Bethesda's Shivering Isles and it's jittering madness drives saves over the edge.

[Dark Jaguar]

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Shivering:Reference_Bug

In short, due to the way Oblivion handles assigning every generated object an ID code and the way some new AI scripts (mal)function, a save file can be destroyed. There is HOPE! Just not for 360 players...

On the other end of the scale is the "Oblivion for Oblivion" mod, which sets out to add the Oblivion keyblade to Oblivion (it was MEANT to BE!).

http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index....1019&st=20

[Great Rumbler]

I've already put about 20-25 hours into SI, so there's no going back for me. Although, I don't think I'll be able to put an additional 130 hours into this game, so it might not ever come up.

[Dark Jaguar]

If it hasn't gone too far, and a fix comes along, you'll still be set. It couldn't have raised it that much in that amount of time. The thing is, you have to wait for Bethesda to patch it while I can at least make do with an unofficial mod to take care of it in the mean time.

Basically what I'm saying is you should hold off playing Oblivion (or delete the expansion and play without it (you can still redownload it for free)) until this gets a fix. Or go on ahead, but do not look my way for mercy from an old salt who gave ya fair warnin'.

[Dark Jaguar]

GR, the final patch for shivering isles is now out, for both PC and 360, so you can play the game again.

[Great Rumbler]

Hooray!

But I'm already done playing it. :(

[Dark Jaguar]

"Done", like forever?

[Great Rumbler]

Probably not forever, but right now I'm focusing on other games.

[A Black Falcon]

I actually played Morrowind for the first time in a really long time (my last save file was from late 2005, I believe... ) last month, trying it out on my new PC... it was a bit more fun than I remembered, I think. I might play it more... haven't yet, but I might. I still dislike a lot of their design decisions, though. If they want a big nonlinear game, they should stick with the big overworld and warping the first two games had... but a game with the scale of TES but with strategic combat, a focused plot with main game encounters of the quality of Baldur's Gate or Fallout as well as those "wander around and do random stuff" elements, and parties could be great... it'd probably take forever to make, but it'd be great.

As it is though, because of the action combat, Morrowind feels more like an FPS than RPGs at times... and given my frequent antipathy for the FPS genre much of the time, that's not such a good thing. The graphics are nice though... Like with most RPGs of its type it's best when you're in a dungeon; that's probably why I was enjoying myself, because I was actually in a dungeon... sure there's other stuff there, but (to oversimplify things) the core of the TES games really is in simple action-combat dungeon crawling. Their other quests and guild quests are often not that thrilling... though it was cool in Arena to see towns that were actually large and not normal RPG towns of "four houses counts as a city". Of course, that latter model is exactly what Morrowind uses, but oh well... You can't make a game for console gamers AND have the scale and depth of a PC RPG. Both Morrowind and KotOR prove that. With the mediocre quality of the main quest, that gets old, and I don't really have fun just randomly wandering around with no point... I want to be doing some kind of quest. It's the same in Guild Wars -- I don't just go to areas again and again just to get good drops. I go somewhere if I've got a quest that sends me there or perhaps if I'm trying to completely explore that area for the map (and thus record a lasting achievement). Arena had some direction, thanks to its simplicity ('get the special items from dungeons' essentially), but the series quickly lost any sense of focus... I like having actual interesting encounters and situations like you find in the Baldur's Gate games or other similar PC RPGs, and TES doesn't really have that. Instead, it has you wandering around some pretty-looking dungeons killing things. Fun too, very different in focus...

Anyway, at least the game runs a lot better on this machine. Morrowind may have come out just a few months after I bought my old computer, but it never ran that well on it... being able to play with the graphic detail settings maxed with no framerate problems does a lot to help a game. :)

... why do I keep buying new games when I have so, so many old ones that I need to play as well? :D I've got unfinished games going back.. well, as long as we've had computers... and many of them are ones I keep meaning to play or finish someday and never quite get around to doing... oh well. Finishing long games is overrated... :) (At least with Morrowind I have the excuse of it being long and having a huge time commitment requirement/entry curve you need to get over before you figure out how to be good at it that I just decided wasn't worth the effort... with games like KotOR I got almost to the end of and then just stopped playing I don't have such excuses. oh well. :))

[Great Rumbler]

but a game with the scale of TES but with strategic combat, a focused plot with main game encounters of the quality of Baldur's Gate or Fallout as well as those "wander around and do random stuff" elements, and parties could be great... it'd probably take forever to make, but it'd be great.

