Oblivion: PC Gamer Praises in Preview

[Craigboy2]

In PS:T you could pretty much remove every game feature except the badly written page after page of text and have virtually the same game.  Ergo: PS:T wasn't a crpg; it was a book.  And a badly written one at that.  Wot a chunk of poo.

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It seems liked someone rubed you the wrong way, I liked Ps:T and I thought the story was pretty good.

[Craigboy2]

That was just for E3, in the game she won't set her dog on fire and she'd probably won't let you inside her house while she's sleeping.

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E3 just being a 'demo' is no excuse for writing the dumbest dialogue of all time.

 

"The whole thing is terrifying, actually. Would you mind staying around for a while? Just to keep me company?"

"Why would I stay in this dump?"

"There's no reason to be rude! You can leave now if you want!"

"I'm only kidding, my friend."

"Oh, silly me. I should have known you were only teasing. Please, come on upstairs with me."

 

I mean, seriously, what the freaking crap?

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You know that was almost a year ago.

[Volourn]

"You know that was almost a year ago."

 

I wa sborn 29 years ago. Nature regretted it then, nature regrets it now, nature will regret it in the future.

 

The truth is the truth no matter the time.

[Shadowstrider]

Uhm... as is the case in many demos, that text does not appear in the game, and was made quickly as a tool to show what the engine is capable of.

 

Whats next? You guys gonna make a comment on how pop-ups explaining how to use features in the game are breaking immersion? I've always liked how the Elder Scrolls games handled character creation, with you choosing things as you play through, allowing you to practice with them, then asking if you'd like to change anything at the end of character generation. That way if something does not function like you thought it would, you can change it quickly and practice with the changes some. That breaks immersion, though, so it needs to be omitted.

 

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

[Craigboy2]

"You know that was almost a year ago."

 

I wa sborn 29 years ago. Nature regretted it then, nature regrets it now, nature will regret it in the future.

 

The truth is the truth no matter the time.

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Holy **** what you just said was completely irrelevant!

[Volourn]

"Damned if you do, damned if you don't."

 

Welcome to the life of a game developer.

 

 

 

"Holy **** what you just said was completely irrelevant!"

 

Look closer, and the answers you seek shall be found within.

[Gromnir]

Wow, screw actual writing, RPGs dont need crap like that, Oblivion is going to be grrrrreat.

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There are a lot of people who believe that writing an ultra-tight story with minimal amounts of mostly insigificant player choice = role-playing. I know that Oblivion seems to be going very far away from that concept and that annoys a lot of people, but it seems great to me.

 

Bethesda tries to do a lot of experimental stuff in their games. Sometimes it fails (spectacularly), but I like the fact that they are doing it.

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don't hurt yourself beating on that strawman.

 

good writing does not necessarily require that a protagonist be coddled as he is forced down the critical path towards a fulfilling and coherent story. tangential and optional side quests were numerous in morrowind, and each of those tangential side quests offered an opportunity to be seeing how committed the bethesda folks were to exploring development of character and story w/o wrestling the pc into the necessarily confined choices available when advancing the critical path. instead, the bethesda folks introduced a legion of forgettable characters who were offering largely mundane and uninspired quests. in other words, morrowind were dull...

 

'course, as we know that josh is far too smarty to suggest that player freedom needs necessarily lead to lame characters and boring story, we will ease up on him as soon as he eases up on the scarecrow he is knocking the stuffing out of.

 

personally, we is willing to give bethesda a second shot. morrowind reminded us a great deal of bg1... w/o some of bg's few redeeming qualities... and look how much bio improved the bg model with bg2. however, we dislikes the pov that oblivion has chosen, and the art looks hideous... so they better have overhauled morrowind's gameplay and writing in a big way if Gromnir is gonna be won over

 

HA! Good Fun!

[alanschu]

I really have no problem with Bethesda. Because they ara making crappy games, and i am not buying them. Everyone is happy, right? Yes, but until Fallout 3.

 

Please Bethesda, don't touch my game, don't touch my memories...

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What games? Name one crappy game.

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The funny thing is that somehow his memories of Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 seemed to be directly tied to Fallout 3.

[Gromnir]

for some, fo ain't a game as much as it is a religious icon. did the holy grail ever exist? ultimately does it matter if it did or did not?

 

HA! Good Fun!

