Очевидцы об Обливион: (английский простой, я думаю, можно осилить даже с обычным школьным уровнем)
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After a solid five hours, I have the following mini-review:
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IF YOU DIDN'T LIKE MORROWIND DON'T BUY OBLIVION. Oblivion is kind of like The Sims 2--it's a major refinement of its predecessor but it isn't a huge step forward. Fans of the previous game will think it's fantastic, and the rest will probably agree that while things were tweaked in the right direction overall Oblivion still suffers from the same problems.
Pros:
The world is lush and beautiful. You've seen the screenshots, you know what I'm talking about.
The intro dungeon bit works well, even if Arx Fatalis already did it better.
Some of the side quests have been great, and every now and then one will bang your door down and sweep you along for the ride, which is actually quite cool.
The game has great atmosphere.
Load times not that big of a deal; I never even noticed them while walking the countryside.
Cons:
First and foremost, this game performs unforgivably bad. Even on my fairly powerful system I have to scale things back to get a reasonable frame rate, and even then the graphics are worse than Half Life 2 while the framerate is half as good. One section of the city drops to around more or less 0 FPS for no discernable reason and I literally have to walk around with my head down to even pull up a menu.
Unless your machine is godlike you will suffer weird draw distance issues which detract from what is supposed to be the stunning beauty of the outdoor environments. Foliage rolls out before you like a red carpet and ruins and trees pop in and out of existence well within your vision. I'm sure these problems go away on a system powerful enough to handle enormous draw distances, but seeing a building spontaneously built wall by wall by roof is distracting.
Remember how empty and soulless Morrowind felt? Yep, it's back. Supposedly bustling cities feel evacuated and I have yet to witness the radiant AI create more than stilted conversations.
So far all the NPCs have lacked any character whatsoever. Everyone comes off as nothing more than a vessel upon which to hang exposition and quests.
The user interface is terrible. Frankly, I can't believe something this unintuitive made it through the development process. Simply put, the interface was designed for a console.
Oddly enough, one surprising complaint I have is for such a major release the game feels rather cheap. Oblivion has a lot of weird elements that are hallmarks of budget development:
* The install had an issue where it sat on a blank screen for five minutes at the end; I thought the install had crashed until I called a friend who had experienced identical behavior.
* You have to restart the game every time you want to make any change in the video settings.
* The audio settings don't have an option for speaker setup. Is it too much to ask for a two speaker versus four speaker configuration?
* The menus don't have tooltips and it's extremely difficult to figure out some of the most simple of actions, like how to drop an item.
* The mouse cursor speed is painfully slow, and the mouse sensitivity slider only affects mlook.
In summary: I am most definitely not saying that the game sucks but it certainly seems to be a different one than was promised in the countless previews. I've had enough cool moments to be fairly enthused about diving back in for small one-hour chunks in the future, but I am currently feeling a bit disappointed that I bought into the hype.
Time will tell.
Also: Developers, if you are making a text heavy game with lots of tomes sitting around that we are encouraged to read, for god's sake give us a reading screen that allows us to manipulate the font and page color for maximum legibility. I love to read but my god YE OLDE TEXT FONT on brownish pixilated pages grows old quickly. Why isn't this a standard yet?
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I've only been playing for about two hours, buy my system performance sounds better than Stitches (although it might be similar and I just don't mind as much). I tried setting everything to MAX (resolution was still on 1024x768 though) and framerate tanked to around 5-10fps (in a forest area with no AI around - would surely bottom out with any real activity). With settings above average I get a decent 15-30fps so far, higher in dungeon settings.
I haven't visited any city yet, I only played through the whole intro section and walked around the forest a bit (very nice trees/foliage/bushes/etc).
My short list:
Pros:
- Nice character selection, lots of features and subtle tweaks to facial structure, color, hairstyle/length, etc.
- Very good looking graphics everywhere. The dungeons and forests look superb to me, bravo! But for all that is good and holy, TURN OFF THE HDR AND BLOOM CRAP! (good thing you can)
- Brings back most of Morrowind elements like skills and traits, but sightly simplified (there is no spear or axe skill, for instance, but there is blade and blunt, and there's no medium armor skill, just light and heavy) which is fine with me
- All new stuff to mix for Alchemy!
- Nice sneaking system (not as good as Thief, but still cool, with satisfying reward for sneak attacks
- Very nice physics on objects, bodies, etc. Great to see that last arrow fling back their arm or whatever you hit.
- Cool "grabbing" feature - you can manipulate stuff, turn over dead bodies (which tumble/flop on the ground convincingly)
- Draw distance is nice and HUGE!!! I love it, even if it comes with some odd baggage, IT'S WORTH IT!
- Some interface elements are nice improvements - very easy to quickly set hot keys 1-8 for instance, just have your inventory or spell list open, hold the number and click the item, voila.
- Very similar feel and vibe to Morrowind, feels familiar and comfortable (this is a pro for me)
Cons:
- draw distance items ought to fade in, not pop in so suddenly (maybe they fade sometimes? I seem to have noticed it both ways, can't remember exactly now)
- Performance is only decent, not super optimised (but this is to be expected, and it's not an outright BAD performer like TDS)
- Interface menus are decent, but bulky and slow. I prefered the windowed layout of Morrowind much more, but I'm hoping the new tabbed interface will grow on me
- Interface/dialog text is FREAKIN' HUGE! I'll have to dive into the .ini files to see if I can't shrink that crap down a lot. Big consolitis symptom there.
- Focusing on things with the crosshairs is no longer precise and exact. Now if you are near it you can "frob" it. But this causes some minor trouble with layered/piled objects, or minor confusions elsewhere. Example - I picked a mushroom from a small bunch growing, and there was another couple bunches to the sides, but I wasn't sure if there were actually three bunches or just two, so I picked another one (the one to the right), and got something, so I said to myself "aha, there ARE three bunches, time to pick the one on the left now", but it turns out I HAD picked the one on the left at first, and there were only two bunches overall. Crap, that was a long stupid example, but hey
- what's with the big ZOOM ZOOM in on people's faces during some conversations? It's not like I suddenly ran up and got in their face. I don't have a zoom lense eye like Garrett. It detracts from the otherwise good first person immersion factor
- If you forget to turn off Bloom and HDR, you won't be able to see anything that is at all brightly lit, it will just be a blank white space on the screen (why do they do that junk???)
- Icons in the compass to hold your hand - what's with that? I would rather stumble upon and discover something, rather than have an icon for it pointing the way. This is definitely another element of "consolitis", dumbing down the game a bit
- The actual paper map (in the box, that you unfold) is decent but not as good as Morrowind's (but that would be hard to top). It's more like a basic styled map with few places listed instead of the super detailed Vvardenfall drawing. This actually might be a "pro" because the Morrowind map spoiled a lot of things
- Very very similar to Morrowind (if you really disliked Morrowind, it's unlikely Oblivion will change your mind - but then again I haven't played much yet so I could be wrong on this)
I think it's easier to nit-pick in detail than it is to be positive in detail (is that just human nature?), because even though my con list appears larger, I honestly have a very positive impression of the game and know I'm going to love it for the forseeable future
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