Elder Scrolls: Oblivion

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
My pet peeve with the current system is soul gems. No more low level creatures to fill the soul gems with. The greater gems are hard to come by (somehow that dosen’t scale in the stores) or I am missing something. After 2-3 captured souls I keep on getting the message that I do not have a gem powerful enough for the soul.

Downloading the mod the remove the scaling. Give me my rats and wolves!!!!!!
 
So between level 15-20 you are in trouble due to the lack of a proper soul gem supply.
Anyway a great game but it has its balancing issues.
 
Well isn't the point of levelling being able to dominate the lowly animals that scared you the first time round.

What's the point in having the exact same kind of difficulty in a battle for the entire game regardless of your level? Where is the drive to make you char better?
 
To tell the truth, I kill things like timber wolves with one swipe (level 17-18). Spriggans (their damned heal spell) and will-o-wisps (their thrice-damned drain spell) have become beatable by just sword where that was totally impossible before.

The only thing that remains at constant difficulty are the NPCs, bandits and such. I actualy like that (despite it ruining the immersion somewhat): the stuff you get from fallen badits is much better* and the game remains challenging.



*Ebony cuirass+longsword from a marauder captain just yesterday.
 
As for the soul gem thing, after reading a FAQ, I don't think the level of the creature affects it's soul-level, just the type.

All hominid NPCs have 1600 soul-points and can only be captured using a black soul-gem.
 
Yeah but the problem is that most of the soul gems that I have are of the lesser type and creatures that I meet are those that require the better gems that are almost impossible to find.

I guess I’ll have to start collecting black soul gems. :twisted:

Anyway I download a mod that removes the scaling. It’s totally fun. Bandits and other humanoids are at high levels but realistically equipped. The main fun is in the monsters while there are a lot of low level monsters there are also a few that are urber powerful. There is a spell that works like the detect life but it detects the level of the monster as compared to yours. Brings a whole new level to gameplay IMHO. Now whenever I see a monster I have to decide whether to engage or not. Real fun. :) Yesterday I was chased by 2 minotaur lords half way across the countryside. 😀
 
Well isn't the point of levelling being able to dominate the lowly animals that scared you the first time round.

What's the point in having the exact same kind of difficulty in a battle for the entire game regardless of your level? Where is the drive to make you char better?
Click to expand...

That may be the point of levelling for you, and you're welcome to it. I think the idea of scaling was so that the game would be consistently challenging throughout and never become too much of a cake walk. I know some people like cake walks by end-game, and enjoy that feeling of confident superiority. (Again, they're welcome to it.) But the Elder Scrolls series is all about giving players a huge world and no particular rules or timetables, so the game creators really can't be sure at what level the players would be doing any particular thing. So everything scales to be a reasonable challenge no matter when the player hits it. In some ways, it makes sense.
 
O come on, give it a little bit longer than that. Almost no game can really grab you in 30 minutes.

However, if RPG is not your thing, then it's not going to work, not in 30 minutes and not in 30 hours.
 
I love games like Baldurs Gate II. I like old school rpgs.

Oblivion is like wander through the start dungeon. Get that certain item and bring it to a certain person.

Wander off, do a few side dungeons. Bored, everything is samey so far.

Arrive at place and I'm off again on a trek across the wilderness. Is this a walking game or something else? I'm confused....

I'm not totally finished with it. As I've said before Eve swallows most of my gaming time atm so I don't have much time for anything else. However I don't hold out much hope as very open ended games don't do it for me.
 
I love games like Baldurs Gate II. I like old school rpgs.
Click to expand...

It's funny: I cashed in a gift certificate to buy Oblivion, but there was just a little money left on it, so I picked up the Icewind Dale Collection at the same time (which I'd never played; loved all the other Black Isle standards, though, back in the day).

You'd think the newer, glitzier, high-performance game would leave the older one in the dust, but absolutely not: I find myself playing both equally as often, and ID is the one I find myself thinking about most when I'm not playing. I love getting a game of ID1 going, finding some 80s tunes streaming on a radio station somewhere, and gettin' all retro with it. 😛

Anyway.
 
balders gate was something i never managed to get into for some reason i just didnt like it didnt grab me.

Oblivion on the other hand has grabbed me ive just went over the 40 hour mark and havnt completed the main game yet. But i do have 3 houses(i stole all the money i needed) playing a bad character, did all black hand missions and all arena, three quaters the way through the thieves guild.

btw i have the cheap 2000 shack(fully furnished) the house in Bruma and the most expensive house(25000) fully furnished 😀

i love this game for the most part, a few things bug me like the crap health spells and the way your horse trys to "help" you in battles but just gets in the way, same with other characters that are meant to help you but they just get in the way and you accidently kill them.ARGH!
 
I love games like Baldurs Gate II. I like old school rpgs.
Click to expand...

