Oh, come on, Bethesda!, Closed cities AGAIN? Options

[Thomas Kaira]

May I ask exactly why? Oblivion could take open cities in perfect stride. The only reason the cities got closed at all was because BethSoft panicked about the console support.

Granted, they did have an excuse then, as they only received the Xbox 360 to do actual testing over the last three months of dev. time, but here... not so much. The current excuse is that the consoles can't handle what they are doing. Trouble is, the industry always manages to surprise us with exactly what those consoles CAN handle.

So long as the NPC count in the cities goes up by at least twice what we got in Oblivion, I will be understanding and shall complain no more. If not... well... then I will KNOW you are just being lazy. I want to see progress in making these games the best they can be, I don't want Skyrim to simply be Oblivion HD.

Source

In other news:

- Alchemy is becoming a stealth skill. (Approve! Approve!)

- There will be no minigames involved with the crafting skills (Thank you!)

- Giants, Draugr, and other creatures will receive a bit of culture from the AI engine (Looking forward to this.)

This post has been edited by Thomas Kaira: May 3 2011, 07:07 PM

[Thomas Kaira]

Bethesda changed their "recipe" completely when they created Oblivion; remember that. This is the reason many Morrowind fans (like Helena) refused to continue on, because Bethesda tried to rewrite their tomes and fell flat on their faces as a result. The main reason Oblivion has such a huge modding community is a that it is a testament to how much Oblivion fell short of expectations Practically nothing that was wanted ended up in the final product, mostly because Oblivion was not designed to be as much a "game" as it was designed to be a technical marvel, and such marvels are fleeting and tend to die fast. If Oblivion did not get its SDK, it would not have lasted a year.

Yes, Oblivion did many things most games had never even dreamed of before, such as the distant land rendering that it was possible to explore every inch of (unfortunately, the Distant LOD is horribly low-res and rife with glitches), a dynamic weather system (with broken precipitation), Radiant AI (that is incapable of decent pathfinding and tends to not value their lives), and HDR lighting (that was way WAY too bright).

See what I'm getting at here? Bethesda tried to do too much too fast, and we were left with a bunch of technical features that look great at a glance, but when analyzed are actually kinda sloppy, and that is what we got at the expense of a HUGE amount of Morrowind's atmosphere. Where Morrowind feels unique, and a sort of Wonderland, Oblivion is the generic "been there, seen that" Sylvan forest type landscape. Cyrodiil was supposed to be a jungle, too, until Oblivion smashed that to bits and Bethesda pulled a ret-con on us (I hate ret-cons).

Oblivion does a heckuva lot of stuff, but it does absolutely NOTHING well. It's actually quite similar to GTA III in that regard, I quote an article I once saw in Game Informer:

"If you can't do one thing right, you can just do a bunch of stuff poorly."

Oblivion falls into the latter category; it is a game that stuffs so much into your face it makes it very difficult to realize that the distant landscape is full of tears, for instance, or the rain ignores rooftops and balconies, or the NPCs constantly get stuck on lampposts and repeat conversations in the same conversation and the same person changes his opinions constantly, or the notoriously terrible level scaling, or the hacky-slashy boring and way too drawn-out combat, or the fact that the entire world feels exactly the same throughout, or that Bethesda broke several skills by making them rely entirely on player skill over character skill.

My current load order numbers hundreds of plugins, and 90% of them are dedicated to addressing those above problems (the rest are new quest mods). I really hope Bethesda learned their lesson with Oblivion, because they blew it big time on what could have been something really special.

This post has been edited by Thomas Kaira: May 26 2011, 08:25 AM