Well in that case, I suggest either waiting for a demo, or getting a "demo" :p

Depends on your (probably god-awfully high) rate.

Yeah, it's ridiculously high - I took out a $5000 loan at 7.75% for my truck, yet my CC company won't do any better than a $1k limit / 22.3% APR ( ). Needless to say, I'm looking for another CC..

22?! ****. Just about every card I looked through when I was applying was 16ish, and that's still not good, but you have to start that high with no credit.

What kind of prettyness can I expect with:
Athlon 64 3500+
1gb ram
Nvidia 6600 GT
?

Not as much as you'd want, Detty. I've got a 6800GT, but worse proc. Probably a bit less than mine.

Detty: Medium to highish settings. A tad less then what Yoshi's screenshots are showing.

Jepman: The setting is uNumDepthGrids = 1 (def. 3)

Yea, I tried that, didn't fix it for me and rendered water reflections really ugly. Its wierd, people report it looking great at 10, and I can't get it to look great at 8 without reflection problems.

Might just be the way it is with ATI.

This is what the game looks like maxed out. Warning, heavy pictures.
Note that water reflection are slightly messed because I tweaked the .ini file to have distant textures look better. There isn't as much water in this game, so I decided to go with the farther textures.



Nice landscape
Belenos with imperial city in view
Striding through the forest
Trying to hide
Arriving into Chorrol
Work out before bedtime
Up on the rood for a nice little breeze

The picture of you crouching... Is... unbelievable...

Aye, I just wish I could have anti-aliasing with HDR

Btw new tid bit that might interest you all if you are as annoyed as I am that you can't save your savegames (especially annoying if you run more than one character).

I figured out a simple workaroudn and if you type fast at all, its faster than hitting esc, save game, etc.

Open the console and just type /save (name) (ex. /save belenos01) and you'll have a save game with that name. Console is dropped down like in any fps game.

Wait, does your character actually have real needs now? Like, does he have to sleep or something, and will working out on target dummies boost your skill? Or were those just poses for the pictures?

Poses, although I do think that if you shoot arrows at a target you'll gain skill. I know you can gain skill by watching 2 people spar in training.

You don't HAVE to sleep, I don't think, but I do all do time. I try and roleplay a bit and this character doesnt travel the forest at night, so i never realized whether i need to sleep or not. Obviously as in morrowind you HAVE to sleep a bit to go up your level and choose the stats to raise.

You can buy ho use 's and sleep with em.

I started a mage/thief. Destruction + Rich. This game owns you. I never travel at night either. I just like seeing the beautiful daytime.

Also, don't forget that waiting will refill your health/magicka

I have an AMD Athlon XP 2700+ [2.17Ghz] with 1.5GB of DDR, running with an nVidia GeForce 6800GT.

I hear that the game is obscenely demanding and almost unplayable without the very latest hardware. Would it be worth buying it on this system, do you think?

Yes, Dormouse.

1) You hear wrong
2) Yes.

These shots look much better than what I had seen from official shots so far. Looks like it has a nice atmosphere.
But, does it have weather effects? A little rain or snow couldn't hurt.

Impi, there is indeed rain (awesome rain might I add. You have the drops and a down pour, thunder, etc.) and in some parts of the map there is snow fall.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6146346.html?autoplay=6146354

12 hour Oblivion marathon. Wathing now.

EDIT: actuallly, it's only the highlights, 17 minutes long. But now, I WANT THIS GAME.

Nice. At first I was sceptical about this game, because everything looked so clean and shiney. But now I guess it comes onto my things-to-play-after-Gothic-3 list.

Oh things aren't so clean in kvatch and oblivion.

New shot 1
New shot 2
New shot 3

[url]www.srtest.com[/url]

If anyone is like me and doesn't use fast travel (instead you just ride your horse from one place to the other), you'll notice that you'll get Loading Area text poping up at the bottom of your screen every 10-20ish seconds, I found a way to remove it but its not in the .ini file.

You need to open up the Construction Kit (get it at the official site elderscrolls.com) and go into the sLoadArea and remove the Loading Area... text and voila.

Not a big deal but a tad less annoying.

Btw, I love how gates just randomly pop up in the wilderness. Had to close one out near Bruma. I guess someone was coming for the blades. Closing a gate is typically always the same business, but the layout varies. This time I had to crawl through a dark cave swarming with scamps to get to the tower. Tower layout was also different.

Wandering is the way to do it, really. You gain so much more experience and have a lot more fun with the game that way. Though it does take longer.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Wandering is the way to do it, really. You gain so much more experience and have a lot more fun with the game that way. Though it does take longer.[/QUOTE]

It does indeed take longer, but to me at least, its so much more fun seeing sights and dropping by other cities and settlements on the way. Or being threatened by bandits. Flashing back and forth between cities would be a pain. The only time I did it yet was when I closed the first gate kvatch and found Martin and had to bring it back to Jauffre in Chorrol. I didn't fancy riding my horse with a dude following me on foot, and I lacked time before I needed to stop playing anyways. Other than that, I've been horsing it.

