Have I already said that I hate Netimmerse/Gamebryo?

Well, people are reporting that with a simple change to the advanced options of Nvidia drivers you can greatly reduce mouse lag and have a more steady framerate.

This is a bug in the Netimmerse/Gamebyro engine that is about three years old and that I discovered because without the fix I just couldn’t play anymore DAoC on my old Geforce 3.

To apply this fix and enjoy the improvements in Oblivion you just need this small file (right click and “Save As..”, or it will show on the browser window). Double click on it and it will ask you to add some options to the Windows registry. Accept it. It should work with every driver version, so don’t worry about compatibility issues or nasty surprises. It just enables some hidden options in the graphic drivers.

After you have applied the registry key you’ll have a new tab in the options of the drivers. Under “Performance & Quality Settings” you’ll find “Additional Direct3D Settings” and it’s where you’ll have to change the “Max Frames to render ahead” from 3 to 0 (or “1”, just try both. At that time setting it to “0” didn’t work. I don’t know if something changed). This is a “safe” change. It won’t create problems in other games, so don’t worry about messing up.

The slower Oblivion runs on your system the more this fix will improve things.

Congratulations NDL. Three years later and this major bug is still there, intact.

From the GDC and from Joystiq:

During a Q&A session with media over lunch after yesterday’s GDC keynote, Sony’s Phil Harrison confirmed that PS3 software will be region free and that multiplayer gaming will also be free.

“It’s possible for developers to put all the TV formats – PAL, NTSC, HDTV, and so on – on the disc.” Can Sony bring the world together with games?

Finally a marketing decision that isn’t going against the interest of the players. That’s all I wanted to hear.

PS3, I will buy you.

Just arrived in my mail:

Your order for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Collector’s Edition) has been posted.

It’s shipped! Woooo!

I’m surprised because the order is from Play.com, which is in the UK. The game wasn’t expected to be out before Friday since it’s when games are usually out over there.

Now I’ll have to wait for it to fly here, which means Monday or Tuesday. Better than I expected!

Next month I turn to the PSX2. Both Dragon Quest 8 and Final Fantasy 12 should be out. And I think I’ll get the expansions for both FFXI and Guild Wars too (even if this last one as a digital download).

Still waiting for Prey (and Civ 4 patch, that was expected for the end of January and still missing).

Echoing a post on Grimwell:

So, a friend of mine just posted this on the official SWG forums.

maxtheuser:
Title: I am so thankful.

Subject: That there has not been a negative reaction to this recent nerf. SOE obviously did a wonderful job with this publish, and should be commended. Gamespot should right an article about how well done this mini-publish was.

I logged into the forums expecting to see pages of protest threads. Instead I saw only one. Sure, the title keeps changing, as does the original poster, but there’s only one Wink This shows that the Devs did a wonderful job with this publish, and it is obviously what the playerbase wants. I mean, I don’t anyone really wants to get past cl45 anyway.

Kudos Devs! 3 cheers for the Devs!
—

He’s referring to the fact that two repeatable quests have apparently been made unrepeatable and in fact, the only reliable way to level in SWG is now to use quests from the premium content released in their last expansion.

Anyway. One minute later….

There is no dissent, there is only the Force….

I don’t know the details of the issue in the game and what was changed in the “mini-publish”, so I don’t know if it’s well founded or not. But I’ve still heard similar complaints since the release of the NGE about the difficulty to level up if you don’t own the last expansion.

This appears to me as a valid concern. I’m above the parts and when I read that message I don’t think “ban this idiot”. Instead I think: “Well, what he says makes sense. I would like to know the reasons behind the change and what the devs think about the whole issue”.

Banned for sarcasm? Come on, this is ridicule. I’m not defending in any way who posted that complaint, it could have been expressed in a much better way and have a more specific title, but it’s still within what should be tolerated on a message board. The possibility to express disagreement and ask clarifications. That looks as a valid concern, it needs to be answered, not moderated.

Moderation rules should be flexible, even if they may bring to misunderstandings. You have to let the players express their malcontent, even if it isn’t within the standards of “politeness” you would like to see. I find ridicule that “sarcasm” is passable of a ban on a message board. Sarcasm comes from “satire”. What about banning “parody” as well? These are fundamental forms of expression. They are essential.

I’ll say it again, that post looks like a valid argument of discussion. It wasn’t so constructive but it expresses a malcontent that looks founded and deserves to be taken into consideration. I consider “trolling” an act that is disruptive for the discussion, that tries to derail it just for a laugh or to delegitimize who is writing. A way to avoid the discussion, to kill it, to negate it, to flood it with noise. That post doesn’t do anything like this, it just expresses a malcontent in a not so constructive way, but still understandable and acceptable, from my point of view. Not only the poster shouldn’t have been banned, but the thread shouldn’t even get locked. It brought up a problem, not in the best way possible, but still trying to expose a valid concern that should be examined instead of suppressed.

But what I find incredible is that SOE has a policy to make sarcasm outlaw. It’s impossible to not see it as a way to suppress valid forms of expression. A way to impose authority and not let you express any sort of individuality.

