Investing in stores in Oblivion

[Relien]

Personally I'd prefer it if they'd hide the damage stats and let the player see (viscerally ) what the difference was through using different weapons, or through descriptions / prices / preferences of NPCs etc.
That way designers would have the freedom to have steel longswords do e.g. 11.384 damage, without it looking odd to the player. At the moment, the choice is between 1 point steps and 2 point steps, simply because the system has to look simple to the player. It'd be very surprising if either of these were the ideal solution. Once you hide the stats, you can use 11.384s to your heart's content.

That would be nice, but there should be some representation of the item's quality corresponding to the character's ability to quickly recognize its usefulness without having to damage/hurt something with it. Something like a graphical bar, since it will not disturb the player like 11.384 would.

Also, they seem to have used a rather simplistic More damage == Heavier model.
Now I know this isn't generic fantasy land, but Bosmer / Altmer are still known as archers / mages, not for their brute strength. Does the following make sense?

Well, it could be dark elven. According to MW they're quite strong, the only stronger races are Nords, Redguards and Orcs. I presume you took those numbers from the guide - I didn't see it, but an example of a strong yet light material should be glass.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

I'm not suggesting it's worse or better - just that I would have preferred the damage ratios to have been closer. The material used could increase price, durability, amount of enchantments etc. - but increases in damage should really be pretty minimal. This is something that effects many RPG's, so it's not a dig at Oblivion alone.

Thats OK, I appreciate the difference, because it allows me to feel there actually is one - if the difference were a fraction, while more realistic, I would probably feel that the material didn't really matter. Of course there are other ways besides damage to do that, but it is the most obvious one.

 

[Lumpy]

Daedric should deal more damage than normal weapons, since it's basically enchanted.

 

[Solik]

I sincerely hope those guilds on the right become part of this "downloadable content" thing. I might actually toss out a couple bucks for that if I found myself wanting more after finishing the guilds offered.

 

[galsiah]

Daedric should deal more damage than normal weapons, since it's basically enchanted.

Sure - thats a special case that makes good TES sense. Glass doing twice the damage of iron seems a bit much though.

Something like a graphical bar, since it will not disturb the player like 11.384 would.

I think I'd prefer nothing of that sort. Just a name, a price and an image. Perhaps hovering the mouse over the weapon in menu could give the player's assessment of the weapon in text.

At the moment, the stats just tell the player:
Iron < Steel < Silver < Dwarven < Elven < Glass < Ebony < Daedic.
Not Fine < Fine.
Akaviri is a bit different.

If Oblivion had turn based combat, and the player knew an enemies health exactly, then the precise stats would help. As it is, it isn't, he doesn't and they don't.

All the player would need is a bit of info to indicate the pro's of each weapon type at the start, from books / NPCs etc. Given that the model is so simplistic, this wouldn't be hard to describe or remember.

Even without that information, the player can easily see the More Expensive == Better relationship. As well as the well known law of consumer electronics: Heavier == Better [unless the workmanship is fine, of course].

I really don't see the use of numbers or bars in this area. There's no need to make finely judged stat based decisions in Morrowind / Oblivion. All you need is to know "X is a bit better than Y, and a lot better than Z".

If you're going for strategic, turn based combat, then I'm all for drowning in stats. If you're going for first person, real time, without much strategy, then I think visible, numeric stats are just an extra layer of complication between the player and the game world.

 

[Lumpy]

@Solik - 6$ for a whole guild would be reasonable.
@Galsiah - What I'd like to see more would be several items of equal power, but with different advantages or disadvantages.

 

[bryce777]

I always find it funny when people say things like "Well obviously these guys aren't stupid".

Ok now, in general I would once agree that it was true that programmer = smart guy. Extremely smart guy, usually, if he had any success whatsoever; of course, often that intelligence was sort of limited and people are usually not intelligent in all areas (except me, of course).

These days, however it is much different; there are super high level APIs like DirectX that take care of a huge amount of work for you (in fact I am sure a lot of the work of many game programmers is mostly just fightin DirectX quirks, design flaws, and bugs), machines have ludicrously powerful processors and immense data banks. Not to mention all those fancy graphics have years of effort put into them by artists making all of those effects. All the real work is done on the graphics processor and all the algorithms have high level APIs to call them. On top of that, oblivion does not even use its own engine. So, the programmers are basically just modders who also hack on the source code.

Now, over at Id or someplace like it some amazing programmers work, and do some amazing things, but seriously I don't think that game programmer means genius by any means. Also, programmers do not necessarily have any input whatsoever into the design process. I have no idea how it works over at bethesda except the end result is awful and senseless in most cases.

 

[galsiah]

@Galsiah - What I'd like to see more would be several items of equal power, but with different advantages or disadvantages.

I agree. I'd like to have some important decisions to make. Even on this level, it's a "choice with consequence" thing again.

At the moment it's basically:
I have sword X, but I've found sword Y, which is better, so I'll use that.
Or
I am using sword X until I can afford sword Y - which is better. Then I'll use that.

Different weapon types provide some variety I suppose, but usually you'll just choose the type you have the highest skill in. After that the only decision is "How much can I afford to get the most UBER sword?".

