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Niklas was listening to Cher while typing:
Bugger off, multiplayer is for fools who wish to associate with idiots.
Hmm, I didn't really mean this. Anyway, definately no multiplayer as far as I know!
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Leding:
I kept trying to get into Morrowind. I would come up with awsome class ideas and spend hours piecing them together... but the combat kept killing it for me. I like having combos and abilities to push 'n stuff ;pDoes Oblivion have a better combat system in that regard?
There was only one possible class in Morrowind - the Warrior/thief who dabbled in magic 
And yeah the combat system kinda sucked.
It was still one of the greatest games ever, IMO.
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Niklas had this to say about Optimus Prime:
Hmm, I didn't really mean this. Anyway, definately no multiplayer as far as I know!
*scratches his head as he stares at the RQG* So...Cher makes Niklas mean?
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Zephyer Kyuukaze's unholy Backstreet Boys obsession manifested in:
*scratches his head as he stares at the RQG* So...Cher makes Niklas mean?
She elicits rage in me.
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Niklas had this to say about Captain Planet:
She elicits rage in me.
A common response.
It is held in thought
only by the understanding
of the Wind.
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We were all impressed when Maradon! wrote:
There was only one possible class in Morrowind - the Warrior/thief who dabbled in magic
Daggerfall was so much worse, only class in that was a warrior with jsut enoughmagic skills to join the guild and dot he security quests that gave items taht cast spells better than any mage ever could, and all you had to do to be a theive was chill in a store till it closed
"I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
-- George Herbert Walker Bush
There wasn't really any way to be a mage in Morrowind, since even if you maxed out your INT and shit, you wouldn't really have enough MP to cast a lot of magic, or if you could, you wouldn't be casting very powerful spells.
Hopefully it'll run (though the Air Force guys in the store as well as the guy behind the counter told me it won't with my specs)...
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Verily, the chocolate bunny rabits doth run and play while Mortious gently hums:
I remember when someone (was it Leopold?) was almost having a fit and shouting at people for playing Morrowind how they wanted to and levelling up before doing the storyline missions.
Shit, I got so involved in the game I forgot to start the main storyline until I was like level 15 or something (the guy did say to gain a few levels and come back when I was more powerful, after all). Turns out the rest of the game was pretty much a cakewalk at that point.
Great game, though, unlike its predecessor.
--Satan, quoted by John Milton
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Willias had this to say about Captain Planet:
I think the only reason I used magic in Morrowind was to heal myself after marching through armies of bad guys.There wasn't really any way to be a mage in Morrowind, since even if you maxed out your INT and shit, you wouldn't really have enough MP to cast a lot of magic, or if you could, you wouldn't be casting very powerful spells.
Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willias?
Clearly, you just weren't doing it right. 
Heck, you could have lots of MP if you play a Breton with The Apprentice. Triple the MP and the Breton magicka resist counteracts The Apprentice's magicka weakness.
--Satan, quoted by John Milton
Then I stopped exploiting the mana potions you can make and sleeping for days at a time to get mana back. It came back just fast enough to keep going if you were careful, but if you ever went all out you needed potions or switch to melee/ranged weapons.
Made the spellcasting game way more fun.
[edit]Also, the mod allowed % mana to return over 100, 200, 400, and 800 seconds if you wanted to rebalance it.[/edit] Inferno-Spirit fucked around with this message on 03-07-2006 at 01:15 PM.
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nem-x impressed everyone with:Going to see how much this improves in less than a week.
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There was much rejoicing when nem-x said this:
oh geez
Horsies!
As you raise your skill in the melee skills of the game (Blade [swords and daggers], Blunt [hammers and axes], and Hand to Hand) you gain special power attacks.
The first you recieve is Disarm, which knocks the weapon that the enemy has equipped out of their hands and onto the ground. Good against solo opponents, but all enemies drop weapons out of their hands when they die, and if you disarm an opponent with weapons being on the ground nearby, the guy you're fighting will just pick up another weapon.
The second you recieve is Knockdown. Pretty simple, you knock an enemy on their back allowing you to get in free hits. You can also use this attack to knock enemies off of cliffs and such, since they take falling damage just like you do.
