Picking up Oblivion... any advice?

Chance

I'm planning on picking up Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion today for my PS3 (I don't have a PC that could run it), and I'm looking for some advice or comments on the experience.

(1) Is the GOTY edition all that and a bag of potatoes? From what I've heard Oblivion is intimidatingly huge, so the additional quests don't have much appeal to me - but if there's any horrible bugs that version fixed, it may be well worth it to go that rout.

(2) From the vids I've seen, I think I could really enjoy being a melee class - I like the idea of hitting a button to raise my shield and block incoming attacks, but I'm not blind to the additional options that spellcasting would offer. I'm sure there's no 'best' class, so I guess my question is 'what did you find the most fun?' Can you have a blast the whole way through as a straight fighter, or is a warrior-mage rout a better bet?

Thanks for any advice!

Uncle_Balsamic

My favourite class is all out magic. It's good fun although it makes the game a bit easy what with the crazy spells. A warrior mage would be pretty damn good too.

The GOTY has Shivering Isles, this must be played.

Enjoy the game man, I play Oblivion on the 360 myself.

Steel Angel

Chance wrote: »

(2) From the vids I've seen, I think I could really enjoy being a melee class - I like the idea of hitting a button to raise my shield and block incoming attacks, but I'm not blind to the additional options that spellcasting would offer. I'm sure there's no 'best' class, so I guess my question is 'what did you find the most fun?' Can you have a blast the whole way through as a straight fighter, or is a warrior-mage rout a better bet?

The warrior/mage types like spellblades and battlemages have always been popular choices in TES.

The atmosphere and the setup of the Dark Brotherhood quests are some of the best parts of the game, though stealth characters have various idiosyncracies you have to deal with in the vanilla game.

I think very few people go through the game as a "pure" fighter type. Tagging a melee skill, an armor skill, armorer, block, marksman, and athletics (if you're dumb. NEVER do this in the unmodded game) still leaves room for magic or stealth skills to be tagged as major skills.

Chance

Yeah I don't think you can mod the PS3 version.

I should probably have noted, I've never played an Elder Scrolls game before (Spellblade/Battlemage, what?). It took me until this past year to get into offline RPGs even a little (P3 and FFXII, I really should finish FFXII).

So GOTY = necessary, pure figher = silly... well, buying a new version is better for my conscience anyway (sorry, wallet).

B.C.

I've always played Oblivion as ranged characters. Seeing as you can't deal with the retarded enemy scaling on the 360 there's always a chance of you accidentally getting ganked by surprise. I'd much rather stealth shot the most intimidating enemy then pick off the rest of them as they charge. Some of the arrows you can find in the game are ridiculously amazing. High end alchemy can also create some incredibly nasty poisons that make even the toughest of daederics look like the obligatory sewer rats you fight in all RPGS.

It makes things incredibly efficient, and I always have my knife when things get hairy.

Vic

I suggest melee, the combat system of the game seems to make it the most fun way to play. If you have played a caster in any other RPG created, you will quickly get annoyed at the absolute lack of any interesting combat spells. Summoning and nuking is basically all you can do.

Venkman90

B.C. wrote: »

I've always played Oblivion as ranged characters. Seeing as you can't deal with the retarded enemy scaling on the 360 there's always a chance of you accidentally getting ganked by surprise. I'd much rather stealth shot the most intimidating enemy then pick off the rest of them as they charge. Some of the arrows you can find in the game are ridiculously amazing. High end alchemy can also create some incredibly nasty poisons that make even the toughest of daederics look like the obligatory sewer rats you fight in all RPGS.

It makes things incredibly efficient, and I always have my knife when things get hairy.

This

After trying out a Spellsword and quaffing potions like a madman I reverted back to my Assasin who can clear out Necromancers with ease, 6x Stealth Headshots before you can summon? Ya!

Face to face I prefer an enchanted shortsword for that bit of extra punch, Debaser is a good early quest one you can get.

Also a 360 player, I had it on the PC but it ran like a dog, the mods were nice though (attack and hide ftw)

Fuga

Had a stealth character. Too easy, the bonus for shooting without being spotted was huge, pretty much 1 killed everything. That was not fun.


But maybe that was because i downloaded some mod that made the xbonus bigger. : PP

Chance

I do like the idea of a stealth character (I had 3 Rogues in WoW, eventually swiching to a Resto Shammy for the +social aspect), but I've heard conflicting things about it in Oblivion.

One major thing is that people say it just doesn't work without some mods on the PC version (no luck for me), but I've also heard that the GOTY edition makes it work... somehow - I never found specifics.

