Now we descend into Oblivion ... (pt 3)

[El_Cid]

Another link from me

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?SCID=27&CIID=36546&p=1

which people may or may not know about. I have a few ini changes already, but still was not completely satisfied with the performance i had been getting from the game, and it seems the further into the game you go the slower it becomes(just a drop of a few FPS max, but a pain).

So i found this site, tried the 'performance' ini tweaks and it worked(remember to make a back up of your origonal ini file - it can be quite handy).

Now i get 20-26 outside in the forests etc, around 30-35 in towns, and 35-40+ in dungeons. I've gained roughly between 2-10 fps over those various sections, which has made alot of difference. It would be nice to get more, but i'm hoping patches+ GPU software upgrades add the rest as they get released.

I hope some find this useful

Also that site has a decent overview on Modding:

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?SCID=27&CIID=36919

I would add the fewer Mods you can get away with the better(performance wise). I'm currently running 10+ a few that fix quest bugs and a few that make it look nicer(LOD landsacape + colour map mods).

A word of warning; i did try two mods that added extra weapons and armour - and it messed something up - all the gaurds in the imperial city developed invisible bodies(heads and feet still there!). And the only way i could fix the problem was by re-installing Oblivion(a pain in its own right - it doesn't like to unistall itself!). So keep back ups of important saves and dont go too crazy on the mods

[Rasputin]

man oh man , i at a frustating moment.

I doing the Lost historys quest and cant locate the damn butler for skinigrad. i folow the indicators to his location on my map, but when i ge tthere it moves , it goes from in the city to the in the castle, i talk to the NPCs and they tell me certai ntimes he will be in certain palces. if i wait for him he doesnt show !!!!

i know htere are aother ways to finish the quest, but it appears he is also the only person to sell my the house in skinigrad and i want that house !!!!


any ideas folks, this is on the XBOX 360 so cnat laod any patches eetc.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I'm not playing so much on weekdays anymore. I can't afford to stay up until 2AM and then get up at 6:30AM for work.

It's all weekend playing for me now .

[Quillan]

Ras, he moves around town. You'll just have to look for him, or else go back to the castle and use the wait function. A word of advice, wait in at least 4 hour chunks. For some reason, waiting in 1 hour increments never seems to adjust things. I was trying to get a guy alone during one of the DB quests, and he was sitting down to eat in an inn, at 9 pm. So I waited, and waited, and waited, ad nauseum. He sat there and ate for 12 hours, as I waited 1 hour at a time. Reloading the save I made right before waiting the first time, I waited 4 hours and it reloaded the inn. If you wait until around 5-6 pm in one chunk, he'll probably be back in the castle.

[Rasputin]

ok i did try waiting but yes it was normally only the small blocks as you say. will try the longr waits and see if he returns home to castle.

[Silver14]

I've taken a break from Oblivion, an extended break now as I had to reinstall my OS this weekend. I should be getting some parts in on Tuesday to help fix the problem for good.

Which means I'll have to hunt down all the good mods again, which probably isn't a bad thing seeing as they have probably been updated by now.

Oh and Solver/Snoopy, you might want to lock the Oblivion Vol II thread, it was above the Vol III thread.

[Harovan]

I'm also on Oblivion vacation. I won't touch it again until the godawful German localization is fixed. A patch is in the making, as I read today.

[Sirian]

OK. Solver wants to read my blather on the topic of Oblivion. Why? I'm not sure. But here I am. If any of this (the parts not tagged) are deemed to be too spoilerish, let me know and I can tag them. I'm not going to reveal any specifics in the open, but perhaps even some general insights would disrupt some folks. (Although, honestly, if you don't want ANY spoilers, then you should do what I did, and avoid any talk of the game until you've played most of it.)

Originally posted by bonscott
Well, I've hit the point in the game where I've got more money then Talos. I actually bought the house in Choral (pretty cool actually).

That's not a lot of money.

Spoiler:

On my highest char, I ran out of things to do with my cash. Hauling 900 pounds worth of Daedric gear out of every gate I close and selling off the items for 1700 apiece (usually, sometimes 1500) will rack up the ridiculous dough pretty quickly, even though the items weigh 60 and 90 pounds apiece, most of them. At least I went from 100k to 350k without really noticing passing through the land of 200k. (I must have, though. ... Right?)

Money really isn't an object in the game at all, thanks to the preponderance of magic gear that swarm the land as you reach high levels. Past a certain point, the spigot will open, and you will only ever be short on cash until your next run through a bandit or marauder lair, or anything else with opponents who wield weapons and wear armor. You can't really AVOID reaching high levels, either, although you can go a little slower if you wield two-handed weaponry and/or operate an armorless mage who uses fewer, mightier spells. It will still go by quickly, though. Your major skills are set to gain faster than your minors, so using them at all will level you in short order. You can stop leveling if you have a few skills you rely that have maxed at 100, and you deliberately avoid using the others (if you don't need them) but I'd think you'd have to really game the system hard to get a char that has reached this plateau at something less than about clvl 17 or so. You could, of course, reach a point at which you simply stop sleeping. If you never sleep again, you'll never level again. That's doable.

