Oblivion

Do non-official (illegal) mods exist for Oblivion on the 360?
Should I download any official patches (I haven't once logged on to 360live since I got my 360 several years ago)? Do hardware/graphic patches exist?

And is there a site that shows you how to make pretty faces using the offical oblivion face maker?

If you want some lolz, do a search for some of the japanese Oblivion mods

picked up the goty edn. to help quell the pre-FO3 DLC withdrawal

what do I need to know before I start?

I don't know about "need to know". I would say don't need to sweat the character creation stage, as you can practice every skill as much as you want. I'd skip the advice that seems widespread online to delay leveling so as to keep the game's difficulty down. I leveled like crazy and had a rocking good time. I didn't do a lot of sneaking or backstabbing, though: I tend to bash my way through RPGs and had my usual mage-fighter orc to do so.

The Shivering Isles expansion has a better story than the main game's main quest, I think. And the Knights of the Nine quest was really fun and yielded great items. I'd do so those sooner rather than at the end (which is what I did), if I could go back and play again. And I could play again, but after 120+ hours I think it's time for me to move on to Fallout 3 and Fable 2 (once my 360 comes back from Microsoft).

hey, czn, oblivion is an awesome game. I wish my disc wasnt scratched or I would go play it right now.

there is a big leveling problem in Oblivion.

see http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Leveling and http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Efficient_Leveling
-pay particular attention to the 'avoid over-leveling section' and save one permanent save after you just leveled efficiently so that you can go back to this save in case you over level. To prevent over leveling just remember to always train your minor skills first, and then work on the major skill you need for the level up. This prevents being forced to take +3 or +4 bonuses because you accidentally leveled up your tenth major skill before you intended to. (see all the general tips on efficent leveling in the link I gave you)

if you want to be a mage, than go all out.

* The following races provide magicka bonuses:
o Breton: 50 points
o Altmer: 100 points

* The following birthsigns provide magicka bonuses:
o Mage: 50 points
o Apprentice: 100 points (but accompanied by permanent 100% Weakness to Magic.) -good when paired with breton
o Atronach: 150 points (but accompanied by permanent Stunted Magicka) -don't do this on a first run through.

lastly, do the mage quest right off the bat... then you will get access to arcane university right away.

If you come upon the nirnoot plant -don't sell it (it will grow back after 3 months I believe but there is only 100 of them in the game and you need to collect 100 if you want to do the nirnoot quest)
http://www.melyanna.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/plants_nirnroot.jpg

One more thing - download all the recommendeed mods if you have the pc version of this game http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Recommended_Mods

awesome, thanks dudes

NEVER. STOP. JUMPING.

actually ninroot doesn't grow back... do you have the pc version czn? you can mod the hell out of that bitch and it wouldn't matter anyways. I don't even know why I play the game on 360 :(

"NEVER. STOP. JUMPING."

so now that I will not play this anymore, I want to know: why? If you hit 100 in acrobatics, can you jump realllllly high? Or are there other benefits of having a high acrobatics?

I think "NEVER. STOP. JUMPING." is more of a comment on how people play, i mean why run anywhere when you can run and jump and shoot fireballs at the same time?
if you are using efficient leveling you are going to have to stop jumping sometimes though...

A little of both actually: yeah, you can jump reallllly high and access stuff you wouldn't otherwise; but I was always building three skills at once while moving place to place just for efficiency's sake. At first I was annoyed that Fallout didn't use the same metric for skill building; in retrospect I think it makes for a less grindy game.

are there like a lot of things on high shelves?

it kinda makes it easier to get around. You can leap fences and get down hills quicker and escape in dungeons from places you couldn't otherwise.

heard this game is really good, ten quid on amazon, is it worth a purchase???

yes very much so yes

Gotta get a new computer this year so I can finally play this. What with Morrowind being my favourite RPG ever and all.

Oblivion had sooo many flaws, but it was still fun and addictive

i am in the first throes of addiction to this game but i'm coming to the conclusion that it basically sucks

I never played this. Played Morrowind and decided first person swordplay is the worst thing ever.

i had big problems with a lot of stuff in Dragon Age: Origins, but in the end i really liked it. i liked, at the heart of it, that it was interested in telling a big story where you were moving things along in heroic fashion, but there were other people involved with their own motivations: you could tell that what you did mattered.

