HoonDing

Where exactly?

Have you looked at the thread about how to run the game on Vista: Link ?

Unless your computer is ancient (pre 2005), it should run fine on XP.

Not without a nice cup of metagaming:

Shawshank Redemption. Very good, but nothing like the book.

I guess it'd be hard for any Tolkien-related MMO to stick faithfully to the lore of the creator... 'magic' as in D&D magic would be restricted to the Istari & wielders of the Three, female characters would be restricted to staying at home, etc. Not to mention that the entire premise of LOTR was that the only hope of vanquishing 'evil' was to destroy the One Ring. Victory by arms was impossible to the numeric superiority of the Enemy & the division among the Free Peoples of the West.

*wipes away tears* This totally made my day...

Wow, that's impressive... I'm definitely going to give this game a try when it's out. If there's any MMO being able to kill World of Warcraft, it should be this one.

I wouldn't be surprised if the MMO 'explains' what happened to Revan/Exile in the Unknown Regions to render a KOTOR 3 unnecessary.

I thought that one was notoriously bad.

I would rather have it done manually, not by a god damn skill. Hell, I'd rather be the one fishing, than watching some dumb**** throw a fly into the water and try to pull a fish out and have to watch. Have you been playing Fable too much? Largest fish I caught in that game was around 200 kgs. No kidding.

*cough* Soresu *cough*

Near the end of the game, is there any way to

I don't know... usually when I am actually consciously looking items in a Bethesda game, they all seem to disappear from the game.

The dungeons usually contained a decent item, it was just all scaled to the PC's level. In Morrowind one could enter a ruin at level 1 and come out in full ebony armor IF one managed to somehow overcome insurmountable odds.

I did enjoy Oblivion on its own terms but compared to Daggerfall & Morrowind it is indeed completely ****. Maybe Bethesda will redeem themselves with TES V... FO3 was a step in the good direction for me. Biggest problem is they completely messed up the lore... like the 'bad guy' misnaming all Daedric realms near the end of the main quest - which wasn't intentional but due to mistakes made by writers... would this had happened with Ted Peterson or Michael Kirkbride still around? EDIT: Also what they did in Shivering Isles was greatly over-the-top... they turned lore topsy-turvy because they thought it would be fun (and indeed it was, becoming Mad God and what not), but I highly doubt they thought about the consequences of this on future Elder Scrolls games. In all Elder Scrolls games the previous hero 'disappeared', but when a hero becomes a 'god'... well.... Another example is the upcoming Elder Scrolls novels, where suddenly a flying city of undead & a new Prince appears out of nowhere... fun indeed.

Well, it's understandable considering the mages guild plotline centered around the war with the King of Worms. Only problem was that the legendary King of Worms turned to be a big pansy once you faced him, to say the least. Very disappointing.

Kreia mentions on Korriban that compared to the old masters (e.g. Tulak Hord) the current Jedi are mere children playing with toys - and that was 4,000 years before Sidious. Hence Naga Sadow/Tulak Hord/Freedon Nadd/... > Revan/Exile/Bastila/... > Yoda/Mace Windu/Sidious/...

I am going to try The Secret World when it is out. I'm curious to see this product FunCom spent so much blood & sweat on instead of making TLJ 2 Dreamfall Chapters..

Mind Trick is severely underrated.

Isn't there another thread for FO3 bashing?

Shivering Isles >> Oblivion. Once I entered the 'mysterious door', I never returned to Cyrodiil. Heh, Haskill & Sheogorath are the only memorable NPCs in the whole Elder Scrolls IV, which is pretty sad.

Imo, the Daedric quests, the entire Dark Brotherhood/Thieves Guild questline and some of the unique city quests were hardly mundane, predictable, etc.

Bloodmoon

Keep looking, then... there are a lot of quests that are quite different from what you describe. But yes, I'm done with Oblivion myself. I only fire it up if I want to mess around with Morroblivion a bit.