Looking at No.2 and No.5 I get the impression that IC is the same size but the island is somewhat smaller. Interesting pics though, IC does look much more impressive from the outside.

From the outside, it looks barely the size of Hawkmoth Legion Fort.

Is it me, or is there a giant Imperial Legion guy in No.5?

That's what I was thinking

the title describes me pretty well. i was overly excited by what we got to see of oblivion before its release. therefore im trying to be a little pessimistic this time around, though thats really hard!
and i never thought cyrodiil would be jungle, so no reactions..

The video from the intro, from which these pics are, is clearly not ingame. It was rendered with a completely different software.

I have been around here during Oblivion's production and while I was enthusiastic, a lot of stuff rubbed me wrong from the start - i.e.:

level-scaling - funnily enough I remember that even at that stage people pleaded with Beth to confine it to skills rather than equipment and to have minimum and maximum cut-off levels for areas. Which was thankfully finally implemented in F3.

removal of levitation without introduction of climbing

the fact that radiant AI would cause NPCs to _kill each other_ rather than merely knock out. It was immediately clear that we wouldn't see much of it in the finished game after that.

lack of mounted combat, rationalized by the arguments that one couldn't use, say, Hand-to-Hand while riding a horse

their lack of intention to overhaul attribute multiplier from MW or to do something to make specialized characters not so terribly inferior to the Jack-of-all trades. Etc.


I liked a lot of things too, though:

proper dialog instead of wiki (didn't turn out so great though)

better quests in general and better guild storylines - I'd argue that they delivered there, compared to MW, although there is a lot of room for improvement

better combat - ditto

better ambiance because NPCs would have goals and occupations - turned out so-so, but a step forward.

Etc.

While I am not a blind fan of MW and initially welcomed a lot of changes, Obl didn't click with me. I loved and played MW and FO3 much more.


What I hear about Skyrim makes me more enthusiastic than Obl ever did though, since a lot of it is stuff that I always wanted to see in TES - like puzzles, perks (in particular slowing time and superior stealth attacks with daggers) or stuff that people have been yearning for since DF, like economic system, quest randomization, etc. which could be incredibly cool if properly implemented. Oh, and the terrible attribute multipliers are gone and they give us hope that specialized characters aren't going to be wimps. Now, if only they wouldn't screw up... Oh, and invest in decent writers for a change.

For me, I was amazingly excited for Oblivion, and it seemed to be one of the best games ever. Then I realised they lied to our faces at the E3 demo. :glare: I don't care how you put it, that's bad.

Anyhoo, been in the forums long enough to realise that answering what I've been asked about my opinion = I'm a flaming troll, so that's all folks.

I was hooked on it when it was new and fresh, but after that i was disappointed with the game.

It does look smaller than it should, but the IC is actually really very big. n terms of house/shop numbers, it's the biggest in MW or OB, and it's physically bigger than almost all others. See http://images.uesp.net//b/ba/MW_Map_Ebonheart.jpgpicture of Ebonheart and http://www.uesp.net/maps/obmap/obmap.shtml IC map. Use the ships in the docks as a measure for comparison. I think the lack of life around the walls does detract from the feeling of size and centrality.

Actually as I was reading this thread that is exactly the word that popped into my mind.

Folks speaking about their feelings going from MW to OB sound a lot like my feelings going from OB to Skyrim. "It'll be everything OB was and more".

From what I recall the same thing is happening again. So what ever you read in the forums now, replace Skyrim with Oblivon and it is the same thing 5 or 6 years ago.

So when ever you read, Skryrim will be the best ever, the same thing was said for Oblivon being the best ever.

I have to say that this is one of the most depressing threads yet.

I was excited about it throughout the process. Although I was only about 15 years old back them and didn't understand soft shadows, immersion, etc.

I do remember a lot of people being upset when the compass was announced. I didn't think it was a big deal back then but I do now.

Ebonheart is not really a city, more like a Pimp-my-fort. Legion fort, Duke's castle and some following content. Thing is, in IC there's market district and no shops elsewhere, Temple district with one temple, Emperor's palace with... Nothing, etc etc. In Vivec, for example you'll find some shop, book store, clothier, tavern, chapel, strange cult, ..., almost behind any corner.