ES:O doesn't have any of that feeling. the whole world is overpopulated and none of it matters. there are four human 'races', three elves, orcs and some animal people, and none of them are different from each other. they're all everywhere. the main plot is dumb and without consequence. apparently the emperor is dead and people say that's bad but it isn't really. there are gates to hell opened everywhere, and people say that's bad too but you're basically at your leisure to do something about it or not. none of the stuff you do in the world is related to anything else. the guild quests and local town quests and just random shit scattered everywhere is just there just because. how many abandoned mines and elven ruins and crumbling fortresses can there be, really?

i am impressed with the sheer level of detail in the world and people and items and options. sometimes DA:O was a little too brief and basic. how do people come down in a Bethesda vs. Bioware fite? cos in the atmospherics, oblivion is worse. the characters are ugly. the names manage to be both obtrusive and unmemorable. i know it's fantasy, but there are two towns named "Anvil" and "Bravil". you couldn't workshop that for another afternoon? didn't want to name them all Somethingvil? and the voice acting is just bad. i can pick out some of the same radio-ad people from Fallout 3.

that's not even to bring up the totally stupid character system. seriously this "over-levelling" problem is one of the biggest unforced errors i've seen in a game like this. you have to NOT pick "primary" skills that you use the most, or fit the character you want to play, because they'll make your character WORSE in the long run, because your stats won't get the right number of boosts during play? whose fuckin dipshit idea was that?

i feel like, with the amount of work-hours put into how many different potions you can make out of a bunch of rice you steal out of a bag, and how powerful they will be based on a computation of your skill and alchemy equipment, couldn't they have thought through the system and the story a little more?

xp hahaha yes i'm not really enjoying the fps melee stuff either, as a core part of the game experience.

I don't think you need to sweat the over-leveling thing; I ignored it, leveled as I wanted to in whatever skills I wanted to, & was fine. Combat is so rarely hard that leveling doesn't much matter.

Looking back I feel kinda silly for how much time I put into this game, & wonder if that's why I'm having a hard time getting into Fallout 3 (plus the "nuke Megaton?" question has me paralyzed)

Yes, in retrospect sweat everything. Overleveling especially. Frankly, my character became a god at one point... Specifically because I looked up the best weapon enchantments you can ame at Arcane university. I quit playing and I never even finished any questline.

Also money. Don't sweat that. Don't run out of dungeons just to sell. A bunch of equipment. Leave the crap there. Money shouldn't be a problem.

The reason I didn't have as much fun as I could have playing this game is because I was playing it too slowly, scavenging all the equipment, leveling in an annoying manner so that I got +5 bonuses, and generally just not jumping headfirst into everything.

Yes, in retrospect don't* sweat anything*....

eh i bailed on this. just too many things that were plain unenjoyable.

the designers wanted to out-detail the competition, so they packed the world full, but the result is just tedium imo. the core game mechanisms are anti-intuitive and unenjoyable, and the narrative & visual elements are lacking in atmosphere and don't add up to the feel of a coherent place in a coherent time. Dragon Age just has this beat.

i was ready and willing to get sucked into a big rpg, but, let's hope new vegas is actually good.

does anyone call this "blivs"

This game has so much wasted potential.

Hopefully the next Elder Scrolls game will put a stronger focus on gameplay and story. Has melee combat (sword, shield, mace, axe, spear...) ever felt right in a first-person RPG?

The stupid levelling thing is the reason I can't get into this - like, if you are going to make it legal for me to get to 100 in all the spells by casting one low-level spell over and over again, I am going to do that? And then I am going to quit, because now the game is too easy and I'm bored.

has any game ever done first-person melee right (outside of 1v1 situations, like Fight Night or parts of that Riddick game)? It's really hard to map the spacial sense needed for close combat with a flat viewing field.

it just feels like it's not very well thought-through

most rpgs give you xp for killing things, and completing tasks. then with the xp you either level up and improve your character, or you spend the xp directly to improve your character somehow.

but oblivion basically de-linked the "tasks" part. you don't get any benefit from doing anything plot related. you make your character better by doing the same repetitive shit, and the quests are there in case you just get too bored.

i am impressed with the sheer level of detail in the world and people and items and options. sometimes DA:O was a little too brief and basic. how do people come down in a Bethesda vs. Bioware fite? cos in the atmospherics, oblivion is worse. the characters are ugly. the names manage to be both obtrusive and unmemorable. i know it's fantasy, but there are two towns named "Anvil" and "Bravil". you couldn't workshop that for another afternoon? didn't want to name them all Somethingvil? and the voice acting is just bad. i can pick out some of the same radio-ad people from Fallout 3.