Answer the polls instead.

Matt Peckham writes for some magazine, has had a copy of Oblivion for some time before release and spent a good amount of time trying to break things in the game (broken toys! Is it not what we all love to do?). I really like how he writes and exemplifies arguments. If I could, I would recruit him in the mmorpg blog world. Or better.

Some quotes that say a lot more about the game than every review you’ll read:

Okay, since it’s out now, a few bones of contention. YMMV.

– The interface has been officially hijacked by NTSC. It’s not awful or anything. It’s actually pretty and clean and easy to read. But at 1680×1050, I want to see more, more, more damn you, more! Instead of scaling, everything just gets…bigger. Thank you Xbox 360, I love you kiss kiss.

– No pop-up tooltips on buttons. I mean, duh.

– No alt-tabbing. Crashy-crashy big time.

– Walking/running animations = stick-up-ye-olde-ass. Improved, yes, but I’m still waiting for a decent side-to-side ankle/foot animation, and running up/down steep inclines deserves at least a minor animation tweak. It looks really gamey when you’re in third person running laterally along 70-degree grades.

– The weather FX are a sliver worse than Morrowind. I had a pre-release beta copy of Morrowind back in ’01 and recall pointing out to Bethesda that the rain fell right through building awnings and such. Retail release, problem solved. Oblivion puts it back. Maybe it’s Kitty Pryde rain.

– No kids. Why not?

– Windows in buildings are always…blue. And bright. Doesn’t matter time of day. How hard would it have been to include a simple dimming trigger on the effect mapped to day/night cycles? The same holds for times NPCs are in the house and an option to see “lit windows” exterior to a building. Why should we have to check for locked status, or break in just to see if someone’s home?

– A.I. glitches. These were inevitable, and I can name twice as many cool things as I can weird ones. But for instance, last night a guard suddenly snapped and went on an attack rampage, no explanation…assaulted everything in sight, including a fellow apparently masochistic guard (just kept walking until his health dropped to near-zero, at which point he ran). Steal a horse successfully, ride it up to a guard, get off, then get back on, will get you a sudden “you thief!” The A.I.’s still triggering primarily off scripted actions/events/behaviors, in other words, not contextual information. A.I. “friendly fire” (not from you) can cause it to attack its peers incorrectly at times as well.

– Voiceovers are well-done in that adolescent boy’s fantasy kind of way (that’s a compliment), but we still have the occasional female that drops a male-voiced line (Oblivion’s nod to trans-gender?) or canned lines spoken through ‘rumors’ in an “okay, it’s a male generic response, it sounds close enough” way by many of the filler NPCs. Conversation topicality itself’s a mixed bag. It gets repetitious quickly, but in 30+ hours of play so far, every time I think I’ve heard it all, someone says something new that’s related to something I did and resets my impatience ticker. It’s vastly improved over Morrowind’s talking signposts.

Graphics schmafficks, I think the outdoors look great and I’m not put off by the low-res distance issues (though I’d be a bit grumpy were it to turn out the 360 was once again responsible). Nothing else, Planetside, Farcry, whatever, has tried to give you this kind of three or four mile spread (Farcry comes closest, but I could cut across a “level” in Farcry in a tenth the time it takes to navigate LOD in Oblivion). I can handle for now the bits of texture goofiness in trade for the landscape the same way I accepted (without admiring) the way roads in Arena zigged and zagged randomly to nowhere.

Qualifier one: I love RPGs. My favorite genre, a smidgen up from war and strategy games.
Qualifier two: I’m generally adoring Oblivion, don’t get me wrong. Just tough loving it here and there.

Okay, positives.

– The stat system feeds the physics engine in a way that’s difficulty to convey without experiencing it. Every single stat has some gradient relationship to how you *are* in the world, how you move, jump, shoot, fall down, etc. It makes the entire experience feel like an honest-to-goodness tiny-piece-of-world-simulation. You can really mess with the Havok-derived system in all sorts of crazy, genuinely interesting ways.

– Jeremy Soule’s score is better here than in Morrowind. I always disliked the trudgy main theme and the “trebley” incidental string effects. Oblivion’s still signature Soule, but classed up, imo.

– The A.I. will do things like leave a city on the east side of Cyrodiil and literally walk all the way to the other side of the province without breaking. It’ll take on critters along the way, it’ll grab meat (and who knows what else) from what it kills, and it navigates verticals and horizontals with fair aptness. You can send an NPC off to a dungeon or a house or whatever, and show up yourself days later to see the results of battles or encounters…or you can go with the NPC and see them actually play out. It’s Gothic’s behavioral system considerably trussed up and expanded.

– NPCs and beasties will follow you *anywhere*. Run through doors, into houses, up stairs and 2-3 more doors, and they’ll be right behind you. It’s much more difficult to snow the A.I. in general.

– I’ve mentioned it before, but the sound design’s a big step up as well. Different types of armor make different sounds altogether, for instance, and according to the literature, affect your stealth capabilities.

– The persuasion system/game’s much improved, essentially a little four-way mini-game that feels about right. Any more complex or involved and persuasion would be a gamey chore.