It just seems silly that there is no variation at all in speed or reach between weapons in the same category. That could make things a little more interesting. It's no real problem, since this will certainly be simple to mod in. It would have been nice to see a bit more interest out of the box though.


bryce777:
I agree with you to an extent. Game programmers are no longer lone geniuses, or very small groups of highly intelligent hackers. The area now has good information, good low level support, bigger teams and bigger projects - generally more in common with other software engineering areas. That's probably a good thing.

What it means for programmers is that it's less important to be a genius hacker, and more important to be able to communicate well, work as part of a team, and organize efficiently. If you're a genius who can't cooperate within a team or work to a reasonable set of requirements, then you're no use. If you're reasonably intelligent, competent, communicate well, and are professional, then you're useful - even if you can't do anything amazing alone.
Being a genius is a nice extra for a programmer, but all the teamwork, communication and professionalism is vital.

Most programmers probably don't have much influence on an initial design in any case. I think most companies probably welcome suggestions when clear decisions haven't been made. They can't be continuously adapting things to any wild idea that comes up though.

I think that some decisions could probably have been made better for Oblivion, even at a late stage. In most cases though, the writing was probably on the wall after the first few months.

Whoever came up with the initial design for Morrowind / Oblivion is clearly in need of education in some areas (though sadly perhaps not in marketing / selling to masses of rabid 11 year olds).

 

[Lumpy]

@Galsiah - What I'd like to see more would be several items of equal power, but with different advantages or disadvantages.

I agree. I'd like to have some important decisions to make. Even on this level, it's a "choice with consequence" thing again.

At the moment it's basically:
I have sword X, but I've found sword Y, which is better, so I'll use that.
Or
I am using sword X until I can afford sword Y - which is better. Then I'll use that.

Different weapon types provide some variety I suppose, but usually you'll just choose the type you have the highest skill in. After that the only decision is "How much can I afford to get the most UBER sword?".

It just seems silly that there is no variation at all in speed or reach between weapons in the same category. That could make things a little more interesting. It's no real problem, since this will certainly be simple to mod in. It would have been nice to see a bit more interest out of the box though.

Galsiah, I'm sure that there will be a difference in speed between Daggers and Long Blades. Which means that it will be more efficient to enchant daggers than long blades.

If two weapons with different strengths are under the same skill, than there would be no reason not to carry both with you and use the best in each situation. Sure, that is nice too, but the most important differences should be between weapon and armor skills.
If the only difference between weapon skills is the shape of the models, why have different skills at all? There should be three melee weapon skills in my opinion. Daggers, weaker but have much more powerful critical hits are are faster. In open combat, they deal less damage/second than the other weapons. Swords, which deal the most damage. And Blunt Weapons, which don't deal as much damage, and are the slowest, but less of it is absorbed by armor. Making a weapon specialist would also have more advantages, so there would be a reason to take more than one skill at character creation.

 

[galsiah]

Galsiah, I'm sure that there will be a difference in speed between Daggers and Long Blades.

But why have the speed of all longswords identical? Perhaps an ebony one should be a bit slower, a glass / elven one a bit faster. The differences needn't be huge, or even often significant. They'd mainly provide a bit of natural variety. Similarly, it's unlikely that all longswords would be exactly the same length. Why the uniformity here.
They needn't all be different, but a bit of variety would be nice.

I agree that different weapon skills operating differently is more important, but why not have both? Perhaps less than a 0.1 difference in speed / reach makes no difference. In that case I agree that different weapon types having variety is the priority.

Whether every character ends up carrying an Uber Daedric sword, an Uber Daedric Hammer, an Uber Heavy armor, an Uber bow, and Uber spells, we'll have to see.

 

[Solik]

I suspect that if they were different enough to notice, they would overlap too much with other types of swords. If they weren't different enough to notice, then it would be a waste of time.

 

[Section8]

Gah. Another thing to add to the "failed potential" list. Perhaps there's still some hope for differentiation through enchantments, but there's no interesting choice to be made within that weapon list.

 

[Drakron]

Not only that people notice DPS and if one weapon costs 2500 and another costs 750 but both have exactly the same DPS there is no incentive for tbuying the 2500 one, even if it does "more damage" per hit.

The idea is you get a better weapon that does more damage, not you get to spend more money as your DPS is the same as your basic weapon.

 

[Blahblah Talks]

WTF??? You get double the money you've paid if you win your bet in the arena. How stupid is that?
On the other hand, it's nice to see that arena fights are actually affected by your luck.

You pay the guy 100. If you win, you get 200 back from him. Your 100, plus his 100. IOW, he holds your money when you place the bet, and gives it back to you if win.

Yes. I got that. But isn't it reasonable that you'd get less than 200%? What does the arena gain from this?

OMG U want Ublibion 2 be a casino sim???!!! ITS A RPG!!

 

[bryce777]

Gah. Another thing to add to the "failed potential" list. Perhaps there's still some hope for differentiation through enchantments, but there's no interesting choice to be made within that weapon list.

Well, the whole thing is just ultrageneric, and that's the problem. They may as well say +1 through +12.

I like a system like in ultima or arcanum where weapons are all just individual; there is no need for 15 types of broadswords, and if the broadswords are no different than the longswords then who cares? Since they are getting away from roguelike in the series, they should create unique items instead of maintaining the genericness of the original without the flexibility. It is also sort of broken in that a dagger is usually a better wapon than anything else in the game with its extra speed....

At least in DnD you had varying damage versus large and small creatures and in the new system you have varying threat range and stuff.

The actual system in arcanum was great. Unfortunately, the items themselves were flawed because some of them were just completely unbalanced. Since every weapon had a meaningful speed rating, what might be a good weapon for a character with high strength and low dex could be a bad one for a character with high dex and low strength and someone high or low in both might be better off with something else entirely.

 

[Kairal]

Theoretically the weight equally extra damage should provide some choice into the game provided that the weight is a meaningful difference. In Morrowind at least better wapons were significantly heavier. With my wimpy thief it meant I had to stick to daggers because other weapon types were far too heavy (and even with shortswords I sometimes had to make sacrifices) The problem was with something like glass armour as it was the strongest and lightest of the light armour class meaning that you would always end up with it. I think it's disapointing that they just used a formula though.

 

[galsiah]

While that's true, it's not a very satisfying choice - at least I don't find it to be one. Items being lighter basically just makes them less annoying. I'd prefer it if items were varied in such a way that I didn't think "I'm choosing this one because it's less annoying". Perhaps such items could be a bit faster to swing, faster to draw, or more likely to backstab effectively. They shouldn't all have all of these qualities necessarily, but something more interesting than just being light to carry.

I do agree that weapon weight makes the choice more interesting. I just don't think that's enough on its own.

 

[Section8]

I've been thinking a bit on this, and I think that weapon stats are significantly less important in an RPG when compared to weapon characteristics. Certainly, stats form the foundation of weapon characteristics, but much like character stats they're only the component pieces that form the basis of an actual character personality, which is really the crux of RPGing.

When weapons basically boil down to simply being a uniform progression of better killing tools, then that's as disinteresting as a one dimensional character system, where levelling up doesn't further define a character, it just makes them better at what they could already do.

Also in a single player CRPG, there's no reason why formulaic balance shouldn't be overshadowed by differentiation. It's tragic that a P&P system like D&D 3E, which must be simple enough to be calculated in the players' heads on the fly, has more complexity and characterisation of basic weapons.

Here's hoping magical and enchanted weapons aren't quite so bland.

 

[Lumpy]

I'm sure there will be many different enchanted weapons and armor, from which they player will have to choose rather than having to simply take the most powerful one. I don't think there was a most powerful weapon or armor in Morrowind at all.

 

[Micmu]

Since pauldrons have been "merged" (again) with cuirasses and gloves come in pair, there will be no more asymetric armors - there are only 5 armor slots now. Another TES feature stomped. Some reviewer also said you can't wear boots/shoes (!) under a robe, they are automatically unequipped.

 

[Human Shield]

Since pauldrons have been "merged" (again) with cuirasses and gloves come in pair, there will be no more asymetric armors - there are only 5 armor slots now. Another TES feature stomped. Some reviewer also said you can't wear boots/shoes (!) under a robe, they are automatically unequipped.

Road warrior armor was one of the few cool things about Morrowind.

 

[ANDS!]

Since pauldrons have been "merged" (again) with cuirasses and gloves come in pair, there will be no more asymetric armors - there are only 5 armor slots now. Another TES feature stomped. Some reviewer also said you can't wear boots/shoes (!) under a robe, they are automatically unequipped.

Road warrior armor was one of the few cool things about Morrowind.

Yes - incredibly fun to find that someone was selling only ONE right gauntlet or ONE left pauldron, and you'd have a mish-mash looking fool of a character.

Realistic. . .maybe. . .fun - hardly. Not to mention ridiculously cumbersome (literally and figuratively).

 

[Twinfalls]

Some reviewer also said you can't wear boots/shoes (!) under a robe, they are automatically unequipped.

HAHHAHAHA! How the fuck do they explain that? And I'm talking about rationalising it for the game-world, not giving us the real explanation, which is obvious (our incompetent graphics team were unable to prevent clipping issues, so we did the Bethesda Thing (tm) - CHUCK IT OUT!)

 

[AlanC9]

Not to mention having that many more bits to repair and loot. More interface fiddling, yay!

More stuff to enchant, for that matter. One of the MW online guides (Gamespot's?) actually said that one of the big reasons to go with heavy armor over unarmored was that you had so many more slots for constant enchantment items. Not quite sure what that guy was smoking; by the time you've got that much enchantment the game's a cakewalk without items.

 

[Micmu]

Yes - incredibly fun to find that someone was selling only ONE right gauntlet or ONE left pauldron, and you'd have a mish-mash looking fool of a character.

Realistic. . .maybe. . .fun - hardly. Not to mention ridiculously cumbersome (literally and figuratively).

I'm pretty sure bethesda could "merge" all equipment into one item, toss in few more arcade elements and fanboys will be still defending the game as FUN and REALISTIC and IMMERSIVE and EPIC, etc.