Oblivion turns 10 years old

[DosBuster]

They repeat themselves less in Skyrim? That's odd. I remember each NPC having generally one or two scripted lines that they would repeat all the time, almost every time you passed them. The Cloud District guy as an obvious example, or the speech by the Stormcloak dude that would trigger literally every time you entered that building. I know there is plenty of repeating dialogue in Oblivion, but a lot of times it's not scripted or canned, i.e. they repeat the mudcrab story, but in Skyrim the NPCs generally repeat their single unique phrase over and over. I still think in the end Oblivion's system would be best with more topics of conversation.

the guards and such have repetitive dialogue, but you'll be in the middle of nowhere and find a random npc who will tell you his life story in 3-4 lines *1000

 

[DosBuster]

It's a shame they completely removed disposition in Skyrim. Hopefully they'll go back to that, but I doubt it since Skyrim was a "YUGE SUCCESS!" and a "PERFECT GAME!" according to many critics.

Skyrim still has disposition, they just dont have ui telling you stats, there's still a bunch of disposition-esque values in play.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

the guards and such have repetitive dialogue, but you'll be in the middle of nowhere and find a random npc who will tell you his life story in 3-4 lines *1000

That's fine, but the people in major cities you frequent also repeat themselves a lot.

Skyrim still has disposition, they just dont have ui telling you stats, there's still a bunch of disposition-esque values in play.

Yeah, it does. There are a lot of Perks and tricks in the Speech tree and what not.

 

[buru5]

It's a shame they completely removed disposition in Skyrim. Hopefully they'll go back to that, but I doubt it since Skyrim was a "YUGE SUCCESS!" and a "PERFECT GAME!" according to many critics.

Skyrim still has disposition, they just dont have ui telling you stats, there's still a bunch of disposition-esque values in play.

Too bad there are only 2 ways to raise disposition: completing quests related with that NPC and investing (if they're a merchant).

 

[Red Rogue]

I agree with you. Skyrim was a complete dumbing down of almost every aspect of the series, especially the NPCs and dialogue. Hopefully Bethesda will return to their roots with the next ES game but somehow I doubt it.

Sorry friend, but if you think there's even a slight chance BGS will make a proper RPG again then you are naive and the sooner you accept that the less it will hurt. I think Fallout 4 was the nail in the coffin for me. Going forward, every BGS game will just be an open world action game that has an inventory.

 

[buru5]

I agree with you. Skyrim was a complete dumbing down of almost every aspect of the series, especially the NPCs and dialogue. Hopefully Bethesda will return to their roots with the next ES game but somehow I doubt it.

Sorry friend, but if you think there's even a slight chance BGS will make a proper RPG again then you are naive and the sooner you accept that the less it will hurt. I think Fallout 4 was the nail in the coffin for me. Going forward, every BGS game will just be an open world action game that has an inventory.

Yes, that's why I said I doubt it. I don't trust Bethesda after Skyrim and ESPECIALLY after Fallout 4. I wasn't impressed with Fallout 3 either.

 

[buru5]

Here's some screenshots of my current Oblivion playthrough...

 

[Red Rogue]

You reminded me how comfy this game was. Felt like exploring an oil painting.

Shit you actually do just that in game.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Comfy and pleasant. At least, when the jaws of Oblivion aren't trying to devour the land.

 

[adddeed]

But such a contrast to a game like Witcher in terms of design. This looks like a theme park, comfy and safe and not believable at all. Witcher feels like an actual place, in the way the areas are designed. You know, proper elevation, foliage, detail, density, variation, that sort of thing.

 

[buru5]

But such a contrast to a game like Witcher in terms of design. This looks like a theme park, comfy and safe and not believable at all. Witcher feels like an actual place, in the way the areas are designed. You know, proper elevation, foliage, detail, density, variation, that sort of thing.

I don't see any roller coasters or merry-go-rounds, do you?

