DISCLAIMER: This is not a platform preference thread. I'm just sharing what was, for me, a pleasantly surprising experience.

My TES history has been somewhat odd. The first TES game I played was Morrowind on Xbox. The Dirty Disc Error bug and other issues severely hampered my enjoyment, but I soldiered on and found a game that now sits among my favorites of all time. Eventually I got a decent PC, and played the GOTY Edition on it as well. When Oblivion came out, I got it for PC.

After playing Oblivion (and Morrowind) on PC for many years and hundreds upon hundreds of hours (definitely well over 1,000 hours if you count both games) with unofficial patches, texture mods, performance tweaks, and everything else I could find to enhance my experience, my motherboard and CPU croaked about a month ago. With the announcement of Skyrim, I started seriously craving some TES action, and it'll be a while before I can afford to replace the parts with newer ones. So I bought the GOTY Edition of Oblivion for my 360. I felt I would be making a lot of sacrifices, especially in the visual department, but I didn't mind. I just wanted to be in a TES world again.

Much to my pleasant surprise, I can honestly say it doesn't look bad at all. Nor does it play poorly. Maybe it's because I'm a long time multiplatform gamer and am accustomed to both PC and console play, but this game definitely feels like it was made for this system to me. It looks a lot better than I ever expected it was going to. The loading times are roughly comparable to what they were on my PC. The distant LOD textures, while worse than a modded Oblivion on PC, don't look anywhere near as bad as the vanilla textures did on PC for me. I'm not sure why (or how) that is.

Don't get me wrong. I love the customization and optomization I can get on PC, and I plan to upgrade my rig as soon as I can so that I have one for Skyrim. But this is still a perfectly enjoyable, beautiful to behold game on 360 by my standards. If anything, how alike they look is what surprised me most. I have no qualms about killing the nine months before Skyrim comes out in this game on this platform.

According to comments made by Todd Howard, the PC versions and 360 versions (as well as the PS3 version, for that matter) of Skyrim will look pretty similar to each other, as well. I don't play Oblivion on a 360 or a PC, so I can't comment on how similar they are in appearance, but I've read the PS3 version looks and runs a bit better than the 360 version, so I guess that means all three versions are pretty comparable. :shrug:

I'm one of the one's that find the 360s lowered settings very noticeable.

More the resolution than anything is what's noticeable the most to me.

But no, the 360 version does not look bad, just not that good imo.

Oh, I would never argue that it looks as good as it does on PC (at least not to me.) I'm just very pleased and surprised by how good it does look. The decrease is more than bearable to me, and I was thinking I would just find it tolerable.

Wait till you start missing mods..

There's nothing wrong with the 360 version of Oblivion at all, it's where I started before moving it onto my PC so I could speed it's destruction along. :dance:

Well, maybe the lighting is a bit iffy (Bloom vs. HDR, I'm kinda spoiled now), but the textures were fine and the game played quite well on that controller. I enjoyed it when I had it, but now I'm on the PC, so I'm not going back.

Well; I've played the 360 version my whole life without complaint; but I can't imagine downgrading from a heavily modded Oblivion back to the Vanilla one. Sure, I love it; but others don't seem to..

Edit: By "my whole life" I mean, ever since I got it. Not literally ever since I was born..

ps3 version is definatly better then 360... the distant textures are all rendered and dont pop in as you approach them. I have owned both versions...

but graphics dont make up for its lack of DLC ie wizards tower. PC > xbox > ps3

I think we got that :thumbsup:

Nice to hear you had a good experience going from PC to 360. It′s really all about the general feel of the game, not what platform you prefer

I don't own a pc... so, but vanilla on the 360 seems to get the job done for me.

PC and console versions of Oblivion all feature HDR lighting, not Bloom.

There's always talk about graphics, but does anyone find the 360 controls lacking? I played Oblivion on the PC years ago and very recently picked it up for the 360. It seems to me like it's harder to be a hybrid spell caster on the 360. I have a spell on my RT Bumper of course, and I have another keyed to my left thumb pad (bow, sword + shield, and potion are at the other 'cardinal' positions). I realize that I could put more spells at the NW/NE/SW/SE positions, but it seems so easy to screw that up. Does anyone else miss the hot keys? Or does anyone have a suggestion on how I can make the 360 play cleaner? Maybe I should just face that fact that I'm a PC gamer and my 360 is essentially there for Netflix.

Your a PC gamer meaning your not use to it so you will never get the hang of these controls personally they svck badly IMO.

Oblivion is playable on the console? with that wimpy 30 FPS LOL that must be torture PC FTW!

No, honestly. It plays adequetely and I'm deriving a ton of enjoyment from it. I'd rather be playing it on PC right now, but since I can't for some time, I'm just pleased with how well it runs and looks.

I guess what I'm saying is that anyone out there who wants to play the game on console but is afraid of how it will look or play, should be able to do so with reasonable confidence that they'll still have a good experience that won't disappoint them. (Unless they demand the absolute best performance possible, mods, and other features they can only get on PC.)

ive heard this also, and apparently pc hardware requirements will be about the same as oblivion, i imagine abit higher, but its because of the consoles, so we will have to wait for the requirements.

And i have been playing it on ps3 for a while after moving to pc and it runs just as good i think, obviously no mods but with SI on the GOTY you can have a decent experience.

After finally playing oblivion on a effcient pc with 60+ fps its hard to go back to the 30 fps ps3 version but when I travel I can't take my pc with me so the ps3 version has to when I'm away from home. I would recommend Oblivion in this order PC>PS3>360. DLC does not make up for graphics, PS3 already has Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine which is the best DLC available for the game. The other DLC is mostly house mods and horse armor and is not really worth it.

Whereas for me, "slumming it" wouldn't begin to describe the experience. :gun:

PC only, ever. Would not accept anything less, no matter what. For oh so many reasons, too. Not just the absolutely stunning modded graphics, for example. That would be the least of it, in fact.

I'm a die-hard PC gamer myself. I've never owned a console. But if, for some reason, I could only play Oblivion or Skyrim on a console I would play on a console rather than not play at all.

That's okay. People are allowed to have different standards.

I don't really care that much about graphics, but if I palyed on a console I would miss my gameplay improvement mods.

I just started with the oblivion mods a few days ago (after owning the game 2 years) and I have to say that shader updates alone make the PC version 100x better than vanilla was for me. That is at 2560x1600 res where all of that blocky low-res stuff is terribly noticeable.

I'm wondering If I played Oblivion to death on PS3 and PC is it worth it to buy it again for 360?