Oblivion turns 10 years old

[unfairlight]

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is good & I like it.

 

[catfood]

 

[Dakka]

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is good & I like it.

I always had a lot of autistic item collection habits in the game

 

[Makabb]

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

Talking about Oblivion for 5 hours

 

[vdweller]

When it came out it was the best hiking simulator ever. Running nude in the sunset! Hit it, Jeremy!

Not sure why you keep throwing the word "RPG" around in this thread.

 

[unfairlight]

Talking about Oblivion for 5 hours

I watched it all, real good shit to be honest. Unfortunate he won't be doing any more like that. Worth a watch still, he goes over the good and bad pretty fairly.

 

[Tom Selleck]

You could start and play and get tired of and quit Oblivion in 5 hours and don't need get a weird secondhand impression from no internet megasperg youtube instead.

 

[the_shadow]

When I first tried Oblivion a few years ago I thought it was lousy. All I remembered was it being a pale shadow of Morrowind with some confusing and pointless minigames (lockpicking and speechcraft). Reading this thread inspired me to give it a second chance, so I cranked it up to the hardest difficulty and started a mage character. My thoughts so far, negatives and positives:

Negatives:

- It keeps the same level up system that Morrowind had, where your PC is actually better off having skills that don't use often as Majors to better control stat point gains on leveling. I wouldn't count this as a strike against Oblivion since Morrowind had the same flaw, but it's even more important in this game to control the pace at which you level due to the level scaling.

- Enchanting, alchemy and spell-making don't seem quite a powerful as in Morrowind.

- The mini-games are still annoying, although not as bad as I originally thought. You can ace the lockpicking mini-game once you know a very simple trick, and the speechcraft mini-game isn't hard, just dumb. Why on earth would threatening some PC's increase their disposition towards you?

- They got rid of levitation and mark-recall.

- Level scaling of items. I can understand why they did it, but I dunno, this is just a preference thing.

- Main plot is kind of boring.

- The world just seems smaller than in Morrowind.

- Restoration takes *forever* to increase. At higher levels it takes at least 4 minutes to increase Restoration by 1 with constant casting.

- Everything costs an arm and a leg.

Positives:

- Combat is much more enjoyable than in Morrowind

- No cliffracers

- Dialogue is handled a bit better than in Morrowind

- Quest design is better than Skyrim, and while the main plot is boring, at least it doesn't rely on OMG dragons

- I'm actually impressed by the radiant A.I. Yeah yeah, I know it has its flaws, but it was pretty ambitious for its time. It reminds me of the level of NPCs interactivity that Ultima 7 had

- Level scaling. Again, it wasn't executed as well as it could have been, but at least humanoid enemies remain somewhat of a challenge as you level up, even if they are a few levels below you

- I enjoyed the Thieves Guild quests.


Overall the game is decent if you do your own thing and try not to compare it too much to its predecessors.

 

[vdweller]

Talking about Oblivion for 5 hours

I watched it all

 

[MWaser]

Positives:

- Level scaling

 

[Rinslin Merwind]

When I first tried Oblivion a few years ago I thought it was lousy. All I remembered was it being a pale shadow of Morrowind with some confusing and pointless minigames (lockpicking and speechcraft). Reading this thread inspired me to give it a second chance, so I cranked it up to the hardest difficulty and started a mage character. My thoughts so far, negatives and positives:

Negatives:

- It keeps the same level up system that Morrowind had, where your PC is actually better off having skills that don't use often as Majors to better control stat point gains on leveling. I wouldn't count this as a strike against Oblivion since Morrowind had the same flaw, but it's even more important in this game to control the pace at which you level due to the level scaling.

- Enchanting, alchemy and spell-making don't seem quite a powerful as in Morrowind.

- The mini-games are still annoying, although not as bad as I originally thought. You can ace the lockpicking mini-game once you know a very simple trick, and the speechcraft mini-game isn't hard, just dumb. Why on earth would threatening some PC's increase their disposition towards you?

- They got rid of levitation and mark-recall.

- Level scaling of items. I can understand why they did it, but I dunno, this is just a preference thing.

