You didn't mention the colors. It may be me, but those oversaturated colors gave Oblivion a very strange feel. There are other games, like Demon's Souls, where it seems like an artistic decision, but in Oblivion just seems... weird. Particularly in the levels located in... well, Oblivion, with magma and all.
Do you mean how you can't have both bloom and HDR? Definitely annoying, that... I distinctly remember bloom on the 360, so that's what feels 'right' to me
I've heard the same, though I haven't seen a source for it - though I also haven't specifically gone looking for one. It's certainly a strange decision, if true...
@@Takarias - I _sooort of_ understand it - because of the branching dialogue paths you can't necessarily record them all in a narrative order, so it might be that they just recorded them alphabetically so that it'd be easier for the devs to find them when they needed them. That's exactly the kind of decision I can imagine STEM people making =)
@@Takarias i think the main source on this info was mark lampert (sound designer) being interviewed in a noclip piece which covered bethesda's sound design in general, plus small tidbits elsewhere from other staff corroborating it. apparently the studio hadn't really thought ahead about recording lines, and vocal direction was an afterthought - just a job assigned to the sound designers, none of whom were directors or even specialised in working with actors. they had put a lot of effort into preparing chronological scripts and explainers for the main characters (eg uriel and martin), with written tone direction etc. but hadn't thought ahead when preparing the scripts to give to the general cast in the vocal booth, and had no way to sort lines in a logical sequence at the time. very little preparation or development time was put into guiding the stable of small-name actors who had to portray dozens of characters for minor quests or 'extras' dialogue. the marquee actors actually apparently got well-constructed pamphlets for their script and detailed descriptions of their character's personality and backgrounds; apparently this was mostly prepped by ken rolston rather than by the sound design team. patrick stewart said (i think in a vanity fair interview?) that bethesda gave him 90 pages detailing uriel septim's background, life and times, and personality - this was way more than he'd been given for most roles of any kind and it helped him understand and approach the character, saying the amount of detail made it his favourite experience doing voicework in a videogame.
Oblivion has an art style that makes us feel as though we are in a fever dream or as if we are in a drug-induced whimsical fairy land. The decision to integrate the Shivering Isles DLC was top notch.
@@hschan5976It was. I mean, who would write about a hermaphrodite who was in a relationship with the god of rape and domination, and proceeded at some point to bite said God's dick off and use it as their spear if they weren't on drugs.
Yeah, the Shivering Isles being added to Oblivion in particular, is _brilliant._ Oblivion's pretty infamous for having eccentric, bizarre, and often flat-out _dumb_ NPCs. I mean, just look at the myriad of "Oblivion NPC in real-life" videos right here on RUclips, where people splice Oblivion music over footage of people doing stupid shit in public; that trend didn't start from nothing, mind you. But this utterly _broken_ NPC AI is what makes the Shivering Isles such a perfect fit for Oblivion. Because, lore-wise, the Shivering Isles are supposed to be full of crazy people; one giant, open-air mental institution, so to speak. So, Oblivion's notoriously wonky, janky, _idiotic_ AI works wonders there. I mean, the people living in the Isles are _supposed_ to be unhinged and eccentric, so the fact that Oblivion's NPCs are exactly that by design, is (like I mentioned) a *PERFECT* fit.
One of the classics in Oblivion dialogue is tone shift. A character will suddenly go from a weary sounding old woman, to shoot towards a glad sounding much younger lass
It's usually the job of a dialogue director/editor to keep all this in a constant direction. I can forgive that, seeing it's their first fully voiced game.
Jauffre's VA died a few years ago. I had a few drinks in his name. I was playing Skyrim the other day and some mod added a Shady Sam to Dawnstar. Not sure what one. I had memories of the original near the imperial city being the place to get huge amounts of lockpicks.
@@AshenBuncakes Ralph Cosham has actually been gone over a decade now. I went through a phase where I bought every audiobook he narrated, even if I wasn't really interested in the story, just because I wanted to hear him read to me. It wasn't cheap to buy all of them, but I have zero regrets. "Spill some blood for me, dear Brother."
Oblivion was the first elder scrolls game I ever played and this unearths equally weird memories of what just feels like a very old fever dream of sorts.
Same to me. I remember playing this for hours and hours when I was a child. I was amazed by the freedom of the game and how every little thing could be picked, like the fork, knife and plates in a dinner table, or every item displayed in a shop. But it was a weird game with weird memories.
When Oblivion was released, the most common video resolution was 1024x768, 1280x1024, or 1280x720, and no doubt that's what it was mostly tested on. Those low res normal maps might have looked fine at such low resolutions.
Oblivion is at an awkward transition phase of technology. It's a very common phenomenon in earlier games, at various points where major advancements were made that weren't quite mastered yet. I first noticed it with the earliest truly 3D games when compared to 2D sprites, it always felt like a step back to me, but it happens at later points too.
I have a huge affinity for the very early hd games. Stuff like Fear, Condemned, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Half Life 2, and of course Oblivion. The pre "Unreal Engine 3" look for hd games. Such a unique vibe.
@@jaykelley103it even spreads into other genres of games. Just look how awkward some character models looked like in 2007-early 2010s FIFA/PES games. They sure feels like home in Oblivion's Cyrodiil 😂
Morrowind was very transitional too. I remember temporarily getting my hands on a GPU that had shaders... and Morrowind was one of the few titles that supported them... for water effects 🙂
I've just been playing Doom 3 the past few nights and what an unusual era for visuals, they loved to flex lighting, coloured lights were still novel, and normal maps were so obvious and black. But I don't hate it. Their attempts to be realistic hopscotched over what realism actually looks like back into a state of artistry that's so outdated that it never really aged. I also feel old textures and tilesets had more visual detail than today's PBR which has been infamously 'plasticy' in several games. Though between Doom 3 and Oblivion specifically the former loved moving lights while Oblivion loved bloom.
I remember seeing the teaser trailers for Oblivion and being genuinely blown away by the graphics, I couldn't imagine how anything could get more realistic. That awe does not hold up in retrospect, but Oblivion for me has that special level of jank that I love, it feels like part of the charm, not something that was missed for a cash grab to force it out the door, nor overpolished and restricted to the point where developer sanctioned fun is the only way. And the shivering isles, still the best DLC for any bethesda title IMO, would not fit tonaly into any other title. The obsurdity mixed with Oblivions janky, silly charm is what makes it!
I had some kind of 360 promo pamphlet that I absolutely drooled over while looking at 2.5" screenshots of Oblivion. It doesn't really hold up in person, but it's still a neat game :)
I remember being blown by Morrowind's graphics when I first played it. Especially the water, I couldn't believe how real the water looked, I had never seen anything like it in a game before.
The most interesting thing about Oblivion to me is that *despite* the extremely weird visuals, it still manages to feel very immersive with its NPC AI (janky as it is) and its writing. I think Morrowind does a lot of other things better, but these two things make Oblivion a game I keep coming back to so that I can roam around the world and listen to its NPCs and do all the fun quests.
Oblivion was the last ES I could decorate with game items and have them stay. Skyrim sends a physics blast through the house and all my work explodes like a confetti cannon.
the way oblivion is "weirdest" about is the way it balances gameplay, there are incredible amount of little systems that are incredibly deep advanced and balanced for seemingly no reason.
And if you dont know how they work, it might happen you need to lower the difficulty. Just because you did not know you need to plan your leveling right to not get progressivly harder enemies. (in that the difficulty rises disproportionally.)
