Oblivion - Everything you ever wanted to know....

docvego · Post by **docvego** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 2:52 pm

What's the point of even playing a game if it dosen't have full BreadPhysX support? It's like shipping a game without audio.

Toe · Post by **Toe** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 3:06 pm

docvego wrote:What's the point of even playing a game if it dosen't have full BreadPhysX support? It's like shipping a game without audio.

Oh great, another bread doughboi

Huw the Poo · Post by **Huw the Poo** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 3:06 pm

On the release date (UK):

Play says 02/12 while Amazon says 25/11. Hmmm.

Scraper · Post by **Scraper** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 3:19 pm

Any word on whether or not baking and selling bread will be a learnable profession? If it is oblivian will be the best bread baking simulator EVAR.

Elmo · Post by **Elmo** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 3:37 pm

I knead this game.

Buatha · Post by **Buatha** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 4:22 pm

Imitating Homer Simpson:

"Dough!"

Phanboi · Post by **Phanboi** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 10:15 pm

Will my virus scanner stop my pc from getting a nasty Yeast Infection if I get one of these Bread PhysX processors?

Freezer-TPF- · Post by **Freezer-TPF-** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 10:57 pm

This is good news. I like a little rye humor in my RPGs.

tripcrow · Post by **tripcrow** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 11:14 pm

Can anyone expand on this official FAQ?:
WHAT ARE THE PC SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS?
We don't know at this time, but it will certainly look the best on the latest hardware available when the game is released.

If there’s going to be “200+ Hours of Gameplay (Main Quest is 20-25 hours long)” does anyone have a good idea about how much play a power type player would get out of the game if they wanted to finish up the main quest at near the same time their character was reasonably maxing out. Be nice to go in with a rough idea on how many side quests I can do. Sure’d hate to be stopping half way or so through like with MW because I topped out to early.

Beer Goggles · Post by **Beer Goggles** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 11:32 pm

Wheat is going on here?

CeeKay · Post by **CeeKay** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 12:37 am

DEVS WHAT ABOUT THE LIZARD ON KHAJIT PRON???/? IS IS IN YET????

docvego · Post by **docvego** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 7:12 am

Can anyone expand on this official FAQ?:
WHAT ARE THE PC SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS?
We don't know at this time, but it will certainly look the best on the latest hardware available when the game is released.

Instead of speculation I'll feed you a bunch of quotes straight from the mouths of Bethesda's Minions:

Todd Howard wrote: Since it takes us a good three to four years to make one of these [games], we have to think far in the future when we start. We've always seen the series as something that will really show off the latest hardware, so we do add things right until the end, while also making educated guesses as to what hardware of the future will do. The hardware companies do a very good job of giving us early info so we can plan ahead. At the same time, we hope to have options for the player to turn a lot of these graphics down so that it can run on a wider variety of PCs. That's something we feel we didn't do enough of with Morrowind; there just wasn't enough you could tweak down to get it running well on a nonsuper computer. We'll address that better in Oblivion.

Ashley Cheng wrote:We plan to scale Oblivion better for older machines than we did for Morrowind. Having said that, it never hurts to buy the fastest machine on the market. Our games will always be on the bleeding edge. Quite frankly, there are larger barriers to what we can do than just what the development platform is - time and resources being the biggest. We proved with Morrowind that a deep, complex RPG can work on a console. Nobody else would even think to try it - but we did it. And it did very well for us. At the end of the day, we make the game we want to make and then put it out on as many platforms as possible.

Gavin Carter wrote:We hope to include even more options than Morrowind had for scaling the visuals up and down. We’re still finalizing what the specific options will be, but you’ll be able to toggle specific shader effects, reduce lighting complexity, and some other high-level things in addition to the usuals like changing resolutions. Since we’re still optimizing the engine, we’re not ready to talk about specific requirements just yet.

Pete Hines wrote:As always, we like to push the technology, so if you want your PC to run the game at its fullest potential, you’ll want the latest, greatest PC out there. However, we are working on making it much more scalable than Morrowind so that the game will run on a wider variety of machines. It’s just too early to say how far we’ll be able to drop the system specs and still have the game achieve an acceptable level of performance.

For a reference of what people's computers are like these days here is Valve's recent Hardware Survey

Source of Quotes

wonderpug · Post by **wonderpug** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 8:48 am

Also from one of the recent interviews:

Elite Bastards: With the Xbox 360's advanced Xenos graphics chip from ATI, are there going to be any graphical differences between Oblivion on the PC compared to MS' new console? What are some of the technologies supported by the Xenos chip Bethesda's programmers are most keen on taking advantage of?

