Lord_Haart wrote:Ok, here's some facts about Oblivion in reply to the near-flaming (negative comments based on heresay):
(1) Rund BEAUTIFULLY on my P4 2.4GHz, X800pro system. Looks like 1000* better than H5. EVERY LINE of speech is voice acted, with full lip-synching.
(2) AI is excellent, near human at times.
(3) Gameplay is incredible - the combat system isn't as deep as DMoMM (which makes sense since Oblivion is and RPG while DM is an FPS), but is still immensely satitsfying. After nearly 200 hours on the game, I'm still not bored of fireballing monsters and watching them get hurled through the air.
(4) DIFFICULTY IS SCALABLE - yes, enemies scale with you, but on both PC and Xbox there is also a difficulty slider you can change at any time. And instead of easy/normal/hard, it has a full range 1-100. So if you feel the game is too hard, turn it down a bit at a time. Too easy, turn it up. It's a really natureal way to do this.
I can't help feeling this is directed towards me :p On point 1, yes Oblivion looks better than Heroes, the voice acting is greatly superior (although I kind of like Agreal I don't care for most of the other voice actors). The only flaw in the voice sand story in Oblivion is that they didn't hire enough actors for all the parts (after some time you recognise the arch mage actor for instance, playing guards, necromancers ect). It's still excellent though. I put the similar sounding characters down to race and accent it doesn’t effect immersion too much and is understandable from a real world perspective.
2, The ai out of the box was great for simulating people shopping and the like, but the combat is much improved by some of the mods (like the Oblivion Overhaul mod) while still not perfect this does make some of the ranged monsters like Necromancers much more difficult (since they now run from you and then when you stop to fight there summoned mobs they turn around and start spellslinging again). The game has the potential for even better ai than is presented in Oblivion, (by which I mean, the code is present in the game but isn't used, some mods and hopefully the expansion will make more use of the potential).
3, The game is Good. Better than morrowind, the story is engaging, the side quests are amusing, the game is well constructed. (although short compared to Morrowind). How good you find it will depend on if you like open ended rpgs (I prefer Baldur's gate style myself but that's just a personal preference).
4, Have you tried the difficulty slider at max? It's a joke, you'll get an entire level up off swinging your sword against a single wolf almost... you won't have enough magic regen to be able to take the magic route, and will need invisibility to take the stealth route. It doesn't make the enemy play better or have more spells and options, it just increases hit points which totally wrecks there combat system.
In any case it still doesn't solve the problem I was referring to when saying enemies were autoleveled, what I mean is.. a level 1 wolf has set stats which are in relation to yours. When you level up in Oblivion all wolves in the game level up too, all the wolves become "level 2 wolf" never again will a level 1 wolf spawn. The loot is similarly levelled, if you get a sword to drop at level 1 it will be the "level 1 sword of magic" if you get it to drop at level 3 you get the "level 3 sword of magic". It means you can finish the whole game without ever levelling up once which has been done or at an absurdly low level (say level 4... which I've seen done).
You should compare this to MM7, where you can go fight a dragon at level 1 and get your ass handed too you, or you can go at the end of the game when the dragons are just as tough but when you are significantly more powerful in relation to the game world. In oblivion if you went to fight a dragon at level 1 it would instead of a dragon, spawn in something like, "an ailing sick dragon with a slight cold and an oncoming heart attack," but you would never find something you couldn't beat.
~ Rapier.