@@maxmisterman785 that's temporary, during levels 5-15 the game keeps ramping up in stakes with enemies generated, as these are the levels usual playthrough is set up. Enemies advance in "soul tier" every roughly 5 character levels, first you meet stunted scamps with 40 hp, then clanfear runts with 75hp then fire atronochs with 150hp, progress is fast and enemies become meaner and faster and etc, but when you reach "grand" souls then enemies drop from greater 330 hp storm atronachs only to grand xilvail which have 12x lvl hp, so they will be weaker for a long while not the 2x jump like earlier
@@tomaszpawlik5091that’s interesting i feel like a similar thing happens in Skyrim but less extreme… like in my first play through until about level 20 every bandit chief was like impossible and would one shot me and then the game got easier after that. I know in my first playthrough of oblivion I ended up starting over bc I was doing the optional kvatch stuff and the game was spawning like 8-10 klannfears who destroyed all my backup and were just one shotting me over and over again
@@forcedintofemininity yeah it is also a thing in Skyrim, although its lesser since you have a choice in progression and if you make right ones it will be a breezee, in Oblivion your progress is predetermined. Hell every game ever is designed around easy start hard mid point and fair finale - its a story telling formula used Universally put up any movie following the hero's journey formula and you will notice the hero is usually at its weakest in the middle act.
I'm guessing they did the difficulty slider option cuz doing separate difficulty modes like Normal/Heroic/Legendary/etc would need custom placements/designs and they probably didn't have enough time to do that if they wanted -- It's something that can/should/is? being explored currently though
The thing about ragdolls, particularly of this era, but still seemingly not something that's been completely solved even in modern games, it how quickly it switches over. The body will just immediately collapse on the spot, with all tension immediately gone from its limbs, in an incredibly unnatural way. There's no force in it, no inertia as any movement they were in the process of making immediately freezes before physics take over, no feeling of the life actually draining out of them. Heck, often it'll do a little jump as the physics engine takes over, making it even more unnatural. In a way, the preset death animations were more realistic, even if they could be janky in their own ways. I think the best solution would be a combination of the two, but developers seem to have all agreed that just letting the physics engine suddenly take over a completely lifeless doll that was frozen in place mid-movement is the correct answer.
6:45 Sorry to correct you, but Oblivion does not use PBR. PBR games began to emerge around 2012 (2011's Skyrim is not PBR either as not all games got on the trend right away because PBR is more performance intensive). Games before PBR did use normal maps, diffuse maps, and specular maps, but these were more rudimentary than modern PBR. PBR changed everything by re-approaching how textured surfaces worked by trying to base everything on reality. Before, games typically used: A bump/normal map, a diffuse map, and a specular map. With a typical PBR workflow, games use: Albedo map: The local color of something, before any lighting (including AO) is factored in. Before PBR, ambient occlusion was often baked into the diffuse map, which meant no matter what lighting scenario was hitting the surface, it would also have dark crevices and cracks as if they were painted on. Roughness map: How "glossy" a surface can appear. Before PBR, surfaces just had a specular map which basically said how shiny each part of the texture is, but a roughness map instead looked at the microfaceting of a surface and would soften the reflection instead of removing it, much like how it works in real life. Also before PBR, Fresnel wasn't often implemented, so reflective surfaces were always shiny no matter what angle you looked at them from. With Fresnel a surface's reflection sharpens as you look at the surface from a glancing angle, and softens when you look at the surface head-on. AO map: Used to represent shadowing of microdetails such as crevices and cracks. Ideally the lighting engine will remove the AO if a light is shined directly on the surface. Before PBR this was just baked into the texture. Normal map: Fakes smaller details on a surface without additional geometric detail. Fun fact: In the very early days before PBR some games just used a grayscale texture called a bump map, which could show bumps on a surface but lacked accurate lighting directionality when a light was present on the surface. The colorful normal maps that we know of today did exist before PBR. Metalness map: Defines whether the surface is metal or not. Often these are black and white if you want to be physically accurate. Before PBR, to make something metal, you just cranked up the specular on it which worked ok but it was physically inaccurate.
It might be a little intentional~ My delivery in this one is actually a bit unusual, though. I pushed things a little further, trying to imbue the voiceover itself with a sense of weirdness. I do not think I was particularly successful, but I am always learning!
Man your narration style is impeccable. So calmly funny, and youre incrediblemat finding little tangents and then find your way back seamlessly. Subbed
I easily put the most time of any part of my process into the writing - drafting, editing, editing, editing, and editing some more lol I get comments like this every few days, and I appreciate all of them. Makes the effort feel worth it beyond just the viewcount, y'know? Thank you for the support!
I realize this video is focused on graphics and physics, but another thing that adds to oddness of Oblivion is the combat. The combat feels like fighting michael phelps underwater. Still love the game oh.
The axe and bow that I used in this video don't give this impression quite as strongly, but I find swords in Oblivion feels like slapping people with a long floppy stick. Skyrim certainly improved in this respect lol
Various tweaking/new approaches to the combat system can fundamentally improve it into something that feels much more smooth/responsive/tactical/precise
The physics thing when objects hurt you / launch into the edge of the universe is I'm pretty sure is an engine issue and not an Oblivion specific issue, as Skyrim has the same thing.
I love Halo 2, my girlfriend and I were playing it for her first time a while ago and she couldn’t stop laughing at Sgt. Johnson's lip sync which I guess if you’ve got no nostalgia for the game does look kinda goofy
17:34 I was taking high school economics at the time of playing this and when we learned about Bear vs Bull markets, I memorized it by picturing an Oblivion bear oddly ragdolling down a hill; Because a Bear market is all downhill. I still imagine that when thinking of the terms. Lol.
Oblivion is... weird for some other reasons as well. I think it's meant to be. It's the break point in lore, the end of the Septim line, the and the end of the emperor we've been working for since Arena (seriously though, that's supposed to be the same emperor), It also is a change in lore, which had central Cyrodiil as jungle in prior games, and full of imperial forts and such. And then we get to Oblivion and it's a 'generic fantasy land' type area. So it ends up having to get retconned in Skyrim. (Listen to loud preacher man in Whiterun).
These are valid points -- I think a depth and immersion focus for the existing story framework is something that can only benefit the overall experience -- In addition to 'pathway/divergence' and realistic outcomes
The warping and such with the walls is a result of using early steep parallax on low resolution normal maps. The first 3 STALKER games also suffer from this in a different way. If the normal map is too low resolution, it comes out looking almost amorphous and bubbly, like the texture boils as you move around it. If the normal maps get too high res, the parallax picks up the noise and will make surfaces that are supposed to have slight texture jut out like needles.
Its weird that i dont have any desire to go back to oblivion. Morrowind is my nostalgic game, and Skyrim is the one that "plays" the best. Oblivion is somewhere in between. Another great video!
As easy to get in and play Skyrim is, I slowly really enjoys Oblivion more since Skyrim unmodded often forces you to certain questlines and ruins your roleplaying possibilities. Oh, and stupid dialogues of Oblivion NPCs are just gold
I much preferred Oblivion's questlines to Skyrim's, pretty much for the reasons Skyrim just unnecessarily forces you to join factions just to complete the main quest. A main quest I found even more dull, somehow, than entering one of Oblivion's interminable gates for the 50th time. And factions with storylines that were too short and to me a bit lazy. I think it's because I felt it took itself far too seriously. I haven't played either of them in years, now - I'm hoping for the day OpenMW's support allows them to be playable using it. Oblivion on Linux natively would be so nice.
I honestly feel like half the appeal of Elder Scrolls is the fact that every game looks and feels vastly different in terms of art style and gameplay it's what adds to the uniqueness of the franchise
I think Oblivion was very much a product of its time. Lord of the Rings was at peak popularity around the world so it obviously takes alot of visual inspiration from that. Doom 3 and HL2 made people super obsessed with graphics and polygons, so it had to have some of that too. As for the glossy "wetness" and rounded corners, I do honestly think thats a thing for the time too. Alot of games had a similar thing going on, but if you look at stuff like cars or phones/devices from the same time it certainly had this rounded off, soft corners, space age-y vibe to it. I think its what either they thought was cool at the time, or what they though people wanted. Oh well at least they revolutionized the industry with the horse armor dlc.
Something I never see mentioned is how absolutely ridiculous the logic surrounding the very start of the game is. Valen Dreth harasses you the second you finish character creation. The way he talks and the things he says implies that he is seeing you for the first time. From your characters point of view they literally just got tossed in here a few minutes ago, got yelled at by some crackhead and then immediately escaped. But the game also tries to play it up like you've been wasting away only to be saved by divine intervention (the concept not the spell).
