'd say the size should be atleast the same, if not larger.

Nite_Hawk

 

Excuse me if i dont trust the previews made by people but i dont.
It must be a great game but in the end we just have to wait 20 days and see ourselves...

 

What's crazy is how big Daggerfall was. Granted it used a lot of random generation, but that land area was aboslutely unbelievably huge.

"Just to walk from one end of the world to the other will take over 2 full weeks in real-time (we actually tested this!)"

 

( Anyone remember "The Eye Of The Beholder" ?? )

 

I enjoyed those back in the day.

 

I see your point, but... honestly, I think that RPGs may have to be an exception. The first time I played MW my hardware was totally not up to task, so it was a slow and painful process. A week later I bought a 9500p and it was better, but not really great. Recently I reinstalled it and my system kicked its ass, but my g/f played it and she thought it was really boring. I was feeling the same way, actually, until I installed a bunch of mods (mostly textures and sounds to liven the place up a bit, no new game elements), and now I'm loving it again. The Oblivion intro sounds much more exciting than is typical of Elder Scrolls, but I'd still say on principle, you do have to give an RPG as complex and open-ended as an Elder Scrolls a little more than two hours. Two hours into "normal" (i.e., not reviewer-mania) play would usually get you just past character creation, and the opening dialogues with characters in the first town.

Ha! my g/f, for example, LOVED fable! Actually I dug it too, but it's a totally different fare than I'd expect from an Elder Scrolls game. The reviews talk about how much more exciting the new one is, but Fable was just fluid... almost too much so. I never saw any need to ever do anything but repeatedly press "attack". One thing you can count on, is that Oblivion will have infinitely more spells and an awful lot more plot than Fable. And better houses to buy ;D

...could have sworn it was 1.8 km = 1 mile. ^^

HOW TRUE!!!

one thing that confuses me is the whole use of real-world distance measurements. The only measurement of interest is real-time, and even that one is dubious if it means a lot of walking through nothing. Now, it's an Elder Scrolls so I'm sure the wilderness will be awesome, but in MW for example, you ran a LOT lot faster than 4 mph, and you maintained it for ridiculous durations. you probably ran 10 mph, on average (given that everyone ran everywhere, and thus speed constantly went up), and never slowed down. And why would you want to? the walking speed was unbearable!!!

...not me! I could never stand dungeon hacks. Well, except for nethack. ;D

 

Niet. 1.609km = 1 mile.

 

FABLE was indeed small..However it had one of the best music scores to accompany it that i have ever heard. Plus the between quests story telling was something cool.
As for the Eye Of The Beholder i wish they made a new one now..It would be quite an eye candy.

 

Google is your friend

 

You're probabaly thinking of the nautical mile.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_mile

 

hahaha thanks for the links guys, but i actually did look it up before posting XD the "^^;" was supposed to indicate guilt -- my reaction was just stunned XD for over a decade i think, i've been using 1.8 km per mile and somehow getting away with it! >_<;;; anyway, to derail this topic... am i the only one who's worried that oblivion will be disappointing compared to the current state of morrowind, until the mods come out in force? XD

 

The truly amusing thing was the ensuing shitstorm of fanboi rage. It really reinforced my perception that Elder-Scroll-fanbois are some of the most obnoxious and retarded fanbois in existence. All he did was to point out performance problems of the Xbox version.

 

IMO most of the rage is from console gamers. There's something special about that crowd and their particular prized trophy platform. There's a lot of fuel from the need to justify the purchase. Doesn't help that this is probably the first interesting title for the 360 so all their hopes and dreams are resting on this game being the second next final tertiary coming of modern gaming!

This is only further reinforced if you visit the official forum. Threads there quickly blast into "fan boy rage", from some obviously immature people (probably like 12yrs to teens I'm guessing). And the threads always burst into 360 vs PC arguments. You can not have an intelligent discussion there. People don't read previous posts, they just reply to the first inflammatory post and the forum server suffers horribly as people post and post within seconds of each other. LOL. These are not fans of the Elder Scrolls series or of single player RPGs in general, but people who want pretty graphics with nifty shadows and to be told that their platform is best. I call it the Hype Crowd because they will all disappear very quickly after release I imagine, because Oblivion is certainly not going to be the type of game these kids are imagining. Once the game is released and the rabid speculations and dreams and platform rivalry questions are all answered, the noise will utterly die off.

It is fascinating how there are conflicting reports of how the game looks and runs. The vids online of it are all so silky smooth. (Offline rendered?) I'm guessing that we're seeing a lot of how perceptions of framerate/quality differ among people. You can catch a pretty serious LOD/mipmap shift in the extensive gameplay vid on IGN, right at about 2:20, at the end of the outside walk towards the city in the distance.

 

fun stuff. you could go there and argue FOR everything! pc is l33t! 360 is l33t! see how long it takes for them to catch on.

 

Regarding draw distance, fps etc. The unofficial Morrowind FPS Optimizer has a fantastic option - it allowed seperate draw distances for combat and non-combat. I'm happy playing 20-30fps (honest!) with HQ and long draw distances. The game responds fine and looks great. As soon as you go into combat mode, the fight music kicks and the draw distance drops to keep fps high. A side effect is a 'fog of war' that decends on you during battle. Almost an effect worth having in it's own right!

 

that sounds like a very clever way of doing things.

my anemic rig forced me into stealth play (to avoid crowded fights) where all my resources were no longer adequate to play beyond a slide show fps.

 

To quote Desslock again: he thinks this person's gripes over the draw distance/LOD issues is pure BS. His hours spent playing the PC version left him breathless, saying it's the most gorgeous graphics he's ever seen and that, in fact, interior graphics pale in comparison.