Preview Oblivion E3 fun at GamersInfo

Tags: Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

<A href="http://www.gamersinfo.net/">GamersInfo</a> went to E3 this year. I know this, because they talk about it in <A href="http://www.gamersinfo.net/index.php?art/id:539">their preview</A> of <A href="http://www.elderscrolls.com">Oblivion</a>! Here's a bit about the game, though:
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<blockquote>As with Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, character generation is done much the same with your actions determining the type of character you will play. If you act like a warrior you will be a warrior. If you act like a sneaky thief you will end up being a thief. And any combination will allow you to be what you want, so you can be a warrior with stealthy skills and magic skills. There is no experience. Instead players gain in skills as they use them so the more you use that sword the more skill you will have with it. This system has been successful and fun in the past and there is no reason to change it in this the latest iteration of the game.</blockquote>
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No experience? Got to love the stuff coming out of E3.
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As for the <i>successful and fun</i> with <i>no reason to change</i>, here's to placing a weight on your keyboard to wake up to a 100% Athletics skill!
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Spotted at: <A HREF="http://www.bluesnews.com">Blue's News</A>

To be fair, most experienced gamers can simply open the console and get the desired stats in almost any game much quicker than then weighing down a key. So this system just gives idiotae a way to cheat, too. On the other hand, would it be so hard to stop skill accumulation after maybe 30 seconds of continued use? As soon as the key goes up you reset the timer. That would go a long way to stiffling the potential abuse.

You could make a machine out of lego technic to keep pressing the key then, if only to ease the boredom of increasing the stats.

Or you could record that specific keystroke, and have a program repeat it a million times... though the lego technic way sounds more fun.

I think the only reason you'd want to change Morrowind's skill system, is that it doesn't work

The biggest problem is how Morrowind completely screwed over anyone who picked a race that gave bonuses to their major skills. If I make a Redguard swordsman with Long Sword and Heavy Armor as major skills, I'm losing two potential levels. I'd be nice if bonuses like that counted towards levels. If I started at level 3 instead of 1, it might even make a little more sense considering how Redguards are supposed to be such great warriors.

To be fair, most experienced gamers can simply open the console and get the desired stats in almost any game much quicker than then weighing down a key.

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If you do that, the increase doesn't count towards leveling up, which would really be the only reason that people actually do that. Same thing goes for acrobatics and jumping everywhere instead of walking.

MSFD have said in the past that they would try to minimize the opportunities for abuse, but that this wasnt a very big concern. I totally agree with him - if someone want to cheat/abuse then I dont give a *. I dont do it cuz it would ruin the game for me.

the exploits do not bother me too much, considering it is a single player game (what's the hurry to gain level?). so long as the exploits are not blatantly obvious (as in MW) I wouldn't mind it too much.

guys who go through quite abit of effort to exploit it and end up upsetting the game and spoiling the fun have only themselves to blame.

Yeah, my view is that if you want to spend hours & hours casting spells against a wall, put a weight on the run key overnight, or otherwise go through some lengthy exercise in tedium to raise your skills, rather than just playing the game and letting your skills raise "naturally", why, that's your prerogative. After all, people do similar things in real life. Personally I think it'd be boring to do that in a GAME, but to each his own. I don't even consider things like that to be exploits, at least not in a single player game.

There were definitely exploits in Morrowind. For example, unlimited potion stacking, which is now prevented by a skill level based limit on the number of potions you can have affecting you at once. We're aware of all of the exploits folks found in Morrowind -- after all, we do read the forums -- and have taken steps to fix, prevent, or otherwise address them. That isn't to say folks won't find OTHER exploits, but hopefully it'll be harder to find them (and hopefully our QA staff will discover them before we ship).

Of course for PC gamers there's always the console, but then you're REALLY cheating

The problem is, there is no character building then. It's just a record of your actions that make the actions more powerful as more get recorded.

You're not actually leveling and deciding how to spend your points and building your guy out, you're just running around and shit.

The 'you can do wacky combos' has never worked out good, I think. Instead of being cool and free like say Fallout, it's just a mess. There's no structure or anything, all you do is pick a few things and form a list and that's it. So you're not really 'blurring the lines' or anything or making a unique class, you're just using shit from 3 categories.

Kinda hard to explain, but hopefully someone understands. The character system in Elder Scrolls sucks, pretty much.

Not to mention stats are completely useless, they just adjust some values for damages and shit, but dont have any weight on anything.