There's no SpeedTree stuff in Skyrim is there? I hate Speedtree. Or 2D textures in general. You can spin round and round the trees and grass, but you're always looking at it from the same side. I hate that.

My first experience with this type of thing was King's Field 2. Now KF1 had real 3D trees. For KF2 they made them have 2D textures...ugh!

I know, all I was replying to was the suggestion of it seeming to be smaller than Hawkmoth Legion in Ebonheart.

No, there's no speedtree, they have their own tree generator. As for 2d textures... textures are 2d by default.... and as for the spinning around trees, that issue is only relevant when you are at a great distance, with the LOD. Whenever you are reasonably close, the tree is a fully 3d object that you can walk around like a building and it doesn't stay the same perspective.

My initial disappointment (mostly related to level scaling and the meta-gaming it encouraged) wasn't anything Francesco's couldn't fix. This time around it's at the back of my mind that with all the changes to mechanics a similar miscalculation is possible, but so long as the world is rich and interesting and the story passable, I see no reason to worry overmuch about it. There is sure to be a modder who will share my viewpoint and "fix" it. This time around there's even hope of mod-fixes for console players.

If anything, I'm more excited about Skyrim than I was about Oblivion because Skyrim appears a bit more exotic in terms of landscape and culture. Really, I can't see the game failing me in ways that can't be fixed.

I stopped following the Oblivion pre-release cycle with any hopefulness pretty early. I was worried, first of all, about the voice acting. I deeply enjoyed Morrowind modding, particularly intricate companion and quest mods, and didn't see any way to play an unvoiced mod in a voiced game. (I still can't really deal with it, though not for the reason I thought. I presumed it would break immersion for me -- in reality, the unvoiced close-ups trigger my uncanny valley response. I'm hoping I'll enjoy modding Skyrim more thanks to that not being an issue any longer.) That limitation worried me, and implied I'd get a lot less life out of the game. I also worried that the voice acting would lead to fewer quests and less detailed and varied responses from NPCs, and it did.
My lack-of-interest got piqued even further when they revealed that the number of guilds was going to be drastically dropped. I'm really hoping E3 will show more guilds again, because Fighters/Mages/Thieves/Dark Brotherhood is really not enough for me, probably because I never concieve of my characters based upon simple roleplaying archetypes.
The not-jungle worried me a lot, mostly because I loved the Dance in Fire series in Morrowind and wanted to experience something remotely like that in the game based in Cyrodiil. Got over it by the time I actually played the game though (hardware limitations + lack of interest = only picked it up a year or two ago).
The general tendency of paring things down worried me as well. (Spears were my favourite. Le sigh.) That worked out a lot better than I thought, and I was actually mostly happy to be the person limiting my own character, rather than having my skills limit it for me. I was even rather pleased that it didn't actually matter what I took as skills, because my character could grow and develop fairly organically in spite of how they started out. (Yes, I'm looking forward to this being pushed further in Skyrim. They just better make those skill-trees well since they're axing attributes.)
Was also worried about the player being more important than the character, because... I fail. I prefer that my characters don't. (I spent 30 minutes getting that stupid arrow through the friggin' hole in the last Thieves Guild quest and I had zoom and had read tips in advance.) But it looks like they're trying to help that issue for fail-action-gamers like me.
(Intense) level-scaling... I knew I'd hate. But I loved killing lvl10 NPCs at lvl3. A lot. And that was being taken from me. Still hate it in OB, but Beth learned from that, too.
Beyond that, I figured it'd be a pretty game I'd like to play eventually but probably not extensively because of what the propaganda was implying, and my anolysis was about right.
This cycle feels much more like DF->MW for me though, where I just had faith and trusted the changes. I was blindsided by a few things in that game (linear questlines for guilds, NOFASTTRAVEL?!, no climbing, Imisslanguages, et al), but overall was very happy with it. I'm hoping and expecting that will happen again.