How is stealth 'fixed' in the GOTY edition? I also have trouble imagining how to deal with 'boss encounters' as a straight stealth class. Is the stealth in oblivion all about the bow? Sneaking up on someone and backstabbing them is deeply ingrained into my perception of a stealth class.

Also: thanks very much for all the advice! I'll definitely find it helpful when setting out to climb the mountain of content that is Oblivion.

Venkman90

Well having played stealth in both PC and 360 (so with and without mods) the main change is the attack and hide mod, you can 1 shot with the bow from the shadows in vanilla but then any other adds in the room will instanlty know where you are and come running, with the mods on the PC you can break line of sight and re-hide for more stealth kills.

Essentially you are way OP on the first kill and as squishy as you like for his mates (unless you are well armoured).

Chance

Just read a few reviews of the GOTY edition and I have a few additional questions:

The Vampire Glitch: I'd heard about this, and mistakenly thought ti was from the original version. Turns out it's just in the GOTY edition - is there a patch or fix for this, or should I just pay close attention to where/when I save?

DLC: I also read that there's additional DLC above and beyond what's included on the GOTY edition disk - is that stuff free? I'm cheap.

Fuga

Not free. Don't know what vampire glitch you're talking about.
And no, i think you still got +damage if you sneak up and hit them with a short sword too.

Cherrn

Chance wrote: »

DLC: I also read that there's additional DLC above and beyond what's included on the GOTY edition disk - is that stuff free? I'm cheap.

I don't think there is. I don't know if Fighter's Stronghold is in GOTY, but it's the only one that's not in the vanilla/KotN/SI package. But if that's the only one you're missing, don't worry about it. The majority of the DLC content are just extra houses that you can purchase stuff for.

Some people say that Oblivion is unplayable without mods, but this is right balderdash. Just read up on creating your own class; you can easily gimp yourself if you do it wrong.

Chance

Thanks for all the help and advice

Evangir

The good thing about Oblivion is that you're not really tied down to being just a melee fighter, or just a stealthy character, or just a magic user. You can realistically do all three things on one character after some work. My only advice is to read some of the levelling guides up on GameFAQs and such, since the levelling system in unmodded Oblivion is completely broken. To get any enjoyment out of the game, I ended up having to spend about 15 hours levelling my character up to a pre-determined level (in my case, level 20 was the cap I decided on), just grinding out particular skills to get the appropriate stat bonuses on every level-up. It's tedious, but let me focus on exploration and story once it was done, rather than levelling.

Eggplant Wizard

The problem with Oblivion is that the game actively punishes you for picking skills you actually plan to use. It's a huge nuisance in an otherwise awesome game. Read up on character creation before you dive in, unless you enjoy getting killed by bears every 10 minutes.

Pagan_CyC

A couple key bits of info:

1) Oblivion matches your opponents to your level
2) If you level 'wrong' you end up weak compared to the opponents provided

This page is incredibly useful for effective leveling:
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Efficient_Leveling

But I recommend not taking it to an extreme as micromanaging your leveling can take a lot of the fun out of the game. But on the other hand, you can end up invincible if that's your thing.

RedThorn

Fuga wrote: »

And no, i think you still got +damage if you sneak up and hit them with a short sword too.

It's worth noting that not only do you get a bonus for sneak attacks with onehanded melee weapons, it's twice the bonus that bows get (2x bow and 4x onehand melee before 25 skill, and 3x and 6x after). Also, alchemy is highly useful no matter what kind of character you're playing.

SniperGuy

Oblivion has the best arrow shooting I have ever seen. I always grab a bow.

DisruptorX2

Get the GotY edition. Nights of the Nine and Shimmering Ilses add fun quests to the game.

Play a stealth archer.

Do not level. Set all the skills you will never, ever use as primary skills. Leveling makes you weaker, unless you micromanage like fucking crazy. And we all know how fun that is.

Nickle

Don't focus too much on power leveling. For one, the enemies scale (at least on the 360 version, which I played), and two, being completely invisible all the time pretty much saps all of the fun out of the game. It's true that you can kind of screw yourself, but if you just want to have fun anyway you can always mess with the difficulty slider, until you get to where you want to be.

I still need to finish the damn thing, and force myself to wear normal armor.

IceBurner

Trolls are ridiculously fast and strong, but fire works really well.
Most Daedra are weak against lightning and resist fire and frost.

