Without having pre-ordered the game, I went to some of the stores in town to pick up a copy of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion yesterday. Everywhere it was completely sold out. While walking out of Best Buy, I saw a guy walking in with the game and a receipt, so I watched him try to return the game, get turned down and then I followed him out of the store and asked if he wanted to sell it. Turns out his system couldn?t run it, so I bought it from him.
Installation went faster than I?d thought that it would? took about 15 minutes.
My system is not too extreme: 3.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 (northwood), 1GB DDR 2700 ECC, nVidia GeForce 6600GT 128MB. It detected the card correctly, but set everything to 640x480, medium quality... which seemed a bit on the low side. I?m playing at 800x600, no antialiasing, medium settings on everything and the framerate is generally very good.
I've previously played two others in the Elder Scrolls series: Morrowind and Daggerfall. I'm a bit of a fantasy RPG fan and have been playing computer RPG's since the time of Wizardry 3, and Hack(Nethack). Recently I've played a fair bit of World of Warcraft - and I still play Nethack.
The intro to the game is very impressive. Patrick Steward (the bald captain of Star Trek: Next Gen) does the voice-over for the emperor, and plays the emperor in the first part of the game. It?s nice to have a professional voice, although the emperor looks nothing like Steward, so it?s a bit weird to hear his voice come of this computer AI mouth. The intro is a very long and protracted affair in a dungeon with scripted characters. It sets up the storyline, teaches the interface and teaches the three main class types: mage, fighter and thief. Then it basically ends by dumping you on the banks of a river, outside of the city, at night with very limited direction on what you are supposed to do next.
The graphics of the game are without a doubt a step beyond anything that I have ever seen before. ?Half-Life 2?, FEAR and Call of Duty 2 are all well done graphically, but Oblivion is a clear step above them. What it does better than anything that I have seen is detailed texturing that has reflective elements. The texturing is very well done. Maybe in the ballpark with Doom, but Oblivion uses more colors than brown, black and red and so it looks much better. It it also has an absolutely massive map that seamlessly loads without a pause ? like World of Warcraft. In fact, load times in general are very fast throughout. The sky texture is detailed, the trees are amazingly detailed, reflective effects are impressive. The sound is very well done, and I have surround sound enabled and it works really well. The music is well done. All voices are ?voiced? by actors. Interaction with the characters is very limited ? the same system they?ve used since Daggerfall (the Elder Scrolls game before Morrowind) ? you can ask everyone about two things and occassionally you?ll get more things when you are doing a quest.
There are a lot of races but they basically come down to ?human?, ?elf?, ?cat-thing? and ?orc. Classes are divided into three main sets: mage, fighter, thief. Combinations are allowed (and encouraged), so thief-mage and fighter-mage are fine. Levelling is the same as Morrowind, choose your profession and you get sub skills (heavy armor, blade, destructive magic, sneaking, etc.) for that profession and then practice those skills and you increase, then you train to move to the next tier and when you have moved enough skills, your ?level? increases. I chose ?fighter mage? ? similar to my Morrowind choice ? and it feels virtually identical... which actually is a bit disappointing.
The game play is a bit of a disappointment in that it hasn?t really changed. It plays and feels a lot like Morrowind (it?s 4 year-old precursor). Fighting combat is ok, but it fundamentally comes down to ?block constantly until you see an opening and then attack quickly and go back to blocking?. It?s not awful, but it?s very straightforward. No special moves ? and if there are, they are going to be automatic (because there?s only one attack key). I would really like to get a special move or two each time I advance in, say, macecraft. Similarly, spells are also just ok. The effects are nice - although not as improved as the rest of the graphics in the game. They look cool, but the spell system has the same kind of randomized feel - any effect possible can show up as a spell - as Morrowind. And things like a freezing spell (can't remember the name, but something that does 15 points of cold on touch), it would be neat to have an image of the monster freezing or something, but instead, it just turns blue briefly. Setting the target on fire looked bit better, though. Long-range targetting is hard ? I have been mostly missing with fireballs at a distance. I need some kind of heat-seeking fireball because the human-targetted variety are missing a lot. Thief stuff is well done ? this is one game where the thief class should be fun to play. Lockpicking is neat, sneaking works well.
In summary, so far (3 hours play time) it feels like Morrowind on graphical steroids. A vast confusing, beautiful world filled with fairly well done AI characters, a neat class system, and a less than impressive spell and fighting system. The monsters are definitely scary, the atmosphere is definitely convincingly portrayed. I like it. I just wish they?d improved the gameplay as much as they?ve improved the graphics.