The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion announced!

Do they only have a gothic2 demo in german or what? I would like to try it before I waste tons of money.

 

No demo that I'm aware of. You can pick it up here in the States for $20. The game is excellent and is everything Chalnoth stated earlier that he likes in a RPG.

 

Edited by me...

later

 

Sorry I guess the "tons of money" was a little off I meant before I waste even a moderate amount like $20 . Anyway I will think about it. I don't evn know if I would like it b/c I dislike most RPG's and only a few I liked, Morrowind mainly b/c you could explore a big world and I think that is a cool thing.

 

I disagree. The history/lore in Morrowind is world-class and puts many other games to shame, but that's it basically. The only ambitiousness I can see was shipping a huge map with hardly any game in it.

The sheer mass of Morrowind is amazing - there is probably more much stuff to explore in Morrowind than in ten other CRPGs combined - but since it is just the same stuff replicated over and over and over again (with marginal customizations that don't matter a flying meow as regards game play) there is actually no more to 'experience' in Morrowind than in, say, one of the NWN games or KotOR, and quite probably less. So in that regard Morrowind is actually just par for the course, unless you want to focus on the Guiness book aspect that there are so-and-so many hundred hand-placed cups and knifes in the game and so-and-so many thousand NPCs each of which has assigned an individual (and easily confusable :?) name and one of about a dozen faces and one of perhaps a dozen generic scripts.

But while Morrowind may have ten times as much 'mass' as most other RPGs it actually has less than one tenth as much 'game' in it. Most gameplay aspects look like they are still in late alpha (proof-of-principle/demo) stage or at best early beta; the whole game feels like haphazard mish-mash of toys thrown into a sandbox, with a myriad of half-assed "fetch/deliver/kill something" type quests that seem to be designed to send the player all over the map and to keep them occupied with searching for needles in a haystack (since directions supplied by quest givers seem often deliberately misleading or even downright inaccurate).

Sure, some things were beautifully done: Ajira's greetings, her reports and her desire to become Journeyman before Galbedir made her seem alive and a real character; I liked her a lot and also some of the other Khajiit. Other memorable things include a story that 'ends in a prayer instead of a bloodbath' unless you do something about it; a monk hiding booze in order to cause a rebellion because he does not like being stuck in the middle of nowhere; a chieftain who wants you to acquire a noble bride for him; M'Aiq the Liar, and so on. But the other ninety percent of Morrowind are lifeless, stale and repetitive. Tribunal was a tremendous improvement but Bloodmoon was even worse than the original game, and of course neither expansion fixed the main problem which is that Bethesda never bothered to the design and finish the underlying game in the first place.

Of course you can invent your own game and play it in this big sandbox, or you can play around the provided toys - sending guards into orbit, getting Nix-Hounds to levitate, collecting service providers like merchants (Mudcrab, Creeper, a bartering enchanter, a bartering spell-maker ...) in a convenient location, finding all books in Morrowind and building a big tower out of them, or even obscure hobbies like finding the other fake soul gem and all eighteen rolling pins that are in the game. But this does not change the fact that there is no game worth playing in this sandbox unless you are satisfied with pure make-believe or you set up an elaborate set of rules, both of which are basically ways of inventing your own game for yourself.

The adventure portion of the game is worth about a hundred hours of gaming (this varies depending on your learning curve, obviously, and also how many copies of a rose you want to smell before you stop bothering) and so there is no question that Morrowind provides adequate value for the $25 that it costs in the case of PC GotY which includes the expansions. But except for Tribunal the adventure is watered down by the endless repetitiveness, and once you have consumed the adventure nothing remains except a stale aftertaste. The underlying game is so unfinished and incoherent that the replay value is zilch.

