“Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion” is another game that I’m anticipating (and I’m definitely not alone in this case) and that should be out about at the same time of Prey. I’m more doubtful about this one, though, it has too many things that sound even too good. The expectations about this game are so high that I’m sure it will finish to delude on some aspects, as it happened with Morrowind and Daggerfall before.

On the boards people are complaining about the recent announces about the lack shadows for static objects or the impossibility to use random objects as a throwing weapon and all sort of fluff. I don’t think that these details will matter and I’m even sure that the problems of the game will be somewhere else. I pray that the gameplay will feel more involving and fun than the bad examples of the previous chapters. And I also hope that the game world will have some interesting living characters and dialogues instead of just “database indexers” as Charles defined them on QT3.

I like a lot the idea to add more content as the game is released. From what I heard Bethesda plans to release mini content packs at a low price that can be downloaded directly from the site. This strategy has a lot of potential and if they commit to release a good amount of high-quality content (and assuming the game reveals to be a solid platform) this could turn into a gold mine. I so love this idea of “ongoing” development even applied to a single player game. I could support these just forever.

Anyway, this video is really, really good and builds good hype. It is so much better than the video released at the E3 and it seems taken from a Deutsche TV or something similar. It’s really worth seeing from the beginning to the end since it shows various aspects of the game, from the environment to the “feel” of combat and the physics engine. The only thing that still looks bad (and only slightly improved over Morrowind) is the animation of the human characters. They still move like wooden puppets. The transitions between different animation states is particularly awful.

I also hope they scale up the weapons models over those in MW. That’s one part that I hated so much. All the weapons look so tiny and even a 2-handed sword looks like a normal 1 hand. While the 1 hand look like daggers at best.

Anyway. I’m still working (slowly) on my “total” Morrowind mod pack. I hope to finish and balance it before Oblivion is released :)

The running time of the video is 5:28

(the video here below is embedded in flash, so it’s not really hosted on this site – if it breaks or if it’s slow it doesn’t depend on me)

EDIT- This is an update I wrote today on Q23, about the other side of the hype:

I just finished to read a preview on an italian magazine and they praised the game a lot (this about the European press preview in London, I don’t know exactly when it was).

But they also said they are worried about the release because in the four hour test the game crashed many times and the engine seems to be rather heavy.

They also said that the shaders 3.0 were still not complete and because of this the game had problems with the light system and even showed graphical artifacts on the scene. In fact Bethesda prohibited to publish screenshots not approved or take photos during the demo.

Still, they repeated that they are confident to solve the bugs before the game is released.

If you were wondering about the delay, these seem to be the reasons. This about the PC version.

They also wrote that the graphic quality of the NPCs, armors and clothes was overall high but also varying.