Fuck you, Bethesda Software

The BBQ Pit
1

As someone once put it, I am filled to the brim with Grrrr.

Normally, I’m a very occupied Media student who does Youth politics on the side. I like to keep busy, gives me less time to think and I feel more in charge, and more comfortable with myself. However, I’ve always been something of a games geek. It’s been dormant these last two years, as my schedule has picked up, but there was this one game that I really, really, really wanted to play, as the predecessor was a lot of fun to pick up when I had a few hours to spare.

Most of you will probably have inferred, by now, that the game I’m talking about is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. So, today, on the one free day I’ve had in a period of three weeks and will have in a further period of three weeks, I stop off after school to pick up my copy. Of course, I have to shelve-race from store to store, but finally, at Play Com’s downtown, I manage to pick one up. Big YAY!

I take the buss and ferry back home to my island, go to two meetings in the evening and then - finally! - two hours ago, I settle back in my stressless and tear the plastic manically off the casing and insert the DVD.

Crickets
Crickets
Chack chack chhhhhack chhhhack chhhhack
Wild howls of anguish

That, my readers, is the sound of my DVD ROM NOT being able to read the gorramn DVD and tossing in some surface-mutilation as a pure bonus. Now, I’ve tested the DVD on my father’s work computer in their apartment a few minutes away; works fine. But it just won’t fucking work, down here. AAAAARGH!

Of course, you groan, I can just hand in the DVD and get a fresh copy! That’s bound to solve the problems. I wish it was; the Play Com salesman grinned at me as I picked up my copy; it was the very last one, and due to downprioritizing the local warehouse to the advantage of a bigger town’s, nearby, he won’t get in any more copies for ten days! YARGH! I want - no, DEMAND Oblivion, DAMNIT!. And I mean that in more ways than one.

Oh. Just to toss insult on top of injury, the Forum Registration part of Bethesda’s support function now refuses to load the security pass “image,” so I can’t go there to bitch and moan, either. The humanity.

Regards,
Bash

(Apologies regarding my English, I’m a Norwegian college student and I’m out of touch. Have mercy)

2

You sound like a militiant Buddhism. “What do we want? The surcease of desire! When do we want it? NOW!”

Too bad about your game. I got mine last night, and it’s seriously cool. Unfortunetly, it looks like I need to drop some cash on a new video card to get the most out of it. I turned the settings all the way down, and the animations is still a little choppy. And it doesn’t look nearly as pretty as Morrowind! Oh, well, it’s not like I had anything else to spend that $300+ on.

3

I return with news from the front; now even my old man’s computer won’t read it. It locks up and hangs if I just enter it into the DVD ROM (I was going to attempt to bypass the - according to the forums - batch’s flaw by making an Image of it on a computer that could read it, then lugging my harddrive up and slaving it and transferring it) so the computer has to be physically booted. Jack Daniels on a Pogo stick - with no ice - I’m pissed.

Aww, c’mon man, it’s a case of priorities. Enabling yourself to play a game that will more or less permanently disable your social life has to take front seat, right? :slight_smile:

4

Can you burn a working copy on your dad’s computer?

If not, this sounds to me like a strong case where it *would * be ethical to download an illegal copy (of course I’m not going to say how to avoid the thread being locked) just so you can play it in the meantime and mail off your DVD to the manufacturer for a replacement.

I’m totally against piracy, but if you’ve legally purchased something, you do what you need to do in order to be able to play it.

5

I found an old Best Buy giftcard in my desk Friday afternoon. I wasn’t sure if it was still good, but I decided to try it out on a copy of Oblivion. There were plenty on the shelf, once I found them (someone should be fired for not bothering with so much as an end cap), and I paid a just a few bucks out of pocket for it.

I’m still amazed that an nVidia 6800GT lags every time a battle starts, even at medium settings and 1024x768 resolution. I’d assume that I didn’t have it configured properly if I couldn’t run Far Cry with every setting maxed at 1600x1200 resolution. ‘Tis a serious bummer.

Great game, but I’d imagine only a fraction of people who purchase it will enjoy the best the graphics have to offer.

6

Are you kidding? Your English is great!

PS: Sympathies regarding Oblivion. I know I want it badly, but I can’t get it either.

7

I’m torn. We’ve got a 360, so I could get Oblivion on the 360… But I hate playing RPGs on the console.

But then I know our poor little 9800 isn’t going to be able to cope with Oblivion. What to do? We can’t even upgrade our video card, we have no AGP slots. I think it’s AGP. And we haven’t been able to find any higher-grade cards that will go in our PCI slots. So we’re stuck, unless we also shell to upgrade our motherboard.

But I really hate playing RPGs on the console. What to do?

8

PCI video cards are sloooooow. They just don’t have enough bandwidth over the PCI slot.

9

I hate to piss on the rant here, but isn’t this more an issue with your drive? If it works on your dad’s system, that seems like the disk itself is OK. What am I missing here?

10

You know…you can download it right (at least in the states). I think its on Direct2Drive.

I HAVE the game and can’t play it (my hardware appearently isn’t up to snuff even at the lowest settings). After the splash screens the game dumps me out to desktop…even when I boot my XP partition directly. Oh well…

-XT

11

Unfortunately at the time the guy who was building our PC got the motherboard, PCI cards were All Teh Rage!!11! and it was massively expensive to find a motherboard with AGP slots, or both. So he got what we could afford, which was the PCI-slot board. Then everything changed, and now we need to gut our box and start over.

12

The bloody game is a poorly optimized mess.

SLI apparently does NOTHING. I’m getting the same performance from 1 card as with two (7800 Gt’s), and that is pretty bad performance (low to medium settings). I’m just hoping a patch will fix my woes.

13

Here is the link to downloading Oblivion (assuming you have a high speed drive). I did this with Gal Civ IV and it worked pretty well.

-XT

14

Could be worse. My system can supposedly handle Oblivion just fine (Well over the Recommended levels.) I would need to buy a DVD drive for my desktop, but that is years overdue anyway. Except for one small problem. My CPU is only a 1.3 GHz Athlon XP. :frowning:

Not like I really have time to play it anyway, between City of Heroes/Villains and EVE Online. And I can always fire up Morrowind and play through it.

15

The game is a crapshoot in terms of performance a system like mine (AMD x2 3800, 2 7800 GT’s in SLI, 2 gig RAM dual channel mode) gets lousy performance, yet an ATI 9800 will run at about the same clip as mine, with only AF and AA turned off. Boggles the mind.

Other than that though, the game is amazing. I’ve only a few minor complaints, mostly about the interface, but just about everything else is a huge improvement from morrowind.

16

From what I’ve heard, the game doesn’t work too well with NVidia cards.

17

NVidia is supposed to be releasing a patch soon for their cards and Oblivion.

I’ve got an AMD Athlon 3300+, 1 GB of RAM and an ATI All-in-Wonder 9600 and it runs on my computer at its lowest settings. I wish I could have anti-aliasing on, because it looks 1000 times better, but I’ll take what I can get. It gets a little laggy if I’m trying to do too much at once, especially outside but the cities are fine.

18

From the reviews I see lately, in any kind of non-optimized-for-SLI/Crossfire application (read: every application), SLI doesn’t get you any boost whatsoever in real-world gaming.

19

oh, and for the record:

2600+ AlthlonXP, 1GB RAM, Radeon X850XT AGP, and it looks and plays GREAT.

20

Strange that you have bad performance with that rig, maybe something in the SLI? It runs like a dream on mine (3.4 P4, 2 gig dual channel RAM, single 7800GT) with most settings on max at 1280x1078. FPS occasionally drop just under 30 in town around a lot of NPCs, but I barely notice because the rest of it is so damn pretty.

I absolutely agree about the interface, Morrowind’s was far superior. Other small complaints I have are that the journal is damn near useless and wolves are the new cliff racers. I’ve also stolen some things by accident while trying to stand up from a chair and didn’t realize the pointer was aiming at something on the table. Yeah, the guards didn’t find that very amusing. Word to the wise…do not fuck with the guards, they will own you in seconds. Found that out the hard way. :smack: