Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

For a while now I’ve been playing through Morrowind and it’s expansions. It’s been a pretty decent game so far. The thing is though, I’ve also had Oblivion sitting here for like a month - but I was sure that it wouldn’t run well at all on my machine. So today I got frustrated during a quest in Morrowind and decided to test out the sequel and see how bad it actually runs on my aging “gaming machine”.

It turns out that it runs pretty well! When the game auto-configured, it set everything to medium. I double checked the resolution and it had decided to set my screen to 640×480. That gave me pause - but I said fuck it, set it to 1024×768 and upgraded a couple of the recommendations and it looks pretty good. The engine sadly performs better than it’s predecesser (and that’s even with the Morrowind FPS Optimizer). I played through the introductory dungeon in probably 10 minutes, just testing the waters. I reached the outside environment and man, are the visuals nice.

The only time I’ve seen a poor framerate really was when I entered a room and spontaneously 10 NPCs decided to get up and walk around. There had to have been a bug there, since it looked absolutely stupid.

The game itself, on first impression obviously, seems just as good as the reviews. The loading times are remarkably short when they do occur, which is the opposite of what I expected. The quests seem to have more thought put into them than Morrowind, and the world seems a lot more real. It’s nice to see trees for example. And good God the facial animations are fantastic.

The only two things that jumped out at me were the fact that you can’t make notes on your map anymore, and you can’t name your savegames. I would guess those are going to be filed into the “dumbing a game down for consoles” category by a ton of people, but I’m filing it under “you lazy bastards”. In a game world the size of Morrowind or Oblivion the notes were pretty crucial. In the last game I used to mark any dungeons that I’ve been through as cleared, or marking the NPCs on the open map and so forth. And I mean seriously, “Savegame 1″, “Savegame 2″, and so on? That’s pretty ridiculous. There’s already third-party savegame manager for the PC version.

Having said all this, there’s now one thing preventing me from playing:

Someday she might start doing quests, but for now Chie seems content in stealing everything in the Imperial City that isn’t nailed down and then selling it in the markets.

Edit: And for the record I bought the game. I got a used copy of the Collector’s Edition for the PC, it came to 63 dollars after tax. Someone bought it and returned it an hour later since their computer couldn’t run it (a laptop).