- Main plot is kind of boring.

- The world just seems smaller than in Morrowind.

- Restoration takes *forever* to increase. At higher levels it takes at least 4 minutes to increase Restoration by 1 with constant casting.

- Everything costs an arm and a leg.

Positives:

- Combat is much more enjoyable than in Morrowind

- No cliffracers

- Dialogue is handled a bit better than in Morrowind

- Quest design is better than Skyrim, and while the main plot is boring, at least it doesn't rely on OMG dragons

- I'm actually impressed by the radiant A.I. Yeah yeah, I know it has its flaws, but it was pretty ambitious for its time. It reminds me of the level of NPCs interactivity that Ultima 7 had

- Level scaling. Again, it wasn't executed as well as it could have been, but at least humanoid enemies remain somewhat of a challenge as you level up, even if they are a few levels below you

- I enjoyed the Thieves Guild quests.


Overall the game is decent if you do your own thing and try not to compare it too much to its predecessors.

Agreed almost with all except npc level scaling. Level scaling is bad for me, not because npc become too hard, but because it just unrealistic even for video game. If I am remembering correctly, in Middle Ages bandits was mostly from poor peasants and villagers, they barely had any militia training. Sure they were able to gain some useful tricks during their attacks on caravans, but for them it was almost impossible to gain knight training in swordsmanship. In another words: If you gain level after slaughtering whole bandits cave, it does NOT mean next bandits should be more tough guys than previous, this is just not make any sense because they can be from same village. Not sure connecting Oblivion with real world is right, but I hope you got my point.

And yes, overall game is decent for it's time release and to be honest people who hate game with such fiery butthurt after more than 10 years since relise is overreacting a bit. Sure people can have full right to call that game a shit, but judging from many replies in this thread some people seems to be specially waited 10 years and their volcano finally erupted. I see nothing wrong with that, just too much emotions about game which came out so long ago.

 

[the_shadow]

Positives:

- Level scaling

Again, the way level-scaling was implemented wasn't great, but Morrowind is far too easy once you gained a few levels. Level-scaling mitigates that somewhat.

 

[circ]

level scaling is fine in some situations my friend. see one of the problems with lack of level scaling is you railroad the player. not very immersive.

 

[Popiel]

Ten years of shit.

 

[DosBuster]

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.

Someone actually did get dynamic real time shadows into Oblivion, but I remember it basically making the game unplayable.

 

[Zer0wing]

Someone actually did get dynamic real time shadows into Oblivion, but I remember it basically making the game unplayable.

These are the functions built in engine and that's what Bethesda cut without further development.

 

[DosBuster]

 

[Hirato]

Someone actually did get dynamic real time shadows into Oblivion, but I remember it basically making the game unplayable.

These are the functions built in engine and that's what Bethesda cut without further development.

They were using pretty much the same version of the engine as Larian did for Divinity II, the latter of which did allow full dynamic lighting and shadows as an option.

 

[Zer0wing]

They were using pretty much the same version of the engine as Larian did for Divinity II, the latter of which did allow full dynamic lighting and shadows as an option.

How come one corporation with experience of working with the engine be so incompetent, more than some struggling small indie studio?

Holy shit, I forgot about Divinity II. Which does have dynamic shadows'n'shit on Xbox 360.

 

[the_shadow]

I'm not trying to be facetious here, but does anyone really care about shadows in first person/third person games that don't involve stealth? The only real benefit of having shadows is being able to see someone before they can see you.

 

[Hirato]

I don't really care if it's realtime or not, but without shadows the entire environment just looks flat, ugly, and uninteresting.

The main sticking point is a lack of contrast, which primarily comes from shadows.
And when you have a game like oblivion where everything is assembled from half a dozen set pieces, lighting (and by extension shadows) are one of the only things you can do to make each area distinctive and set them apart.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

When I first tried Oblivion a few years ago I thought it was lousy. All I remembered was it being a pale shadow of Morrowind with some confusing and pointless minigames (lockpicking and speechcraft). Reading this thread inspired me to give it a second chance, so I cranked it up to the hardest difficulty and started a mage character. My thoughts so far, negatives and positives:

Negatives:

- It keeps the same level up system that Morrowind had, where your PC is actually better off having skills that don't use often as Majors to better control stat point gains on leveling. I wouldn't count this as a strike against Oblivion since Morrowind had the same flaw, but it's even more important in this game to control the pace at which you level due to the level scaling.