I think games of this time stand out more because the technology had finally advanced enough that developers could now at least try to do things everyone had wanted for so long, but making a rewarding, fun and unique game was still the priority. Both movies and games now just seem like the majority are taking the path of least resistance and making things that are "fine" and able to be "finished" enough to ship so that the companies quarterly results will show some revenue. Now that technology has caught up enough to do at least some AI, I can only hope that it is experimented with in games to bring weirdness back.
Weird is financially risky. This is why sequels dominate - they're safe bets for investors. Why take a risk on a new IP when you know the next COD will print money?
What in the world did Daggerfall fans do to you? I can't think of any reason to call Starfield 'Daggerfall 2' that doesn't start with them destroying all you hold dear. This was an interesting video, though! I honestly really like the aesthetic of Oblivion, even when it's weird and doesn't seem to make sense. I definitely prefer it to Skyrim, which is visually just kind of depressing for large chunks imo
Most quests in Daggerfall - that is, all of them outside of the main quest - send you to a random dungeon that you fast travel to before fast traveling back for a reward. The bounty boards in Starfield are exactly this idea I also think they're the best part of the game, but are woefully unsupported by survival and sandbox mechanics :(
No idea how many times I watched the tech demos leading up to Oblivion's launch. At launch it felt like many features (radiant AI, textures, faces etc) had been toned down to get the thing to run, but I still had such a great time with it.
@@mrturret01in unpatched oblivion there's a baker npc that if you reverse pickpocket bread to him he's scripted to sell it but the radiant ai system somehow screws up and corrupts the save. In dev versions there were also npc's with low responsibility that would steal food to fulfill their tasks just get killed by guards constantly, there was a lot they wanted to do but didn't work and couldn't be solved in time so it was downscale drastically to make dev time for the actual gameplay
The second game I played in the series, and though it was a steep learning curve after "Skyrim" with its much more in-depth and somewhat sadistic levelling system, it eventually became my favourite in the series, balancing the gen 7 aesthetics of "Skyrim" with the deeper role playing mechanics of its predecessors. I'll even defend the stilted radiant AI - if nothing else, it makes sure no playthrough feels exactly the same. And the Dark Brotherhood questline is the most inappropriately hilarious fun I've ever had in a virtual RP. And it is possible (albeit fiddly as all hell) to make a prettier orc than that...
haha, yeah, I just tweaked every slider and went with whatever made the nose bigger for each one. You can push things even harder than I did, though...
What's really funny about the leveling is that it's almost the same as morrowind, but the changes to level scaling and trainers are what made it sadistic
This is a good video on why Oblivion looks the way it does. I feel like there's more weirdness in it too, though obviously this is a very good beginning. And yeah I'd like videos on the other games you mentioned, the GT one especially.
Ok but in 2006 those shiny walls and the bucket that hangs crooked when you shoot it with an arrow blew our fucking minds. We knew the faces and voices were silly af of course.
You think it's... bad that the character creator lets you make a monster? WRONG! This game and most of the Souls-games have a greatness added to them for letting you make something horrible ugly and worth murder just from the way it looks.
You make great videos, very calming and yet thought provoking at the same time. When i clicked on your forst morrowind video i was genuinely shocked when i saw you didnt have a million subscribers because you do great work. Cant wait for the next one keep up your lovely work :)
I really appreciate the in-depth reasoning with how the textures are built up and adds to the experience! I feel this is a very untouched part of the "oblivion magic".
11 mins in mentioned the wetness of the walls as a oddity. 12:30 mentions camera angle, and character faces. Thought I was going to get a deeper philisophical video
The physics discussion reminded me of a game in oblivion that my friend made when it was new called "dismay" 1. Make a max AOE target spell 2. Find a room with as many objects as you can. 3. Drop your entire inventory 4. Spam the custom spell 5. Feel dismay while finding your stuff.
I guess its the parallax mapping that's causing it; to me Oblivion has always felt like I was looking at a fisheye image even though it doesn't look like it.
Could also be the scale of the viewmodel relative to the world render FOV. It's sorta off, but not egregiously so. This video is also at an increased FOV because I'm a PC snob that can't handle anything under 90 lol
Play on a crt and nearly all of the visual problems are fixed. noticeably the wetness and the eyeballs...game was developed for crts. This has been my favourite game to play around with crt shaders for as well if I'm not on a real crt. Blows my mind so many people use crt shaders or scanlines for 2d pixel art games but xbox and 360 era also benefit hugely from some rolling scanlines and gaussian blur imo xo
I grew up on elder scrolls, oblivion was my first game though I've come to play all of them except arena. For me some of the most memorable things about the game were how lush and green everything was, everything just felt so alive and magical. My 6 year old brain barely even registered that everyone looking like a malformed potato, or that all the walls looked like they were wrapped in plastic lol (P.s. until I was like 8 or 9 the zombie in the starter dungeon made me cry every time I restarted the game. Scared the shit out of me 😂)
As far as the rounded appearance of meshes goes, the normals of the adjacent polygons along edges that meet up to a certain set angle can be assigned a smoothness value, minimizing the faceted look of low poly models. If that angle is set too high, such as 90+ degrees, or smoothness is applied where it shouldn't be, you can get that odd rounded look.
Is that phong shading? Sounds similar, at any rate. I'm sure this has something to do with it, but even the silhouettes of some things - rounded sacks and barrels especially - feel too round for their surroundings. I dunno, it's hard to describe. A weird lookin' game in any case!
@@Takarias There are a few methods used to interpolate the normals along an edge, I'm not sure which one Oblivion uses. In any case, it's popular for "faking" a high poly look by smoothing out adjacent faces, but if it's abused you get the unnatural weirdness you mention.
For those that dont want to use cursor locker, and are using windows, settings > devices (windows 11: bluetooth&devices) > Mouse > turn off Scroll inactive windows
This will not prevent clicking on those inactive windows, which occasionally happens, at least to me. But if you don't suffer that issue, this works too, thanks for commenting!
Half-Life 2 also came out a year & a half before Oblivion. In that game, you WANT to zoom in on the NPC faces, even the idle animations are really well done to this day. In Oblivion, it zooms in on everyone, whether you want it to or not, and oh god WHY??! It's like a bad Thunderbirds puppet face filling my whole screen!
I think this may actually be true! Oblivion uses physics middleware called Havok, which is highly performant, but needs some work to be done by the developers of games that use it before it feels impactful and juicy. I suspect it may also be set up (out of the box) for a smaller worldscale than Oblivion uses, so that a terminal velocity of X over 1 unit doesn't line up with what we see here on Earth. This is barely more than a vaguely educated guess, though, so don't quote me on it lol
Hey, I'm a first-time watcher of your channel. I just wanted to comment my appreciation for your care to link all of the tools that you used in your video and the extensions you're using. I personally don't need these, but I appreciate that you did this a lot :D
Fighting enemies always feels weird; like slow fluid animations that seem to glide past where the enemy "is" and then the enemy just spontaneously dead-drops faster than my wifi
Oblivion was the first TES Game I played and is what got me into the series and thus I'll always consider it my favorite for the sheer amount of joy it's weirdness gave me that first time playing.
I remember seeing screenshots of oblivion in Game Informer back in the day and drooling over the bricks in the jail cell and objects on tables, specifically candles. I probably put more time into this game than any other game that I have ever played.
I'm not disliking this video because I think you are dissing on oblivion. I'm disliking this video because you're five minutes in and have explained three mods, none of which are related to the thesis of the video.