[alanschu]

Fair enough.

 

I still think it's silly that a separate product would really taint the memories that someone had with a different one.

[Darque]

Everyone has their own opinion on things

[alanschu]

Fair enough.

 

 

I remain optimistic, as I'd really like FO3 to kick ass.

[Darque]

I'd love for it to be the best game ever

 

I'm not sure it'll happen... unless they get the feel/story right. <_<

[Shadowstrider]

good writing does not necessarily require that a protagonist be coddled as he is forced down the critical path towards a fulfilling and coherent story.  tangential and optional side quests were numerous in morrowind, and each of those tangential side quests offered an opportunity to be seeing how committed the bethesda folks were to exploring development of character and story w/o wrestling the pc into the necessarily confined choices available when advancing the critical path.  instead, the bethesda folks introduced a legion of forgettable characters who were offering largely mundane and uninspired quests.    in other words, morrowind were dull...

<Snip>

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Absolutely. The first chance I get, I'm going to pitch some of my ideas to the dark overlords who rule Bethesda with an iron fist. First though, I have to meet them, and half the design staff.

 

As for the art, Oblivion is a beautiful game. I don't see how it could be considered ugly, by any stretch of the imagination.

 

As for Morrowind, it did a lot right, but a lot wrong; as with any game. The characters were forgettable, no doubt, the dialogue was impersonal, which lead to the NPCs being forgettable. I think Oblivion improves on this, despite its lack of "Standard" dialogue. Some NPCs are forgettable, and this is by design. You shouldn't remember every Tom, ****, and Harry you meet in the Imperial City, but the Radiant AI helps to bring them to life. You can see them going about their normal routine, talking to their neighbors, with each load yielding a slightly different dialogue. Sometimes it can yielf wonky things, and I suppose someone could fireball their own dog... I just don't think I've seen it happen. That'd sure teach him to stay off the couch, though.

[Meshugger]

In PS:T you could pretty much remove every game feature except the badly written page after page of text and have virtually the same game.  Ergo: PS:T wasn't a crpg; it was a book.  And a badly written one at that.  Wot a chunk of poo.

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Wow, hold it there miss. If Planescape: Torment wasn't a good story, then what is a good story for an RPG?

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Where did I use the word story?

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No need to be a smartmouth.

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No smartmouth here. I ws merely noting that tere is a difference between "story" (ie plot) and the writing that conveys said story. Plus PS:T has a lot of writing that has nothing to do with the stoiry arc in the first place.

 

Thirdly: my primary point was not about the poor and self-indulgent writing (hello Reekwind! wtf? ) but that the most seriously interactive aspect of PS:T is moving the scrollbar.

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That has to be the first time i heard an argument like this, are you implying that even if the writing is bad and fails to convey the story in a good matter, the story itself can be awesome/great/marvellous?

 

If true, then Oblivion has the possibility to have the best story ever.

[Dark_Raven]

To each their own. I feel Fallout 3 should not be made. It's been too long between sequels and I do not favor the idea of strangers to the game series to work on it. A terrible shame that BIS and Interplay bit the dust. I would have looked forward to this game from them.

[astr0creep]

I loved Morrowind.

 

I LOVED Morrowind. It was the (almost) perfect RPG, a lot better than NWN. It did not take you by the hand to show you where to go and what to do. it allowed you to do WHATEVER you wanted, be WHOEVER you wanted to be and the great Construction Set allowed you to expand on that.

The story was very good. You become a frakkin' god! It was however diluted by the huge environment and hours upon hours of exploration which made plot points few and far between.

 

You can actually get lost in this game!

 

Total immersion due to great FP perspective(the only way to play!)

 

The graphics at the time were state of the art, especially if your machine could handle a bit more workload. Lightyears beyond what NWN offered. Most bugs could be fixed simply by reducing the resolution by one notch.

 

Granted, character models, voices and sounds could've been better, but they were fixed later with truly fantastic user mods.

 

The player made the game balanced or not, easy or hard and all of this was available within the game, out of the box.

 

Morrowind allowed the player to actually play a role! It even allowed the player to create and customize a role. Because it was a role-playing game, not an adventure game!

 

Best of all, for once there was an original RPG product that didn't rely on D&D!

[Gromnir]

"As for the art, Oblivion is a beautiful game. I don't see how it could be considered ugly, by any stretch of the imagination."