I think it's impossible to have both. You either spend you're time working on an insane of amount of dialogue, story elements, and character interaction or you spend a little bit of time on that and create an insanely huge overworld. Not that it wouldn't be awesome to have both in a single game, but unless and until a company decideds to spend six years working on a game, don't expect that to happen.

they should stick with the big overworld and warping the first two games had...

No way. Fallout uses a similar kind of overworld structure, and while an stunning game in many respects, it's simply not a game that I could concieve of playing for 190+ hours like I did with Oblivion.

[EdenMaster]

On the other end of the scale is the "Oblivion for Oblivion" mod, which sets out to add the Oblivion keyblade to Oblivion (it was MEANT to BE!).

http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index....1019&st=20

Wow, that keyblade looks incredible! It's a bit too overpowered for me right now though, even though I <i>could</i> afford it, I wouldn't want to throw off the balance of the game by having such a powerful weapon when I am still fairly weak (I've only just started playing a couple weeks ago, I'm only level 7).

[Dark Jaguar]

It's finished! Yeah that is game breakingly strong, but it is a fun little item to play with at least.

[A Black Falcon]

I think it's impossible to have both. You either spend you're time working on an insane of amount of dialogue, story elements, and character interaction or you spend a little bit of time on that and create an insanely huge overworld. Not that it wouldn't be awesome to have both in a single game, but unless and until a company decideds to spend six years working on a game, don't expect that to happen.

Yeah, I know, and I was thinking it when I said that. Still, it'd be awesome if it could actually happen. MMORPGs try for the scale thing with more strategic combat than the TES games have, but they do other annoying things and have more grind than anything else ever... and generally don't exactly have great, highly designed plots. Guild Wars tries, but while it does a really good job, it's still not quite the same as a Baldur's Gate or Fallout...

No way. Fallout uses a similar kind of overworld structure, and while an stunning game in many respects, it's simply not a game that I could concieve of playing for 190+ hours like I did with Oblivion.

Heh.. you never played Arena or Daggerfall did you? :) I said 'like the first two games' for a reason. In Daggerfall the overworld was one contiguous area, but it was INSANELY huge. Way, WAY bigger than the Morrowind or Oblivion ones, by far. It used random generation for a lot of stuff so they didn't have to design everything... and there was a map where you could quick-travel between towns. In Arena things are a bit different -- you go to the cities (which in the first games are actually big) and get quests to do in town, or explore arounds the city, but can't actually get from one city to the next overland. The scale is too large... it models the entire Empire you see, and not just part of one province of it like the other games, and you can visit any major city in any province. The goal is to complete some dungeons, which you find by following the main quest path. Otherwise you can just wander around and stuff...

Anyway, the point is, those games had huge, huge scale and quick map travel. It worked well, and it never should have gone away (though didn't Oblivion supposedly add some faster travel method than Morrowind had?).

Also, including the expansion, Baldur's Gate II is a good 130+ hours long...

[Great Rumbler]

It used random generation for a lot of stuff so they didn't have to design everything...

Eww...

though didn't Oblivion supposedly add some faster travel method than Morrowind had?

Yes, you could fast-travel to any area that you've been to once before.

[Dark Jaguar]

Not really "any" area so much as specific "trigger locations" on the map. Still, that's usually enough.

[A Black Falcon]

Yes, you could fast-travel to any area that you've been to once before.

Right. So then what were you complaining about? Oblivion fixed the problem. You don't need to be able to warp everywhere, just to the towns or dungeons or major points like that...

Eww...