Finally, there is the special attack Paralyze, which pretty much locks the opponent down for a significant amount of time. The attack knocks the opponent down just like Knockdown does, but the enemy will stay down, likely long enough for you to kill them with an onslaught of attacks.
There are other "perks" just like these for other skills in the game. For example, eventually you will get the ability Dodge for raising up acrobatics, and you'll improve your sneak attack to the point of being able to sneak attack an enemy as if they had no armor on by raising your sneak skill.
I like. 
Yes, I got tired of having very little information about the game and went out and bought the strategy guide so I could look at everything that isn't quest related. Willias fucked around with this message on 03-15-2006 at 06:11 PM.
Take your time leveling up in this game. Monsters and encounters scale with your level. Moreso than they did in Morrowind.
As you level up, you'll fight against more and more powerful creatures. Eventually, you'll fight the same stuff over and over again (the game's encounters are scaled and tiered, as you level up, you fight more powerful monsters until you get to the top one in each tier, which is around level 20) but the monsters will still scale with your level, so the game never becomes incredibly easy like it could with Morrowind.
Also of note, that randomly generated monsters are usually 2 levels below your own.
Finally, npcs are usually scaled a certain amount of levels ahead of your character, or behind your character. Of note, (since we all know at some point we're going to try and bitch slap some guards) guards will always be 10 levels higher than your character is, and guard captains will always be 15. AND THEY WILL CHASE YOU DOWN MUCH FURTHER THAN THEY DID IN MORROWIND. Doesn't help either that there are Ranger-ish guards that wander the wilderness that will be quite happy to send you to jail.
Which brings me to a few other points. When you get caught doing something illegal, there are 3 things that the guards may do to you (you'll have a choice). First of all, you can resist arrest. Not a good idea, as guards are much more powerful than you, as stated above, and will chase your ass down for a very long amount of time. Second, you can be send to Prison. Fun. The amount of time you have to spend in prison depends on the costs of the offenses you have commited (notably, killing someone has a 1000 gold fine attached to it). The amount of days you must spend in prison is equal to the costs of the crimes you have commited, divided by one hundread. 10 days of jail for killing someone in other words. For every day you spend in prison, one of your skills is selected at random and lowered by 1. Unless the skill is Security or Sneak, then those skills are raised by 1. Note, you can't exploit this and gain extra level ups. Bethesda was smart enough to prevent that exploit. 
Finally, you can pay the fine to the guards for whatever price is on your head, if you stole something, it's taken away from you.
Oh, and for would be theives, AI is smarter this time. Much smarter. Don't think you can outwit the game by dropping stolen shit at your feet, and then when the guard leaves you can pick it back up. If you have stolen loot at your feet when you are arrested, the guards will pick it up. You'll have to hide your stolen loot if you get caught and want to keep it. Also, if you get caught picking back up your stolen loot, the same price that was put on your head the first time you grabbed it will be put right back on your character. In other words, be careful stealing or don't steal at all.
More on jail... (SPOILERS AHEAD!) In jail all of your crap is taken away, you're stuck behind bars with a bed. If you want to wait out the jail time (and lower your skills, which isn't a good thing) you can use the bed to sleep away the time. However, you can also break out of jail. When you are put in prison, you have on basic clothing (prison wardrobe) and if you were carrying one, a single lockpick. You can use the lockpick to pick open the cell door, and sneak out. Or, if your sneak skill is high enough, you can pick pocket (yes, pick pocketing is in, if you sneak near an npc you can pick pocket them the same way you would talk to them) the master key from a guard that will walk by your cell. Once you've opened the door of your cell, you better be one sneaky motherfucker, if you get caught, YOU WILL be attacked by the guards. And with no weapons, if you don't have good hand to hand skill, you're going to get dead, real fast like. You'll have to sneak past several well equipped guards and sneak to an Evidence chest placed in the prison. Inside is your equipment, and any stolen loot that was found on your character. Now that you're back to being fully equipped, you need to sneak out of the prison, and head for freedom... except for the fact that once you get far enough away from the prison, you'll have a brand new price put out for you head, and you'll have to go into hiding and wait for the costs of your evil deeds to go down. However, if you wait it out, you'll still get all the equipment (minus stolen stuff) back after your sentence is over.