Gavin Carter: The performance of the Xbox 360 GPU is something we’ve been extremely impressed with even going back to the alpha kits. It’s really a beast thanks to innovations like the unified shader architecture. It tears through our longest shaders like a hot knife through butter. As far as differences, if you’ve got a fast PC with a graphics card with full shader model 3.0 support, the differences should be miniscule in nature.

baron calamity · Post by **baron calamity** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 8:56 am

So what cards have 3.0 support? Just the Nvidia 7800 & ATI X1800?

Smoove_B · Post by **Smoove_B** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 9:01 am

baron calamity wrote:So what cards have 3.0 support? Just the Nvidia 7800 & ATI X1800?

So...ATI cards that didn't exist during development, and went to retail sale a few weeks ago will be the closest ATI option for playing the "console" version of Oblivion?

Tainto.

EDIT: for clarity

tripcrow · Post by **tripcrow** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 9:03 am

“However, we are working on making it much more scalable than Morrowind so that the game will run on a wider variety of machines.”

Now that's good news. With a 2.66 P4, 512 ram, & FX 5200 w/128 I’ll buy the PC version and hold off on getting a new Xbox till Christmas for the kids.

Now all I need is a feel for how many side quests and how much exploring I can do without maxing out too early. My blind guess would be to spend as much time on side stuff as the main quest. So that’d be 40-50 hours (double the projected 20-25 hour main quest) length of play out of the possible 200. How’s that sound?

baron calamity · Post by **baron calamity** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 9:24 am

Smoove_B wrote:
baron calamity wrote:So what cards have 3.0 support? Just the Nvidia 7800 & ATI X1800?
So...ATI cards that didn't exist during development, and went to retail sale a few weeks ago will be the closest ATI option for playing the "console" version of Oblivion?

FYI cards just don't spring out of a pod. They have beta test and sample cards months before launch. I believe the ATI 520 was in developer's hands back in March.

Smoove_B · Post by **Smoove_B** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 9:38 am

baron calamity wrote: FYI cards just don't spring out of a pod. They have beta test and sample cards months before launch. I believe the ATI 520 was in developer's hands back in March.

Oh, I realize that. It just seems strange to hinge your software release on PC hardware that might not ship when you're ready to sell your product, no?

And that doesn't change the fact that Oblvion has been in devleopment for years. You're telling me they changed back in *March* to suddenly favor particular video card protocol that might not be available?

*sigh*

I wish Hetz could make it feel all better.

Booner · Post by **Booner** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 9:45 am

baron calamity wrote:So what cards have 3.0 support? Just the Nvidia 7800 & ATI X1800?

Nvidia 6800s support 3.0 shaders.

Freezer-TPF- · Post by **Freezer-TPF-** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 10:19 am

Booner wrote:
baron calamity wrote:So what cards have 3.0 support? Just the Nvidia 7800 & ATI X1800?
Nvidia 6800s support 3.0 shaders.

Nvidia 6600 series does also.

Blackhawk · Post by **Blackhawk** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 10:22 am

docvego wrote:For a reference of what people's computers are like these days here is Valve's recent Hardware Survey

Interesting - from that, an average PC would be roughly:

Intel 2.3 Ghz to 2.69 Ghz
OR
AMD 2.0 Ghz to 2.29 Ghz
512 Mb to 999 Mb RAM
ATI Radeon 9600 Series
XP SP 2 (Build 2600)
70 Gb to 79.9 Gb total hard drive space

DuckofDeath · Post by **DuckofDeath** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 9:16 pm

from an interview on EA:

"kathode: We are using some SM 3.0 stuff, but it is mainly for optimization purposes so you will probably see all or at least most of the effects with a SM 2.0 card. It will run better on a 3.0 card though."

take that for what you will, Bethesda continues to be pretty quiet on tech issues for the most part though. It'd be real spiffy to get more info.

baron calamity · Post by **baron calamity** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 9:53 pm

I am waiting for the day to come when kathode is just going to snap...

Kathode as play by Lewis Black: "Enough Enough! The truth is we have no clue. No fucking clue at all. It might run on an Apple fuck Mac, we don't know, we don't know."

docvego · Post by **docvego** » Wed Oct 26, 2005 7:03 am

If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in beta.

Blackhawk · Post by **Blackhawk** » Wed Oct 26, 2005 10:08 am

I just found an interesting Oblivion quote:

After Battlespire and the action/adventure Redguard are both completed, one more Elder Scrolls game will appear before work truly begins on TES 3: Morrowind. After that, TES 4: Oblivion will enter production. It will be quite a while before we see either of the latter two, though, so any thought as to what might come after is pure speculation.

Source: PC Gamer, October 1997. Other upcoming games discussed in the article: Ultima IX, Wizardry 8, Might & Magic VII, and 'The Dark Project' (working title).