It's funny: I cashed in a gift certificate to buy Oblivion, but there was just a little money left on it, so I picked up the Icewind Dale Collection at the same time (which I'd never played; loved all the other Black Isle standards, though, back in the day).



Give me lovely static back grounds and isometric view points any day. It's my strong belief that 3d is not always the way forward in some games.
 
Anyone else got or getting this? Initial user reports are good especially the sys reqs.

I'm thinking I'll get it, I just hope it's a little less open ended as Morrowind and a bit more structured. Wolfy isn't fond of do what you like games as they quickly feel pointless.

Importantly I hope they solved my biggest gripe of the first game whereby traders often didn't have the money to buy your loot.
Click to expand...

Its funny you know. I would like to purchase the game but I dont like shelling out $90 odd Aus dollars for these games. I simply dont get that much out of them.

I play to excess, thats for sure, but its pyschological with me - I can afford to buy them and I strongly believe in supporting the developers through purchasing legit software, but I know I will be disappointed if I do buy at top dollar. I now find myself waiting a few months for them to drop their prices. They often halve in price after 5-6 months.

Weird, I know.
 
Give me lovely static back grounds and isometric view points any day. It's my strong belief that 3d is not always the way forward in some games.
Click to expand...

Absolutely concur! Baldurs Gate still looks ok and its almost a decade old!

Which is a big reason why Neverwinter nights was a horrid disappointment for me. I just didnt dig the 3d engine.
 
Weird, I know.
Click to expand...

Not weird at all. Let's be kind and call it "a mature perspective" instead. I actually do the same thing, for 4 reasons:

1. I can't play every game at the same time, so I try to be selective if I'm going to pay full price for something, and then I play the heck out of it. I find that if I have too many games going at the same time, I end up not finishing any of them.

2. The longer you wait, the better the price is (as you've already said).

3. The longer you wait, the longer your PC will last you before you need to upgrade (after all, why upgrade right away when there are still 5 games you want that will run fine on your old system?).

4. In some ways the most important: the longer you wait, the better chance there is of a patch being available to fix the debilitating bugs the game shipped with. *sigh*
 
Yep, excellent points.

Although, that said, Stano may be right in that this game might remain highly priced for a little longer...

But regardless, I agree and waiting a little while for a product to come off the proverbial "market-crazy boil" is a good thing and applies to all products, not just games, eh.

Its funny too, the more I get into some of the gripes on this game, the less I'm interested.

I've got a full copy of Baldurs Gate 2 here with the expansion that I'm yet to load up [had it for over 3 years]. That will keep me going for 6 months, at least, anyways. :lol:
 
It's really a good game. Once I was swimming in the river in Cheydinhal with nothing on except my thongs when I heard "For Lord Dagon!" behind me. I turned around and saw two Lord Dagon followers fully armored and armed charging towards me. There's nothing I could do except to swim to the middle of the river. Luckily the other npcs killed off those 2 buggers. Talk about getting caught with your pants down.
 
I've been playing for awhile now. Gorgeous game that is pushing my AMD FX-55, X800XT, 2 gig RAM system. Currently I am not going with any of the mods so as to get a better sense of the leveling up of the NPCs. I found the old system - NPCs staying constant - a little boring when I got to a certain point, though Morrowind remained interesting throughout. On the other hand, I'm more interested in the game's story lines and quests than just hacking and slashing, which feels more like a FPS with swords than an RPG. Had an interesting experience - went to help defend a farm and inadvertently killed a farmer; his brother then attacked me and I killed him in self defense. Their father went into severe mourning and didn't give me a reward as he now had funeral expenses. And, of course, the Black Brotherhood visited me that night. Interesting - "friendly fire."

Lobo
 
Ironically, after I got my copy of the game on the 21st, I didn't post anywhere online for 11 days or so. So I largely missed this thread.

As for the comments on leveling, I like most of it, as I liked it as it was in Daggerfall, which leveled monsters to you in an even more strict manner. Particularly, I prefer this for NPCs. However, when I wind up getting faced with undead enemies that have craploads of health, it's not so fun. It also makes "class change" darn-near impossible, as I found out when I took my (master-level) wizard and attempted to pick back up the sword I had put down at level 3. At any rate, I didn't mind the enemies doing craploads more damage, it was just that I simply HAD to use my uber-level destruction magic or get killed pretty quick. It was also annoying that enemies grew to requiring me using my best spell 3-5 times to kill them, rather than it simply being outright overkill.

The obscene monster health, and the other gripe for leveling are the special abilities; I constantly tire of the "your willpower/intelligence has been damaged" message from will-'o-the-wisps, and the healing powers of the spriggans, make fighting them in melee a no-no; again, with many combat instances, I find myself simply blasting them away with magic.
Importantly I hope they solved my biggest gripe of the first game whereby traders often didn't have the money to buy your loot.
Click to expand...
I don't see anybody else mentioning it, but I believe you have found their solution; I personally like it, that the price limit is simply PER TRANSACTION, rather than per day.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom