3GHz Intel
1GB RAM
ATI Radeon 9800Pro 256MB video card
It auto-detected Medium settings. I modified water and upped the resolution to 800x600. I’m going to see how it works on 1024x768 tonight and play around with the different options.
I have the same setup, just a 7800 GT instead of a 7600. Both overclocked (don’t know how much… done by Velocity Micro).
It hits 25-30 fps on 1280*1024 with everything ramped up, with HDR activated (that frame rate doesn’t bother me, though it may to others).
Btw, if you are thinking of buying Oblivion for the PC, but don’t know how it’ll do (or seeing how far you can push things):
http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=270923&st=0
Look at the 2nd post for a comprehensive look at video cards and how they can run the game. It is a really well done look at things.
Yeah, I’ve been running around in the exact same location. I guess I found one of the Xbox 360 glitches.
Well I picked the game up yesterday and am about 2 hours in. Perhaps I’m in a slightly different situation than most, in that this is the first Elder Scrolls game I’ve played. I got into Morrowind a bit too late – after only about 10 minutes, the graphics and gameplay seemed so dated, I switched it off and never came back to it. I figured I’d be better off waiting for the next installment. And here we are.
My first impression is that I like it. The graphics are gorgeous, but then again everything is these days (having just come off of playing F.E.A.R., Empire at War, etc.). The real draw, that I believe was the huge attraction of Morrowind and the other TES games, is the open-endedness. Seems to have it there in spades. Then again, I sometimes have trouble with open-ended games in the sense of “What should I be doing?”. I mean, I know that I can always just do the main storyline, but aside from that, what should…nay, what can I do (other than exploring)?
1st person melee combat is a bit weird. I mean, the bow and arrow is straight-forward enough, but the sword swinging seems a little clumsy. I mean, I’ve fought a handful of goblin and stuff, and that Necromancer Witch “Gravefinder” wassit, and it’s basically just run up to them and hack hack hack hack. I guess this might get a bit more elegant as my sword or block skill increases, but at the moment it doesn’t seem like “swordplay”. When I try to slow down a bit and time/block with my sword or shield, it just doens’t work out so well.
Any suggestions on this?
Well, I just got out of the opening dungeon. Very nice. It’s a good intro to the game - you have the chance to check out all the basic skills, and then decide what you want to do. I’m a custom assassin class.
Problem, so far, is that every time I kill anything the game pauses for about a quarter to half a second before the ragdoll animation kicks in. My computer isn’t slow, and other people haven’t complained about this problem, so I’m wondering if it’s something else on my end.
I assume Oblivion is functionally similar to Morrowind in that it ramps up some (or many) encounters based on your level. You could wander almost anywhere you liked and meet stuff you could handle. There were exceptions, usually clearly delineated: you didn’t go past the Ghostfence into Red Mountain or you’d get your butt whupped. But then again, everybody everywhere was warning you not to, so that was all right.
Some encounters, such as vampires, were pretty far off the beaten path; and by volume there weren’t that many of them compared to other stuff.
You can change to a third person view (in the PC version and presumably in the Xbox version too).
I find that you don’t get charged Fatigue to keep your shield up — only when you block — so you could try timing it so you’re looking for a strategic moment to drop shields and fire your forward phaser array at the … wait a tic, wrong game. Similar concept, though. 
All the previous Morrowind characters I made ended up looking functionally similar, because I made custom classes based on the stuff I was gonna do anyway. This time I’m going to play the basic classes the way they were meant to be played and see how that works out for me.
I generally like to make a thief-type character, but in Morrowind I liked to have at least one skill tied to each of the stats they help work out, because otherwise you get to a level at which you can no longer advance anything a lot sooner.
I have to amend this post. I got to the first Oblivion gate. LAGGY as all get out.
I get that half-second lag before an enemy attacks me. I’m not unhappy about that in the least-- it’s a good warning signal, and for people like me who didn’t grow up with a controller in their hands, it gives me a chance to get myself thinking about what buttons I need to push for combat.
Even at harder levels it will be mostly hacking away if you use melee weapons. Though, you’ll hit more often for more damage. Higher levels will let you use more advanced spells though, making you melee a bit less sometimes. Yeah, there really isn’t swordplay.
Oh, and I’d council against the 3rd person view. Nice for looking at your character, but useless for gameplay.
From a min-max perspective (which I don’t play personally), you major skills should be the lowest. That way, you can rise up higher in level. For example, if your starting skill is < 10, you have 9 levels to raise off that one skill. You can get 70 levels that way.
Skills you use will rise up on their own easily enough, even if they start low.
Could you explain this? Levelling up is based just on skills, not attributes, right? So how does what you say work?