 

[Red Rogue]

But such a contrast to a game like Witcher in terms of design. This looks like a theme park, comfy and safe and not believable at all. Witcher feels like an actual place, in the way the areas are designed. You know, proper elevation, foliage, detail, density, variation, that sort of thing.

I see what you're getting at and I'll agree to an extent, however I really don't think the two can be compared.

Or at the very least, I don't think calling Oblivion unbelievable with a negative connotation is quite fair. We all know that Oblivion was controversial for the whole Cyrodillian jungle debacle, but changing the province to a "safe" fantasy environment does show the intent of BGS to achieve a level of familiarity inside the comfort zone. Sure, Cyrodiil isn't as rigid, harsh, genuine or authentic as TW3 environment, but it does succeed at being a warm and pleasant landscape that is easy to look at.

When it's not being devoured by the jaws of Oblivion, of course.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

And I wouldn't say that authenticity or having proper "elevation, foliage, detail, etc." is really necessary to make an enjoyable world to explore. I'd go as far as to say that really plays a minor part in how interesting an RPG world is to explore. Most RPG worlds are abstracted and not built to scale, and I'm personally not one who needs or desires the world to make absolute sense, i.e. there needs to be this many farms outside the city to feed this many people living there and so on.

For some examples, most RPG worlds like the Gothic 1 & 2 worlds aren't too authentic by real-world standards yet they are incredibly interesting to explore. You could say the same for many other RPG worlds as well, including the TES games. They also have authentic details within their inauthentic worlds that helps the game world feel alive and make sense within the game's parameters.

 

[buru5]

I think it's also worth noting how meaningless "not believable" as a criticism is in role playing games. After all, Minotaurs don't exist in the real world. Immersion relies on suspension of disbelief and is required for almost all RPGs.

You may not like "generic" looking fantasy worlds, but really that comes down to personal opinion and shouldn't really be a criticism of the game itself, even if it's not as varied as Morrowind which is the only slightly unique setting we've had in an Elder Scrolls games (even Morrowind was not truly unique). Vanilla Oblivion had some beautiful landscapes for its time regardless, the only thing really ruining it are the pop-ins but that's more a technical limitation that a lot of games suffer from even today.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Yep. And a lot of the design in Oblivion was very subtle. While the meme goes "forests everywhere!!", there are actually subtleties in the world design. The swamp-like area on the border of Black Marsh, the mountainous areas west near Hammerfell and the snowy north near the Skyrim border and so on. I found the same holds true for the dungeons as well. While recently playing for many hours in a single run I didn't find copy/pasted dungeons. Yes, they re-use assets all over the place, but the layouts of the dungeons themselves and the intrigues of each are pretty much all unique in their own way, it's just more subtle and isn't kicking you in the grill with it.

But anywho, as I said in a previous post I'd suggest checking out some mods for the game and revisiting it. It looks great in 4K, and the mods that expand the cities, like Better Imperial City and what not make the game feel new again if you haven't played in awhile. I'd also suggest trying Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul which makes the game more like an old-school, non-level scaled RPG. I like the idea that dungeons further from the road are more dangerous, for example, and it changes a lot of details like that.

 

[buru5]

Why does Oblivion have much better dynamic shadows than Skyrim? I never noticed it before but these shadows are really good compared to Skyrim, which featured blotchy shadows even at ultra and in some areas was missing actor shadows entirely (bug?).

 

[DosBuster]

Why does Oblivion have much better dynamic shadows than Skyrim? I never noticed it before but these shadows are really good compared to Skyrim, which featured blotchy shadows even at ultra and in some areas was missing actor shadows entirely (bug?).

Huh? In Oblivion, barely anything in the world cast a shadow, Skyrim casts a ton more shadows than Skyrim. The blotchy shadows were also fixed in the special edition.

 

[buru5]

Huh? In Oblivion, barely anything in the world cast a shadow, Skyrim casts a ton more shadows than Skyrim. The blotchy shadows were also fixed in the special edition.

