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TheMadGamer
High Emperor
Joined: 03 May 2002
Posts: 487
Location: Southern California |
| A Gamer's First Impressions |
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Well I finally got my grubby little hands on the PC version of Oblivion and decided to share my first experience with the game like 17,982 other posters on this forum for the benefit of those of you unlucky enough to still not have the game.
Quickly, my gaming background reaches back to the mid-70s beginning with the Odyssey 1 videogame system. My first exposure to an electronic ‘adventure’ type game was the Atari 2600 game, ‘Adventure.’ My favorite CRPGs in the 80s were the Ultima series, Wizardry, and Bard’s Tale series. I’ve also played every single TES game. I was even a beta tester for Daggerfall (/runs and hides). My most recent CRPG experiences include Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2, Morrowind, Gothic 1, Gothic 2 (plus its expansion which I’m actually just finishing up), Divine Divinity, and Arx Fatalis to name some of my favorites. Probably my favorite game of all time would be Ultima 7 The Black Gate. My library of CRPGs fills up a couple of 8 foot by 4 foot cabinets in my garage. Truly, it’s amazing I ever married.
I will write my impressions in a ‘stream of thought’ fashion and include whatever was running through my mind, regardless of how trivial. My first experience with the game includes the tutorial dungeon only so unless you’ve been purposefully hiding in a box it’s doubtful anything I will write will be a major spoiler… however… their may be *some* minor spoilers here so if you’re a freak about that stop reading now.
MY SYSTEM
Windows XP Home
Intel P4 3.4EE 800Mhz FSB w/2GB RAM
ATI X800 256mb
I run the game with a normal bootup that loads about 6 million processes because there’s nothing more important in the universe than for every single software maker to have a little icon sitting in your system tray.
THE BOX
As a proud supporter of Bethesda I purchased the Collector’s Edition (CE) of Oblivion. If not for my admiration of Bethesda and the kind of company they represent themselves to be, I probably would have just bought the plain version as the extra content didn’t really perk my interest all that much. The CE box opens in both directions outwardly so that what you end up with is a set of materials that will lay out across your whole desk. The presentation is very attractive. I really like the art style and color scheme of the Oblivion box art, manual, and related materials. Inside the box is a beefy lore manual, the Oblivion game disc, the Bonus DVD disc, and finally the Oblivion manual itself. There is also a little advertisement here for a mobile phone version of Oblivion. Interesting – as much as I’ve stalked Bethesda’s website over the last few months I never saw this until now. The screenshots of the Mobile phone version of Oblivion looks reminiscent of the now defunct Origin Systems game, Crusader, No Remorse. My only super-duper-minor gripe about the box is that it’s damn hard to close it all up without everything falling out of the sleeves. You really need 3 hands to do it properly.
LORE MANUAL and BONUS DVD
I have not yet explored either of these two items. I did quickly thumb through the Lore book but that’s it. I will probably read it from time to time before bed.
THE MANUAL
The manual is informative to a degree and reads quickly. I particularly appreciated the ‘Introduction to Oblivion’ section which provides a great overview of the type of game you are about to play. There were a number of how-to things I read in the manual that people here yesterday on this board were complaining that Oblivion could not do when in fact, unless the manual is lying, you can do. It’s really worth it to read the manual, it will save you a little frustration. The manual does leave a few things out that really should be there. A full description of the settings you can make in the various options menu should be there – especially since there are no ‘tooltips’ that further describe the meaning or purpose of each option setting. However, to be fair, you can find a full description of most of the option settings, particularly the visual settings, in the Readme.txt file included in the folder where you installed the game. But really, this should be in the manual. Another item not included in the manual is information about each Birthsign. While character development in-game is very informative, I still found it strange that the Birthsign info was omitted from the manual when all the other aspects of character creation (attributes, skills, races etc.) were included – it just seemed odd to leave this out.
INSTALLING
I put in the Oblivion disc. After a few moments the install wizard started. You specify a game location and it installs. It took under ten minutes for the game to install and there were no problems. Oblivion is my first DVD game. I found it very refreshing NOT having to swap numerous discs to get a game installed. The only super-duper-minor oddity I experienced with the installation process is that AFTER the installation meter completes to 100% and disappears the installer program remains open for quite some time, maybe two to three full minutes. While in this state, there are no pictures (you see pictures of Oblivion art during the installation) – all you see is the setup window which is all black. During this time, if you try to launch the game, you will get a missing DLL error message which may cause some people to panic (like me). Apparently the installer really is still doing something. So if this happens to you, just take a deep breath and wait – it really takes like 2 to 3 FULL minutes.
LAUNCHING
Launching the game gives you a nice menu with some pleasant music. From here you can set some of your visual options, manage your plug-in data files, and of course start the game itself. When you choose to start the game you get to a nice menu where you can start a new game or load previous saves and whatnot. Clicking start a new game plays a very cool intro video. The production of this intro was VERY well done.
OPTIONS
The various option menus are laid at well. I just wish that there were more in-game tooltips to help further explain some of the option settings, particularly options related to visual settings. You also need to pay attention to the scroll bar on the right. In many of the various option menus you might think there are only 4 or 5 settings when perhaps there is a list of far more options by scrolling down. One last remark is that some of the visual option settings require you to exit Oblivion before they take effect. Because there are quite a few visual options that require this, it could take a little bit of time to determine an optimal set of option settings for your machine.