Useless stats = suck
Unstructured skill list = suck
No character building = suck

LlamaGod said:

The problem is, there is no character building then. It's just a record of your actions that make the actions more powerful as more get recorded.

You're not actually leveling and deciding how to spend your points and building your guy out, you're just running around and shit.

The 'you can do wacky combos' has never worked out good, I think. Instead of being cool and free like say Fallout, it's just a mess. There's no structure or anything, all you do is pick a few things and form a list and that's it. So you're not really 'blurring the lines' or anything or making a unique class, you're just using shit from 3 categories.

Kinda hard to explain, but hopefully someone understands. The character system in Elder Scrolls sucks, pretty much.

Not to mention stats are completely useless, they just adjust some values for damages and shit, but dont have any weight on anything.

Useless stats = suck
Unstructured skill list = suck
No character building = suck

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Man you forgot to end your totally negative and unconstructive post with "cheers".

this sounds wacky as hell:

The new Radiant AI is said to give them daily schedules and the ability to make decisions based on what's happening around them. By way of illustrating this, one part of the demo showed two characters having what was described as an unscripted conversation. In another, a female fed her dog some meat, which caused it to run around and bark, whereupon she hit it with a paralysis spell to shut it up.

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That's a pretty strange description, space captain. That stuff happens in the demo, but the way it's described in your quote does sound wacky as hell.

its from the IGN article here:

http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/620/620347p1.html

but i actually meant it in a good way - if the AI shows anything that novel I will be impressed... but if its a routine that gets repeated thousands of times, it wont be so impressive

That section of the demo looks heavily scripted, but it's actually an example of how tightly you can use what we call "AI Packages" to create situations.

Outline: Woman decides to do some archery practice (in her room of all places). She goes & picks up a bow, then a quiver of arrows, and equips them. Then she walks over in front of a target and takes three shots. They all miss (and usually knock stuff on the dresser below the target around the room). She then goes over to a table & picks up a potion, walks back & drinks it down. Then, she takes 3 more shots, and all hit.

The cool thing is, the way the AI packages are set up only has parts of that in it. Basically the first one says, "Shoot 3 times at this target from this location." But she doesn't have a bow or arrows. The AI scans the room and finds a bow and arrow in there that she owns, and causes her to walk over to them and pick them up, and to equip them. Then the AI makes her walk over to the specified location and take 3 shots. Note that the acquisition of the bow and arrow were completely automatic. If there hadn't been any in the room, she might have gone to a store in town and bought some, or if her responsibility was low enough, stolen some.

Anyway, the package then causes her to fire 3 times at the target. Each shot misses, not because it's scripted to do so, but because her Marksman skill is set to 0.

At this point the first AI package is done, and another one kicks off. This one tells her to drink a particular potion. So she goes & gets it and drinks it. The potion is a "Fortify Skill: Marksman" potion that raises her Marksman skill by a significant amount.

That done, the FIRST AI package is run again. She already has a bow and arrows, so she just takes three shots. Her Marksman skill high, she hits the target dead on with each shot.

The rest of that part of the demo, including the parts with the dog, proceed in a similar fashion.

Packages can be very very specific (i.e., eat food at this table in this Inn every day at 5PM) or very vague (i.e. eat food every day at 5PM). In the second case, how the NPC acquires the food depends entirely on the NPC's stats, items in the environment, and what the NPC owns and/or has in their inventory. If the NPC has an apple, he or she will just eat the apple. If the NPC has food back home, the NPC might go back home and eat there. The NPC might even hunt for food, or steal it. There are a number of settings on AI that govern this behavior.

The designers have a lot of control over this, so total chaos can be avoided (if desired).

It's pretty cool, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what the mod makers come up with.

MrSmileyFaceDude said:

The cool thing is, the way the AI packages are set up only has parts of that in it. Basically the first one says, "Shoot 3 times at this target from this location." But she doesn't have a bow or arrows. The AI scans the room and finds a bow and arrow in there that she owns, and causes her to walk over to them and pick them up, and to equip them. Then the AI makes her walk over to the specified location and take 3 shots. Note that the acquisition of the bow and arrow were completely automatic. If there hadn't been any in the room, she might have gone to a store in town and bought some, or if her responsibility was low enough, stolen some.