Finally, for those who want to murder... Sneak is your friend. First of all, the higher your sneak skill, the more powerful your sneak attacks are (sneak attacks are done with 1h weapons and bows). A picture in the guide depicts someone doing a 6x damage sneak attack, and also states that for having maxed sneak skill, your sneak attacks hit as if the target has no armor (pain!). If you kill someone in one hit with a sneak attack, they won't be able to cry for help, and as long as no one was watching, you can completely avoid getting in trouble for killing that person.
And for those that say it just makes the whole game more challenging, part of the challenge is getting up to those levels in the first place, in my eyes. You're reward is being able to beat the snot out of the simple city folk(including the guards) if you desire. Of course, I'm not someone that camps easy crap either to become super powerful and then run through the game. But, if that's what's fun for some people, let them do it. That's just how I feel about it though. *shrug*
It got kinda lame, since nothing was able to put up a fight against my character. I could literally walk into a town and lay the smack down upon all who stood before me.
I kinda like the fact that in Oblivion, guards will stay a good deal more powerful than you. Obiviously, however, is that once you do get to the upper levels, guards WILL be easier to deal with. Your stats will skyrocket, along with increased armor and damage from more powerful magic and weaponry, while the guards only gain benefits to base stats and hp from the extra levels.
What I'm saying is... you're still going to get to a point in Oblivion where you can kick the shit out of most of the stuff you find in the game. However, it's not going to become a cakewalk like it was in Morrowind.
Oh, and apparently there are Black Soul Gems in this game. Didn't manage to find where (trying to not look at the quest stuff) but apparently they do exist (read it on TES forums). For those who don't know, they allow you to capture the souls of npcs.
Edit: Oh, and to throw out a bit more info... You can make poisons in this game. Willias fucked around with this message on 03-16-2006 at 11:12 PM.
Just like you would make a potion through alchemy, you make a poison by making a potion that has absolutely no beneficial effects. You can then apply the poison to weapons or bows. The guide specificly states doing this to help with assassinations by combining poisons with sneak attacks. However, if you try to murder someone by sneak attack, and the poison is what finishes them off, not the sneak attack, they'll manage to alert the guards.
Don't expect to level up quickly in this game, folks. Where as gaining skill ups was linear in Morrowind, it has been confirmed that gaining will ups will get more and more difficult as your skill rises in Oblivion. Also, apparently getting skill ups will take longer in general as well. I suppose that is why all of the Master trainers (the ones that can train you to 100 skill) require you to do a quest for them before they will train you.
On that note, in Oblivion you pick 7 main skills. Each of those skills is set at 25 at the beginning, and all the other skills are set at 5. To level up, you have to raise your main skills.
(Also of note, your characters main skill preference, combat, magic, or stealth, will also add 10 to the score of any similar skill that you pick as a major skill. For example: If you pick Combat as your main skill preference, and then pick Blades as one of your main skills, you'll get a +10 bonus to it.)
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Willias wrote this stupid crap:
More info for those who don't care to look it up! Spoilers may be ahead. (ono!)Take your time leveling up in this game. Monsters and encounters scale with your level. Moreso than they did in Morrowind.
As you level up, you'll fight against more and more powerful creatures. Eventually, you'll fight the same stuff over and over again (the game's encounters are scaled and tiered, as you level up, you fight more powerful monsters until you get to the top one in each tier, which is around level 20) but the monsters will still scale with your level, so the game never becomes incredibly easy like it could with Morrowind.
Also of note, that randomly generated monsters are usually 2 levels below your own.
Finally, npcs are usually scaled a certain amount of levels ahead of your character, or behind your character. Of note, (since we all know at some point we're going to try and bitch slap some guards) guards will always be 10 levels higher than your character is, and guard captains will always be 15. AND THEY WILL CHASE YOU DOWN MUCH FURTHER THAN THEY DID IN MORROWIND. Doesn't help either that there are Ranger-ish guards that wander the wilderness that will be quite happy to send you to jail.
I hate that. I always did. What's the point of levelling then?