Idk if I'm crazy but when you compared halo 2 and oblivion side by side I find Oblivion to be way more beautiful. The weird graphics you mentioned gives it a timeless unique look that I absolutely love. It feels like a painting come to life
Oblivion absolutely looks better, Halo's just really impressive for its hardware. Though I will maintain that the animation quality in Halo is leagues better
Spot on with your observation of playing halo 2 with the xbox 360. Bought my 360 april of 2006 with Oblivion and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. I spent quite a bit of time playing Oblivion, but experiencing halo 2 on xbox live for the first time was absolutely life changing. Team snipers ate up my entire summer that year. Fondly remember spending hours on end each night trying to find new superbounces and learning to do them during matches. Was extremely disappointed superbouncing no longer worked in the MCC.
Oblivion is my favorite of the Elder Scrolls games. I played it when it first came out on my nephew's Xbox360 and spent days playing it without sleeping much. I just love almost everything about it and still play through it once a year (With plenty of modding of course). It just has this otherworldly charm that I've not found in any other game. I love just wandering around taking in the landscape. One of mu favorite things to do is find a cozy inn and just hang out there (The Inn of Ill Omen is a favorite haunt of mine). I wish this video had been longer as I know there are all kinds of weird and interesting things about the game that are not covered here. Another thing I'll say about Oblivion is that it has the best soundtrack of the series so far and one of the best fantasy soundtracks period, IMO. The tracks Wings of Kynareth and All's Well are two of my favorites. Loved this video, and your presentation. I want to make videos that talk about the games I love, but being autistic with lots of social anxiety has prevented me from doing it thus far. So hearing that you're neurodivergent and doing so well is a big encouragement to me. Subscribed!
In Skyrim when you get hit with an attack that hits you and reduces your health to zero, the excess damage is transferred to force (which is why getting killed by giants will send you rocketing into low orbit). Maybe something similar is happening in Oblivion, where hitting someone with an arrow will transfer some excess force to them, resulting in that weird jerky ragdolling.
Very very very slow video.... Also for someone who seems to be quite technically knowledgeable, it's a bit of a let-down that your "weirdness" ends up boiling down to: early 00's normal mapping, early 00's models, early 00's animations, early 00's physics. Most of the stuff mentioned in the video was actually pretty cutting edge at the time, including the faces, so it is no wonder that the developers wanted to show them off. The true weirdness comes from the aesthetics, the plot and dialogue, the gameplay systems, the mise-en-scene within the environment as opposed to the number of polygons it is made up of.
I'm having my second play through of Oblivion now in VR, and I'm loving it. My last plaything was on release on the 360, it was my first RPG, and it blew me away.
First time viewer here, enjoyed the video. 👍 I played Oblivion for about 300 hours back in the days on xbox 360 and actually really liked it, it was my first TES game. One thing that amazed me was the large world and sense of freedom. Also the fact that if I dropped some junk somewhere it would still be there ingame days, sometimes weeks later. Also the music is mint.
Also one thing to note is the graphics. While being old, the game looks still absolutely ok to this date. And I still love the skybox with the different planets floating over at night. Just beautiful. Oblivion is prob my fav game of all time.
The weirdest thing for me in Oblivion was being able to keep the boots of springheel jack if your health and acrobatics were high enough. Keep the boots and just bounce around everywhere jumping like a giant just slammed you with a club. I adore that game.
Just for me currently, but I am planning a 2024 wrap up video using data from them. Kinda like the Spotify or Steam annual summaries, but *all* of the games I've played through the year on all platforms.
@@Takarias That sounds like it would be neat to look back on and remember what games you played and when but it just seems like a bit too much work for me lol
Something I never hear people talk about is just how profoundly revolutionary this game is for console gamers. There was never such a deep and reactive MMO. People make fun of the npc behavior and dialogue, but this felt so real as a first time player
I too grew up with Oblivion, a friend of mine owned a copy on PC, and I watched him play it for hours, creating characters completely broken and hideous, but it had a certain draw to it that I couldn't look away from. I eventually got a Xbox 360 and a copy of it from Gamestop (rated T before they recalled the copies back for the re-rating to M). Did I understand how to level up in the game? No. Did I understand anything going on in the story? No. I still had a great time, and a lot of that was laughing at the game, mainly laughing at the tone and character moments that were out of pocket and not at all what I was expecting. I think my favorite line that encapsulates this feeling is the guy you meet outside of Kavatch who says "I'm getting out of here before its too late, they'll be here any minute I'm telling you! Run while you can!" And then he silently walks away, sprinting as fast as he can while the happy exploration music plays in the background.
Oblivion was originally supposed to be a very different game. The setting of Cyrodil was supposed to be a huge tropical jungle dotted with Ayleid ruins and sometimes thriving settlements but with the Imperial city being this enormous city with some areas in ruins and others built up, but then Todd Howard wanted to make everything like Lord Of The Rings, just like Skyrim was supposed to be very different until Todd Howard wanted to lean more heavily on the Viking influences despite it not really making sense. TES is really a mess after Morrowind, if we're being honest.
"Did they know that faces were bad?" Everyone knew this - except one person, whose name was Todd Howard. Todd was happy with everything, as were the dungeons of Oblivion. Seriously, at Fallout 3 the game design department promised to quit entirely if Todd did not expand the team of those who would make dungeons
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
What did I miss? What else is weird about this great game?
You didn't mention the colors. It may be me, but those oversaturated colors gave Oblivion a very strange feel. There are other games, like Demon's Souls, where it seems like an artistic decision, but in Oblivion just seems... weird. Particularly in the levels located in... well, Oblivion, with magma and all.
The light settings are off change it in the launcher, which make them look better I play half the game with your settings until reset my settings
Do you mean how you can't have both bloom and HDR? Definitely annoying, that... I distinctly remember bloom on the 360, so that's what feels 'right' to me
No facial hair 😂
Rat Ragu and Powdered Deer Penis!
I heard the dialogue lines in Oblivion were recorded in alphabetical order, and I can absolutely believe it.
I've heard the same, though I haven't seen a source for it - though I also haven't specifically gone looking for one. It's certainly a strange decision, if true...
@@Takarias - I _sooort of_ understand it - because of the branching dialogue paths you can't necessarily record them all in a narrative order, so it might be that they just recorded them alphabetically so that it'd be easier for the devs to find them when they needed them. That's exactly the kind of decision I can imagine STEM people making =)
@@Takarias i think the main source on this info was mark lampert (sound designer) being interviewed in a noclip piece which covered bethesda's sound design in general, plus small tidbits elsewhere from other staff corroborating it. apparently the studio hadn't really thought ahead about recording lines, and vocal direction was an afterthought - just a job assigned to the sound designers, none of whom were directors or even specialised in working with actors.
they had put a lot of effort into preparing chronological scripts and explainers for the main characters (eg uriel and martin), with written tone direction etc. but hadn't thought ahead when preparing the scripts to give to the general cast in the vocal booth, and had no way to sort lines in a logical sequence at the time. very little preparation or development time was put into guiding the stable of small-name actors who had to portray dozens of characters for minor quests or 'extras' dialogue.
the marquee actors actually apparently got well-constructed pamphlets for their script and detailed descriptions of their character's personality and backgrounds; apparently this was mostly prepped by ken rolston rather than by the sound design team. patrick stewart said (i think in a vanity fair interview?) that bethesda gave him 90 pages detailing uriel septim's background, life and times, and personality - this was way more than he'd been given for most roles of any kind and it helped him understand and approach the character, saying the amount of detail made it his favourite experience doing voicework in a videogame.
I've heard the same about Skyrim
@@ratcarpet I really love that bit about Patrick Stewart you shared
Oblivion has an art style that makes us feel as though we are in a fever dream or as if we are in a drug-induced whimsical fairy land. The decision to integrate the Shivering Isles DLC was top notch.
I feel like a lot of the elder scrolls lore were the result of mushroom and ketamine trips lol
@@hschan5976by 3-5 dudes yeah, pretty much.
@@hschan5976It was. I mean, who would write about a hermaphrodite who was in a relationship with the god of rape and domination, and proceeded at some point to bite said God's dick off and use it as their spear if they weren't on drugs.
The other planes of reality and mad gods give the world a chaotic vibe.
