I finally started playing the original release on Steam since I don’t have a powerful computer.
It is fun, but it’s much smaller than I imagined. People always complain about the drauger ruins in Skyrim as being repetitive, but damn those oblivion gates are just the same thing again and again. Hardly any variety between them.
I’m pretty close to just dropping this game and starting up Skyrim again.
Yeah, but you really don’t have to engage with every oblivion gate you see. There’s a lot of really great quest lines to engage with, but the main story is one of the least interesting the game has to offer.
100% agree. The thieves guild, dark brotherhood, overall mages guild (minus the recommendations and lackluster manimarco) are all better than the Skyrim faction questlines. Even some of the standalone quests are just a master craft of storytelling
The Oblivion gates are super boring. Before dropping the game, try the Shivering Isles expansion - it’s a really different experience from the base game and I personally like it much better. It starts here:
If you limit yourself to only going into dungeons that quests send you to, you’ll have a better time. Legend tells it all the dungeons in this whole game were made by one person, so blundering into random ones tends to be really underwhelming compared to Skyrim. While that is charming for me in its own right to wander into a random dungeon and not know whether there will be anything interesting about it at all, all my best memories of this game are of the quests and the dialogue.
It’s a product of its time. Oblivion’s game size was right at the 4.7G limit of what would fit on single layer DVD-5.
Oblivion Gates
Ugh, arguably the most boring and repetitive part of the game. Such a wasted opportunity too as they could have made each Oblivion gate be a hellscape mirror of the area that it spawned in (including towns). That would have been a fairly small amount of additional data for a huge gain in game play.
They suck, don’t do any more of them then you have too.
Yeah I definitely remember oblivion gates being a drag, but I only ever did the main campaign on one character so I never bothered with them on subsequent plays. Anyone know if the new version modifies the gates at all?
As far as I know, the new version didn’t change a single thing other than graphics and maybe some bugs. Right now, I am doing an oblivion gate and I am just running through without fighting anyone. I actually just turned my steamdeck on and was in the last room. It was too easy and much better that way.
Yeah, Bethesda loves to ruin their game worlds with weirdly repetitive additions. Morrowind constantly spawns assassins on you, Oblivion does the Oblivion gates, Skyrim has the dragons. In the latter two, I think, it’s best to just not start the main quest, which prevents the Oblivion gates and dragons from appearing, at least if you replay the game.
I just started playing this remaster, and only played to Skyrim before. And I really love this title! I feels the same waves than when I was on Skyrim. I think this release is the best occasion for newcommers and younger players
I think oblivion was the best RPG of the series. And the remaster just made it more enjoyable to play. The original had some…interesting ideas that ultimately flopped (that god awful levelling system they bastardized from morrowind).
The quests are peak, quirky, and actually have rewards at the end since you can’t make god tier equipment right out the (oblivion) gate. Levelling feels good again, and you don’t have to cry into a pillow because you ran too much and leveled your athletics and now you HAVE to take a speed point as an attribute on level up even though you wanted strength.
Don’t expect a 2025 game in terms of mechanics and level design. For it’s time Oblivion was a very good game. This is a polished version of the original with updated graphics and somewhat modernised combat and movement. They ironed out a lot of clunky mechanics and bugs too.
As far as remasters go the GTA ones were absolute dogwater just like warcraft 3 remastered. This one is very good and imo comparable with the command and conquer remasters.
I dont think they could have done much more without making the game completely different.
Tbh, I actually think this ends up being a win for Skyblivion. I think a lot of first-time Oblivion tryers were hoping for more dramatic changes, as opposed to basically unchanged Oblivion with a weird facelift running on top.
the doomed king and his armed guards need to escape through a secret passage that just so happens to cut through my jail cell seems a little too convenient
I remember playing it for the first time in 2006 and I had completely forgotten about that guff by the time I got out of the tutorial. My character went on to ignore the main quest for many dozens of hours.
Of course several of those hours were spent struggling to defeat boars that started appearing on the road at level 5. They were insanely tough since I'd accidentally made the most difficult possible custom class. At least the remaster doesn't have that problem. Instead the combat is very easy — unless you go up one level in difficulty in which case you'll probably be killed by a mudcrab.
I like it. I think if I had been a first time player (far from it — I played it at release), this would be a worthy way to experience the game. That said, playing it again just feels deeply discordant for me. It’s drop-dead gorgeous with the visuals, but the sound effects, NPC models, and so much more just remind me of the original jank, and it snaps me back and forth, lol. Going back to KCD2, cus it’s new to me.
I remember a similar story some time ago, of another map that was just a big arena filled to the brim with all the enemies. Part of the strategy was circle strafing the whole place while enemies killed one another, then using the ammo to deal with whatever was left. Can’t remember the map name
The YouTube algorithm has been real weird lately. It suggested a video to me and I had no idea why until now. I watch a lot of Doom stuff, so it wasn’t off base, I just didn’t have context for it.
It’s Coincident (the streamer this is about) commenting over a “lost” demo of Okuplok playing the map themselves. Spoiler: they do not finish it! But it was neat hearing Coincident discuss his own strategies for the map in comparison to how the creator (allegedly) approached it.
