I have a real bee in my bonnet about substandard engines. Oblivion is really very poor in this regard (as was Morrowind before it - bad Bethesda, no twinky), and it certainly impacts on what should really be the king of all immersive games.
That said, I understand the desire to use middleware to speed development. But it's just so frustrating to have these sorts of issues when you can see that it just doesn't have to be this way - WoW being a perfect example. Imagine a single player game set in a world like WoW, it would be spectacular. And the engine is one of the best I've seen in terms of requirements and bugs. In the hundreds of hours I've put into that game, I've encountered a handful of crashes, and I've seen it run smoothly on some pretty poorly specced PC's. Now, granted WoW doesn't display anywhere near the same geometry as Oblivion, but frankly I think in many ways it looks just as good, and it certainly runs a damn sight better.
Re: Gothic 3 to use crap-engine too
I have a real bee in my bonnet about substandard engines. Oblivion is really very poor in this regard (as was Morrowind before it - bad Bethesda, no twinky), and it certainly impacts on what should really be the king of all immersive games.
That said, I understand the desire to use middleware to speed development. But it's just so frustrating to have these sorts of issues when you can see that it just doesn't have to be this way - WoW being a perfect example. Imagine a single player game set in a world like WoW, it would be spectacular. And the engine is one of the best I've seen in terms of requirements and bugs. In the hundreds of hours I've put into that game, I've encountered a handful of crashes, and I've seen it run smoothly on some pretty poorly specced PC's. Now, granted WoW doesn't display anywhere near the same geometry as Oblivion, but frankly I think in many ways it looks just as good, and it certainly runs a damn sight better.