I’m happy to see that it looks good! The return to a more serious style is welcome after 3 games of perhaps taking it too far.
First impression is it seems a lot more Destiny-like: personal vehicles, quests you can pick up anywhere, dynamic events. I’m not complaining necessarily, but looks like they took some notes.
The movement options seem nice but not sure they add that much really. If they don’t solve a challenge that the enemies provide then it’s kinda pointless. I almost never used slide or ground pound in combat in previous games because I was better off just shooting the enemies.
And as much as I love my Jakobs weapons, I was hoping to see a manufacturer revamp. They even used the same companies in Tiny Tina’s with only minor tweaks. The heavy weapons sharing a slot with grenades looks to be a fantastic change though, very welcome.
Also, no lip-sync on NPCs? Looks weird having Amara speaking but her character do nothing.
Overall though looks like a solid but not ground-breaking entry. The guns look just as fun as before and the art design is a step up (those bosses!) from before which I love to see. I know people complained about the Vault Hunters being generic but I don’t have a huge issue with it. I don’t need my characters to be the blue-haired anime character sitting by the window.
Thanks for posting, I wouldn’t have seen this otherwise.
Playing through those old games now, I feel like they could use some kind of dodge move to get an escape from guaranteed damage, so if the movement does that, I’ll be happy. But those games are also littered with level designs that make you take the long way around due to a single ledge being too high, so hopefully it alleviates that problem a bit too. The Destiny personal vehicle seems like a departure from Catch a Ride, but maybe those already weren’t in 3 for all I know, and being able to spawn it out of nowhere probably is an improvement.
Movement techniques should always be optional and not necessity to do. Somebody wants to zip around and somebody wants to stay still and fire away. Some mechanics solve problems, but some just are there to give freedom.
Guns. They have spend three main games and four spinoffs building the companies. At this point the manufactorers are basically characters. Why chance it?
I think 2 can also be used as an argument for why they should switch it up. After all, we switch playable characters each game to keep things fresh, so why not do the same with guns? A new planet should bring some new gun modifiers, and they could still bring back some of the old manufacturers as rare loot or legendaries to get even more variety. After 13 years and 4 entries, I’m just a little tired of reloading Tediore’s and throwing away all Hyperion and Torgue guns I pick up (exaggerating!).
I somewhat agree with you on movement: it doesn’t have to be for combat or necessary. But you have to adjust the enemies to account for the extra player tools lest you make melee or slow projectiles trivial. That and I believe that the best games implement features that solve something, even if the devs create the problem the feature solves. Take Doom Eternal for example: I wouldn’t have used half the tools in that game if they hadn’t provided challenges that were best overcome by using them. On medium-high difficulties you end up using everything at hand to get through the levels because otherwise you die, and that’s fulfilling! If I had the same tools at hand but the enemies were all .5x speed then it wouldn’t be very engaging.
I’m having relatively good performance in 6600rx on Linux but after a while theres some sort of GPU memory leak (would be my guess) where fps halves until the game is restarted.
Like many UE games over the years, they didn’t properly optimize Unreal itself for their use, and there were already several ini tweaks up on the Nexus to remedy this the day of launch.
Went from 27 average fps when in exterior cells to a solid 60, with an unsupported GPU by just using one of these ini tweaks.
This is such a common problem with games on any iteration of Unreal Engine, and has been for over 2 decades. Since it’s so common to see, I wonder if the documentation just sucks.
It’s poorly optimized. At version 0.4 is probably the first thing that looked decent, with final art in place, but no QA or optimization done. My bet is that they had to launch earlier than expected due to the rumors, or they extended way past the due date and the money for the project ran out. If successful, probably optimization will take place, but they are waging on it.
I’ve gotten a lot of freezing and stuttering playing on my desktop PC (Linux with Proton). The deck actually seems to be more stable, though it is locked to 30 fps and textures still take a minute to load sometimes.
For day one, performance is actually fine. I have much bigger gripes than getting fps dips in the open zones. Like levelling ffs. I have 100 strength, willpower, and blades, but am doing less damage to mobs now than I was doing in the beginning of the game. Or levelled loot drops and quests.
The key to oblivion is to pick tag skills that you won’t use. If your build is a stealth archer, pick block blunt and restore. You only level when your tagged skills level, so your archery illusion and sneak will be 100 but your character will be sub level 10 so you’ll basically be a god
Sort of. The new leveling system has minor skills contribute to your levels, to a lesser degree. IIRC it’s something like 10 major levels or 20 minor levels (or some combination thereof) to get a character level.
The level system doesn’t work that way anymore. Now when you level up, it doesn’t matter what skills you leveled up when you get a new level, you always get 12 points (called “virtues”) to spread around to any stat. Luck, however, takes 4 “virtues” to level one point, while the others are just 1:1 and you can add up to 5 at a time.
I can level up entirely through using Agility linked skills but then put my stat points into Strength and Intelligence instead of agility.
The real issue has to do with the level scaling on enemies still being the worst of any Elder Scrolls game because they didn’t change anything about that from the OG. So once you’re level 50, everything has the best weapons and armor on them.
Yeah, I wonder if that’s perhaps the result of basically stapling the old game engine onto UE5 in order to preserve the core gameplay. Back when Oblivion was first released, multicore CPUs were incredibly rare, so it’s likely the engine was not built to take advantage of them. But ever since then, most of the improvements in CPUs have come in the form of adding more cores rather than increasing clock speed, and it’s by no means trivial to convert single-threaded code into multi-threaded. Most likely it would require a complete rewrite, which they’d probably want to avoid in order not to introduce more bugs.
But of course, it could also just be UE5’s fault, since even a single core on a modern CPU should not be slower than a 2006 model.
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