What I like about this image is that this is probably the biggest object that I can compare to something I know, that I can “comprehend”. With 6 km wide, it is about the same size as Grenoble, a city I have seen from above while hiking. I can understand how far the picture looks from it, how small a human would be on it
If Lyft fails to address unsafe driving behavior, pursuing a claim can bring attention to dangerous patterns. This legal action can push Lyft to adopt more stringent safety protocols, what to do if your uber crashes such as better driver monitoring and stricter policies to deter risky driving. It benefits both current and future passengers.
(in regards to the first paragraph) there are more than two reasons to play video games. “choose one of these pre-selected answers” is probably not the reason for most.
True but I often felt the push pull of the two groups. Especially in mmo's. PVPers tended to be the challenge minded while PVEers tended more toward the role players. I often would chat about how I was just there to play with dolls.
Reminds me of the 90’s. When anime was becoming more available in the west. Titles like Ghost in the Shell, Akira and La Blue Girl. Everyone here just figured they were cartoons and cartoon were for kids. So kids got to watch it…
Now it’s like they see poker, so it must be gambling. Doesn’t matter it’s not the case at all.
Wife thought the same thing about anime when I met her, now it’s almost all she’ll watch. She’s had to get used to some of the…cultural differences…that Anime includes, but she’s so used to it now that it barely registers any more.
ETA: this is mostly a dig at the depictions of teenagers in Neon Genesis specifically, and especially the unhealthy relationships between adults and children in that show
The national government in Japan is a pile geriatrics who don’t want to do anything. Pretty much every prefecture(think state or provenance) raised the age of consent to 18 a long time ago.
I remember politely telling the guy at my local Family Video that “Watership Down” should probably be removed from the kid’s section. He scoffed at me and just gave me a “yeah… mkay.”
A few weeks later, I noticed it was gone. I commented on it to a different guy this time and he said “yeeeeah, the boss’ sister brought it home for her kids. It’s gone now. Like… actually gone.”
Childhood trauma could have been avoided with that one.
I saw la blue girl when I was 18 and it traumatized me. That shit is fucked up. I thought it was anime bc my friend had a big collection and it was just there on the shelf.
It’s a weird hentai, but it’s overall pretty tame.
Bible Black is more intense. Then Urutsikodoji. Then some other fucked up anime that didn’t stick into my memory. La Blue Girl is barely a step above regular hentai in fucked-up-ness.
I am not in the market for a console (my last one was the Sega Mega Drive which was abandoned after we got a Pentium 1 PC and dialup), but I got to say, I love Nintendo’s pricing policy.
It’s almost as if they are taking the piss and want to see to what extent their fans are gluttons for punishment.
One possible complicating factor for those games? While they’re physical releases, they use Nintendo’s new Game-Key Card format, which attempts to split the difference between true physical copies of a game and download codes. Each cartridge includes a key for the game, but no actual game content—the game itself is downloaded to your system at first launch. But despite holding no game content, the key card must be inserted each time you launch the game, just like any other physical cartridge.
This is full on corporate regressiveness.
Nintendo will also use some Switch 2 Edition upgrades as a carrot to entice people to the more expensive $50-per-year tier of the Nintendo Switch Online service. The company has already announced that the upgrade packs for Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom will be offered for free to Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers. The list of extra benefits for that service now includes additional emulated consoles (Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 64, and now Gamecube) and paid DLC for both Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Mario Kart 8.
Wait so you have to subscribe to get access to emulators (which are all open source I am assuming)? And you can’t just buy a retro game (ala GOG) and play it to your heart’s content? You need a sub to Nintendo online?
I think it kills game leaks before the street date. Even if the data isn’t in the cartridge (which is stupid), you would still be able to sell the cartage assuming the online service is still active.
Sucks for game preservation though. I’m personally hoping there’s some flaw in the gen 1 hardware that can be exploited for archive purchases.
Their emulators have always been proprietary. The waters were a little muddied by the NES/SNES Classic consoles using a Linux OS but the emulators were their own code.
Their FOSS code is made available when required and is published here:
The key card thing is seriously infuriating, both from a consumer standpoint and from a media conservation standpoint.
Basically you own a game cartridge, but as soon as Nintendo shuts down their servers for whatever reason it becomes a useless piece of plastic. They really don’t want us to own anything anymore.
I'm not sure that's how that works. The Switch already had both physical boxes with digital codes in them and cartridges that required mandatory downloads to run. This seems like a physical unlock key for a digital download, which depending on how it's implemented is actually easier to both resell and use offline than the Switch 1 solution to the same problem.
I don't recommend purchasing either, and I avoided both of those options on Switch 1, but I'm pretty sure this at least does not make things any worse.
I have major gripes with a number of pricing choices in this thing, but to the best of my current understanding this one is based on a misunderstanding.
It's also true of the partial download carts for Switch 1 that don't include a full playable version of the game in the cart.
Presumably the digital back-compat on the Switch 2 means the Switch will live a lot longer usual for Nintendo platforms, and we don't know if there will be a backwards compatible Switch 3.
But in practice, this is just an iteration of the Switch 1 version of the same thing. It's not great. I avoided both the mandatory download carts and will likely avoid these ones, but it's not a bigger deal than it has been for the past five years or so.
Oh wow, that cartridge thing is actually just the worst of both worlds. I’m similar to you, my last console was a Mega Drive but I did get a Switch for my wife and played a couple of games on it which was fun. Not really keen on giving Nintendo more money though.
arstechnica.com
Aktywne