Yeah, the Shivering Isles being added to Oblivion in particular, is _brilliant._ Oblivion's pretty infamous for having eccentric, bizarre, and often flat-out _dumb_ NPCs. I mean, just look at the myriad of "Oblivion NPC in real-life" videos right here on RUclips, where people splice Oblivion music over footage of people doing stupid shit in public; that trend didn't start from nothing, mind you.
But this utterly _broken_ NPC AI is what makes the Shivering Isles such a perfect fit for Oblivion. Because, lore-wise, the Shivering Isles are supposed to be full of crazy people; one giant, open-air mental institution, so to speak. So, Oblivion's notoriously wonky, janky, _idiotic_ AI works wonders there. I mean, the people living in the Isles are _supposed_ to be unhinged and eccentric, so the fact that Oblivion's NPCs are exactly that by design, is (like I mentioned) a *PERFECT* fit.
It's the play-doh graphics with whimsical fever-dream lighting, hilarious animations and overall fantastic bizareness.
The graphics are not really that bad. Except the characters, which are awful 😆
One of the classics in Oblivion dialogue is tone shift. A character will suddenly go from a weary sounding old woman, to shoot towards a glad sounding much younger lass
Thank you kind sir.
It almost never happens outside of the beggars though ppl just overexaggurate
That's what happens when they just read all of their dialogue lines in the studio in a row
It's usually the job of a dialogue director/editor to keep all this in a constant direction. I can forgive that, seeing it's their first fully voiced game.
There's a reason why "stop right there criminal scum" is such a meme.
HALT!
Pickpockeeeet! Pickpockeeeet! GUAAARD your PURSEEEEESSS!
HALT!
YOU VIOLATED THE LAW
“Stop right there! You violated my mother”
i cant tolerate any bad-mouthing of oblivion's va cast. they are beloved to me. iconic, and irreplaceable. they are the ones from my dreammsss
Jauffre's VA died a few years ago. I had a few drinks in his name. I was playing Skyrim the other day and some mod added a Shady Sam to Dawnstar. Not sure what one. I had memories of the original near the imperial city being the place to get huge amounts of lockpicks.
@@AshenBuncakes Ralph Cosham has actually been gone over a decade now. I went through a phase where I bought every audiobook he narrated, even if I wasn't really interested in the story, just because I wanted to hear him read to me. It wasn't cheap to buy all of them, but I have zero regrets. "Spill some blood for me, dear Brother."
13:09 as Best Guest once said, oblivion characters “maintain the most profoundly neurotypical eye contact”
Best guest!!
Starfield blows that out of the water. Genuinely unpleasant. I hope that IP never gets any more games.
Stepdad was looking over my shoulder when I first played. He saw it zoom into the emperor’s face and he was like, “woah! So realistic!”
Oblivion was the first elder scrolls game I ever played and this unearths equally weird memories of what just feels like a very old fever dream of sorts.
Same to me. I remember playing this for hours and hours when I was a child. I was amazed by the freedom of the game and how every little thing could be picked, like the fork, knife and plates in a dinner table, or every item displayed in a shop. But it was a weird game with weird memories.
When Oblivion was released, the most common video resolution was 1024x768, 1280x1024, or 1280x720, and no doubt that's what it was mostly tested on. Those low res normal maps might have looked fine at such low resolutions.
I haven't tried 4K yet, but Oblivion looks phenomenal at 2560x1440 too.
Oblivion is at an awkward transition phase of technology. It's a very common phenomenon in earlier games, at various points where major advancements were made that weren't quite mastered yet. I first noticed it with the earliest truly 3D games when compared to 2D sprites, it always felt like a step back to me, but it happens at later points too.
I have a huge affinity for the very early hd games. Stuff like Fear, Condemned, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Half Life 2, and of course Oblivion. The pre "Unreal Engine 3" look for hd games. Such a unique vibe.
@@jaykelley103it even spreads into other genres of games. Just look how awkward some character models looked like in 2007-early 2010s FIFA/PES games. They sure feels like home in Oblivion's Cyrodiil 😂
Morrowind was very transitional too. I remember temporarily getting my hands on a GPU that had shaders... and Morrowind was one of the few titles that supported them... for water effects 🙂
I've just been playing Doom 3 the past few nights and what an unusual era for visuals, they loved to flex lighting, coloured lights were still novel, and normal maps were so obvious and black. But I don't hate it. Their attempts to be realistic hopscotched over what realism actually looks like back into a state of artistry that's so outdated that it never really aged. I also feel old textures and tilesets had more visual detail than today's PBR which has been infamously 'plasticy' in several games.
Though between Doom 3 and Oblivion specifically the former loved moving lights while Oblivion loved bloom.
I remember seeing the teaser trailers for Oblivion and being genuinely blown away by the graphics, I couldn't imagine how anything could get more realistic. That awe does not hold up in retrospect, but Oblivion for me has that special level of jank that I love, it feels like part of the charm, not something that was missed for a cash grab to force it out the door, nor overpolished and restricted to the point where developer sanctioned fun is the only way.
And the shivering isles, still the best DLC for any bethesda title IMO, would not fit tonaly into any other title. The obsurdity mixed with Oblivions janky, silly charm is what makes it!
I had some kind of 360 promo pamphlet that I absolutely drooled over while looking at 2.5" screenshots of Oblivion. It doesn't really hold up in person, but it's still a neat game :)
I remember being blown by Morrowind's graphics when I first played it. Especially the water, I couldn't believe how real the water looked, I had never seen anything like it in a game before.
The most interesting thing about Oblivion to me is that *despite* the extremely weird visuals, it still manages to feel very immersive with its NPC AI (janky as it is) and its writing. I think Morrowind does a lot of other things better, but these two things make Oblivion a game I keep coming back to so that I can roam around the world and listen to its NPCs and do all the fun quests.
Real!!
"You are the one from my dreams... I woke up screaming"
So unsightly even Namera wants nothing to do with you.
Everytime he says that line, I'm always like "those were nightmares, not dreams"
Oblivion was the last ES I could decorate with game items and have them stay. Skyrim sends a physics blast through the house and all my work explodes like a confetti cannon.
I would always have a heart room from all the…hearts I….collected
@@ElijahBobija so romantic
Bro if you wanted to play as a Khajit you should have just changed race and not morph your orc dude into a cat lmao
The craziest part is that you can push it so much further than I did!
😂😂😂
the way oblivion is "weirdest" about is the way it balances gameplay, there are incredible amount of little systems that are incredibly deep advanced and balanced for seemingly no reason.
And if you dont know how they work, it might happen you need to lower the difficulty. Just because you did not know you need to plan your leveling right to not get progressivly harder enemies. (in that the difficulty rises disproportionally.)
@@maxmisterman785 that's temporary, during levels 5-15 the game keeps ramping up in stakes with enemies generated, as these are the levels usual playthrough is set up. Enemies advance in "soul tier" every roughly 5 character levels, first you meet stunted scamps with 40 hp, then clanfear runts with 75hp then fire atronochs with 150hp, progress is fast and enemies become meaner and faster and etc, but when you reach "grand" souls then enemies drop from greater 330 hp storm atronachs only to grand xilvail which have 12x lvl hp, so they will be weaker for a long while not the 2x jump like earlier
@@tomaszpawlik5091that’s interesting i feel like a similar thing happens in Skyrim but less extreme… like in my first play through until about level 20 every bandit chief was like impossible and would one shot me and then the game got easier after that.
I know in my first playthrough of oblivion I ended up starting over bc I was doing the optional kvatch stuff and the game was spawning like 8-10 klannfears who destroyed all my backup and were just one shotting me over and over again
@@forcedintofemininity yeah it is also a thing in Skyrim, although its lesser since you have a choice in progression and if you make right ones it will be a breezee, in Oblivion your progress is predetermined.
Hell every game ever is designed around easy start hard mid point and fair finale - its a story telling formula used Universally put up any movie following the hero's journey formula and you will notice the hero is usually at its weakest in the middle act.