Most things cast shadows. Buildings and objects don't, maybe large landscape objects don't either, but trees and grass do. Many of the objects that don't cast shadows have permanent shadows instead, which aren't very dynamic but it's still a shadow nonetheless. So to say that hardly anything cast shadows in Oblivion is just wrong, and while Oblivion doesn't cast as many shadows the ones that are cast are significantly better than vanilla Skyrim (I don't know anything about Special Edition).

In Oblivion if you walk around with a torch at night actor shadows will rotate based on your position, which I don't remember being in Skyrim. If it took the Special Edition to make half-decent shadows for a game that came out 5 years after Oblivion then that's kinda sad.

 

[Hirato]

I think it's also worth noting how meaningless "not believable" as a criticism is in role playing games. After all, Minotaurs don't exist in the real world. Immersion relies on suspension of disbelief and is required for almost all RPGs.

That is a non-sequitur.
When people say the game or its world is 'not believable", they're not saying "hurr, there's minotaurs in here!"
What they're saying is that the game has failed to present adequate verisimilitude for its own world inside the context of its own world.

This can be for any number of reasons, from the characters being too dumb to live, contrived plots that ignore the excruciatingly obvious, a setting that makes no goddamn sense in the context of the universe.
In essence its a complaint about there being a (large?) number of things that go out of its way to shatter the immersion and the suspension of disbelief.

Most things cast shadows. Buildings and objects don't, maybe large landscape objects don't either, but trees and grass do. Many of the objects that don't cast shadows have permanent shadows instead, which aren't very dynamic but it's still a shadow nonetheless. So to say that hardly anything cast shadows in Oblivion is just wrong, and while Oblivion doesn't cast as many shadows the ones that are cast are significantly better than vanilla Skyrim (I don't know anything about Special Edition).

In Oblivion if you walk around with a torch at night actor shadows will rotate based on your position, which I don't remember being in Skyrim. If it took the Special Edition to make half-decent shadows for a game that came out 5 years after Oblivion then that's kinda sad.

Let's go over this VD style.

Most things cast shadows

No they don't, and you disprove your own point in the very same sentence.

Buildings and objects don't

Correct, they don't.
This includes, sun, braziers, lamps, and your own torches and spells.

maybe large landscape objects don't either

Landscape doesn't cast shadows, period, and neither do any of the objects on it.
This includes, sun, braziers, lamps, and your own torches and spells.

trees

Trees don't cast shadows either, at least not proper ones.
Bethesda did do 'canopy shadows', but these are just your standard animated decal applied to the ground, the principle behind it is the exact same as drawing water caustics in Quake.
You have a series of textures that simulate a bit of animation, and you just cycle through these; Bethesda just tiled these under the trees, I don't know if the blending information was hand painted by artists or dynamically generated based on tree proximity.
Either way, these aren't shadows; but it's a pretty neat little trick and gets some pretty good results, despite being fake.

grass do

Grass doesn't cast shadows, but it's perfectly happy to interact with the above canopy shadows.
With that said, as far as light sources go, grass didn't interact with any apart from ambient/sun lighting, which is irritating at night because you're walking on normally lit ground with completely unlit grass.

Many of the objects that don't cast shadows have permanent shadows instead, which aren't very dynamic but it's still a shadow nonetheless

Sort of.
Bethesda used two techniques for adding "shadows" to furniture, locations and things
1) They painted the world itself darker, if you've ever encountered regular geometry that stays completely dark despite what you throw at it, this is why.
2) they put polygons in the model itself that stetches a blob shadow underneath the object.

But ultimately, neither of these are shadows.

