[Ace]

The Imperial Gardens at night.


Bruma


Somebody's gonna die at the Drunken Dragon tonight...

[Grug]

I went over my download limit this month and thus connection speed was shaped down to dial up. My god did those 3 images take forever to load. ><

They pretty though.

How does the horses thing work btw?
Can you run around stealing people's rides and stuff?
Do you need a skill to ride?
etc.?

[BlackDove]

You press space near a horse IIRC. Directional buttons are for viewing, WSAD for controlling.

[Ace]

Horses can be stolen, your character sheet has a "number of horses stolen" thing

[Grug]

Can you brush their hair and deck them out with horse shoes of speed?
Horses are cool. ^.^

[Ace]

All hail Sithis

[Shade]

Wow... this game rocks. Got it yesterday, didn't have time to play it. Had today off. It's now nearly 2am and I've got no idea where my day went... aside from a few breaks to check email and browse various forums, I've been playing constantly. It has been a long time since a game managed to capture me so, Civ4 kinda got close once during a particularly close game, but still not quite.

I've been pleasently surprised by how well it runs given the quality of the visuals. Having seen the screenshots on this thread, I had expected it to get a bit choppy even on a high end system when outside, but it runs smooth as silk in 1280*1024 with every slider maxed (no AA though).

My only complaint is that the interface is a little bit cumbersome, I would like some hotkeys to directly access inventory, map, journal etc, instead of having to go through several mouse clicks to get to them. But still, it gets the job done, and it is a minor nitpick only. During actual adventuring, I just don't notice the interface, which is as it should be.
 
Gonna go get some food now, or this game might actually kill me through starvation. I just realized I haven't eaten since 9am this morning.

[Grug]

What system you running it on Shade, if you don't mind my asking?

[Shade]

An X2 4600+, 7800GTX and 2GB ram. Yes, I had actually expected that to have at least some problems with the outside scenery at 1280*1024 if I ran at max settings, but luckily I was wrong

As mentioned though, I don't have any AA turned on, so that probably helps a good bit, but I am still surprised that it can cope with 250+ trees with moving leaves, lots of grass waving in the wind, spell and weather effects, reflections from water, specular lighting on most objects, and I don't know what else, at the same time.

At a lower resolution sure, but I thought 1280*1024 would be pushing it too far... only reason I even decided to try it intially was because it's the native resolution for my monitor. Bethesda seem have done a pretty good job at optimization, as some significantly less pretty games (like KOTOR2, for instance) can show a noticable drop in frame rate from time to time.

On a side note, it's now 3:45am and I just played another hour... I really, seriously, ought to go to bed.

[Grug]

An X2 4600+, 7800GTX and 2GB ram. Yes, I had actually expected that to have at least some problems with the outside scenery at 1280*1024 if I ran at max settings, but luckily I was wrong

As mentioned though, I don't have any AA turned on, so that probably helps a good bit, but I am still surprised that it can cope with 250+ trees with moving leaves, lots of grass waving in the wind, spell and weather effects, reflections from water, specular lighting on most objects, and I don't know what else, at the same time.

At a lower resolution sure, but I thought 1280*1024 would be pushing it too far... only reason I even decided to try it intially was because it's the native resolution for my monitor. Bethesda seem have done a pretty good job at optimization, as some significantly less pretty games (like KOTOR2, for instance) can show a noticable drop in frame rate from time to time.

On a side note, it's now 3:45am and I just played another hour... I really, seriously, ought to go to bed.

... you bastard.

[Shade]

I know If it's any comfort, I struggled with a P4 1.8ghz with a geforce 3 until about two months ago. I kinda figured after nearly 4 years without upgrading anything, I could afford myself a treat. And it's not to be a fanboy or anything, but the X2 seems to me an insanely good processor, I can definitely recommend it to anyone looking to upgrade. It runs at 29c idle and has maxed out for me at 40c at a 90% load... with stock cooling. My old P4 runs hotter than that...

[Grug]

Gah!
That thing must of cost a fortune!

I didn't even know they existed! ><

I'm running a P43Ghz, Radeon 9600Pro, 512mb ram. (hence the wish to pick up a gig stick of ram very soon)
*is jeolous*

[Ace]

Hijacked at sea!


Looking for her next victim...


Adran Hlaalu, Champion of Cyrodiil, outside of his manor in Anvil.

[Grug]

=o Boats!

[Shade]

The one time I got on a boat so far I got attacked by 3 sailors. Presumably cause they'd just scrubbed the deck and there I was with my dirty boots dragging filth all over it. Being level 2 at the time, the result wasn't pretty

I took some screenshots of my first adventure outside the Imperial City, but they're a bit large for posting here, sooo... how do I do thumbnails instead of full sized images? I can't seem to find it in the SMF code reference, just resizing which isn't quite what I want (gotta be able to click them and see the full glory of Oblivion ).

[Grug]

lvlshot
/lvlshot



Screens! Screens! Screens!

[Shade]

Thanks, just what I needed Really ought to be documented in the help though, for people like who are mostly ignorant of smf-code. And as requested...

A forest near the city of Chorrom:




Outside the city itself:




I wondered if those mountains behind it could be climbed, so I decided to try. On the way up, I ran into some deer which naturally turned tail and ran when I got close:


The ascent took a while, so it was quite dark when I neared the top. but visibility was pretty decent still by the light of the stars and the moon:


I finally made it to the top of one of the mountains, and could take a look down at Chorrol where I started:


I waited until dawn, and then headed down again, running into this view on the way:


About two minutes after that, I acidentally ran over a steep cliff and went for a base jump.... sadly I had left my parachute in my other pair of pants, and ended up a red stain 50 metres down. So that's how my first real adventure went

[aldo_14]

Bloody 'ell, that is an impressive view.

[Grug]

Damn. Very nice indeed. =o
Fnice.

So is Sean Bean's voice sexy ingame? I bet its sexy.

[Shade]

Dunno, haven't met his character yet, only done one quest in the main story line and I think it'll be a while before I get any further. Patrick Stewart did a nice job on the intro and tutorial dungeon though. Actually, all of the voice acting I've experienced so far has been top notch.

Having too much fun just running around doing, well, stuff... exploring, mountainclimbing, scavenging loot from bandit caves without alerting them (I went for a sneaky type) and I don't know what. Thing is, I can spend several hours just walking around doing random non-important stuff and not get bored with it, because it's just so well done.

And incredibly, having spent probably nearly 24 hours in the game by now, I'm only level 4. 4. After that long in Morrowind I was like level 20. It just doesn't feel rushed, and because of the difficulty in most places being determined by level, there's no need to level just to travel around safely either. Whereas in Morrowind, just travelling around could at times be suicide if you weren't of a sufficient level.

But that goes with the general trend I guess, as this game is plain and simply better than Morrowind on pretty much every level.