Yes, that was one of my mistakes. I assumed (Mostly because I didn't know) that all the things that make Morrowind great, would be in Oblivion, and then built upon.

I have much more reasonable expectations now. I know it's going to be totally different. I know there are some bits that are going to disappoint me, and others that are going to blow my mind (I only knew the latter in Oblivion), and I also see evidence in Fallout 3 and the Shivering Isles expansion, that Bethesda knew even before release, what was wrong with Oblivion. If I had to point out the overall feel Oblivion had, it'd be like Red Dead Redemption. You have this huge, sprawling world, but for the most part, it's pretty shallow, and doesn't offer much in the way of enticing exploration. On the flip side, Morrowind feels more like Shadow of the Colossus, where exploring every nook and cranny is exciting and rewarding (Remember the Lizards and the apples!), and also how exploration fit in as a game mechanic in itself.

Oblivion was full of disappointments but it's still a great game. But honestly if it weren't for mods I would have uninstalled it years ago and never touched it again. I don't know how it got through testing and QC without anyone mentioning anything about the level scaling. Seriously, throughout the entire development process nobody ever said "You know, seeing all these bandits walking around in glass and daedric armor is kind of lame." Actually I have a feeling several people spoke out about it but were ignored because there wasn't enough time to do it properly.

Oblivion is an example of an epic game being rushed for it's entire 4 years of development. Obviously 4 years is a lot of time to develop a game but Oblivion really needed at least another year for polish. In that time they could have made level scaling more practical, squared away the issues with radiant AI rather than gutting it, fixed a lot of issues with the graphics engine and spent a lot more time on testing. The release of the 360 was part of the problem but I think it really all boils down to BGS setting unrealistic goals for the amount of time they had.

They've learned a lot since then. Fallout 3 had relatively fewer problems and Skyrim should have fewer problems still. From what I've been hearing they have a pretty good handle on how much they can do in the amount of time they have and it sounds to me like they're not even discussing features that aren't already up and running.

Yeah, I'd imagine that Bethesda was under a lot of pressure to get Oblivion out in the fairly brief 360 launch window, which was from November to April. You can't deny that it was basically Microsoft's Flagship title.

I realy wasnt expecting much from Oblivion. A freind showed me the E3 Demo, and that was about it realy. I saw some screenshots and I bought it the day it came out.

For a long time I was happy with the game and I played it for 4 years. But I allways hated the lighting and lack of shadows.

Now I cant be bothered playing it any more. To bring it up to todays standard I need ALOT of mods and of course the more mods you have, the less stable the game is. Eventually I couldnt go 5 min without the game crashing. So I gave up.

I was way too hyped up for Oblivion. I actually registered at Direct2Drive as a US citizen so that I could get the game one day earlier.
I was so excited about it all, but then it just fell flat. Everything looked the same with no unique elements, all enemy encounters felt the same, all the mystery and joy over finding previously rare stuff like glass, artifacts and daedric armor was gone.
It felt like you had no reason to explore anything unless you had a quest requiring you to go there. In Morrowind I can spend hours going through random dungeons and caves just because every one feels different and has the possibility of containing something awesome (yes, I still play it; working on the Telvanni quests, because after playing the game for years upon years, there are still things I haven't done yet). In Oblivion you just grind through quests, because exploring randomly feels pointless when you can get full glass armor by killing a random bandit. The entire atmosphere of Morrowind, so alien and unique, was nowhere to be found. At all.

And don't get me started on the lore. When I first started playing, it didn't bother me much, but when I went back and read the description of Cyrodiil in the Pocket Guide to the Empire, I almost got teary-eyed (massive nerd-points right there) because of how badly I felt they had screwed up. Especially this part:


Morrowind's plot and setting was filled with political and religious struggles; all NPC's had their own beliefs and agendas. In Oblivion, this was reduced to "herp smash the bad guy derp" and completely black-and-white scenarios.

I'm just praying that the political struggle we've heard of in Skyrim will be deep and engrossing, so that the game doesn't revolve around smashing evil one-dimensional dragons in the face for hours.

EDIT: Also, music. Morrowind's music is amazing; Oblivion's is just bland.