I'm guessing they did the difficulty slider option cuz doing separate difficulty modes like Normal/Heroic/Legendary/etc would need custom placements/designs and they probably didn't have enough time to do that if they wanted -- It's something that can/should/is? being explored currently though
The thing about ragdolls, particularly of this era, but still seemingly not something that's been completely solved even in modern games, it how quickly it switches over. The body will just immediately collapse on the spot, with all tension immediately gone from its limbs, in an incredibly unnatural way. There's no force in it, no inertia as any movement they were in the process of making immediately freezes before physics take over, no feeling of the life actually draining out of them. Heck, often it'll do a little jump as the physics engine takes over, making it even more unnatural. In a way, the preset death animations were more realistic, even if they could be janky in their own ways.
I think the best solution would be a combination of the two, but developers seem to have all agreed that just letting the physics engine suddenly take over a completely lifeless doll that was frozen in place mid-movement is the correct answer.
Combining both is an excellent idea , and improvements to the physics/impulses can do a lot
GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 is a mix of both.
Not sure why youtube recommend you to me but I can't complain. I really like the way you talk. It really pulls me into the story you weave.
Thank you! My delivery and recording setup are constantly evolving, but I think they're in a pretty good place right now :)
Tru, very good voice dis dude has
6:45 Sorry to correct you, but Oblivion does not use PBR. PBR games began to emerge around 2012 (2011's Skyrim is not PBR either as not all games got on the trend right away because PBR is more performance intensive). Games before PBR did use normal maps, diffuse maps, and specular maps, but these were more rudimentary than modern PBR.
PBR changed everything by re-approaching how textured surfaces worked by trying to base everything on reality. Before, games typically used: A bump/normal map, a diffuse map, and a specular map.
With a typical PBR workflow, games use:
Albedo map: The local color of something, before any lighting (including AO) is factored in. Before PBR, ambient occlusion was often baked into the diffuse map, which meant no matter what lighting scenario was hitting the surface, it would also have dark crevices and cracks as if they were painted on.
Roughness map: How "glossy" a surface can appear. Before PBR, surfaces just had a specular map which basically said how shiny each part of the texture is, but a roughness map instead looked at the microfaceting of a surface and would soften the reflection instead of removing it, much like how it works in real life. Also before PBR, Fresnel wasn't often implemented, so reflective surfaces were always shiny no matter what angle you looked at them from. With Fresnel a surface's reflection sharpens as you look at the surface from a glancing angle, and softens when you look at the surface head-on.
AO map: Used to represent shadowing of microdetails such as crevices and cracks. Ideally the lighting engine will remove the AO if a light is shined directly on the surface. Before PBR this was just baked into the texture.
Normal map: Fakes smaller details on a surface without additional geometric detail. Fun fact: In the very early days before PBR some games just used a grayscale texture called a bump map, which could show bumps on a surface but lacked accurate lighting directionality when a light was present on the surface. The colorful normal maps that we know of today did exist before PBR.
Metalness map: Defines whether the surface is metal or not. Often these are black and white if you want to be physically accurate. Before PBR, to make something metal, you just cranked up the specular on it which worked ok but it was physically inaccurate.
The slow pace of the narration makes this video come close to unintentional asmr territory.
It might be a little intentional~
My delivery in this one is actually a bit unusual, though. I pushed things a little further, trying to imbue the voiceover itself with a sense of weirdness. I do not think I was particularly successful, but I am always learning!
I’ll never forget the painting quest
Certainly some interesting quests in Oblivion!
Man your narration style is impeccable. So calmly funny, and youre incrediblemat finding little tangents and then find your way back seamlessly. Subbed
I easily put the most time of any part of my process into the writing - drafting, editing, editing, editing, and editing some more lol
I get comments like this every few days, and I appreciate all of them. Makes the effort feel worth it beyond just the viewcount, y'know?
Thank you for the support!
I realize this video is focused on graphics and physics, but another thing that adds to oddness of Oblivion is the combat. The combat feels like fighting michael phelps underwater. Still love the game oh.
The axe and bow that I used in this video don't give this impression quite as strongly, but I find swords in Oblivion feels like slapping people with a long floppy stick. Skyrim certainly improved in this respect lol
That and the floaty jumping
Morrowind has the mage t-rex hands though
Various tweaking/new approaches to the combat system can fundamentally improve it into something that feels much more smooth/responsive/tactical/precise
The physics thing when objects hurt you / launch into the edge of the universe is I'm pretty sure is an engine issue and not an Oblivion specific issue, as Skyrim has the same thing.
Oblivion doesn't look weird, it's beautiful. My favorite graphics design of all time.
"I'm weird, and I'm a good boi :)"
oookaaaay, we're starting the video that way
I did mention I'm weird, yes? :P
Another way to describe those textures.. "wrapped in plastic"
6:45 Takarias: “and that’s where PBR comes in”
Me: Pabst Blue Ribbon beer?
Takarias: “- or physically based rendering..”
Me: oh
Alcoholism squad
I love Halo 2, my girlfriend and I were playing it for her first time a while ago and she couldn’t stop laughing at Sgt. Johnson's lip sync which I guess if you’ve got no nostalgia for the game does look kinda goofy
That character creation almost gave me a hernia from laughing so hard. When you turned it to the side
17:34 I was taking high school economics at the time of playing this and when we learned about Bear vs Bull markets, I memorized it by picturing an Oblivion bear oddly ragdolling down a hill; Because a Bear market is all downhill. I still imagine that when thinking of the terms. Lol.
Oblivion is... weird for some other reasons as well. I think it's meant to be. It's the break point in lore, the end of the Septim line, the and the end of the emperor we've been working for since Arena (seriously though, that's supposed to be the same emperor), It also is a change in lore, which had central Cyrodiil as jungle in prior games, and full of imperial forts and such. And then we get to Oblivion and it's a 'generic fantasy land' type area. So it ends up having to get retconned in Skyrim. (Listen to loud preacher man in Whiterun).
For so many reasons
These are valid points -- I think a depth and immersion focus for the existing story framework is something that can only benefit the overall experience -- In addition to 'pathway/divergence' and realistic outcomes
Coming from Morrowind to this I was blown away by the view distance and i quite like some of the "puffy" weapon models.
The warping and such with the walls is a result of using early steep parallax on low resolution normal maps. The first 3 STALKER games also suffer from this in a different way. If the normal map is too low resolution, it comes out looking almost amorphous and bubbly, like the texture boils as you move around it. If the normal maps get too high res, the parallax picks up the noise and will make surfaces that are supposed to have slight texture jut out like needles.
12:44 I like the zoom in , it makes you stop and actually talk to the person
Its weird that i dont have any desire to go back to oblivion. Morrowind is my nostalgic game, and Skyrim is the one that "plays" the best. Oblivion is somewhere in between. Another great video!
I always go back for the quests. I really enjoy the faction quests and the Daedric quests
As easy to get in and play Skyrim is, I slowly really enjoys Oblivion more since Skyrim unmodded often forces you to certain questlines and ruins your roleplaying possibilities. Oh, and stupid dialogues of Oblivion NPCs are just gold
I much preferred Oblivion's questlines to Skyrim's, pretty much for the reasons Skyrim just unnecessarily forces you to join factions just to complete the main quest. A main quest I found even more dull, somehow, than entering one of Oblivion's interminable gates for the 50th time. And factions with storylines that were too short and to me a bit lazy. I think it's because I felt it took itself far too seriously. I haven't played either of them in years, now - I'm hoping for the day OpenMW's support allows them to be playable using it. Oblivion on Linux natively would be so nice.
Got into oblivion a couple years ago. Fun game despite it's age. I hate oblivion gates
You are having the proper oblivion experience
I honestly feel like half the appeal of Elder Scrolls is the fact that every game looks and feels vastly different in terms of art style and gameplay it's what adds to the uniqueness of the franchise
You definitely have to go into each game with a different set of expectations.