So to say that hardly anything cast shadows in Oblivion is just wrong

It's actually completely accurate, because the ONLY THING, and I mean the ONLY THING that casted ANY shadows what so ever, were Actors (NPC, your character, and monsters)
Everything else just uses directional shading.

and while Oblivion doesn't cast as many shadows the ones that are cast are significantly better than vanilla Skyrim (I don't know anything about Special Edition)

Skyrim has much better lighting, shadows, and shading, period, on account of actually having a proper lighting model that doesn't make Quake's lightmaps look technologically advanced.
Things actually get illuminated properly; the entire world and everything in it cast shadows; things don't stay super dark because the artists had painted it that way, etc.

I will concede that Skyrim's lighting model can produce some really harsh results, particularly if you're near a bright light source with absolutely no ambient lighting whatsoever.

In Oblivion if you walk around with a torch at night actor shadows will rotate based on your position

I see no reason skyrim can't do this; I'm sure there's a mod that can move the light's origin in front of you so that your viewing angle impacts it.

If it took the Special Edition to make half-decent shadows for a game that came out 5 years after Oblivion then that's kinda sad.

As far as I'm aware, Special edition just added a stronger blur effect on the shadowmap.
The blotchiness is kind of an artefact of how shadowmaps work.

Imagine you have a single texture, and for each pixel, you're calculating its offset in the world, and then tracing from this 'texel' to the light source to see if the light affects it, and you basically collect all the 'nos' in this texture.
This texture is pretty coarse, and in the absence of actual anti-aliasing (I don't think the texture format allows it), blurring is a fairly cheap standin for it with decent results.

It doesn't really bother me because I prefer the actual working lighting model to the alternative.

 

[DavidBVal]

Oblivion.

I loved Elder Scrolls 1-3, each for different reasons. Each of the early games had big flaws as well, but that wasn't important when the designers had a very clear plan on what they wanted to excel at. Morrowind, for instance, had such an incredible concept and design, a world that felt so "alien" yet real, and was a great sandbox to wander around creating spells and items, killing gods and trapping their souls, or whatever you wanted to do. Small details, like Telvanni buildings having vertical corridors and no stairs simply because Telvanni can levitate. And while graphics weren't technically superb, I'll never forget the first time I set my eyes upon the Ghostfence, or that floating Ministry of Truth. Gameplay was a bit weak, and the game was too easy, yet there were exceptional things hidden out there that I wanted to discover.

So when Oblivion was announced, I was really excited about it. I was totally unaware of concepts like "decline" as I have a rather busy life I hadn't barely played any new games those days (only NWN and mostly multiplayer), and didn't read websites or forums. In my mind, newer would still mean better, because it was what made sense. I was ready to accept Bethesda's trademarked flaws in mechanics, and tons of bugs, but I was eager to explore a brand new world, learn of unique lore.

And thus my innocence died.

At first I thought it was me. Here in this forum we're now used to overanalyze game design, but back then all I knew is that cRPGs were fun to me without really understanding why. Some games had been less fun to me, like NWN OC, but I didn't bother with knowing why exactly. Oblivion however opened my eyes, it was my blue pill. Seeing how much they had cared about combat in real time, I decided to roll a physically weak archer with some spellcasting support; that seemed to require some skill and sounded challenging. After the first hours I was thinking "So, I no longer enjoy RPGs? is this what growing up is about, no longer enjoying stuff you loved as a teen?". Everything was so bland and uninspiring, I couldn't care about it, felt like an unpaid second job. But I forced myself to play through it, because I was sure the "fun part" was right after the corner. Just another Oblivion Gate, this one won't be unbelievably long and dull. Just another step in the main quest, another generic medieval town, another oblivion gate,... and at some point it was over. I don't remember many details, it's all blurry in my mind.

I needed to know if the problem was me or the game, so I decided to test right away. There were many classic games I had never played, so I picked one and installed. M&M6, Mandate of Heaven. What followed was a 3-month long RPGasm which healed all my wounds.

