The wait is over. I got my hands on a copy of Oblivion.
Like many fans of the Elders Scrolls series out there, I had been waiting this release with a mix of anticipation and fear. Anticipation for the wonderful improvements promised by Bethesda. And fear of the inevitable disappointment at some of the changes that would be introduced.
Bethesda delivered on both accounts.
The bad news first....
I have been playing for a few hours only. The first hour was spent on a practice character - just to get the feel of the game. It took that long to configure the graphics to display an acceptable landscape while preserving a comfortable performance. The defaults settings provided by the game are very conservative - to the point of being disappointing at first. Distant hills look like a blotchy golf course. Nearby grass pops up only 10 feet away. I was relieved to find that my machine could handle a maximum view distant of grass and soft shadows from trees without breaking a sweat.
Some additional settings can be tweaked if you edit the Oblivion.ini file... assuming you find it first. Unlike Morrowind, Oblivion stores personal settings such as saved games in 'My Documents / My Games / Oblivion' (assuming you are on a PC of course). This is where the .ini file is stored.
If you intent to take pictures of your trip in Tamriel, make sure to edit that file and set bAllowScreenShot to 1, before you fire up the game. Why they keep leaving that option off by default on PC is beyond me.
Hopefully, someone clever will reverse engineer the rest of the .ini file soon and provide an Oblivion tweak guide like the one that appeared soon after the release of Morrowind.
The second bad news of the game is definitely the interface. This is where you can feel the influence of the XBox the most.
Oblivion's interface is available in one size - BIG. And if you are running the game at high resolution, the interface is REALLY BIG. After all, when you play on an XBox, you have little use of resizable windows and small fonts like in Morrowind.
The interface is also very linear, made up on scrollable list after list. Gone are the tooltips. Gone is the drag and drop of items between character, inventory and the outside world. Gone are the rich, hyperlinked threads of conversations with other characters. And gone are the editable saved games.
Instead, you will have to get used to shift-click to send an items from your inventory to a container (or to simply drop it). You will have to scroll through list after list instead of using your mouse to simply click on the item of your choice. Even the one size map becomes difficult to read after a while. As for the conversation topics, they are reduced to a meager list of topics of interest (with no way to go back to previous conversations). And saved games pile up with a default date and name.
And what to think of the journal system ? One of the main complaints about the interface of Morrowind was its very linear journal system. It looks like they ignored that lesson and went back to the original idea of lists of quests. Instead of a living journal with table of contents, index and quests, Oblivion only offers three lists - all quests, completed quests and active quests. How very disappointing...
A small tip if the new interface leaves you very frustrated - spend some extra time with the Keyboard options and try to map the keys as close as possible to the layout you are comfortable with. I set mine to display the 3rd person view with Tab, the journal with right mouse click and the new Block option with the 3rd mouse button. Only then I became more comfortable with the interface.
After playing the game for a few hours, I can't shake the feeling that the game 'world' is smaller than the island of Morrowind, with less quests to explore (which is almost to be expected from a game that replaced text based quests by hours of audio content).
But then again, I only played for a few hours. It took me days to really appreciate the depth of Morrowind. I will have to revisit this first impression a few weeks from now.