Where money plays its part is in what you can buy now vs what you have to wait until later to get.


You can min/max your way to unfun in this game. You really need discipline to set some personal boundaries. An easy one to start is not to (legally) steal and sell off all the junk lying around the guildhouses of guilds that you join. Go out and get your own alchemical apparatuses (it happens fairly quickly anyway, just clear out a den of necromancers or conjurers, or spend the pennies to buy some). You can also decide not to go out of your way to specifically "self-train" skills you aren't using. That's harder for me to stick with, though.

I spent a lot of time playing this game through the guilds and side quests and various dungeon-delving with no questing going on, before I advanced the main quest with any of my chars. I'm so glad I did this, since as several people in this thread have pointed out, the Oblivion portion of the program is insufficiently varied.

The best thing to do with an Oblivion Gate:

Spoiler:

The best thing to do with an Oblivion Gate is to identify the fastest route through, doing the minimal activity, and just go. Get to the main tower, charge up through there, close the darn thing and move on. Most of the "optional" gates scattered around are lazy programming anyway: repeats of the same few designs, and thankfully, mostly repeats of the designs with shortcuts through them that let you out of there faster.

The best way to play the game may be the one I stumbled on by accident: play several different chars, instead of trying to do it all with one char, so that you spend more of your gaming hours in the low and middle levels. Try out the different ways of playing a char, the different skill sets, and move on to a new char when one gets old. Start your next char in a different town, doing a different set of side quests and local dungeons than you've done before, or than you've done at low levels. Try different races, male and female, and even try some unusual combinations like a Redguard Thief, an Imperial Mage, or an Altmer Warrior. Go with the weaker signs, like the Serpent or the Tower, and work hard to build a persona for your character that you stick to, rather than merely using the character as a vehicle to advance to the most power you can in the shortest time. There's a ton of great gameplay in there, but you may have to color outside the lines a bit to find it all.

If the main quest is boring you, avoid it. You don't have to advance it at all. I didn't even start the main quest with my highest char until she was clvl 28. In fact, for me, it will be a variant to start a new char and move quickly through the main quest at low levels.


As for lockpicks, I can pick any lock with any level of Security skill with three picks or less, and that's only if I'm rushing. I can do it without breaking a pick at all if I'm being careful. With one char, I picked something like my first 70 locks, including a bunch of Hard and Very Hard ones, before I broke my first pick, and that was with a mage who started at 5 Security. I didn't see anybody with the answer, so here it is:

Spoiler:

OK, I'm not actually going to hand it to you on a silver platter, just point you in the right direction. There is no pattern, and the visual cues are unreliable. The secret lies in the sound. Listen, the way a real thief picking a real lock would listen. You can pick your way out of jail at level one with the single pick you can hide (I've done it) once you become adept at listening.

The thief gameplay (and I don't mean the quests, though those are good) is some of the best and most challenging. There's a lot of variation in targets and opportunities to get caught in the act. Plus the rewards are modest, generally, and this is one side of the game that scales little to none. What's in place to steal is what's there and does not generally increase in value as you level up.

I also advise players who are looking to get more out of the game to start over and avoid doing things to level your char faster. Go ahead and use those power spells, rather than using weaker ones more often. You level slower relative to what you are doing, and the longer you delay reaching high level, the more goodness you get packed in to your gameplay before things start to trail off into boredom at the high levels. Switch to two-handed weaponry, or use the best weapon available. Use more power attacks, so that you kill in fewer blows. You WANT to slow down your leveling. You don't get anything out of leveling up, because (almost) all of the opposition simply levels up with you. It's counterintuitive, but you are better off to level slower, in most cases. The more you level up, stat up, and item up, the more your char tends to lose his or her definition and blend in to an "uberchar" that can do it all. That's not where the bulk of the fun lies -- at least for me. I bet for many others, too.

If there are two things I could change about this game, they would be:

Spoiler:

1. That the stat system would not effectively penalize you for roleplaying your char instead, so that it stops being the only right choice (strategically) to min/max stats through the minigame of which skills to use when. The system of major vs minor skills needs more work. It's unbalanced in favor of gaming the system, all the more so because monsters increase at a flat rate, meaning that a char who increases stats slower is losing relative strength. Players don't really want that.
2. That the gameplay on the Plane of Oblivion would be more varied and interesting. The gate idea is clever, but they cornered themselves with it and got bogged down. Always putting the gate seal at the top of the tower means always getting to and then climbing the tower, with nothing truly interesting or worthwhile to explore on the side. That's not good. The only variation really is in getting to the tower. Once inside, it really doesn't matter how the various levels interconnect. It's a simple maze, any way you cut it.

I might change more, but it's better to identify the biggest fun stealers first, and nitpick later or not at all.

I really love the writing in this game, by the way. It's so good, I'm not going to say anything critical about it.