Are you guys buying your horses? 'Cause I've just been stealing mine...

I did steal mine, once, but then I realized when I get on it in front of people they tend to start...killing me.

Right now I'm just using the one that what's his face gave me back in town.

I use quick travel, but only because I've been fencing goods like a mad man. And stopping by the arena alot.

Before heading to sleep tonight, I seriously suggest you guys defrag the disk you installed Oblivion on. Some of those files are huge and got frag'ed up during install. I noticed a significant performance boost in doing so.

I used a third party defrag utility, window's probably wont do its job right with the bigger files. Such a slacker that one is. :p

Man I need to stop playing around with settings, .ini and game files and start playing again, lol.

Question: is ALL dialogue voiced? Like KOTOR?

I've not had dialogue yet that was unvoiced.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Oh yeah, if you are an nV user, don't forget to pick up the latest forcewares. They add performance enhancers for this game.[/QUOTE]
Elaborate? I'm a newbie to Nvidia and I don't know what that is.

A general question: What are some good ways to increase performance without taking a heavy hit to visuals(or I suppose vice versa, just to maximize what I can get)? I have 2.2 ghz, Geforce 6600 GT, and either 512m or 1g of RAM(can't remember) and I'm running at 800x600. Now, for the most part I only get a few moments of slowing but I noticed riding on a horse tends to slow me down a bit. Also, is anyone else getting poor quality of sound on footsteps and weapon sounds? They sound mono and flat to me.

On a gameplay related note, anyone finding sneaking to be disappointing? I can't seem to do it very well, even though I'm a Stealth class. Maybe it's a user error. My character wears heavy armor, but so far I've been wearing Light Armor boots(or even going bare foot) because Heavy Armor boots have yet to get a large improvement in armor over the Light Armor boots. And according to the manual and game guide, the only armor that affects sneaking is the boots. *shrug*

[QUOTE=Kieran Horn]Elaborate? I'm a newbie to Nvidia and I don't know what that is.

A general question: What are some good ways to increase performance without taking a heavy hit to visuals(or I suppose vice versa, just to maximize what I can get)? I have 2.2 ghz, Geforce 6600 GT, and either 512m or 1g of RAM(can't remember) and I'm running at 800x600. Now, for the most part I only get a few moments of slowing but I noticed riding on a horse tends to slow me down a bit. Also, is anyone else getting poor quality of sound on footsteps and weapon sounds? They sound mono and flat to me.

On a gameplay related note, anyone finding sneaking to be disappointing? I can't seem to do it very well, even though I'm a Stealth class. Maybe it's a user error.[/QUOTE]

Performance question : Make sure things such as

Shadow on grass - allow dynamic shadows to fall on grass, looks good but its a gpu hugger

Self-shadow - allow characters to cast shadows on themselves, while it looks great with hoods, its another gpu hugger

Shadow Filtering - blurs dynamic shadows. If off the edge is solid rather than blurred.

I think those are some minor visual upgrades that you can do without if you really need the performance. Also as I said in an above post, make sure you defrag your hard drive.

[QUOTE=Kieran Horn]Elaborate? I'm a newbie to Nvidia and I don't know what that is.

A general question: What are some good ways to increase performance without taking a heavy hit to visuals(or I suppose vice versa, just to maximize what I can get)? I have 2.2 ghz, Geforce 6600 GT, and either 512m or 1g of RAM(can't remember) and I'm running at 800x600. Now, for the most part I only get a few moments of slowing but I noticed riding on a horse tends to slow me down a bit. Also, is anyone else getting poor quality of sound on footsteps and weapon sounds? They sound mono and flat to me.

On a gameplay related note, anyone finding sneaking to be disappointing? I can't seem to do it very well, even though I'm a Stealth class. Maybe it's a user error. My character wears heavy armor, but so far I've been wearing Light Armor boots(or even going bare foot) because Heavy Armor boots have yet to get a large improvement in armor over the Light Armor boots. And according to the manual and game guide, the only armor that affects sneaking is the boots. *shrug*[/QUOTE]
If you have an nVidia card go out and grab the new forceware betas (I got the link through hardocp.com) because they're supposed to improve different performance issues with Oblivion.

As far as the performance goes--your main downfall is the RAM if you have 512. This is really a game that pretty much demands 1 gig for good performance. As is though, you should be fine at 800x600. You'd probably want to turn off different lighting effects to get better performance, maybe even scale down textures a notch.

I sneak very well as an acrobat--you just have to watch light sources and be careful. Then again, I levelled it up a lot early on in the game.

Where the hell is the other thief guild doyen?

Hell, where's the thieve's guild period. I'm trying to look for a place to sell all this carp.