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Tarquinn's fortune cookie read:
I hate that. I always did. What's the point of levelling then?
To gain more powerful skills, spells, abilities, and equipment?
Also, many of the game's quests require you to be at a certain level before you can complete them. Some require you to be over level 20.
Hell, Morrowind did it to a certain degree. The guards didn't really scale with your level, so in the end you could completely decimate towns if you so desired. But when you were leveling from 1 to 20, monsters would slowly get more and more powerful in the wild, and you would start encountering more powerful creatures. It's no different here.
It's not like a rat that you fight at level 1 is going to be a level 20 rat when you get level 20. Monsters are divided into types and as you level you start fighting different monsters of that type.
Actually, I'll even throw out a Monster type's tree:
One of the monster trees is Beasts.
At level 1, you'll encounter rats.
At level 2, you'll encounter wolves.
At level 6, you'll encounter timber wolves.
At level 9, you'll encounter black bears.
At level 12, you'll encounter mountain lions.
At level 16, you'll encounter brown bears.
Note that there is an exception with the Beasts tree, and that is that (or at least the guide doesn't say) brown bears don't scale with your level. Willias fucked around with this message on 03-17-2006 at 02:58 AM.
What is the point when the game is so easy?
The best games are often the ones that - other than any kind of tutorial or training - keep the difficulty pretty much constant but require greater amounts of skill, tactics, and intelligent gameplay in order to survive. This kind of challenge keeps the user deeply involved and interested.
It's why most multi-player FPS and RTS games do as well as they do: each player is on an even playing field to start, and a victory comes from how well he played, not to how much gear he'd built up over time, or God forbid to something as absurd as a random number generator.
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Inferno-Spirit thought about the meaning of life:
I don't understand people who don't want their enemies to grow powerful with them.What is the point when the game is so easy?
No no no, I don't want the game to be easy. I want to encounter more powerful MOBs when I progress in the story. I just don't like that the whole world levels up with me.
For example, I start my adventure in uh... Whimpyvale, a peacful farming community. The worst stuff I will encounter there might be a pack of wolves or the above mentioned rats. Their guards are trained and equipped to handle this. They are lowely militas, but adequate for the tasks in Whimpyvale.
I leave Whimpyvale and go to adventure in Mediumhardcity. It's a major town that is very often troubled by marauding orcs. The cityguard is obviously harder and better trained, as the region is more dangerous.
I end my quest at the gates of hell. There are some humans guarding them. The king sent his best men, his elite, to stop the demons, or at least try, from entering the realm. The enemies there would butcher erverything in Whimpyvale or Mediumhardcity by just looking at them the wrong way. I defeat the King of Hell. I'm the celebrated hero, I win the game and get the power up.
I'm feeling nostalgic and return to where my adventure started, Whimpyvale. It is still a peaceful farming community, just with the difference that bloody demons, stronger than the ones in hell are roaming the landscape, the townguard did some serious workouts and is now the superior of the King's elite at the gates of hell. The immersion is gone, but I still have a challenge. Yay!
My point is that the level of the monsters, the difficulty of a game should be linked to certain regions and the progress of the story and not to the player level. If I want to spend 10 hours just gaining exp and not continuing the story, then YES, I should have it easier as if I just went straight for the juicy storybits.
I know, this is hard for an open game like Oblivion, but similiar games (the Gothic series) manage this too.
"Don't want to sound like a fanboy, but I am with you. I'll buy it for sure, it's just a matter of for how long I will be playing it..."
- Silvast, Battle.net forums
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Mortious wrote, obviously thinking too hard:
I liked combining the super-jump and water walking spells in Morrowind. Could get you from one end of the map to the other in a few seconds. Wheeeeeee *bounce* wheeeee *bounce* wheeeeee.
Super jump spell you could find a short distance from the starting town.
Could cross the main island in 2 jumps. D:
Another interesting bit of information: Apparently, AGI will no longer affect your chance to hit. There is also no +attack stat in the game. If you hit a guy with a weapon, it's a hit, there isn't a chance to miss this time around. However, enemies can be much more agile than they were in Morrowind, and npcs with shields can block.
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Williasing:
To gain more powerful skills, spells, abilities, and equipment?
