Still commenting the graphic engine in Oblivion since it’s the only part I can argue about before I can put my hands on a real copy. And still from Q23:
Here, this should help illustrate what’s going on in the open areas in terms of texturing.
I took this one about a hundred steps from the original poster’s shot, facing slightly more to the north and around the same time in terms of daylight (noon-ish). Note my (crude) but hopefully illustrative yellow line. Below the line, higher detailed texturing. Above the line, N64-blurry texturing. If I walk forward here (say, swim to halfway across the body of water in front of me), the next grid loads in, in this case well up and into the tree line.
Now have another look at the almost same shot six hours later as the sun’s setting. Lighting makes it look (imho) much better, obviously because of the dulled shadow-contrast.
And two more, for fun:
As GG wrote here I really wonder why they didn’t smooth the transition between the two LODs of the textures instead of just switching them sharply as new “grids” are loaded around you.
Oh wait. I know this already. It’s the exact same problem in DAoC, with the difference that the clip plane in DAoC is much shorter, so the sharp line between high detail ground textures and the low detail ones is much less evident. They share the same engine and the limitations are evident.
I always hated Netimmerse/Gamebryo, it could be great as a middleware to speed up the production, but the engine sucks and has an awful performance for what it is able to move on screen. The only part where it excels is the light rendering and colors, and Oblivion confirms again all these points.
I guess we’ll have to wait the sequel to hide these limitations to the eye of the player and have a truly immersive environment where the technical bits aren’t as exposed as in this case.
Where are the praises to the Wired guy?
More comments I leeched:
Finally made it to Chorrol and met up with Jaufree, but I can’t stay awake any longer. So far, the game makes me feel very much like I’m back in the Morrowind universe, especially after my trek from the Imperial City to Chorrol and stops at various “dungeons” along the way. Seeing as how Morrowind is my all time favorite game, this is quite a compliment.
Character creation is as deep as ever, and like Morrowind, it’s more fun (and rewarding) to make a custom class. The face creator is neat, but considering you spend 99.99% of this game in first person view, it has little real utility.
The physics engine seems well implemented. Shooting arrows into the bucket over the well and watching it react appropriately was awesome. Even better was plucking the arrows back out when done.
I haven’t really seen anything interesting happen from the Radiant AI, but I love that NPCs keep daily schedules. This makes the game world even more immersive. Also, random street conversations add spice and seem to work well thus far.
Melee combat feels a lot like Condemned, but with ranged weapons and spells, this has much more depth.
Graphics are decidedly underwhelming. Much like Morrowind in its time, the engine has moments of beauty marred by more than infrequent choppy framerate, annoying pop ups, and generally ugly textures at a distance. For this sort of game, however, the graphics are more than serviceable.
Finally, clipping seems to be a real problem as I’ve already managed to get my character stuck twice without even trying. Unfortunately, I had to restart my game in both cases.
In summary, unlike the revolution from Daggerfall to Morrowind, Oblivion feels like an evolution. The graphics and sound have been enhanced, the dialogue is now audio instead of text, the NPCs have been given a little bit of personality, and the combat system has been tweaked to be more than just button mashing. After my first 6-7 hours of play, this feels very much like an improved Morrowind, which is exactly what I wanted. If you liked Morrowind, I suspect you’ll love Oblivion. Conversely, if you disliked Morrowind because it was too non-linear, or too complex, or required too much reading, I suspect you will find the same faults with Oblivion.