Oblivion

[Caduceus]

I'm sure some of you are like me, played Morrowind to death, and have been eagerly awaiting TES Oblivion. I am going to get it today, hopefully.

I built my machine with the plan of playing the next Elder Scrolls game, hopefully it won't disappoint me.

Most of what I am seeing posted in other places is that
1.) the grass (or what have you) is in a visible radius around your character.

2.) the textures of some objects, most notably the emperor's face, could have been done better

3.) the text print is too large

4.) the inventory is hard to navigate

None of these are show-stoppers for me, especially after plowing through half of Morrowind prior to the patch that let you know if you were damaging your opponent at all. Several of these problems will likely be fixed in a week or two.

Any thoughts?

[NullAshton]

Grass around you in a visible radius, that's a feature. It's so that your graphics card doesn't go wild rendering ALL of the grass around you ALL of the time. Grass is very graphics intensive.

[Fyron]

It's a bad feature. Grass should _never_ be so complicated that it is a major strain on resources... its grass!

[Suicide Junkie]

Unless, perhaps, you're playing "SimMower"

[NullAshton]

No, it's not really outrageous. Grass is usually done by the simple method of a double-sided quad, with transparency. Newer games use stuff such as multiple polygons so that the grass can use the physics engine to move as the player walks through it.

[Suicide Junkie]

But its grass! Unless it has a major impact on gameplay, why should it take up a major chunk of your resources?

[NullAshton]

Because it looks pretty. That's why.

It's the same reason why games aren't just stick-people made out of blocks with triangular ground, and blocky models. That may be efficient, and gets the job done, but it doesn't look nice.

[atari_eric]

The problem here is not whether the grass is rendered or not, the problem is that it's easy to see where it stops. A properly executed rendering would effectively "fade" the rendering so the only way the player would see the rendering edge is to actively look for it - otherwise, it'd be relatively unnoticeable.

[Yimboli]

bingo! atari_eric hit the bullseye...

however, I don't know why we're debating an issue based on the hearsay in the first post. I shall refrain from grass arguments until I try the game and see for myself.

[Caduceus]

Well, I played for about 3 hours last night.

I can understand all the criticisms that people have brought up - in my original post.

The grass radius is noticeable, so I will see about turning it off when I get back outside the dungeon I am in. The first dungeon (outside the tutorial) that I stumbled across is HUGE. Something gratifying in watching a mindless skeleton stumble into swinging blades.

The textures are not bad on my machine AMD 3700+/Radeon X850, but it depends on the lighting. The second time I talked to the emperor - lighting made his face look ghastly, but again that was because of ambien lighting.

I have never been much of a "sneak attack" kind of player, but I am enjoying the bow/marksman part of the game - in "sneak" mode 3x damage from afar, 6x damage if you can stab/slash them before they notice you.

Anyway, much too early to give a full review. I am on the default settings the program set for me - the quality is on high, I think, with a resolution of 800x600, which looks fine. You can set it on letterbox, which I think I might do.

I'll let you know what else I think.