I copy+pasted my lunch without thinking and overwrote my clipboard; guess I’m sans vehicle now.

When you hope they’re dyslexic and show up with delicious baklavas instead.

“Hey, that guy said to tell you-”

“I heard him.”

Where else would she be hiding the gun?

That sounds a lot like chameleon, the spell/enchantment in Oblivion that reduced the ability of enemies to spot you. It was basically a second layer of sneaking that stacked with regular stealth.

There was a famous exploit where if you managed to reach 100% chameleon effect strength, you could literally stand there wailing on NPCs with a greatsword and they wouldn’t even notice. The AI simply wasn’t allowed to know you were there.

There’s a reason the spell was removed in Skyrim. Stealth archers could have been even more broken!

(I know this is a shitpost, but I couldn’t resist lore-dumping)

The Dark Sign is actually Gwyn’s curse on humanity to seal away their potential (the Dark Soul being the only fragment of the First Flame that can be shared and passed on without weakening, he feared humanity growing powerful enough to topple the gods through sheer numbers). That’s why the Dark Sign appears as a flame encircling the Dark. When the First Flame weakens enough, his seal becomes visible as the Dark within humanity begins breaking free.

Shivering Isles rivals Morrowind in my mind. It has a strange and unique setting and most of the content is incredibly well-written, which contrasts sharply with the standard medieval setting of baseline Oblivion (mandatory reminder that Cyrodiil was supposed to be a rainforest, but the devs retconned it to make development easier).

The other expansion, Knights of the Nine, was just a bunch of fetch quests to unlock an armor set and was disappointing in comparison to even the base game (though at least the final boss fight was cool). It also put behavioral tracking on the DLC’s rewards that would disable them if your character gained infamy, forcing you to repeat a bunch of boring travel quests to fix them whenever this happened. There’s a reason KotN never comes up in discussions about the game.

Yep.

Yeah, it ran on AOL’s platform and was a multiplayer dungeon crawler similar to SSI’s other stuff.

Digital Molecular Matter, the DMM you mentioned in Force Unleashed, is just as interesting IMO. It calculated how objects would break under various types of stress and produced some of the best and most realistic destruction in gaming. It even simulated wood splintering vertically when twisted!

I’m guessing it had similar problems to Euphoria since I haven’t seen it mentioned since.

90% of Oblivion’s voice acting budget must have gone to paying for Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean to say a few dozen lines. It’s long been a meme that basically every other person in Cyrodill shares the same six or seven voice actors.

Jeremy Soule did amazing work. Unfortunately it turned out he was a terrible person and he was blacklisted from the industry after multiple allegations were made against him during the #MeToo movement.

I’m still on dual 1080p monitors and a machine that’s more than a decade old and was mid-tier at best when brand new. I’ve only upgraded the GPU and doubled the RAM, yet it still runs basically everything at an acceptable framerate. Hearing that would boggle the mind of my younger self, who struggled for days to get Neverwinter Nights (the Bioware one, not AOL - you know you’re old when you feel the need to specify) to run at more than four seconds per frame in outdoor areas on a fairly new machine.

They announced a 2025 release date back in 2023, and as of the last video update a few months ago it seems they’re still hoping to hit it.

I haven’t seen how they handled the Shivering Isles yet, but if they managed to make the Plane of Madness boring then I’ll be more than a little annoyed.

Ha. Years counted for more back then. Remember, this was back in the day when graphics technology made a qualitative leap every few years. Nowadays things have stabilized and the focus is on boosting framerate and pixel count, but back then each generation was a monumental leap forward in fundamental rendering tech.

The vampire stuff in Oblivion is interesting but short. There’s maybe an hour of content spread across the entire game world.

Morrowind had multiple vampire clans you could join (that were completely hidden and hostile to anyone not infected with their strain of the virus, so probably missed by 99% of players not using a guide), each with their own specialties and questlines, and there were unique interactions with NPCs and factions based on the progression of your vampirism.

It’s disappointing that Oblivion was such a step backward in that regard. My guess is the expense of universal voice acting made detailed optional questlines and responsive NPCs prohibitively expensive. Even Skyrim, which dedicated an entire DLC to vampires, was lacking compared to what was arguably a throwaway feature from Morrowind.

It’s a marketing tactic called “shadow-dropping”. It’s a risky tactic that relies on word-of-mouth for marketing instead of an expensive ad campaign. It tends to be used either when the company isn’t confident in their product, or if the drop is so desirable that it’ll sell well regardless of marketing.

We can assume this is the latter, though it’s possible Bethesda were also hedging their bets due to the remake’s lack of mod compatibility since long-tail revenue from modding basically carries them for the several years between game releases.

This is my main complaint with the remake so far. Original Oblivion was bright and vibrant, which stood out due to the obsession with brown-filtered “realism” in games at that time. Trees almost looked like they were painted with pastels.

The colors in the remake are noticeably toned down. It still looks great, but it lost that dreamlike quality that sold Oblivion as a fantasy world.

Oblivion uses Gamebryo. Creation is Skyrim and later games. That might seem pedantic since it’s a newer version of the same engine, but one of the major reasons for the rename was Bethesda ripping out the Gamebryo rendering code and replacing it with their own, more modern renderer.

The modders have still done amazing things with Oblivion, but they’re limited by the ancient Gamebryo tech. Postprocessing shaders, high-poly meshes and texture upscaling can only do so much, especially on a 32-bit engine that can use at most 4 gigs of RAM (2.5 gigs if Bethesda didn’t set the LAA flag and the end user hasn’t installed a 4GB patch).