I think Oblivion was very much a product of its time. Lord of the Rings was at peak popularity around the world so it obviously takes alot of visual inspiration from that. Doom 3 and HL2 made people super obsessed with graphics and polygons, so it had to have some of that too. As for the glossy "wetness" and rounded corners, I do honestly think thats a thing for the time too. Alot of games had a similar thing going on, but if you look at stuff like cars or phones/devices from the same time it certainly had this rounded off, soft corners, space age-y vibe to it. I think its what either they thought was cool at the time, or what they though people wanted.
Oh well at least they revolutionized the industry with the horse armor dlc.
Something I never see mentioned is how absolutely ridiculous the logic surrounding the very start of the game is.
Valen Dreth harasses you the second you finish character creation. The way he talks and the things he says implies that he is seeing you for the first time. From your characters point of view they literally just got tossed in here a few minutes ago, got yelled at by some crackhead and then immediately escaped. But the game also tries to play it up like you've been wasting away only to be saved by divine intervention (the concept not the spell).
I think games of this time stand out more because the technology had finally advanced enough that developers could now at least try to do things everyone had wanted for so long, but making a rewarding, fun and unique game was still the priority. Both movies and games now just seem like the majority are taking the path of least resistance and making things that are "fine" and able to be "finished" enough to ship so that the companies quarterly results will show some revenue. Now that technology has caught up enough to do at least some AI, I can only hope that it is experimented with in games to bring weirdness back.
Weird is financially risky. This is why sequels dominate - they're safe bets for investors. Why take a risk on a new IP when you know the next COD will print money?
imo when you look at a shot any scenery from oblivion it looks like a painting to me
The min/maxing leveling system is definately one of the weirder aspects of this game.
What in the world did Daggerfall fans do to you? I can't think of any reason to call Starfield 'Daggerfall 2' that doesn't start with them destroying all you hold dear.
This was an interesting video, though! I honestly really like the aesthetic of Oblivion, even when it's weird and doesn't seem to make sense. I definitely prefer it to Skyrim, which is visually just kind of depressing for large chunks imo
Most quests in Daggerfall - that is, all of them outside of the main quest - send you to a random dungeon that you fast travel to before fast traveling back for a reward. The bounty boards in Starfield are exactly this idea
I also think they're the best part of the game, but are woefully unsupported by survival and sandbox mechanics :(
An ocean wide; an inch deep
No idea how many times I watched the tech demos leading up to Oblivion's launch. At launch it felt like many features (radiant AI, textures, faces etc) had been toned down to get the thing to run, but I still had such a great time with it.
The AI had to be toned down because it was constantly breaking the game.
@@mrturret01in unpatched oblivion there's a baker npc that if you reverse pickpocket bread to him he's scripted to sell it but the radiant ai system somehow screws up and corrupts the save. In dev versions there were also npc's with low responsibility that would steal food to fulfill their tasks just get killed by guards constantly, there was a lot they wanted to do but didn't work and couldn't be solved in time so it was downscale drastically to make dev time for the actual gameplay
The second game I played in the series, and though it was a steep learning curve after "Skyrim" with its much more in-depth and somewhat sadistic levelling system, it eventually became my favourite in the series, balancing the gen 7 aesthetics of "Skyrim" with the deeper role playing mechanics of its predecessors. I'll even defend the stilted radiant AI - if nothing else, it makes sure no playthrough feels exactly the same. And the Dark Brotherhood questline is the most inappropriately hilarious fun I've ever had in a virtual RP. And it is possible (albeit fiddly as all hell) to make a prettier orc than that...
haha, yeah, I just tweaked every slider and went with whatever made the nose bigger for each one. You can push things even harder than I did, though...
What's really funny about the leveling is that it's almost the same as morrowind, but the changes to level scaling and trainers are what made it sadistic
Ive always loved how cursed this game is, its a special experience
the funniest game ever
This is a good video on why Oblivion looks the way it does. I feel like there's more weirdness in it too, though obviously this is a very good beginning. And yeah I'd like videos on the other games you mentioned, the GT one especially.
Ok but in 2006 those shiny walls and the bucket that hangs crooked when you shoot it with an arrow blew our fucking minds. We knew the faces and voices were silly af of course.
But everyone could talk! It was amazing!
I like your TES videos, I'd love to hear what you think about Gran Turismo
GT is GOATED
You think it's... bad that the character creator lets you make a monster? WRONG! This game and most of the Souls-games have a greatness added to them for letting you make something horrible ugly and worth murder just from the way it looks.
You make great videos, very calming and yet thought provoking at the same time. When i clicked on your forst morrowind video i was genuinely shocked when i saw you didnt have a million subscribers because you do great work. Cant wait for the next one keep up your lovely work :)
Comments like this mean a lot, thanks. I'm not planning to stop anytime soon!
I really appreciate the in-depth reasoning with how the textures are built up and adds to the experience! I feel this is a very untouched part of the "oblivion magic".
11 mins in mentioned the wetness of the walls as a oddity. 12:30 mentions camera angle, and character faces. Thought I was going to get a deeper philisophical video
Ay he's practicing getting better
The physics discussion reminded me of a game in oblivion that my friend made when it was new called "dismay"
1. Make a max AOE target spell
2. Find a room with as many objects as you can.
3. Drop your entire inventory
4. Spam the custom spell
5. Feel dismay while finding your stuff.
This feels like "ADHD: The Video". Not complaining, though
Play it in 800x600 on a crt and you'll understand why the graphics were lauded for the time
I guess its the parallax mapping that's causing it; to me Oblivion has always felt like I was looking at a fisheye image even though it doesn't look like it.
Could also be the scale of the viewmodel relative to the world render FOV. It's sorta off, but not egregiously so. This video is also at an increased FOV because I'm a PC snob that can't handle anything under 90 lol
The world feeling like a fever dream, everyone looking around nervously like there's some dark entity behind the scenes...
is all lore accurate.
Play on a crt and nearly all of the visual problems are fixed. noticeably the wetness and the eyeballs...game was developed for crts.
This has been my favourite game to play around with crt shaders for as well if I'm not on a real crt. Blows my mind so many people use crt shaders or scanlines for 2d pixel art games but xbox and 360 era also benefit hugely from some rolling scanlines and gaussian blur imo xo
I grew up on elder scrolls, oblivion was my first game though I've come to play all of them except arena.
For me some of the most memorable things about the game were how lush and green everything was, everything just felt so alive and magical. My 6 year old brain barely even registered that everyone looking like a malformed potato, or that all the walls looked like they were wrapped in plastic lol
(P.s. until I was like 8 or 9 the zombie in the starter dungeon made me cry every time I restarted the game. Scared the shit out of me 😂)
As far as the rounded appearance of meshes goes, the normals of the adjacent polygons along edges that meet up to a certain set angle can be assigned a smoothness value, minimizing the faceted look of low poly models. If that angle is set too high, such as 90+ degrees, or smoothness is applied where it shouldn't be, you can get that odd rounded look.
Is that phong shading? Sounds similar, at any rate. I'm sure this has something to do with it, but even the silhouettes of some things - rounded sacks and barrels especially - feel too round for their surroundings. I dunno, it's hard to describe. A weird lookin' game in any case!
@@Takarias There are a few methods used to interpolate the normals along an edge, I'm not sure which one Oblivion uses. In any case, it's popular for "faking" a high poly look by smoothing out adjacent faces, but if it's abused you get the unnatural weirdness you mention.
For those that dont want to use cursor locker, and are using windows,
settings >
devices (windows 11: bluetooth&devices) >
Mouse >
turn off Scroll inactive windows
This will not prevent clicking on those inactive windows, which occasionally happens, at least to me. But if you don't suffer that issue, this works too, thanks for commenting!
Half-Life 2 also came out a year & a half before Oblivion. In that game, you WANT to zoom in on the NPC faces, even the idle animations are really well done to this day.
In Oblivion, it zooms in on everyone, whether you want it to or not, and oh god WHY??! It's like a bad Thunderbirds puppet face filling my whole screen!
