Chylde Roland
March 22nd, 2006, 10:54 am
Okay, time for some impressions.
In a word, the game is beautiful. The environments, characters and monsters are all very, very well rendered. They look like something out of Half Life 2, with realistic facial expressions and roving eyes. When you talk to someone, you can tell how they feel about any given subject by the expression on their face, and the tone of their voice.
One very nice touch is that all the dialog is spoken, even for the more generic NPCs, such as wandering citizens, guards and shopkeepers. They even stop in the street and talk to each other about good shops, and current events/gossip. One minor complaint I have so far is that the voices and their mouth movements don't always seem to synch up properly. But to be honest, I’m just glad they all speak now.
The interface has changed a bit since Morrowind as well. You no longer use the right mouse button to bring up your menus, it's actually used to block during combat. To access the menus, you press tab, or a function key for a specific menu. And there's a LOT more menus than there were in MW. I liked the menus in MW because you could do one right click and see the map, your character sheet, inventory and magic, all on one screen. In Oblivion, you use the tab key to open your menus, then you have to navigate around to get to what you're looking for. I can see why the interface needed to change a bit, and I'm sure I'll get used to it, so it's nothing that major.
The nice thing about the new interface is that you don't have to "ready" your magic anymore. In MW, you could only have your magic or your weapon equipped, not both at the same time, so you had to switch them up. In Oblivion, you can equip a spell, then you can have your weapon out during a fight, and all you need to do is press C to cast your spell. It works well, I like being able to cast a fireball or heal while in the midst of a melee.
The beginning of the game is extremely well done. During this portion, you get a taste of almost all of the different skills, and certainly all of the major ones. They put you into situations where you can use melee combat with a blade, magic combat with a few minor starting spells (I had one offensive and a couple of defensive spells. I don't know if this will change depending on your character or not), marksmanship with a bow and arrows, lock-picking and sneaking. By the time you're finished with the beginning portion, you'll have designed your race and gender, picked your birth sign, picked (or designed) your class and looted a pretty decent assortment of starting equipment.
I have to say I spent a rather long time designing my character, I went with a female Nord named Calleigh. The character designer is very robust, it felt like I was making a Sim for play in the Sims 2. You can adjust ANYTHING about the character, except their height and build (unless that was there and I missed it). I just dove right in and started playing, so I may have missed a thing or two on the way.
Performance wise, here's my specs: P4 2.4 HTT, ATI Radeon 9800 pro 128MB, and 1.5 GB of PC3200 DDR. I cannot run this game at full spec. I'm still experimenting, but it seems to be not too bad at 1024x768 with AAx2. I've turned the shadows way down, because I don't like them anyway, and turned the blood decals down to half, and that seems not too bad. I haven't been in an extremely combat heavy situation yet, so I'm not sure how well this work. I've had some stutter here and there, but I'm still tweaking. No bugs to report thus far.
That said, I am thinking of an upgrade, either a processor upgrade to a 3.0 GHz CPU (which is the max my current mobo will allow) or to another video card. I'm not sure which will give me the best boost, so any comments in that regard would be welcome.
Anyway, I've only played about 3 hours of the game so far, but that's about how things stack up at this point. If I run into anything else, I'll be sure to post about it.
And no Stiler, I haven't ridden any horsies yet, I haven't even seen one. :lol:
The CE came with some decent goodies, as I mentioned in that other thread. I didn't get a chance to take any pics of the goodies, but I'll try to do that tonight and add them here.
In a word, the game is beautiful. The environments, characters and monsters are all very, very well rendered. They look like something out of Half Life 2, with realistic facial expressions and roving eyes. When you talk to someone, you can tell how they feel about any given subject by the expression on their face, and the tone of their voice.
One very nice touch is that all the dialog is spoken, even for the more generic NPCs, such as wandering citizens, guards and shopkeepers. They even stop in the street and talk to each other about good shops, and current events/gossip. One minor complaint I have so far is that the voices and their mouth movements don't always seem to synch up properly. But to be honest, I’m just glad they all speak now.
The interface has changed a bit since Morrowind as well. You no longer use the right mouse button to bring up your menus, it's actually used to block during combat. To access the menus, you press tab, or a function key for a specific menu. And there's a LOT more menus than there were in MW. I liked the menus in MW because you could do one right click and see the map, your character sheet, inventory and magic, all on one screen. In Oblivion, you use the tab key to open your menus, then you have to navigate around to get to what you're looking for. I can see why the interface needed to change a bit, and I'm sure I'll get used to it, so it's nothing that major.
The nice thing about the new interface is that you don't have to "ready" your magic anymore. In MW, you could only have your magic or your weapon equipped, not both at the same time, so you had to switch them up. In Oblivion, you can equip a spell, then you can have your weapon out during a fight, and all you need to do is press C to cast your spell. It works well, I like being able to cast a fireball or heal while in the midst of a melee.
The beginning of the game is extremely well done. During this portion, you get a taste of almost all of the different skills, and certainly all of the major ones. They put you into situations where you can use melee combat with a blade, magic combat with a few minor starting spells (I had one offensive and a couple of defensive spells. I don't know if this will change depending on your character or not), marksmanship with a bow and arrows, lock-picking and sneaking. By the time you're finished with the beginning portion, you'll have designed your race and gender, picked your birth sign, picked (or designed) your class and looted a pretty decent assortment of starting equipment.
I have to say I spent a rather long time designing my character, I went with a female Nord named Calleigh. The character designer is very robust, it felt like I was making a Sim for play in the Sims 2. You can adjust ANYTHING about the character, except their height and build (unless that was there and I missed it). I just dove right in and started playing, so I may have missed a thing or two on the way.
Performance wise, here's my specs: P4 2.4 HTT, ATI Radeon 9800 pro 128MB, and 1.5 GB of PC3200 DDR. I cannot run this game at full spec. I'm still experimenting, but it seems to be not too bad at 1024x768 with AAx2. I've turned the shadows way down, because I don't like them anyway, and turned the blood decals down to half, and that seems not too bad. I haven't been in an extremely combat heavy situation yet, so I'm not sure how well this work. I've had some stutter here and there, but I'm still tweaking. No bugs to report thus far.
That said, I am thinking of an upgrade, either a processor upgrade to a 3.0 GHz CPU (which is the max my current mobo will allow) or to another video card. I'm not sure which will give me the best boost, so any comments in that regard would be welcome.
Anyway, I've only played about 3 hours of the game so far, but that's about how things stack up at this point. If I run into anything else, I'll be sure to post about it.
And no Stiler, I haven't ridden any horsies yet, I haven't even seen one. :lol:
The CE came with some decent goodies, as I mentioned in that other thread. I didn't get a chance to take any pics of the goodies, but I'll try to do that tonight and add them here.