- Enchanting, alchemy and spell-making don't seem quite a powerful as in Morrowind.

- The mini-games are still annoying, although not as bad as I originally thought. You can ace the lockpicking mini-game once you know a very simple trick, and the speechcraft mini-game isn't hard, just dumb. Why on earth would threatening some PC's increase their disposition towards you?

- They got rid of levitation and mark-recall.

- Level scaling of items. I can understand why they did it, but I dunno, this is just a preference thing.

- Main plot is kind of boring.

- The world just seems smaller than in Morrowind.

- Restoration takes *forever* to increase. At higher levels it takes at least 4 minutes to increase Restoration by 1 with constant casting.

- Everything costs an arm and a leg.

Positives:

- Combat is much more enjoyable than in Morrowind

- No cliffracers

- Dialogue is handled a bit better than in Morrowind

- Quest design is better than Skyrim, and while the main plot is boring, at least it doesn't rely on OMG dragons

- I'm actually impressed by the radiant A.I. Yeah yeah, I know it has its flaws, but it was pretty ambitious for its time. It reminds me of the level of NPCs interactivity that Ultima 7 had

- Level scaling. Again, it wasn't executed as well as it could have been, but at least humanoid enemies remain somewhat of a challenge as you level up, even if they are a few levels below you

- I enjoyed the Thieves Guild quests.


Overall the game is decent if you do your own thing and try not to compare it too much to its predecessors.

Agreed almost with all except npc level scaling. Level scaling is bad for me, not because npc become too hard, but because it just unrealistic even for video game. If I am remembering correctly, in Middle Ages bandits was mostly from poor peasants and villagers, they barely had any militia training. Sure they were able to gain some useful tricks during their attacks on caravans, but for them it was almost impossible to gain knight training in swordsmanship. In another words: If you gain level after slaughtering whole bandits cave, it does NOT mean next bandits should be more tough guys than previous, this is just not make any sense because they can be from same village. Not sure connecting Oblivion with real world is right, but I hope you got my point.

And yes, overall game is decent for it's time release and to be honest people who hate game with such fiery butthurt after more than 10 years since relise is overreacting a bit. Sure people can have full right to call that game a shit, but judging from many replies in this thread some people seems to be specially waited 10 years and their volcano finally erupted. I see nothing wrong with that, just too much emotions about game which came out so long ago.

How was it decent for its time? It's a combat driven and the games combat system is fucking terrible. On its own it's bad enough, that it came two years after Namco's Breakdown makes its first person combat seem all the worse.

 

[Rinslin Merwind]

How was it decent for its time? It's a combat driven and the games combat system is fucking terrible. On its own it's bad enough, that it came two years after Namco's Breakdown makes its first person combat seem all the worse.

Well, I will not argue about terrible combat system, everyone has their preferences. Personally I think combat system in Oblivion is slightly boring, but aged better than Morrowind combat system. But I want to ask you why you compare Xbox exclusive with auto-lock system (as many others console games) and multi-platform game where you actually need block attacks sometimes and retreat? Sadly, I never played Breakdown, so I can’t compare (I can't even find gameplay video or pictures) these two games.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Morrowind would have probably being doing itself some favors by having a lock-on system. Lot of that games problems are how it presents itself, it gives you control like it's a FPS, but then stuff doesn't actually hit where you're aiming. You take manually aiming a targeting reticle out of the equation and I'm sure a lot of those problems go away. But that's shooting, and I was talking more melee combat.

Video shows melee moves tutorial at 10:30.



You've got to block and retreat in Breakdown, far more than in any Elder Scrolls fight.

 

[Zer0wing]

I'm not trying to be facetious here, but does anyone really care about shadows in first person/third person games that don't involve stealth?

Oblivion sure does have stealth, BTW...