But if the entire world levels with you, then your new skills, spells, abilities, and equipment really aren't any more powerful at all. They're AS powerful AS your old ones, or possibly even less powerful.
"Power" is a term that is relative to your surroundings. If you level up and get a new sword or a new karate chop, but all your enemies have leveled up in order to make combat just as hard as it always was, you've made precisely no progress whatsoever.
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How.... Maradon!.... uughhhhhh:
But if the entire world levels with you, then your new skills, spells, abilities, and equipment really aren't any more powerful at all. They're AS powerful AS your old ones, or possibly even less powerful."Power" is a term that is relative to your surroundings. If you level up and get a new sword or a new karate chop, but all your enemies have leveled up in order to make combat just as hard as it always was, you've made precisely no progress whatsoever.
If the game gets easier as you get stronger, and more adept, then the game becomes trivial and you're going to stop playing.
[edit]Typo.[/edit] Inferno-Spirit fucked around with this message on 03-17-2006 at 02:47 PM.
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Over the mountain, in between the ups and downs, I ran into Inferno-Spirit who doth quote:
If the game gets easier as you get stronger, and more adept, then the game becomes trivial and you're going to stop playing.[edit]Typo.[/edit]
1) I kept playing Morrowind for hundreds upon hundreds of hours after it became trivial
2) You can preserve a signifigant element of challenge WITHOUT making the whole world level up along with you. Under such a system there really is no point in leveling at all and you might as well totally remove experience and levels from the game entirely.
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From the book of Maradon!, chapter 3, verse 16:
But if the entire world levels with you, then your new skills, spells, abilities, and equipment really aren't any more powerful at all. They're AS powerful AS your old ones, or possibly even less powerful."Power" is a term that is relative to your surroundings. If you level up and get a new sword or a new karate chop, but all your enemies have leveled up in order to make combat just as hard as it always was, you've made precisely no progress whatsoever.
Not quite. You're still getting a wider variety of abilities that you wouldn't have at a lower level, and you're going to be more powerful in the fact that your skills will allow you to cast magic more easily, deal more damage, you'll be able to manuver more easily, etc. You'll also have either customized enchanted equipment or stuff that you've quested for that allow you to simply do more in combat.
If I recall correctly, level really didn't mean much in Morrowind either. You got increased HP and stats. That was it. The difference was, eventually monsters stopped growing with you as you leveled up (and yes, they did grow with you to a certain degree), so you could overpower everything by the end up the game since you had insane equipment, spells, and skills.
The only analogy I can come up with (and it probably isn't a good one) is World of Warcraft. If you fight nothing but even con mobs throughout the entire game, technically you're fighting mobs leveled to your character. At level 10 as a warlock, you DO get a large power boost that changes how well you fight things. You get a Voidwalker pet. Now you're not the person taking damage from mobs because your imp can't tank worth shit, but instead you have a very beefy pet doing so. In general, the mob's capabilities haven't changed much, you were fighting level 9 stuff at level 9, you're fighting level 10 stuff at level 10, however, now that you have more variety in your abilities, you can better fight things that happen to come your way.
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Maradon! stumbled drunkenly to the keyboard and typed:
1) I kept playing Morrowind for hundreds upon hundreds of hours after it became trivial2) You can preserve a signifigant element of challenge WITHOUT making the whole world level up along with you. Under such a system there really is no point in leveling at all and you might as well totally remove experience and levels from the game entirely.
1) I've never enjoyed doing that, and while I can accept that other people do, a game that forces that kind of environment upon me is not a game I'm going to stick with.
So a game that satisfies both conditions must be challenging and yet trivial. I don't see it working altogether that well.
2) How?
Leveling is not about making games trivial. It's about customizing your character to your play style and making the game more fun for you to play.
It's not like the scaling should be done in such a way where level 1 is the same as level 20, i.e. each level you and every enemy get +1 to all stats and that's it. Tough melee enemies should be getting a lot of damage and life per level so they remain a challenge to a tough melee hero, but ranged, stealth, and spellcasting heroes each have to devise a somewhat better strategy than /autoattack. As you progress throughout the game the skills you have chosen should be required to be used in an intelligent manner.