What makes Oblivion fun, at least for me so far, has been the way you can just sort of stumble into everything from everyday gossip quests or Sherlockian whodunit mysteries, to crazy cabalistic conspiracies and genuinely hilarious spoof-quests. Oblivion is much closer than Morrowind to being a sandbox simulation of a “slice of world,” but that’s not ultimately what makes it fun to play. It’s the individual quests and stories this time–and the voice acting and dynamic feedback help enormously–that keep me loading the game after dozens of hours pushing and pulling every game design switch and lever I can think of.

EDIT: Personally, I recommend walking everywhere and just pretending “fast travel” doesn’t exist. What I’ve seen of the main story’s been lots of fun, but for instance, I was near a city up in the mountains and happened to walk in for a peek. Someone approached me proactively and dropped a hint or asked for help or whatever about some issue or another. Ten hours later (no kidding), I’m 2-3 quests along and still hanging out in and around this city. It’s that kind of game, where the individual stories and personalities you happen upon are riveting enough to completely derail any “plans” you’ve made. That’s the core of cool in my book.

I think the idea in Oblivion is that you’re supposed to treat it quasi-realistically. In RL, you want to know what someone’s doing, you shadow them. Half the shadowing I’ve done’s revealed fairly mundane schedules (importantly with variability–they rarely do the same thing in the same order or at the exact same time), but the other half’s revealed some pretty cool sandboxy stuff, hidden agendas or activities, and sometimes just cool little “yeah, that’s pretty natural and makes sense and it’s unique to this particular character’s personality and current wants/needs” stuff.

(about NPCs)
They seem more like individuals, but not much moreso than in the Gothic series. They have agendas, schedules, wants, aversions, and much more specific conversational attributes. That said, they’re still area-general topic-wise, and you’ll get similar responses (though rarely the same) from multiple characters in the same city when you click ‘rumors’. The upside is, as the game world evolves, those rumor updates change to reflect what’s going on, so you have a sense–where in Morrowind this was practically impossible–that NPCs are paying attention to what’s happening, even if trivally so. Suspension of disbelief is still very much necessary.

(about quests)
Far more interesting. Most quests here are highly organic with half a dozen (or dozens) of stopping points along the way. Intrigue, backstabbing, optional ways of doing things (as in two or three or five), taking sides with one party or another, etc. Easily on par with Gothic’s in a good way.

(about the collector edition)
The coin’s pure novelty. The guide’s good if you care, else the writing quality’s a bit…on the lower end. Not as good as the old Origin Ultima guides (though much denser).

For example:

“At last, recognizing the original’s multitudinous anachronisms…” and on the very next page “Imperial scribes of the original Guide ignored this totality for multitudinous reasons…”

Or:

“…there exists a different understanding of how this world came to be…it defines us, this belief in where we came from…”

The DVD’s worth it, probably, though I wish it could’ve been another hour or two. They didn’t spend nearly enough time talking about the A.I. and procedural forests. I’d totally dork out to get the inside track on the creative processes behind some of those bits, not just the PR-approved gloss.

And from Charles, who has interesting observation even if he hasn’t played the game directly:

I watched Kasavin playing for an hour or so last night, and nothing there really said “quality experience”.

In that time I saw:

-about 50 little kobold like enemies that only shoot fire arrows (50 is not an exaggeration, I don’t think). Other than these, there was only one other enemy type, which appeared 3 times.
-NPCs running in to walls without moving.
-NPCs running off to who knows where for whatever reason
-Easily failable escort quests
-lack of friction for physics objects on surfaces (nothing breaks immersion like watching a ragdoll slide down a slight incline!)
-invisible walls (well, didn’t *see*, but saw kasavin trying to get on top of rocks, and there was obviously something blocking him)
-lack of facial expressions to match the emotion in voiced dialog
-the odd long load (but this may be console only issue)
-horrible looking inventory UI (I sure hope it’s completely different on PC)

On the positive side, combat does look like it gives a lot more feedback. Which is nice.

But overall, I’m still taking a ‘wait and see’ approach, while waiting to play it before buying.

edit: And just to toss in my favorite moment, it was a kasavin interaction with an NPC, that went like this:

NPC: “We lost everything! It was horrible!”

GK (out of game): “Oh, so I guess that means you don’t have anything for sale.” *picks merchant option*

NPC (cheerily): “We have many fine wares for sale!”

GK: “Hey wait a minute, I thought you said you lost everything!”

And back to Matt Pekham:

BobJustBob:
I’m impressed by this thread. It took months for the Morrowind backlash to begin. For Oblivion, mere hours.

Matt Pekham:
On the national cynic’s curve, we’ve all progressed mightily since 2001. And I think we’re also (all of us) just a little gun-shy these days about saying “I, uh, kinda liked it?” Hyperbole! Hyperbole! Did you just hear what he just said? HYPERBOLE! Nyah nyah nyah nyah!

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.

Oblivion2.jpg

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.

Oblivion6.jpg

And two more, for fun:

Oblivion7.jpg
Oblivion5.jpg

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.