Monday 19 March 2007

Pic of the day: If not for the mouse arrow, this picture could have been here from the south coast of Norway. It is however from the province of Cyrodiil, in the game massive single-player role playing game Oblivion.

Oblivion revisited

The new video card (Club 3D x1600PRO) really is good. With the old video card, which I had bought specifically for Oblivion, I still could only walk around with mediocre graphics. Most notably, things at a distance were drawn with much less detail. If I wanted a picture with all the detail, I would stop, turn up the detail, wait for the machine to draw the screen, take the picture and turn the graphics back down toward the middle. Not anymore. I walk around in a beautifully rendered fantasy world, full of varied and realistic terrain. Only the monsters are ugly, as intended.

I don't do this all day every day. As a single-player game, it is inherently less satisfying than City of Heroes, which takes place in a shared world, or The Sims 2, which creates cute stories I can share online. Also, while I can play it partly with my Thrustmaster USB controller, I also have to use the mouse quite a bit. The game assures me that I can use the second joystick on my controller to turn the character around (the first is used for moving) but it does not work. Also, picking a new spell / weapon / potion / magic item requires scrolling through a list with my mouse and clicking on one. This is not good for my arm, so I have to limit it. And time limits itself.

Given my less than fanatical interest in the game, it probably does not surprise you that I have failed to buy the expansion pack, Shivering Isles. The name amuses me quite a bit, because it is a (probably intentional) parallel to Shrouded Isles, the first (and quite successful) expansion pack to the massively multiplayer online RPG Dark Age of Camelot. With Bethesda Softworks being quite open about wanting their game to be a "massive singleplayer RPG", and with them having used the same basic game engine as DAoC before (Gamebryo), I sincerely doubt they chose the name by accident. Still, I haven't gotten it, and have no immediate plans to. Perhaps someday.

But I have wandered around in Cyrodiil again, taken pretty pictures, killed monsters and collected magical artifacts, killed bandits and taken their armor (and clothes). Screenshots will show up when they fit in, I hope. Thar's pretty in them thar hills!