THE BEGINNING
Finally, you’re in the game. You see a menu box on the left side of your screen and a nice large close-up of your soon-to-be avatar’s face on the right. There are a lot of customization sliders here to control more facial variations than I ever knew existed. If you’re the kind of CRPG player that isn’t in a big hurry, you’ll spend as much as 30 minutes here or even more, just customizing your facial appearance. I noticed at this point that my mouse movement was very sluggish and moved slowly. Going into the options menu, I slid the mouse speed slider all the way to the right. This only helped a little bit though and later when I got into the actual game itself, I had to slide the mouse speed slider back to the left because in-game movement was way too spastic with the mouse slider all the way to the right. So for now, unless there’s a patch or something, I’m experiencing slow mouse movement whenever I’m in menus. Not a super duper big deal, just a minor annoyance. Perhaps more tweaking of my visual settings will help with this but I can live with it for now.
THE INTERFACE
The War
This has been the subject of numerous posts by PC players. So far, I really don’t have any problems with the interface. I try hard to avoid making direct comparisons to prior games in the series, especially since one of Bethesda’s very own mandates is to re-imagine each game from the ground up. I enjoyed Morrowind’s interface for the most part… and for the most part Oblivion’s interface seems fine. I’m aware that the interface issue is a point of contention in the war between PC gamers and console gamers. Happily, I live outside this war and really don’t involve myself in it. While I’m a PC gamer first, I’m also a console gamer as well, I own just about every single U.S. based videogame console. I enjoy what each type of medium has to offer.
Sorting & Grouping
So far, I like how inventory items are grouped and I like the sorting options. However, it remains to be seen how well this holds up when you start to have a lot of objects in your inventory as well as a lot of variety of objects.
Information
I wish the icons in the interface had tooltips when you hover your mouse over them – this would really help people learn the interface faster and perhaps Bethesda might have avoided *some* of the complaining going on in the forums over this issue.
Map
I think there should be an assignable key that automatically opens your journal and focuses on your map. My work around for now is I try to make sure I’m viewing my map before I close my journal because the game remembers whatever part of your journal you were viewing last so if you close the journal while viewing your map you will see your map first when you activate your journal again. I enjoy the art employed to display the maps themselves, especially the world view map – it is quite attractive.
EDIT: Another gamer informed me that the F1 Through F4 keys take you directly to specific journal screens. F4 takes you to the map. So there you have it!
Containers
Another small oddity is how your input changes when you are viewing a container. Whenever you are viewing the contents of a container you can flip back and forth between your inventory and the container inventory which is nice, but I can’t seem to equip anything. If I try to equip something, instead the object just toggles between being in my inventory or the container’s inventory.
Equipped Item Comparison
One last thing that would be nice is that when you are hovering your mouse over an inventory item such as a weapon if there were a little box that popped open that showed the stats of your current weapon so you can quickly make a comparison – a feature from World of Warcraft that is hard to live without now.
Quest Log
I haven’t had very many quests up until this point, but the quest log seems to be a good improvement over Morrowind. You can make a specific quest active and have all the information about that particular quest appear on a separate tab which is quite convenient. The Map button on the quest page is a nice feature for quickly moving between the informational aspect of the quest to the locational information. It’s a nice touch.
QUICK FIRST DUNGEON OVERVIEW
A lot of people have already talked about this dungeon add-nauseum so I will just make a few points here. The scripted events all seem to work very well. I had no glitches or problems. The tutorial is also very helpful and I found it interesting that the tutorial itself is actually a quest – a nice touch. You get to do a little bit of everything in this dungeon, melee, cast magic, use archery, sneak around, repair some items, harvest mushrooms and plants, and perform a little alchemy. Only one weird thing happened to me at one point. I was walking along when two rats and a zombie charged me but then just kept going. They ran right past me all the way to the last door I had come through and then stopped. I chased them to where they were and none attacked me. So I attacked them. When I did this they attacked me back and all was normal again.
EDIT: Another player informed me that my experience with the rats and zombie running past me was actually Radiant AI in action. What was happening was that the zombie had attacked the rats (I did not witness this) and they all came into my view at the point where the rats were running away from the zombie. Makes sense to me now!
STABILITY
My initial play through lasted about two hours. I had zero crashes during this time.
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The Poster Previously Known As NeptiOfPovar |
Thu Mar 23, 2006 4:53 pm |
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corwin
On the Razorblade of Life
Joined: 10 Jun 2002
Posts: 8376
Location: Australia |
Having just finished the opening Dungeon myself, I agree with all you said. The original Character creation was a near nightmare for me as the mouse was SO slow and laggy. It was painful to spend time creating a character. Why is this so!!! The later menus were fine.
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If God said it, then that settles it!
I don't use Smileys, I use Emoticons!!
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Fri Mar 24, 2006 8:07 am |
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TheMadGamer
High Emperor
Joined: 03 May 2002
Posts: 487
Location: Southern California |
quote:
Originally posted by xSamhainx
Those facial options are so hilariously redundant. Might be fun to pick a famous person, and see if you can model the face of that person with the thing or something, sounds like a good elderscrolls.com contest 
Yeah there are a ton of facial options. It's one of those things that's cool that it's there but for me it's not really a 'must have.'
Though, I do admit, that when I first encountered it, it sure did add even more to the production value of the game.
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The Poster Previously Known As NeptiOfPovar |
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Sat Mar 25, 2006 4:20 am |
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