To bring a weapon/magic skill from its initial rank (== somewhere between barely usable and utterly crappy) to 100 you have to hit something or other so-and-so many thousand times, or cast a spell - any spell of the school - so-and-so many thousand times. It doesn't matter whether you battle a bunch of high-level Daedra while hanging on for dear life or whether you simply wave a rusted knife in the face of a summoned scamp, skill progress is the same, just use-counting. It does not matter whether you fry a couple dozen monsters with clever combinations of spells, or simply cast the same number of 1-mana 1-damage spells at nothing in particular (or use repeated casting of short but powerful self-buffs which is a half-way honest alternative) - skill progress is determined by dumb use-counting. As if that were not enough to kill motivation the game is so out of whack that even a level-1 character can accomplish pretty much anything you want, provided you know what you are doing. The only reason why you cannot beat the MW main quest with a level-1 character is that some stupid script blocks progress until you are level 3, otherwise there is no problem since the main quest is 90% fetch this and go there stuff and the half dozen or so required kills are dead easy except for the Telvanni head honcho with his Daedra bodyguards.

Even simple games that are often regarded as shallow - like Freelancer - have a lot more gameplay depth than Morrowind and a lot more replay value. Not to mention that combat in Freelancer is actually fun with plenty of incentives to improve your skills and/or pick better ships and equipment, which in turn gives you an incentive to obtain money by trading, looting or fighting.

As regards the non-munchkin role-playing aspects of Morrowind: the original game seems to support only thieves and ruthless murderers really well; if you want to role-play an honest forthright character like a Paladin then you have to rationalize quite a bit of stuff that is out of character.

So far our theory was that Bethesda stretched themselves too thin with all the thousands of lovingly hand-placed copies of everything over and over and over, as well as fighting with the half-finished bug-ridden mess of a script engine, so that there were no resources left to progress the actual game beyond early prototype stage. But the new announcement gives raise to a different theory ... Perhaps Bethesda abandoned Morrowind long before it shipped and just let a bunch of content designers add plenty copies of everything to fill the maps, while they switched the programmers and game designers over to Oblivion. At least that would explain the shoddy state of the Morrowind game, and it could actually spell 'gaming goodness' for Oblivion ...

P.S.: in case somebody thinks I am just randomly bashing the game - I am not. I have played Morrowind and its expansions for quite a bit and also participated in the ES forums (which Bethesda killed yet again and most of my posts are gone) for a while, and I even uncovered some new bits of the underlying game math which was actually more fun than playing the game. So I have said nothing in this post that I cannot substantiate in detail - including e.g. exact numbers for skill progress under various conditions (modulo summed round-off error on the order of 1%) instead of the blanket 'thousands' that I mentioned. Except for the theories in the last paragraph, of course.

 

Yeah, personally I think that Morrowind was a good game in its own right, but it had the potential to be just so much more. It was fun, it was big, but it could have been so much more. Hopefully Bethesda will leave us less wanting with this next installment

 

Morrowind stole my sleep for a long long time At work I used to sneak out to the carpark and grab 40 minutes kip in my car most days!

Love that game.

 

Morrowind was overly ambitious, while at the same time using a poor game engine. It looks magnificient (for a title of its time anyway, and still pretty darned good actually), but it runs abysmally even on good hardware.

If the devteam had had more resources and the engine had not been so bass-ackwards, maybe the game could have come closer to fulfilling its true potential, but I'm not that critical of it as it is; it is still one of the most fulfilling adventures out there IMO.

The masses of knives and other junk found everywhere is what makes the game feel real. if those things had not been there it would have felt as sterile and unrealistic as pretty much everything else out there.

Hopefully in Oblivion, we will have chests of drawers that opens like real drawers do and not just pop up an inventory window - which pauses the entire game world by the way. Hopefully it will also be possible to pickpocket people if one is a master thief without getting discovered 95% of the time even with a fair-level chameleon spell going.

 

LOL @ pocketmoon66 - it seems like you had some seriously serious fun with the game. 8)

Okay, decoration is necessary to make scenes look more convincing but what about the dozens of shipwrecks which are all alike and none of which holds anything of interest (except for a certain receipt that you need for an extra comfy pillow, and a side-quest item), the dozens of grottoes that are all alike except for one that looks a bit different and another that leads to the abandoned Dwemer outpost with the Dragonbone Cuirass, or the dozens of tombs most of which are very much alike, or all the egg mines and so on.