Everything in Oblivion feels really floaty. Compare it to something like Half-life 2, it seems like the world of Oblivion has lower gravity
I think this may actually be true! Oblivion uses physics middleware called Havok, which is highly performant, but needs some work to be done by the developers of games that use it before it feels impactful and juicy. I suspect it may also be set up (out of the box) for a smaller worldscale than Oblivion uses, so that a terminal velocity of X over 1 unit doesn't line up with what we see here on Earth.
This is barely more than a vaguely educated guess, though, so don't quote me on it lol
Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.
NGL, I thought the characters in Oblivion were BEAUTIFUL.
Hey, I'm a first-time watcher of your channel. I just wanted to comment my appreciation for your care to link all of the tools that you used in your video and the extensions you're using. I personally don't need these, but I appreciate that you did this a lot :D
I see no reason not to include it! I'm just weird like that :)
Fighting enemies always feels weird; like slow fluid animations that seem to glide past where the enemy "is" and then the enemy just spontaneously dead-drops faster than my wifi
8:28 They must’ve been using pi from Doom... Non-euclidean Oblivion, anyone?
FOV slider was added in Fallout 76 for the first time, not Starfield, same for proper dual monitor support.
Oblivion was the first TES Game I played and is what got me into the series and thus I'll always consider it my favorite for the sheer amount of joy it's weirdness gave me that first time playing.
I remember seeing screenshots of oblivion in Game Informer back in the day and drooling over the bricks in the jail cell and objects on tables, specifically candles. I probably put more time into this game than any other game that I have ever played.
I find the floatiness of the ragdoll physics funny. it's gets giggling every time I see it.
13:11 hey, its not ME:Andromeda's fault. Their face was tired
I'm not disliking this video because I think you are dissing on oblivion. I'm disliking this video because you're five minutes in and have explained three mods, none of which are related to the thesis of the video.
Idk if I'm crazy but when you compared halo 2 and oblivion side by side I find Oblivion to be way more beautiful. The weird graphics you mentioned gives it a timeless unique look that I absolutely love. It feels like a painting come to life
Oblivion absolutely looks better, Halo's just really impressive for its hardware. Though I will maintain that the animation quality in Halo is leagues better
Spot on with your observation of playing halo 2 with the xbox 360. Bought my 360 april of 2006 with Oblivion and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. I spent quite a bit of time playing Oblivion, but experiencing halo 2 on xbox live for the first time was absolutely life changing. Team snipers ate up my entire summer that year. Fondly remember spending hours on end each night trying to find new superbounces and learning to do them during matches. Was extremely disappointed superbouncing no longer worked in the MCC.
Oblivion is my favorite of the Elder Scrolls games. I played it when it first came out on my nephew's Xbox360 and spent days playing it without sleeping much. I just love almost everything about it and still play through it once a year (With plenty of modding of course). It just has this otherworldly charm that I've not found in any other game. I love just wandering around taking in the landscape. One of mu favorite things to do is find a cozy inn and just hang out there (The Inn of Ill Omen is a favorite haunt of mine).
I wish this video had been longer as I know there are all kinds of weird and interesting things about the game that are not covered here. Another thing I'll say about Oblivion is that it has the best soundtrack of the series so far and one of the best fantasy soundtracks period, IMO. The tracks Wings of Kynareth and All's Well are two of my favorites. Loved this video, and your presentation. I want to make videos that talk about the games I love, but being autistic with lots of social anxiety has prevented me from doing it thus far. So hearing that you're neurodivergent and doing so well is a big encouragement to me. Subscribed!
In Skyrim when you get hit with an attack that hits you and reduces your health to zero, the excess damage is transferred to force (which is why getting killed by giants will send you rocketing into low orbit). Maybe something similar is happening in Oblivion, where hitting someone with an arrow will transfer some excess force to them, resulting in that weird jerky ragdolling.
Great video! I really enjoyed the details about the graphics.
14:16 "But the voice acting in Oblivion is..."
Baurus: "Strange."
Very very very slow video.... Also for someone who seems to be quite technically knowledgeable, it's a bit of a let-down that your "weirdness" ends up boiling down to: early 00's normal mapping, early 00's models, early 00's animations, early 00's physics. Most of the stuff mentioned in the video was actually pretty cutting edge at the time, including the faces, so it is no wonder that the developers wanted to show them off. The true weirdness comes from the aesthetics, the plot and dialogue, the gameplay systems, the mise-en-scene within the environment as opposed to the number of polygons it is made up of.
I'm having my second play through of Oblivion now in VR, and I'm loving it. My last plaything was on release on the 360, it was my first RPG, and it blew me away.
First time viewer here, enjoyed the video. 👍
I played Oblivion for about 300 hours back in the days on xbox 360 and actually really liked it, it was my first TES game.
One thing that amazed me was the large world and sense of freedom.
Also the fact that if I dropped some junk somewhere it would still be there ingame days, sometimes weeks later.
Also the music is mint.
It's a pretty unique experience!
When you took into account that you see the events of this game through the eyes of the prince of madness, a lot of it makes a lot more sence.
My nostalgia breaks through all the jank and weirdness. I can acknowledge its there, but dammit my brain only sees greatness.
"they knew the faces were bad, right?"
that's a good question
that's a very good question
Also one thing to note is the graphics. While being old, the game looks still absolutely ok to this date. And I still love the skybox with the different planets floating over at night. Just beautiful.
Oblivion is prob my fav game of all time.
The weirdest thing for me in Oblivion was being able to keep the boots of springheel jack if your health and acrobatics were high enough. Keep the boots and just bounce around everywhere jumping like a giant just slammed you with a club. I adore that game.
Do you just keep a running excell sheet for every game you play?
More than one~
@Takarias are they published or is that just for you?
Just for me currently, but I am planning a 2024 wrap up video using data from them. Kinda like the Spotify or Steam annual summaries, but *all* of the games I've played through the year on all platforms.
@@Takarias That sounds like it would be neat to look back on and remember what games you played and when but it just seems like a bit too much work for me lol
Something I never hear people talk about is just how profoundly revolutionary this game is for console gamers. There was never such a deep and reactive MMO. People make fun of the npc behavior and dialogue, but this felt so real as a first time player
Gonna need a lore video on Ogrum and how he developed his perfect, anvil-shaped skull
I too grew up with Oblivion, a friend of mine owned a copy on PC, and I watched him play it for hours, creating characters completely broken and hideous, but it had a certain draw to it that I couldn't look away from. I eventually got a Xbox 360 and a copy of it from Gamestop (rated T before they recalled the copies back for the re-rating to M). Did I understand how to level up in the game? No. Did I understand anything going on in the story? No. I still had a great time, and a lot of that was laughing at the game, mainly laughing at the tone and character moments that were out of pocket and not at all what I was expecting.
I think my favorite line that encapsulates this feeling is the guy you meet outside of Kavatch who says "I'm getting out of here before its too late, they'll be here any minute I'm telling you! Run while you can!"
And then he silently walks away, sprinting as fast as he can while the happy exploration music plays in the background.
Oblivion is one of the few old games that looks exactly like how I remembered it. It was weird in 2006 when I played it on Xbox 360.
Oblivion was originally supposed to be a very different game. The setting of Cyrodil was supposed to be a huge tropical jungle dotted with Ayleid ruins and sometimes thriving settlements but with the Imperial city being this enormous city with some areas in ruins and others built up, but then Todd Howard wanted to make everything like Lord Of The Rings, just like Skyrim was supposed to be very different until Todd Howard wanted to lean more heavily on the Viking influences despite it not really making sense.
TES is really a mess after Morrowind, if we're being honest.
"Did they know that faces were bad?"
Everyone knew this - except one person, whose name was Todd Howard.
Todd was happy with everything, as were the dungeons of Oblivion. Seriously, at Fallout 3 the game design department promised to quit entirely if Todd did not expand the team of those who would make dungeons
I bought a used copy for the ps3 without any inkling of what an elder scrolls game is and it consumed my life that year. Best memories growing up