I haven’t got there yet, but assuming it’s like Morrowind was:
Say 3 of your 7 your major skills are Blunt, Blade, and Light Armor (like a barbarian, say). Those are Strength and Speed skills.
Keep in mind the following:
a. Leveling up your major skills 10 times (in any combination: say, Blade goes up by 4, Blunt by 5, and Light Armor by 1) makes you go up to Level 2.
b. Since you leveled up mostly Strength skills between level 1 and level 2 (9 levels gained), you get to add Strength to your character (with a nice fat bonus added on since you mostly worked on Strength).
c. You could also add one to Speed (but no fat bonus — your Speed skills only went up by 1 total).
d. This means you might end up with a major skill you never use. That’s okay; you don’t need to worry about that for a while. Eventually you will need to work on that skill in order to increase in level — leveling up your major skills is the only way to go up in level — but that won’t happen for a while.
e. Therefore, the number of levels you can go up = (700 - all your starting skills) / 10.
f. Thus, if you want to go up levels a lot, your major skills should start out as low as possible.
g. The more level-ups you get, the more opportunities you have to rack up your stats (like Strength, Speed, etc).
h. But after a certain point, you don’t need all your stats to be 100, so unless you’re a completist or a stat-monger, it shouldn’t kill your game.
I forgot at some point I set forced 8x FSAA and 16x AF. Very much cutting into the frame rate on my game, I assume.
Nvidia released beta drivers specifically geared towards Oblivion optimizations. Download here
By the way, Fish, I understand that if you have low major attributes you can level faster and higher (I guess I made a mistake by picking a class that had bonuses in what I want to use), but what I don’t understand is why it matters if all your skills are governed by one attribute or if you cover all of them. Either way, you’re going to level up the same number of times, right? Not understanding why you would diversify in that manner.
There’s no reason to need to diversify like that. There may be reasons you might wish to:
A skill can never be higher than the governing stat. You can never be a Master (skill = 100) at a skill if the stat is 40.
With Morrowind, each level-up you got 3 stat points to allocate. A stat point meant you could raise the stat by 1 (multiplied by the bonus). The bonus was something like … uh … if you raised a Strength skill by 10, your Strength stat bonus would be x5. (I think. S’been a while.)
Combine the above and realize that if you want to raise your Strength up by a whole bunch, and all your Strength skills are major skills, then focusing on raising up Strength = you must raise your level and burn those level-up stat bumps.
Diversifying means you have a Strength skill which is not your major skill, so you can burn some training on it and add to your Strength stat bump bonus without leveling up. Also, it’s easier to send a skill from 5 to 15 (and gain the stat bonus) than it is to send a skill from 45 to 55.
Ideally (with infinite money) you’d train up 3 sleeper skills (each with a different governing stat) by 10 each and gain 15 points in stat bumps each level-up. That’s where that (700-skills)/10 comes in: that’s the most number of level bumps you get. Lower starting major skills = more stat bumps available = more opportunity to raise stats = more opportunity to train sleeper skills to higher levels = more opportunity to raise stats even higher, ad infinitum.
Need? Naw, you don’t need to do that. S’fun, though.
Can someone explain to me how the persuasion mini-game works? I still don’t quite get it. Not just how to do it properly, but what it gets you.
i’m excited to pick this up for the 360 tonight!
You don’t ever need stats and skills all maxed out. By the time you get up to that point, you’re already as prepared to kick ass as you’re liable to get. But I often found it frustrating to get that high and be at 70 in just one stat.
I would swear, however, that in Morrowind, perhaps after Bloodmoon, 70 was no longer the cap. I’d get stat points for advancing skills that were not my primary skills.
What it gets you is a raised disposition with the person, just like the speechcraft skill does in morrowind. This can get you more info, better prices, etc.
Of the four options, they’ll hate (major decrease) 1, dislike (minor decrease) 1, like (minor increase) 1, and love (major increase) 1.
You put your mouse on each quadrant to get a facial expression reaction to see which is which.
When you find out which is which, you either select a positive one with a full wedge, or a negative one with a very small wedge. You have to select one option each round, so the key is having more effect (bigger wedges) in the positive ones for a net positive gain.
By the way, my character is:
Custom class
Wood Elf (bonuses to acrobatics +5, alchemy +10, alteration +5, light armor +5, marksman +10, sneak +10)
My class is a custom stealth/rogue/assassin type class
primary attributes agility and personality (for illusion spells, and I figure an assassin should be a sweet talker)
major skills: marksman, security, sneak, illusion, alchemy (poisons), light armor, and blade (figured I should have a close up option but this may have been a mistake to select two weapon skills).
Is this a bad character? I figured picking a race that complimented the class was a good idea - but counterintuitively, it may not be, given that lower stats give you room for faster, higher levelling)