Bioware in a landslide for me. I think you make a lot of great points. Also:

http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u288/callmewingus/happy_birthday_kryptonian.jpg

Some games have had decent/solid first person melee combat, but I don't think anyone's really knocked it out of the park before

like, you don't get any benefit for killing an enemy, necessarily, you get xp for hitting things with your sword. so, in most cases it's technically better for you to whack an enemy with something weaker, and block a lot, instead of beating the thing down outright. i understand the idea of a 'training' model where when you do a thing a lot you get better at that thing, but come on. if you sell a pile of a hundred arrows one at a time it's better for your 'mercantile' skill than if you sell the whole pile at once.

i know i'm basically on a rant now but this is just stupid.

xps

Arcanum gave you xp per hit against an enemy, meaning it benefited the player to only use high speed, low-dmg weapons. That was a dumb system too.

yeah i hated that game. ugly as fuck.

Arcanum's one of the ugliest isometric games of all time (it looks worse than games that came out literally 5 years earlier), plus the tech/melee/magic system is really unbalanced and broken. It does some things well, but there's too much working against it.

What's weird/frustrating about Bethesda is they do put a lot of work into world-building, just not in the parts that matter. I think ultimately a smaller world with much better presentation is more immersive than their approach. There has to be something about the gameworld that invites you to explore it, something besides it simply existing.

Oh and level-scaling is an abysmal concept

"levelling" is an abysmal concept! but you're talking to an ex-adolescent GURPS player here

All the stuff that people are complaining about here would have been totally appealing to me at age 13 when indeed Daggerfall was my favourite game, and all the 13 year olds I know who play games adore Oblivion. So I think it's just something you outgrow.

Oh and level-scaling is an abysmal concept

QFT

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/12/11/skyrim-elder-scrolls-5-coming-11-11-11/

it is going to use a new engine - link

New engine = quality control? Only time will tell.

I don't think Skyrim could be any worse than Oblivion so I'm sort of hopeful about this game. Plus, I don't see and other single-player first-person fantasy RPGs coming out these days - which is pretty odd considering how popular they were at one time.

Plus that is my ideal game genre

I've only just really gotten into Oblivion. Tried it two years ago (?), got bored really quickly and put it down. Pulled it out again a couple of weeks ago and am loving it 16 hours in. So yeah, looking forward to rimming the sky.

I had a crap experience with Fallout 3. Gave up after 12 hours, bored and frustrated.

lol why am i playing this

i dove back into my ultramodded mprrowind the other day after months away. come towards the light.

morrowind, obv

bah id love to but no gaming pc here

id play plain version of morrowind on console if i could. kinda thought bethesda would do that eventually somehow. the continents are already there in skyrim

http://i.imgur.com/xA5d1H7.jpg

high style

£50 and the levelling and the random monster levelling is still probably janky as shit? think i'll probably pass

ok they say they've done something to the levelling and scaling but "best of both worlds" doesn't bode well one of those worlds is crap

Going for a nice walk but then accidentally becoming disproportionately good at walking so all the local bandits are now superheroes armed to the teeth with cutting edge tech and can effortlessly murder you is a seminal part of gaming history actually?

When good men do some jumping instead of closing shut the jaws of Oblivion, that is evil enough

pretty sure this is the worst Elder Scrolls and yet i can't help myself

With this and the new Fatal Fury dropping on consecutive days I can't even figure out which direction to boycott in! I should finish boycotting all the problematic games that are already out!

Is this good?

the original is cool though i like skyrim and morrowind more. a remake sounds unappealing

LOL so I bought this without even a second thought. What can I tell you? It has a nostalgia value for me and besides now it means I can play it on PC with a decent PS5 controller.

From the looks of it theyve kept much of the voice acting but have completely remodelled a lot of the janky looking NPCs and general world?