Also, if you want to use magic, stacking spells is very interesting. Example:

Assuming an enemy not already weak to fire:
Cast 10 fire damage for 2sec = 20 damage
Cast 100% weakness to fire, then fire damage: 40 damage
Cast 100% weakness to magicka, then 100% weak to fire, then fire damage: 80 damage.

The Atronach birthsign on a Breton means you have a very high chance to either absorb or reflect harmful spells. Not recommended for a pure mage, since your magicka will not regenerate on its own. Those glowing "blue signal-fire" Ayleid Wells will refill your mana for free though and come back once every 24 horus.

The various "Doomstone" pillars with runes all over 'em are really worth figuring out.

Walk around with Imperial Legion guards patrolling the roads and they will fight to the death for you. If they do happen to die, their equipment's worth good money and not too shabby when starting out. Specifically, the silver swords they carry aren't really strong, but are capable of harming magical foes--a cut above anything else you're likely to find for a while.

Joining a guild allows you to take just about everything that isn't nailed down from the guildhouses. Quite useful when starting out and short on both septims and equipment

That goblin-headed staff from the tutorial is actually the highest-priced piece of loot you can carry away from it, worth even more than the various gemstones you can find (WTF).

RedThorn

IceBurner wrote: »

Also, if you want to use magic, stacking spells is very interesting. Example:

Assuming an enemy not already weak to fire:
Cast 10 fire damage for 2sec = 20 damage
Cast 100% weakness to fire, then fire damage: 40 damage
Cast 100% weakness to magicka, then 100% weak to fire, then fire damage: 80 damage.

Stacking spells is practically cheating if you do it right though. Spoilered for borderline exploit.

With 2 custom 100% magicka weakness spells with a short duration (Like 2 seconds) with different names and alternating, the bonus grows exponentially each cast.

First spell will give the 100% damage bonus
Second stacks with the first for 200%.
Then the first again for 400%.
Then the second again for 800%.
Repeat ad infinitum until you decide to use a normal weakness (it can be 1% and still retain the huge bonus you've built up) spell with a long duration to make the bonus stick, and then oneshot the monster with a nuke. Alternative methods involve including a minor amount of elemental damage and a 100% weakness to that element on top of the 100% magicka weakness, so that you're doing the damage while you're stacking them. The bonus stacks much quicker, but the mana cost is higher and it will take a higher destruction skill to cast it.

Gaming-Module

As people have said, be careful leveling. I was very dissapointed when I beat the Mage Guild questline boss in like two hits ... with a weapon.

I was I guess roleplaying a pure mage. :-/

Jengo

Personally I'd carefully consider whether you want to get the game of the year edition or the cheaper vanilla one. I chose not to get the game of the year edition and I'm glad I did. I only managed to put in about a 100 hours before needing to take a break from the game. Which is a lot but I still barely scratched the surface on the available content.

If you're going to clock in a lot of hours in the game then it might be worth getting the GOTY edition but if you're not you'll probably be just as happy with the plain old normal version.

Tube

I'd get GOTY if it has shivering isles. shivering isles was awesome.

Don't worry too much about the levelling. people bitch about it overly, you have to be extremely unlucky to really fuck it up, and it's always fixable. you'll just occasionally find fights overly hard and need to save and retreat a bunch.

Steel Angel

Chance wrote: »

How is stealth 'fixed' in the GOTY edition? I also have trouble imagining how to deal with 'boss encounters' as a straight stealth class. Is the stealth in oblivion all about the bow? Sneaking up on someone and backstabbing them is deeply ingrained into my perception of a stealth class.

Until you get your stealth skill up a bit, you won't be sneaky enough to get close enough for a melee sneak attack, one of the reasons bows and stealth are a popular combination.

DisruptorX2

I liked Knights of the Nine better. I actually bothered to go in and finish it. And no achievement. Lame.

B.C.

I'm going to agree with Tube here, leveling and maining skills you would want to main doesn't gimp you as much as people would have you believe. Yes, it will slightly weaken those who are(were) obsessive enough to take notice and do the calculations, but if you want to jump in, start kicking ass, and having fun then don't worry about micromanaging your leveling.

I jumped right into the game knowing nothing about the leveling system with an alchemic archer. I had no problem playing the game once I started getting to the really nasty poisons.

Another tip of advice: Feather spells and potions are your friend. I can't count how many times I was looting very far away from a town and I started filling out my weight limit. Gulp down a potion or two and suddenly I'm moving as if I wasn't carrying any loot at all.

Dírhael

Cardboard Tube wrote: »

I'd get GOTY if it has shivering isles. shivering isles was awesome.