That was half of my "awakening", for the second half I have to "thank" DA:O.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Oblivion was a pretty important step in the modernization of cRPGs and and free roaming sandbox games at large. It popularized such technologies as facegen, thick vegetation, infinite view distance, radiant AI, etc. Sure, the implementation was far from perfect, but still very impressive at the time. Especially since they managed to pull it all off on consoles as well on the PC. This game was able to reach out to so many people it's ridiculous.

The only thing that somewhat brought it down was the level scaling of course. They tried to play it too safe with regards to console players, and as the result the combat is too bland. You never get to feel powerful, because everything, including weapon and armor tiers is tied to your level. When you're level 1, ebony/glass/daedric gear simply doesn't exist anywhere in Oblivion's world. And unique items from quest rewards have like 15 level scaled versions that do NOT level up after you've acquired them. Nowadays you can fix this with mods, and the game is much more fun without the level scaling. Bethesda understood this themselves and their next game Fallout 3 had a much more diverse world with little to no level scaling.

And yes, Oblivion (together with Skyrim) is probably one of the most modded games in existence. The tool set is excellent.

Cue the downvotes.

 

[DavidBVal]

And yes, Oblivion (together with Skyrim) is probably one of the most modded games in existence. The tool set is excellent.

Yeah the construction set was absolutely groundbreaking compared to the Morrowind one, right?

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Oblivion.

I loved Elder Scrolls 1-3, each for different reasons. Each of the early games had big flaws as well, but that wasn't important when the designers had a very clear plan on what they wanted to excel at. Morrowind, for instance, had such an incredible concept and design, a world that felt so "alien" yet real, and was a great sandbox to wander around creating spells and items, killing gods and trapping their souls, or whatever you wanted to do. Small details, like Telvanni buildings having vertical corridors and no stairs simply because Telvanni can levitate. And while graphics weren't technically superb, I'll never forget the first time I set my eyes upon the Ghostfence, or that floating Ministry of Truth. Gameplay was a bit weak, and the game was too easy, yet there were exceptional things hidden out there that I wanted to discover.

So when Oblivion was announced, I was really excited about it. I was totally unaware of concepts like "decline" as I have a rather busy life I hadn't barely played any new games those days (only NWN and mostly multiplayer), and didn't read websites or forums. In my mind, newer would still mean better, because it was what made sense. I was ready to accept Bethesda's trademarked flaws in mechanics, and tons of bugs, but I was eager to explore a brand new world, learn of unique lore.

And thus my innocence died.

At first I thought it was me. Here in this forum we're now used to overanalyze game design, but back then all I knew is that cRPGs were fun to me without really understanding why. Some games had been less fun to me, like NWN OC, but I didn't bother with knowing why exactly. Oblivion however opened my eyes, it was my blue pill. Seeing how much they had cared about combat in real time, I decided to roll a physically weak archer with some spellcasting support; that seemed to require some skill and sounded challenging. After the first hours I was thinking "So, I no longer enjoy RPGs? is this what growing up is about, no longer enjoying stuff you loved as a teen?". Everything was so bland and uninspiring, I couldn't care about it, felt like an unpaid second job. But I forced myself to play through it, because I was sure the "fun part" was right after the corner. Just another Oblivion Gate, this one won't be unbelievably long and dull. Just another step in the main quest, another generic medieval town, another oblivion gate,... and at some point it was over. I don't remember many details, it's all blurry in my mind.

I needed to know if the problem was me or the game, so I decided to test right away. There were many classic games I had never played, so I picked one and installed. M&M6, Mandate of Heaven. What followed was a 3-month long RPGasm which healed all my wounds.

That was half of my "awakening", for the second half I have to "thank" DA:O.

 

[luj1]

Oblivion turns 10 years old

Ah, the first true console RPG by bethesda

 

[Konjad]

This game is such a classic, so many good memories. Even character creation was engaging and I never knew how to make a good character.

 

[catfood]

Amazing 5 hour long retrospective video of this cult classic, courtesy of our own Bradylama