- Sirian

[asleepathewheel]

I would rather there not be hundreds of caves and mines that are unrelated to quests and have nothing of extraordinary value. They tend to just be variarions on the same themes with different breeds of enemies. Im just wrapping up my first full game after maybe 100 game hours (I left it running a few times during dinner etc) and have barely touched the non-quest places, and frankly I don't see a reason to.

My next game I'm going to check out one of the leveller mods and also build my character into a slow leveller, ie, use majors that I will rarely use in the game-h2h, mysticism. Its really a backwards way to play, palying a character against his major skills, but that might make it more enjoyable (though, with already 100 hours in, I've certainly gotten what I paid for.)

[Solver]

OK. Solver wants to read my blather on the topic of Oblivion. Why? I'm not sure.

Thanks Sirian . Suffice to say, since we met, I've developed a taste for your posts and comments on games.

(Although, honestly, if you don't want ANY spoilers, then you should do what I did, and avoid any talk of the game until you've played most of it.)

Hehe... playing "most" of Oblivion would take what, 200 hours ?

Money really isn't an object in the game at all, thanks to the preponderance of magic gear that swarm the land as you reach high levels. Past a certain point, the spigot will open, and you will only ever be short on cash until your next run through a bandit or marauder lair, or anything else with opponents who wield weapons and wear armor.

Thankfully, however, money IS scarce on the lower levels. And that I appreciated. At level 5 or 6, I actually had to count my money when doing shopping, as I just didn't have the funds to buy everything I might want. The later levels... yeah. Once Ebony and Daedric armor starts popping up on every bandit, you can't really help but become very rich.

You can min/max your way to unfun in this game. You really need discipline to set some personal boundaries. An easy one to start is not to (legally) steal and sell off all the junk lying around the guildhouses of guilds that you join. Go out and get your own alchemical apparatuses (it happens fairly quickly anyway, just clear out a den of necromancers or conjurers, or spend the pennies to buy some). You can also decide not to go out of your way to specifically "self-train" skills you aren't using. That's harder for me to stick with, though.

This is just like Morrowind. One of the strengths of this game (and Morrowind) is open-endedness. However, that of course conflicts with balance. hence, you either powerplay or set some limits for yourself, and you should probably do the latter - it IS a roleplaying game after all. I am, for example, playing a "good" character. So I do not steal from guilds, or people's houses. I also increase my skills by actually using them, I hardly ever "self-train". Hmm, well, Oblivion really does let you play it however you want.

Playing several characters is surely the way to go for more longevity. For example, if my first character is a good mage, then surely playing a, say, chaotic-evil thief character would be good for the second time - Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild, that's different quests, and a totally different approach to doing other stuff. Backstab and steal instead of persuade and buy, so to speak.

Got to agree about the Oblivion gates... they are a downside. They sure look impressive, the realm of Oblivion itself look great, but they do become sort of boring because of how similar they are. On the upside, there's usually some fun action in Oblivion, so it's not all bad.

[Brundlefly]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
I'm not playing so much on weekdays anymore. I can't afford to stay up until 2AM and then get up at 6:30AM for work.

It's all weekend playing for me now .

thats exactly what i do. i wish i had your discipline..

[Rasputin]

I love the game it is great. i dont want to learn any easy ways of doing things, lockpicking should be hard not easy so i tend to pickpocket keys to get what i want not use lockpicks. but i am just lazy when it comes to listening to the pins in the locks.

[El_Cid]

I going to be leaving Oblivion for quite a while i think. I've played it over many times now(not getting that far into the main quest or even beyond level 6), trying first the vanilla game and then various mods that i felt would add that missing ingredient.

My conclusion is that i still feel this game has huge potential to be as engrosing as either Daggerfall or Morrowind, so it does contain a great bang for the buck ratio. But at the momment, as it stands, i find it lacking in important area's. Area's that the TES games are usualy strong on(choice, epicness, rpging potential etc).

Once the patches have come out and the Mods have been improved and built upon i'm fairly confident Oblivion will become an essential game for me. Untill that time i'm going back to my Daggerfall game, and am going to be replaying Morrowind - this time on pc(not xbox) with all the many excellent fan based mods i can.

The best thing that has come out of my Oblivion adventure so far is that now i have a very decent PC that should have no trouble playing any game out there(except Oblivion..smoothly ).

Oh and i understand how people can get lured into thinking that graphics are a games most important quality - so now i can really give better games judgements, as i too was lured by the looks of Oblivion for the first few weeks.

Potential sums up my overall thoughts on the game, its has lots of potential. I'm also happy i've played just enough to come to this conclusion, without having to worry about getting bored of replaying it - i've just scratched the surface of the quests so far.

Here's looking to some fine patches and mods and a bright Oblivion future.

In the meantime i'll see you in either Morrowind or around the Iliac bay

[Silver14]

A beta patch has been released for Oblivion.

You can find it at ElderScrolls.com.

It was released yesterday on May 2nd.

They advise in the Release Notes not to install the patch unless you are having some of the problems discussed in the notes.

[Spaced Cowboy]

Like it crashes to the desktop every time I exit?

Which IMO is the best place for a game to crash.

I'm fairly close to the finish, so I'll pass on the patch and go back to gal civ2.