One of the big complaints about the game was how similar a lot of content felt. Still, the game was ridiculously large in size, much more so than Morrowind or Oblivion, so for the "this is actually the scale of a real place" factor, Daggerfall wins handily and Arena doesn't look too bad either. Morrowind didn't feel like that. Not with towns being separated with mere minutes of walking and being relatively small in size... the "big" towns in Morrowind are tiny compared to the towns in the first two games.

Of course, if Morrowind had had the scale of the first two games with no warping, it'd have been utterly awful, so if they wanted to have you walk everywhere, they had to do what they did. Though I suspect that it has a lot more to do with the facts that they wanted to design the whole overworld and not use random generation (so it would take a lot longer to make the overworld as large), and needed to make it something closer to a scale a console RPG gamer would like.

[Great Rumbler]

I'd rather have hand-crafted worlds than a colosal world that's completely randomly generated. I really dislike games that wok like that, for the most part.

[Dark Jaguar]

Well it isn't totally random. It's got a random seed, but from there a built in set of rules controls how things develop, much like Four Swords (or evolution). In other words, no "unbeatable" stuff or just plain broken stuff. Basically, procedurally generated. Mind you, "hand crafted" can still outdo it today, and certainly beats back then. Just wait though, eventually the rules for procedurally generated stuff will develop to a point where it can match or beat hand crafted. That's the point where I upgrade my brain.

[Great Rumbler]

It might get to that point someday, but I haven't seen it yet.

Maybe we will with Spore, but that's really the kind of game that simply couldn't be done the way it's supposed to be without random generation.

[Dark Jaguar]

It's not really random though, it just uses a random seed.

[A Black Falcon]

Right, there's absolutely no way you could do an area the size Daggerfall covers and design it all unless you spent an insanely ridiculous amount of time drawing the map...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daggerfall

Daggerfall is the largest Elder Scrolls game to date, featuring a game world estimated as being 161,600 square Kilometres — roughly twice the size of Great Britain — with over 15,000 towns, cities, villages, and dungeons for the player's character to explore. According to Todd Howard, Elder Scrolls programmer, the game's sequel, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is 0.01% the size of Daggerfall. Vvardenfell, the explorable part of the province of Morrowind in the third game has 6 square miles. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has approximately 16 square miles to explore. In Daggerfall, there are 750,000+ non-player characters (NPCs) for the player to interact with, compared to the count of around 1000 NPCs found in Morrowind and Oblivion. It should be pointed out that the geography and the characters in these later games are much more detailed.

An automap was implemented to help players navigate through the lengthy tombs and ancient underground fortresses. Players have to visit approximately 6-8 provinces in order to finish the game, although a total of 47 areas are present. A limited array of building blocks were used to construct the towns and dungeons, causing some reviewers to complain about the game's monotony. In 2002, Morrowind, the third game in the series, responded to this issue with a smaller, more detailed world with unique-looking cities and NPCs with greater individuality.

As it says: massive, massive size, but with repetition. The random seed would be to decide which blocks are being used for the area in question, I'd imagine...

As for Arena, it's not as big as Daggerfall in total area, though it is different of course because of the 'cities and random generation surroundings which you quick-travel between around the whole empire' concept, not the 'one part of the world you can explore thoroughly' concept that TES II-IV have used.

Oh, Daggerfall was also horribly buggy when it first shipped, only being fixed later in patches, and had nudity (take off your character's clothes and you're naked, though there is a 'no nudity' menu option) and an M rating (for both nudity and blood). Arena has no nudity though.

Oh, one other thing the first two games both do do is have a different combat system for your sword. Instead of just hitting a button to attack, you hold down one of the mouse buttons and 'swing' it across the screen to hit... you do need to be careful to keep it out of the interface section, but other than that I found it at least different. Morrowind dropped it for standard "hit the button" combat.

[Great Rumbler]

Playing Morrowind with infinite draw distance is really, really weird.

[Dark Jaguar]

Okay then.

[Great Rumbler]

I just felt like saying that, but couldn't really find a thread that was talking just about Morrowind. So I picked this one.

[A Black Falcon]

Even in Oblivion it's a little odd, but I haven't tried it in Morrowind... I imagine it would be strange, though.

