From the screenshots Oblivion looks like it could be a great game. I hope they make it as good or (hopefully) better than Morrowind. Unfortunately, games can sometimes turn out to be worse than what we hope them to be so I’m going to keep my fingers crossed on this one. But the first batch of screenshots do IMHO look really good.
What does everyone else think?
Looks cool. The green grass and trees will be a nice change from Morrowind. Guess I’d better get on the ball and finish the main quest!
Bah, Arena and Daggerfall have still left awful tastes in my mouth. Such potential, such little delivery.
I haven’t played either of those but I LOVE Morrowind and I’m hoping this next game will be even better.
I can’t wait! I played the hell out of the original one and the first expansion pack (by the time of the second, I figured >80 hours on one game was plenty).
It looks a million times better than Morrowind, which at the time was gorgeous except for the character models. But more than that, I’m looking forward to just getting into a big story like that one again.
I loved Daggerfall.
I really liked Morrowind.
I will likely give it a try. The more open-ended they make it, the better.
I’ve read it’s going to be geographically smaller than Morrowind, which is depressing. I like sprawling rpg’s, even if they do wind up rather samey in places.
It does look pretty cool, though. Hope it holds up.
The environments look beautiful, but why does every game these days have to be about demons from hell overruning the world and eating the flesh and/or souls of the living? What happened to rescuing the princess?
I was really looking forward to Morrowind for a long time but between the dark tone and exploitable money system, I somehow managed to get bored of a game that didn’t hold my interest in the first place.
Bethesda seems to have really good ideas but poor execution. I’ll probably pick this one up when it drops to $20.
I can understand not liking the dark tone. That’s personal choice, and who am I to question yours.
But why complain about an exploitable money system? It is a single-player game only. It may be exploitable, but you can choose not to exploit it. To me, that’s like complaining that a god-mode hack makes a game unenjoyable.
I’m not so worried about that. But if you think about it, Morrowind had a lot of space but not a lot to fill all that space. My hope is that since it’s smaller Bethesda will put more towns that are busier, and hopefully larger, than the current Morrowind towns.
(I’m assuming this exploit was posted on the 'net. I never really read up on Morrowind after its release so I never saw it.)
I picked up Morrowind the day it launched and this was on of the first things I noticed. It’s not that the money system was exploitable. It’s that it was so ridiculously easily exploitable that I couldn’t get excited about going out and grinding to earn money. It was too easy to get unlimited money for “free”.
I personally need a game to present at least a reasonable challenge for it to be interesting. That’s why I never used game genie and I don’t read gaming magazines or websites with cheat codes. When a “cheat” is so in-your-face like the money in Morrowind, it’s hard not to take advantage of it and thus it spoils, to an extent, my enjoyment of the game.
If it is not using the Creeper and his 24 hour / 5K gold, I missed it. I also got it very early (first week), and while on my second or third time through I learned the codes for different items, I don’t know of any money exploit. And that was using every cheezy tactic I could on the third try.
If you remember, could you post the exploit (spoilered in case someone might still buy the game and play it without viewing websites).
Y’know, I had the opposite feeling about Morrowind–even the outdoor areas were too small. It always seemed like you couldn’t go 20 feet without tripping over a building, an encounter or some kind of exotic ruin. I always thought it was hysterical that there were these demon infested hell-holes a stones throw from all the major cities. Maybe that explains why there weren’t any children around. 
Spread everything out and give me a fast horse or a magic carpet or a fast travel option like in Daggerfall. I shouldn’t be able to run from one side of the playing map to the other in less than 30 minutes. 
Anyway, I just wanted more of a realistic scale. Bigger cities. More spaces between. Etc.
Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve played, so my memory is vague, but here’s what I remember . . .
(Spoiler-boxes seriously screw with my browser and I hate them, so following the golden rule I try not to use them)
SPOILER
It was simple economics. IIRC, you could choose the price you wanted to buy or sell something for. So find someone that really likes you and sell something to them for way more than the default price, then buy back the same item for way less than the default price. Repeat as necessary.
Ah, the persuasion option. Understood. I found going to every single merchant (who never had enough $$ for good gear) in each town more of a grind than whacking stuff with my little ebony dagger. That, and my skill at persuasion was never all that good.
To each his own.
Why go through all that trouble when I can piss an Ordinator off, kill him, then sell some of his armor to the Creeper? 
Just don’t let the others catch you…
You could never carry all their armor!
How would this work though, I didn’t find that big a price difference on most items, and most merchants don’t have a whole lot of gold to begin with. So you could maybe clean out 500 gold from a merchant? I could do that with just 1 really good item I got from looting off combat corpses. There are plenty of items that you can’t even sell for their value because there isn’t a merchant with enough money to buy those items around.
Seems like the exploit would be pretty self limiting because of the low merchant money, or in the very least much more time consuming than leveling.
I seem to recall at least one merchant with about 5,000 gold (I know this sounds crazy but I recall him being a crab?) and it also seems like I remember a way to reset a merchant’s money pool. So I could drain, reset, drain, reset, etc.
The Creeper had 5000, but you couldn’t persuade him. He was some minor demon.
The crab (which I found only after reading FAQs, on my third time thru) had 10,000K, if memory serves. It also couldn’t be persuaded. The crab was in an out-of-the-way place. I’m wondering why anyone would talk to him in the first place.
To get full value, you had to keep going through a cycle of buying, selling and sleeping (which reset the merchant cash). After 5 game days of doing that, I gave up. If I didn’t have a huge purchase in mind, it was too mind-numbingly boring. I was 25,000 gold richer (plus some more because I would clear out all the other merchants’ gold), but I wasn’t having fun. That’s as fun as doing the early Thieve’s Guild quest and just keep trying to steal and reloading until you make your percentile roll. Might as well just cheat your skill up, or cheat the item into inventory.