Don't worry too much about the levelling. people bitch about it overly, you have to be extremely unlucky to really fuck it up, and it's always fixable. you'll just occasionally find fights overly hard and need to save and retreat a bunch.

I actually had the exact opposite experience in that I thought the leveling made the game way to easy for my style of playing. That said, the main issue I take with the leveling is that it never gave me those "Oh my god, WHAT IS THAT THING?! RUUUUUN!!" moments that previous games in the series did at times. Also, scaled loot to the extent it was done in the game takes a lot of the fun away.

It's still a good game, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a solid RPG to play, but I still think that Morrowind is the better game (the older games are also great, but they feel a bit outdated today).

EddieDean

Because the levelling system is basically broken, take only combat skills as your main ones.

One out of blade/blunt/hand to hand (I always favour blade)
One out of heavy armour/light armour (I take heavy)
Block
Destruction magic (for fireballs etc)
Restoration magic (for healing spells)
Marksman

Note that's only six, but I'd strongly recommend all of those. It just means any way you're involved in combat, you're going to benefit from.

For the seventh, it's up to you. The game's very very easily to become well-rounded in. I recently took alchemy, because you can make a vast amount of money selling potions which you brew yourself, though you may want to look into just taking another magic style like Conjuration, if you're going to use something like that in combat.

Also, with regards to actually playing the game:
Carry LOADS of lockpicks, unlock every lock you can so you get better.
Carry a fair few repair hammers, and repair your armour after every combat - this'll really pay off later.
Get good alchemical equipment, and steal any food you can get your hands on, just to level up your alchemy.
In fact, steal anything LIGHT that you can get away with.
Don't pick up items that're worth a load of money that're really heavy. The formula to use is [cost of item]/[weight of item] = [true value]. That way, instead of only having two pieces of 2,000-worth armour and being over-encumbered, have hundreds of jewels and potions each worth less, but you can carry more and be making 13,000 every time you hit a shop.
Join the thieves' guild as early as possible, just so you get a fence and can sell stolen goods.

There're lots of mods which you should DEFINITELY use to clean up the game or improve it in some relevant fashion, but there're threads for that already here.

Fuga

B.C. wrote: »

I jumped right into the game knowing nothing about the leveling system with an alchemic archer. I had no problem playing the game once I started getting to the really nasty poisons.

Exactly + you can always change the difficulty to be easier, so yeah, don't worry about it.

MichaelLC

Shivering Isles was awesome.

I played the default Agent profile, and it worked fine once my Stealth was high enough. 1-hit kills were pretty common, especially with the bow-n-arrow set from SI. I went through the door right after the opening bit, and was all, "woah-crazy town!"

To game the system for Stealth:

Go to SI, and travel NW till you get to Cylarne, an open ruins area with a Golden Saint and Dark Seducer standing guard. You can pick-pocket them ad infinium, raising your Stealth to max. There's NPCs in the regular world too this works on.

Chance

I really appreciate all the help and advice. I'm about four hours in, and after getting out of jail I pretty much just started to explore - which I found pretty satisfying.

I decided to take some advice from here (page 1) and not level up at all - I just trucked along leveling skills, selling crap, killing bandits et cetera. Then I got to my first town with a Mage's Guild, where the first quest was to retrieve a stolen staff, and then the lizard woman asks me to help get her friend out of the Dreamworld. I figured this would be a good time to test out if leveling up would seriously kill the game for me.

So I go to sleep, and it dings me to level 2. It lets me up a few stats +3, and speed +5 for some reason (caster/melee). Then I go straight back to sleep and it brings me up to lvl 3.

I seriously need someone to explain the leveling and +stat deal in this game to me like I were a five year old. From what I'd read it seemed that if you gain 10 skill in three main skill areas, then you get...

Chance

...+5/+5/+5 to add to those skills governing attributes. (Sorry for the 2 posts, my PS3 only lets me type so many words per field.) Anyway, so that was confusing to me.

After I dinged, I went into the dreamworld and had to fight a pair of minotaurs in this guy's dream - and they just beat the holy crap out of me. I tried again and again - I wondered if these were just super-dream minotaurs or was this the result of the leveling up? So I loaded an older save, didn't level, and tried again and I kicked those cowmen's fuzzy asses. Ugh.

*
I don't want to stay level 1 the whole game - I want a huge mana pool and the ability to wave my hand at Hard locks to open them - but leveling was much kinder to these mintoaur...s? Minotai? These things than it was to me.

Also, I don't have a main skill governed by intellect. