TITLE: Woo @ Oblivion AUTHOR: Tom Carrick DATE: 11/06/2005 01:11:00 ap. ----- BODY:
Hopefully as a nice contrast to the STALKER post. Oblivion. I am looking forward to you. You have just been delayed, until "Early 2006". Heh, early. Yeah, anytime before June, then. But I don't mind. At first I was upset about having to wait, especially after just doing a bunch of upgrades so that it will actually run. Now however, I'm fairly happy about it, for two reasons. The most obvious is that we may get a good game out of it. Now don't get me wrong, Daggerfall and Morrowind are both sexy games, but both randomly crash, and Daggerfall is simply horrible with all the bugs, even after all the patches. If I'm going to get a game that doesn't crash out of this, I'm happy. If I'm going to get a truly great experience out of this, with no crashing, I'm even happier. The second reason is a spiteful bitch of a reason. It won't be a launch title for the xbox360. Why isn't this a good reason? Well it is, if you're an xbox fan. I however, am not. I hope the 360 will slump, and with many of the launch titles delayed it's quite possible. Unlikely, unfortunately, but still, it has more chance now. So why, after delays, and a game that's taken ages to develop in the first place, am I still childishly excited about it? I don't know. Maybe the hype's getting to me. I watched the movies up on The Elder Scrolls website. The trailer was a bit dull, but watching the nerdy guy play the game and talk was truly impressive. There were a few things that truly impress me about them. First, the trivial. The forest looks gorgeous. The wind effects are realistic, the trees look beautiful - though a little fake still. Hopefully they will be polished up for the release. Also the animals are a little tacky looking. Specifically, the horse in this screen shot looks quite fake. Hopefully the animals will blend a little better into the environment on release, too. Next, the fight scene. Incredible. It actually looks a bit like what people slashing each other up with swords might look like. Not just a couple of people standing still going "OK I'LL HIT YOU. THEN YOU HIT ME, OKAY?". However... (yes, always a however), it looks slightly weird in the dungeon. My bet is it's 'cause it's an E3 demo, but when the guy's shooting all these things with a bow, I can't see a bloody thing. Nothing. At all. How about a little light, eh? Maybe they were actually visible on the screen if you were actually there, though. Truly, the most impressive thing was the AI. Radiant AI or some such they call it. But it is truly awe inspiring. The example used was a little over the top, what with fireballing your pet dog and all, and I hope this doesn't happen all the time, since the dog population would diminish quite quickly. I also hope there's safeguards there that stop characters important to the plot being killed by random people getting fed up of them and fireballing them. I also like how people have schedules. I was sort of annoyed by the fact that everyone in Morrowind didn't need sleep. They'd just run their stores 24 hours and never leave, take a lunch break, go for a piss (ok, so I don't really need Oblivion to model a shopkeeper going for a piss break, but you get the point), sleep, or anything else, really. The AI used in the demo, though, looked really set-up. I mean, he just walks in there and all that stuff happens without any sort of scripting? I find it difficult to believe. I will definitely enjoy it though, if it works out as well as it seems. Having interesting people to talk to all of the time would be nice. Although I understand they'd probably say the same things, just at different times or depending on their mood, it's a lot better than the basically static Morrowind or Daggerfall NPCs who litter the game doing nothing but saying the same thing as everyone else, independent of the world around them. Okay, upon proofreading this for me, I've been semi-reliably informed by Kyosho that (I'll just post an edited log):
<Kyosho> Okay, the thing in the chick's upstairs apartment, with the dog and all... Yes that was somewhat scripted. It was all AI, but they put in some specific things they wanted her (and the dog) to do, and whether they did them (and the order they did them, I believe) was up to the AI <Kyosho> They wanted something cool for E3, so they fixed it a bit so the player wouldn't have to stand around for an hour to see something cool happen. <Kyosho> meaning, it wasn't completely random. <Kyosho> But think about it, why on earth would you ever want an NPC to kill her dog? and what real person would EVER go to bed while a stranger is in the room? it was all set up. <Knyght> so if you wait around, that stuff might actually happen, should the right potions and spells be known by that character? <Kyosho> yeah
and:
<Kyosho> Okay, the thing about killing plot-related characters... <Kyosho> If you try and kill them, they won't die. They'll just fall down. They'll stand back up after a while. Once they've played their part in the main storyline, you can kill them properly. <Kyosho> Of course, Bethesda has gone through many changes of this system. But I think they're finally sticking with that one.
So, trying to end this gracefully, I'll just say that I'm expecting great things from Bethesda. If I don't get them, they *will* be killed.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Blogger Tom Carrick EMAIL: URL: DATE: 01:06 Yeah. I started writing this article thingy a few hours after they posted that. Seems apt timing, I suppose. I WANT MY OBLIVION :(

Guess I'll just piss off back to Morrowind for a while, though. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Blogger KyoshoBallard EMAIL: URL: DATE: 02:17 Well since basically everything I would've said in a comment ended up in the article, I will just say this. I do not want the 360 to fail. I want it to win this new console war. Sony was the obvious victor last time. With recent things like that rootkit by Sony, I hope they burn. Sony has become even more evil than Microsoft. In fact, in recent years, Microsoft has become a pretty good company. I'm rooting for the 360 this time around. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Blogger Tom Carrick EMAIL: URL: DATE: 02:20 Oh, sure, xbox should win over sony, but nintendo should reign supreme. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Blogger KyoshoBallard EMAIL: URL: DATE: 02:25 It'd be nice for Nintendo to win, but with their gimmicky Revolution, who knows what will happen. I predict Gamecube-level sales. ----- --------