Output Stream of Consciousness

Link: http://www.elderscrolls.com/games/oblivion_overview.htm

I've liked Bethesda's series of games for quite a while now. Daggerfall, Morrowind and now Oblivion.

Oblivion is an epic quest in the same style as its predecessors. The same use-it-and-gain-it skill system is there: if you run a lot, your Athletics goes up. If you jump and fall off things, your Acrobatics goes up, and so on.

The perpetually-staring characters are voice-acted quite well (I swear I heard Patrick Stewart in there). There's utterly no shortage of quests, and you will find yourself perpetually busy. If you get yourself all your recommendations for the Mage's Guild, you get to enter the Academy and create your own spells and enchantments.

The travel system is a refreshing nicety. No longer do you have to manually trudge from the Red Mountain all the way home like in Morrowind, but you can simply travel, risk-free, from a safe place with a clear exit (e.g. outside cities, in the wilderness with no enemies around) to most any previously-discovered site.

Now, Oblivion has some pretty high requirements. My video card and computer setup, perfectly able to handle World of Warcraft with aplomb, was utterly underpowered here. GeForce FX cards suffer quite a bit here.

You can type ~ (tilde) then tlb [ENTER] inside the game to turn "Lite Brite" mode on. You will get grey "blobs" around in many locations, though, but this setting will help:

A: You have to edit your Oblivion.INI and change fLODLandVerticalBias from 0 to -1200 (yes, minus 1200).

However, one very kind soul came to the rescue of most of us with older video cards. His site is over on "Oldblivion" (I must say: I love the name!) Let me tell you, it works. I wish there was something preset in between the low and medium settings (medium settings still give me a slow frame rate during combat), but experimenting should get it there.

It's an addictive game, and I must say I am enjoying my hiatus from World of Warcraft, since I can just save and exit any time I want. I forgot how much freedom you lose when you're in the middle of a three-hour World of Warcraft dungeon run ;)