New Oblivion info...

[Dimmona]

Taken from the Feb issue of PC Gamer (originally posted on shacknews):

The February 2006 Issue of PC gamer magazine featured a cover story on Oblivion, as 1 of 10 "Top 10 games of 2006". The previewer, Desslock, was given a day with the current full beta Build of Oblivion, he said "It addresses Morrowind's short-comings in spectacular fashion, while retaining that games RPG depth" The following is a Paragraph by Paragraph summary of the article.

*= issues yet unknown or unproven

1. Oblivion Begins when Uriel Spetim is killed (In the tutorial). You are tasked with finding the heir and closing the Oblivion gates Spawned by the daedric lord Mehrunes Dagon.

2. Many low level items littered throughout the tutorial, allowing you to get a feel for different skills before you finalize your character. Skills are increased by using them, and higher levels result in more powerful and visually spectacular acts. (One mentioned was an intrigueing "Spinning Sword Thrust".

3. Skills more action oriented than MW; Blocking is manual, damage reduction determined by skill. Two mini-games are lockpicking and conversation.

4. Draw distance on PC is huge, all landscape visuals are dazzling and realistic. Many Plants and animals are available, and apparently you can spend hours of time stalking deer. Compass highlights active quests and other landmarks, Horses can speed travel, and you can speed travel to any of the eight cities. Homes will be available for purchase and decoration in each city.

5. The hand crafting of the world is meticulously detailed, and every house is stocked with items, and decorated. 150 Readable books will be present, as well as periodically released newspapers, which report on current affairs.

6. Havok physics are well implimented, and you can pick up and move things realistically. (The tutorial traps were mentioned). However, all the items are unbreakable, detracting somewhat from the realism.

7. Though Desslock was suspicious of Radiant AI, the beta allayed all of his fears; "Oblivions AI system seems to create an incrediblyvibrant gaming world".

8. The NPCs engage in numerous mundane activities like reading, gossiping, and eating. They also notice tresspassing and stealing, but your cursor will turn into a red hand to show when messing with an item is prohibited. Dialogue is spoken, and random conversations are often new, as they discuss current events.

9. 5 Guilds. 3 can be freely joined (Mages, Fighters, and Arena), while thieves requires imprisonment for stealing, and Dark Brotherhood requires the killing of an innocent NPC. Guild quests dont conflict, so its possible to become head of all 5. Desslock notes that it seems they will be more complex than simply kill so and so, or give this to whoever. He goes over the now well known dark brotherhood quest in which you have to kill various guests at a dinner party. The guests, reacted to the killings, arming themselves, and even accusing others of the crimes.

8. Roleplaying will be taken to a new level, and it is mentioned that you can kill people by poisoning their food. All NPCs are killable, but the main storyline characters can only be incapacitated.

9. NPC battle AI is challenging and intelligent. Creatures and items in Dungeons are balanced to the PCs level. One example of the AI was that upon entering a vampire lair (You can "choose" to become a vampire) the undead turned invisible in order to surround the PC and then luanched a surprise attack. In another encounter, desslock determined the location of an archer by looking at the direction of the arrows stuck in himself. The archer also switched to melee when the PC closed range.

10. Exploration is more interesting due to RAI. NPCs will sleep, and engage their activities during the day for example. Hunting, practicing archery, and sleeping were described as the activities of a hunter. Also, Monks were make wine nearby.

11. When Desslock entered the religious town of hackdirt (A small town), all of the citizens were at church, and desslock attacked the priest. The churchgoers defended the priest, while a "coward" ran out of the door. When Desslock left, the people chased him out of the door, and the "coward" had only left to get a sword he kept at home.

12. Desslock says that Oblivion improves incredibly on Morrowind in every way, The world feels alive. His final words were "I think Bethesda may be on the brink of releasing its Masterpiece".

THOUGHTS: This seems to disprove most of the naysayers on game quality, however, several other things were mentioned.

-Weather is dinamic, and the northern areas recieve snow.
-Each creature has behavior conditions.
-The interface is combined into 4 tabs.
-It says no flying or levitation*
-It says that you can enchant items by capturing souls in soul gems.*
-Editor is included

This was a fairly full summary of the article, please comment.
Though I know some things have already been mentioned, I wanted to include the article in its entirety.

Enjoy

[warning]

Who are you and what have you done with Hetz?

[Hetz]

heh

As much as I wanted Morrowind back in the day....this game surpasses it in everyway.

And the best part is we will all be able to enjoy it very, very soon!  

Oh and here is a cool link that tracks all the dev posts on the game, if you obsess over everything that is said about the game (like me!) then you will find this a goldmine of great info!

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=DevQuotes.List&category_select_id=5

Here is a cool little quote about the Dark Brotherhood and some other stuff:

Someone asked a question about the racial makeup of the Dark Brotherhood. I'll say that it's pretty racially diverse -- Khajiit, Argonian, Orc, Elf, Breton, Imperial... Yeah, all the major races are represented.

On relationships -- no homosexuality that I'm aware of. But there are certainly more relationships, particulalry family relationships, than was seen in Morrowind. There are brothers, husbands and wives, fathers and sons. And yeah, they do know each other, and care about each other, and react appropriately to one another. Lots of custom dialogue to reflect that too.

For example, there's a husband and wife in the Imperial City... both go to watch the Arena fights. But if you talk to them, you'll learn that the husband is a gambling addict...the wife just goes there to catch him in the act. And they're never there at the same time. So there are lots of things like that... relationships, and unique dialogue and behavior to support it.

Also wanted to answer a question Dead_Hand had about appropriate assassin weapons. There's really no "best" assassin weapon, but I personally favor daggers (Blade skill) and a good bow (Marksman Skill). I actually did a lot of playtesting using Hand-To-Hand with a little bit of magic, and that was really cool. It's true that with the bow you can do some great sniping, but some of the Dark Brotherhood quests favor a closer, more "hands dirty" approach.

One of the Dark Brotherhood assassins you'll meet is kind of NOT your average assassin, and it's fun to hear his take on the guild, and killing for a living, and how he doesn't use stealth, that type of stuff.

Okay, I WILL say this... Dark Brotherhood questline will be consistently challenging regardless of the level you play it at. It's been playtested at everything from level 1 to level 25, and the measures we've taken to scale the difficulty have been incredibly effective.

[Destructor]

And I'm not sure I saw this in the first post or not, but you can get 5 different houses for you to throw your stuff in according to the article. One of them is even haunted to start.

[Calvin]

I honestly was not THAT stoked for this title originally-perhaps because one of my best friends works 60 hours a week on it But after reading the Desslock preview, my interest level is really through the roof. I am really excited to play it on the 360, in fact I asked Kathode for a copy this evening and he told me to do something anatomically impossible. I took that as a no  :wink:

[CeeKay]

in fact I asked Kathode for a copy this evening and he told me to do something anatomically impossible. I took that as a no  :wink:

With the sufficient application of high explosives anything is possible  :twisted:

I've really been trying to avoid getting hyped out about this game until they have a solid release date, but it sure looks like it's going to be a classic.

[Destructor]

I've really been trying to avoid getting hyped out about this game until they have a solid release date, but it sure looks like it's going to be a classic.

I've been hyped for this game ever since I put down money for the Collector's Edition PC version...well, a long time ago.