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Well I had a chance to play it for a good 5 hours last night. My PC is running it pretty well but I can feel its limitations, but mostly in the outdoor parts of the maps where the mountains, trees, and weather all pound away at my resources. In caves and rooms, my pc works like a peach. I even have the resolution down a bit to 1024x768 with anti-aliasing off. My system:
AMD 64 3200+
2gig RAM
ATI X800XL
Here's a quick rundown of some things I found...
The Good:
-The scenery and overall graphics are amazing. I haven't played ANY PC game that paid such close attention to details from the modeling of character's faces to the detail in bricks and other textures.
-Control of the character is smooth and true to FPS style games.
-Amazing ability to truly do whatever you want. If you wanna follow the quest... go ahead. If you wanna be lazy and just walk around and check stuff out.. go ahead... if you wanna break into someone's house and kill them in their sleep... go ahead. I spent an hour last night just practicing how to pick-pocket.
-Which brings up the next good aspect. In other RPGs, I found it painstaking to have to distribute my character points into different attributes. With Oblivion, all I have to do is practice. If I constantly creep around without being seen, my "sneak" attribute will get better because I'm constantly practicing. If I use my bow a lot, I'll become a better marksman naturally. Same with swords, different armor, or my personality will be more likable the more I talk to people. So if you like to play a certain way, your character will naturally develop that way.
-Quests are pretty cool so far. Haven't done too many yet cuz I've been walking around and checking things out. The nice thing is that you can complete them in mutliple ways depending on how you feel you should accomplish them.
-NO TIME LIMITS! Do your thing at your own pace! That way you can do whatever quests you want on your own time. No pressure at all...
The Bad:
-Close combat fighting I found to be innacurate and a bit choppy. Even watching the gladiators fight in the arena proved to be a bit silly as they bumped and bounced off each other and swong away like a blindfolded kid swinging at a pinata.
-AI "sheduling" (as they call it) is very robotic. Basically they gave AI characters a series of commands to accomplish different things in the world... so they're not all just standing around in the same place all day long. It's a cool idea... but a few times it caused some problems. I walked into a bar and about 10 characters decided to all get up at once and greet me at the door. This caused a TON of chaos and was annoying to wait through while they greeted me and then walked back to their seat in the pub.
-Found some bugs in the voices... where I'd talk to one person with one type of voice and if I'd dig and ask them a variety of questions, they may not have been programmed with their own unique voice to answer... so the game reuses voices from other characters. Not a big deal cuz they'd say the same thing... but when a character's voice changes it's a bit annoying. (this happened to me twice... so it IS pretty rare considering how many different characters there are in the game!
Well.. that's about it for now.... not much bad at this point! A LOT OF GOOD!!! HIGLY RECOMENDED!!! If your system is even close to mine you should get this game immediately. The depth of it is beyond ANY game I've ever played and is definitely the future of gaming as we know it... Just wait until a concept like this goes online with thousands of live players. Just unreal... I can't wait.
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) ...Superb graphics.