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So when i start "liberating" books and candles for my new home i wont have to worry about someone doing without their items, if they have enough money or if they are thieving bastards like myself they'll go out and get a replacement.... fantastic, then i can go back a few days later and rob them blind again. :D

Just don't get caught -- they may run & get some guards if they see you!

Saran said:

MrSmileyFaceDude said:

So when i start "liberating" books and candles for my new home i wont have to worry about someone doing without their items, if they have enough money or if they are thieving bastards like myself they'll go out and get a replacement.... fantastic, then i can go back a few days later and rob them blind again. :D

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Would it be possible for them to steal shit back from you?

We've made it so that NPCs won't AUTOMATICALLY steal stuff from the player (or stuff the player owns). An NPC could be specifically told to do so via script or package, but that's it. That's a deliberate choice -- we decided it was very important to control that . NPCs can't steal or take quest items from the world, either.

That's fair enough. I can't just imagine the hordes of angry players logging on the the bestheda forums and saying

"WTF WHERE DID ALL MY STUFF GO?!! OBLIVION IS A BUGGY PEACE OF SHIT THAT SUCKS NUTS!!!!1"

Mind you, it'd just be kinda neat if you had to track down the bastard thief who stole all your stored gear. Sort of getting to the point where it's a nice unscripted quest/activity and that you might have to think of a nice security system to deter thieves ie: convert a dungeon into your secret deathtrap lair.

one day Id like to see Elder Scrolls go back to the open ended, randomly generated quest style like Daggerfall... but with a super-expanded AI capacity - so the quests developed complex, detailed scenarios by themselves

man that would be hip - like a RPG/world simulation

To me, the AI engine is the thing I'm most excited about after reading all the previews. I'm slightly aprehensive about melee combat, because I hate to waste much time in battles. I like to go from enemy to enemy pretty quickly and with the blocking, various attack styles, combos, etc., it sounds like combat will be more time consuming. I guess that'll be okay if there's a lot less combat in general. If there are as many creatures in Oblivion's forests as there was on Vvardenfell then combat could almost take over the game. That'd be hugely boring. I'm an explorer/treasure seeker at heart and combat is a necessary evil for me. That said, I'll probably play a sneaky mage and try to avoid melee as much as possible. I plan to focus on Bow as my only weapon skill.

@Kathode or MSFD:

I thought of a question while making the above post. In several interviews it was stated that there are leveled lists for Oblivion. If that is the case, would it be wiser to avoid dungeons for several levels so that the loot you find is worthwhile? I'm guessing that dungeons may respawn after a long period of time, but I don't think that's been addressed yet. Can you give us an idea on how leveling/respawning works?

I vote yes on forest racers.

Vykromond said:

I vote yes on forest racers.

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How could you, i still have nightmares about those cliff racer bastards!

I must say that despite the fact that I was already quite excited about Oblivion, having seen the screenshots and hearing a lot about the improvements over the previous Elder Scrolls game, at this point, nothing excites me more than Radiant AI. I'm already impressed as hell with the AI and automation in Sims 2, but the fact of the matter is that it isn't at all 'independent'. RadiantAI on the other hand sounds like it actually allows for alternative behaviour, which depend on a variety of variables, so someone with high responsibility would be more likely to find a job or sell his current possessions to pay for something he wants to buy, which he doesn't have, while someone with low responsibility would just go ahead and steal it.

I'm assuming that since the AI can steal stuff that they want, they can also be made to go to work, earn money, or perhaps simply sell items that belong to them in order to buy something else. Going to work could be a very simple matter of hunting animals and selling their pelts.

Since the AI doesn't gain experience over time, I wonder if it would be possible for modders to forcibly implement this little feature. It would be something that modders could test and balance in their own time. Its implementation certainly isn't a good way for Bethesda's devs to devote any of their own time to, and it would open room to a lot of imbalance in any case, but I think that it would be interesting if someone did it anyway. I think that a scenario could be created in which a person with low responsibility, who has a tendency to steal things instead of paying for them, would develop thievery and stealth skills over time, and the AI package for "professional thief" would kick in, and he would eventually come to make a living by stealing high-value objects and selling them to fences. Likewise, it would be even more interesting if fences weren't always fences, and simply started as merchant traders with low responsibility. Their low responsibility rating made them more willing to accept stolen goods with low values attached to them as they would be less likely to be caught by police, eventually developing high trading and security skills, which activates the "fence" AI package, making them criminal traders and high-risk smugglers.

Given an ungodly amount of time, I'm sure someone could come up with that, if the tools were available.