Sure, in real life one might expect most tombs to be sort of similar in certain regions and one would expect most of them to be utterly boring, but in games we expect a bit of compression in space/time. You can easily explore almost all grottoes along the whole coast line without finding the only one that holds anything of interest, which is Mudan Grotto way southwest of Ebonheart and which many players may overlook unless they scan the whole map diligently. So many players will risk their life (or at least a reload) to explore grottoes for nought. Or take eggmines. You can explore eggmines until you get blue in the face none of them contains anything interesting unless you want to count the golden eggs which are just a gag for a misc quest and I am not sure they are worth any money (the Gnisis eggmine is an entirely different thing but the game sents you there specifically anyway).

It is the same story with a lot of things in Morrowind - you get served one or two dozen duds for everything that is halfway interesting. I mean, if I want such a low fun ratio then I only need to turn off the computer and step outside - and then at least I get full 3D without jaggies, plus surround sound and force feedback, not to mention an economic model that almost works and a mercantile model that makes a bit of sense. And I can eat bread successfully without a degree in Alchemy. Did I mention that there's not a single Cliffracer?

LOL, I found that irksome too. In Morrowind, tricky pickpocketing requires good magic skill instead of stealth skills, or a hefty chunk of money that you can lend to an enchanter for a moment. Fortify Sneak 300 pts for xx seconds on self With something like that it isn't even worth it to work on the natural Sneak skill but without it you get the short end of the stick even if you have maximum natural Sneak, Agility and Luck.

 

I quite liked Morrowind once I got into it, it is certainly quite different from other games that I've played. The only thing I personally disliked was the fact that it runs abysmally. I bought the game when I had p3-866 with a tnt2 and I found it unplayable. Then I got my gf-4200 and I tried it again and it looked prettier (pixel shaded water ) but still felt unplayable. I finally played it right through when I got my new machine (axp2100+, r9700pro) and it still didn't feel particularly smooth. I hope Oblivion doesn't suffer from the same problem.

Btw: the picture on the cover of that magazine looks very pretty (as should be expected for a game so far off but still).

 

Omg, look at this screeny:

http://www.todesturnpike.com/images/TES4/DSC00473.JPG

It says: "This shot demonstrates the incredible forests that can be generated by the Xbox 2".

And didn't Xbox 2 contain the R500 (aka the original R400) chip? So we can assume that this is what ATi's R500 is capable off... 8) The rest of the screenies look great too!

 

Damn nice screenshot, hopefully it will perform a little better than when Morrowind came out originally.

Though I have to say about Morrowind I loved the game except the main plotline sucked and was a little short (side quests were great and was fun to explore)

 

F*ck_me! Some of the other pics are phenomenal.

http://www.todesturnpike.com/images/TES4/DSC00477.JPG

 

Unbelievable! <drools>

 

OMFG!

As a big fan of Morrowind...I cant wait to get my hands on this game.


-Neutrality-

 

Synopsis of the Game Informer article posted on the official forums:

 

Dumbing it down isnt too bad, it was way too complex for it's own good ... dont put more complexity in than which you want to take the time for to balance properly, and balanced was one thing morrowind was not. Putting in a bit of skill based sword play only makes sense for a first person single player cRPG.

Seems as far as mechanics are concerned they at least learned from their mistakes. Lets see what they do about uninteresting quests and lifeless world/npcs (a couple of states to switch their location and behaviour around based on time of day is nice, but not nearly enough IMO).

 

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one finding that Morrowind was beautifull at the time, but incredibly slow and empty.
Nothing interesting to do, providing a huge world with no clear path to follow isn't that interesting.
I prefer an involving story, then have side quests if I'm interested in them.
From John Reynolds quote, it really looks like they heard me, which means that a lot of people found the game to have the same severe problems making it no more than a failed experiment rather than a game, since there was no fun.

 

Well, maybe TES4 will offer more than just graphics this time...