[Great Rumbler]

It looks just fine in Oblivion, but it's really weird in Morrowind because everything is actually put really close together. The biggest city in the region is actually just across a small bay from the town you first arrive in! Everything's a bit more spread out in Oblivion and it looked that way from beginning, unlike the thick fog that was everywhere in Morrowind.

Also, reading through these old threads made me realize that ABF and I used to argue all the time, some of them even got a little vicious.

[Dark Jaguar]

Well, I don't think it ever reached ABF/OB1 levels.

Huh, so Morrowind is smaller than it looks eh? Interesting. Honestly though, I never go much out of it as wandering around was just so boring. Oblivion is still awesome, though it's starting to show it's age. I can hardly imagine playing it without all those visuals mods installed.

[A Black Falcon]

You were OB1's little clone, and OB1 and I argued a lot, so what do you expect? :)

It looks just fine in Oblivion, but it's really weird in Morrowind because everything is actually put really close together. The biggest city in the region is actually just across a small bay from the town you first arrive in! Everything's a bit more spread out in Oblivion and it looked that way from beginning, unlike the thick fog that was everywhere in Morrowind.

Yeah, that's what I thought you were referring to, things like that. Morrowind is a compressed game with far too little space between the towns. I noticed that without a no-fog mod, and I'm sure it's much worse with one... the game needed a bigger world. And fast travel, too.

[Great Rumbler]

Morrowind is 6 square miles, Oblivion is about 16.

It's hard to go back to Morrowind, even with all the mods. I could say the same thing for Oblivion though, I just put so much time into them back when they first came out that I really don't want to play them much anymore.

You were OB1's little clone, and OB1 and I argued a lot, so what do you expect?

I argued with OB1 at least as much as I did with you, maybe even more. I don't know if we argued much here but there was another forum that both of us posted at where we argued all the time.

[A Black Falcon]

Bah, we all know you were just OB1's alt account, no matter how much you can try to deny it now... :P

Seriously though, sure perhaps you argued at that Asian cinema forum or whatever the other forum you went to was, but here? Ah, not much. You were always his biggest defender in arguments, or at least that's what my memory tells me, so it very often seemed like it was me arguing with the two of you. Also I wouldn't be surprised if your post count rate dropped more than anyone elses' after he left (though everyones' did, so perhaps not, I'm not sure), etc. So sure, we argued. This thread does show some examples of that, doesn't it. :)

Morrowind is 6 square miles, Oblivion is about 16.

It's hard to go back to Morrowind, even with all the mods. I could say the same thing for Oblivion though, I just put so much time into them back when they first came out that I really don't want to play them much anymore.

And I played Morrowind for like 5-8 hours and Oblivion for... uh, a couple of hours maybe? Bethesda's games just never could hold my interest for long. :)

I don't know, the music is good, the graphics decent, but despite how much I sort of like them, RPGs aren't my favorite genre really. I get bored by the repetitive combat of many of them, for instance -- if I'm going to be playing the epic game, why is the combat so simplistic and repetitive and simple? Bethesda also doesn't have the greatest writers or artists, to say the least. I'm sure if I really wanted to though, I could play a lot of a Bethesda game and perhaps enjoy it... but with so many other options out there, it's hard to focus on any one thing, particularly any one thing that doesn't interest me that much. "Why should I be playing this when I could be playing something more fun, like Guild Wars"... I admit, I haven't given Oblivion that much of a chance. I just haven't wanted to play it enough to do that, compared to other games.

But yeah, things like my complaints about depth are part of why I love strategy games so much. Why I've beaten Fire Emblem games (which of course I list as strategy games) as many times as I have all traditional (non-action-RPG) JRPGs combined.


The real problem, probably, though, is that I'm indecisive and have way too many games to choose between. Not a good combination really. :)

[Great Rumbler]

The real problem, probably, though, is that I'm indecisive and have way too many games to choose between

Or that your indecisive and have played a couple of games for thousands of hours.

[A Black Falcon]

Bah, that can't be part of it, those games are good enough to be worth playing for that much time... :p