Oblivion demon portals

[sabishii]

Oblivion's engine just can't handle a huge amount of NPCs at once very well.

Must be the Radiant AI.

 

[Lingwe]

There's a mod to make the demons actually invade, but it's buggy as hell (still in beta) and 90% of the NPC battles happen right outside the Oblivion gates, with the rest happening in Oblivion or around cities. Also its usually like 2 NPCs vs 5 demons, a pretty fair fight, but in no way "epic". Oblivion's engine just can't handle a huge amount of NPCs at once very well.

It isn't really an actual invasion. All that it does is add a bunch of NPCs and Daedra around the place.

If I were going to do it I would just place a disabled daedra in every cell and a bunch of them in cities and if the player doesn't complete the main quest within 100 days then enable all of them. The daedra kill anyone who isn't invincible and the player doesn't have anything to do because everyone is constantly fighting with daedra.

 

[Xi]

Well, since we are talking about Oblivion, Oblivion had more artists then anything else. Artists and Programmers. It had very few actual gameplay developers/implementers in comparison. Developing technology be it graphics, special effects, physics, animation, etc is the most expensive aspect of game development. Implementing content is cheaper, and faster, then everything else. Or at least that's how I have always understood it, though I'm sure I am over simplifying things.

What I imagine is that programming and art designing in itself isn't expensive at all, it's just the jobs that habe to be paid. Designers and artists and programmers want money. And you have to buy programs for art design, maybe. For example photoshop, when you wanna make a 2D game, to design the sprites. Actual programming isn't really more expensive than writing a book, only more complicated.

That's just my view though.

Well the point is that good artists and programmers will cost more then content developers/implementors. Especially engine programmers who are very specialized in there knowledge. I bet they average over 100K a year. Artists won't be much different since filling this type of job role requires very specific skills that aren't always easy to find. Then you have tools, computers, middleware technology, etc. Graphics and technology do not come cheap.

You might have a few writers on staff maybe 1 or 2(I think OB had 3) and then like 10 designers. Stuff like quests, storyline, towns, NPCs, Monsters, etc.

I believe OB had like 40+ Programmers and Artists compared to roughly 14 writers/designers. So considering that artists and programmers cost more and that there are far more of them. Technology development costs far out weigh design costs.

Old SNES games would cost like 200-300K to develop. Compare that to the multi-million dollar projects we have now a days. The biggest difference being better graphics and more technology. Gameplay has not changed hugely. It's been rather stagnant in my opinion.

This is why I believe a niche development studio with fewer devs and more focus on specific markets is an interesting way to go. Hard to say if it would work or not. It would definitely calm down the hardcore scene. They would actually have things to look forward too.

 

[MisterStone]

If I was the boss of a big developing studio and already made money with previous games, I'd aim for an extremely ambitious and great project next time and just make the best and most complex game ever, even if it took 10 years to produce and get the 13-year old fanboys to say it is crap because it's too complicated for them and thus lower the sales greatly.

It would feature a non-linear story in the most true sense of non-linearity. You don't get quests in the traditional sense, but much rather only a quest-goal, and have to figure out the solution to the quest yourself. That would be great, especially with multiple ways to solve the quest.

Everyone realizes that Jarl is more or less describing Ultima IV which was released, when? 1984?

[/u]

 

[DarkUnderlord]

I read the review for Oblivion and it mentioned that the demons never come through the portals to decimate civilisation.
From a game design perspective what would you do ?
If you end the game just because the player took too long its kind of cruel, after they did all that work to improve their skills.

You don't end the game. You just make it harder for the PC to finish because logically, the world gets flooded with Demons. Eventually you'd kill them all and shut every gate down and probably be the last thing left alive. You then have a "Well, you won but geewhillickers lots of people sure did die" ending.

 

[JarlFrank]

Everyone realizes that Jarl is more or less describing Ultima IV which was released, when? 1984?

Well, why shouldn't we borrow ideas from good games?
So many Diablo clones around, why not some Ultima clones?

 

[Chefe]

If you want to put time limits on a game with an overall theme of "immediate impeding doom" then don't make it a sandbox RPG like Oblivion. Make it an action game like Sonic the Hedgehog.

This may or may not pertain to the topic, and impending may or may not be spelled correctly.

 

[Relayer71]

It was dumb on Bethesda's part to have the portals pop up everywhere. They could have just done what they did with that one town that DOES manage to get invaded.

Perhaps put it on some timer. After 5 hours of closing the first one have another open and decimate another town...4 hours later another, 3 hours later another and so on until you finish the quest and put a stop to it.

Take too long to finish the quest and the world gets overrun by the baddies until you have nothing but burning rubble everywhere, townsfolk NPCs running for their lives, Imperial soldiers battling monsters, NPCs looting, just general mayhem.

Radiant AI?

 

[Texas Red]

Relayer, except they dont have to do anything. Dont have any interesting characters, no dialogs, no unique loot, shitty character creation etc. etc. and they still get 9.9/10 OMGARZ GOTY "reviews" and a bunch of morons buying it.

Now they could have done something RPGish or innovative, but they didnt, and nobody cared.

 

[Relayer71]

Relayer, except they dont have to do anything. Dont have any interesting characters, no dialogs, no unique loot, shitty character creation etc. etc. and they still get 9.9/10 OMGARZ GOTY "reviews" and a bunch of morons buying it.

Now they could have done something RPGish or innovative, but they didnt, and nobody cared.

Yeah, the game was just terrible as far as PC RPGs go.

Still, giving the player a more dynamic game world with an "invasion" progressing LOGICALLY could have gone a LONG way towards making the game somewhat enjoyable.

Then they'd just have to "fix" the loot scaling issue and gotten rid of the stupid handholding - which has actually been done with Mods.

These changes alone would not have produced a masterpiece of course but I think it would have possibly made the game more enjoyable and somewhat respectable - and less of a joke.

Of course then it means the masses would have given it a 180% rating or awarded it the Nobel.

The problem with Oblivion was that it seems like Bethesda didn't aim too high, you can't even commend them for effort. The game has a decent shell (the engine & art design - not as inspired as Morrowind but still good) but nothing more.

It's basically just a tech demo.