 

you not gotta stretch 'magination very far at all... simply look at the flat, vacant faces bethesda has given their characters. bethesda shoot for photorealism, and came up short... landed at creepy instead.

 

am not a fan of blizzard. we don't play wow and got no urge to try. however, we thinks that the folks over at blizzard made the right choice in opting for a disneyesque primary color kinda world as 'posed to trying for photorealism. sure, we would prefer something more dark and more grim than the rainbow hued landscape and peoples of wow, but blizzard seemed to recognize that trying to inch closer to realism were a wasted effort. blizzard instead took art inspiration from cartoons & comicbooks.

 

maybe someday personal computers will be goodly enough to run games that got cgi to rival peter jackson's gollum or Kong, but we think that anything short of that will be tending to look bland or... creepy.

 

HA! Good Fun!

[Musopticon?]

I agree, Bethesda tried the same thing with Morrowind, and all the faces ended up being replaced with new ones by the fans.

Edited January 17, 2006 by Musopticon?

[Kaftan Barlast]

Morrowind allowed the player to actually play a role! It even allowed the player to create and customize a role. Because it was a role-playing game, not an adventure game!

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Roleplaying requires dialouge. You need to be able to express your character in different ways through dialouge choices to simulate you speaking as your character in PnP. Morrowinds "keyword" wikisystem made that impossible

[astr0creep]

Morrowind allowed the player to actually play a role! It even allowed the player to create and customize a role. Because it was a role-playing game, not an adventure game!

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

Roleplaying requires dialouge. You need to be able to express your character in different ways through dialouge choices to simulate you speaking as your character in PnP. Morrowinds "keyword" wikisystem made that impossible

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

What is the difference between clicking keywords and clicking key sentences?

 

In order to communicate the way you write about, a game would have to include speech recognition or typing, much like the old adventure games like King's Quest. Or, MMORPGs.

[mkreku]

I still don't understand how the same guys who defend Planescape: Torment's stilted and forced dialogue can sit here and flame Morrowind's keyword dialogue. Keywords really should be a better way of doing dialogue, since no matter how many premade answers you get to a question, there's never the one you, yourself, would have thought of.

 

Of course, I disliked both Morrowind's and Planescape: Torment's dialogue so maybe I shouldn't write at all in this thread

 

 

Edit: Spelling and choice of words.

Edited January 17, 2006 by mkreku

[Kaftan Barlast]

The differance is that a keyword like

 

PORK SODA

 

 

Doesnt let you express you character. Prewritten dialouge like

-Hey @sshole! Are you the dirty bastard who stole my pork soda?

-Pardon me, sir. Have you seen a can of pork soda around here?

-Hiya! Im on the prowl for pork soda... so have you seen any?

 

Does allow you expression, its limited of course, but it still allows you to express the personality of your character which is the most essential part of roleplaying.

[alanschu]

Morrowind allowed the player to actually play a role! It even allowed the player to create and customize a role. Because it was a role-playing game, not an adventure game!

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

Roleplaying requires dialouge. You need to be able to express your character in different ways through dialouge choices to simulate you speaking as your character in PnP. Morrowinds "keyword" wikisystem made that impossible

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

I guess this was a new development. Must have missed the memo.

[astr0creep]

The differance is that a keyword like

 

PORK SODA

 

 

Doesnt let you express you character. Prewritten dialouge like

-Hey @sshole! Are you the dirty bastard who stole my pork soda?

-Pardon me, sir. Have you seen a can of pork soda around here?

-Hiya! Im on the prowl for pork soda... so have you seen any?

 

Does allow you expression, its limited of course, but it still allows you to express the personality of your character which is the most essential part of roleplaying.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Again, it depends how you roleplay.

 

When I click on Pork Soda in Morrowind, in my head I speak a sentence to the NPC. To me (and i'm not the only one), less description allows for more roleplay because I can make up any sentence that I want. I choose, in my head how my character will react. In NWN, the game tells you how to react by giving a limited choice. Good, Neutral, Evil. D&D.

 

I see and understand your point though. And I have no real preference for one style or the other. I just never had a problem with Morrowind's conversations and I have a problem in understanding why some people make such a big deal out of it. The story is told, the ideas are there.

Edited January 17, 2006 by astr0creep