Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

[Dezm0nd]

Agreed ive been dossing about annd grinding my character majors skills up and it's such a better game to play now, hardly any stutterings, nicer models and an overall greater experience.

roll on tuesday when XBL goes down and shivering isles is coming out, nice timing Microsoft you ****wits

[Charlie]

So that last update really did improve the aesthetics of the game? I honestly couldn't notice anything different playing in 480P on a 32" CRT.

Very tempted to pick up an LCD screen to play The Shivering Isles on, I rate Oblivion the best looking game on the 360 and can only imagine how lush it looks in HD. Sigh.

[stainboy]

Didn't know about the update, can't say I've noticed any of those glitches that it fixes but I'll have to have a look to see if the outside world looks better.

Charlie - To be totally honest I wasn't blown away when I took my 360 to my mate's house and saw it running on his 32" LCD. It didn't make me want to go running out and upgrade my 25" CRT.

[Ian(not Ian)]

After the update on 360 I've noticed glitches galore, slowdown, even crashes.
f'r instance. Those draemora spider type mobs (planes of oblivion) will conjure up mini-me versions of themselves when they appear it's in a black box rather than the swirly magicy effect.
Multi-crashes at skingrad gate, same place, evertime forced me to switch off yesterday.

[Rossco]

That sucks, its been perfect for me, put it on for an hour or so last night and just mucked about with various quests inside and outdoors and it was all peachy. And outdoors did look a bitbetter for far away textures but nothing major as far as I could tell, and it will still stutter the odd time while outside while loading, and the loading text still comes up. Someone said that was removed!?

[prinnysquad]

the update has proper skanked my map. I can be walking along just above the gold coast, when a 'new' place comes on the compass. As i approach it, the screen does that 'loading' thing, then all of a sudden the icon in the compass has vanished. When i click onto the map I'm about half a mile west.

Case in point: crowhaven. In the middle of nowhere, I saw a symbol on the compass, approached it thinking, 'oh, new place', then it says 'crowhaven'. This was about an inch north of the 'l' letter of the world 'Gold' on the map. There's nothing there, no icon. When I enter the dungeon, the cursor has leapt over to the coast about an inch north of Anvil to the 'real' crowhaven.

Bollocks.

[Sergeant Syphillis]

Thats crap, I feel for you people, I've not encountered any glitches and it deffinately looks better. Perhaps its because i started a new file with the patch, could that make a difference?

[Ian(not Ian)]

Apart from the game hanging up ^^ It's not gamebreaking stuff. I'm sure I can avoid the place it crashes at easily enough.
Gotta get some time in this week to prepare for Friday's Shivering Isles expansion.

[Rossco]

IGN Insider do this Masterbit HD section with HD videos of games obviously, and theres one of Oblivion on PS3 I just watched and to be honest it looks really nice compared to 360! Outdoors definitely seem ALOT better in the distance and even the lighting inside dungeons etc looks better too. I could be seeing things but it certainly seemed better and smoother all round.

Even after the 360 patch.

[andrewfee]

IGN Insider do this Masterbit HD section with HD videos of games obviously, and theres one of Oblivion on PS3 I just watched and to be honest it looks really nice compared to 360! Outdoors definitely seem ALOT better in the distance and even the lighting inside dungeons etc looks better too. I could be seeing things but it certainly seemed better and smoother all round.

Even after the 360 patch.

I actually did some comparing of this last night, in the same places. Items etc all seem to draw in at the same distance, and the world, number / position of trees etc is identical. The *far* distant textures are the same too, after the patch. Due to the 360's dark video output, you have to turn up the ingame brightness slider quite a bit to get the levels matching, however.

The main difference is that the PS3 version is using Anisotropic filtering instead of anti-aliasing. This means that the edges of everything looks sharper, and textures are sharp further off into the distance. It also means there's a fair bit more "jaggies" however. (I believe the 360 one runs with 4xAA?)

Load times were marginally improved on the PS3 version (a couple of seconds difference really) but the framerate seemed quite a bit worse. I don't remember the game ever slowing down quite as much as the PS3 one did when there were a lot of people in the imperial city going after the player.

I couldn't say for sure, but it's possible that the PS3 version is using bloom lighting instead of HDR, or they have at least lessened the effect of it.


Personally, I prefer AF to AA, so I'm very tempted by the PS3 version, but the main thing drawing me back into Oblivion is the Shivering Isles expansion, and it's not going to be out until the end of the year for PS3, is it? (and I've also bought quite a lot of the add-ons)

[andrewfee]

Finally finished re-downloading the Masterbit video. (IGN's servers are painfully slow for me, for some reason - I never get more than 100k/sec)

I tried to keep this as fair as possible, so I streamed the video to my 360, rather than taking a screenshot of it. As the 360's output is very dark (gamma is way too high) it means that my photos look darker than they should. (I turned the 360 brightness back down to the default to keep it fair)

Lighting might be a little off too, as I didn't spend too long on it:



360 on the left, PS3 on the right. IGN appears to have done some slight sharpening to the video (ringing around high-contrast edges) which is why the texture detail appears to be slightly higher - in reality it's the same.

Height is slightly different, presumably because my character is an Argonian. (not sure what IGN were using)

I'm not keen on what they've done with the HUD though. My 360 is using VGA, so there's no overscan (or sharpening) yet the PS3's HUD is much further in, taking up more room.

The photos don't show off just how much extra aliasing there is - it's quite bad really.

[Charlie]

Going on those pictures the PS3 version looks noticeably better.

[andrewfee]

Going on those pictures the PS3 version looks noticeably better.

IGN have added sharpening to the video though, which makes the textures look sharper. (I can't add sharpening even if I wanted to when using VGA on the 360)

The only real difference between the two is that the PS3 has a ton more aliasing (doesn't really show in photos) but textures stay sharp for longer distances. There's virtually no aliasing at all on the 360.

[Supergoal]

Or if you want the best version get the PC one

[Dezm0nd]

No thanks, i prefer having a balanced bank account and a worse looking but still awesome title

Bring on the Shivering Isles!!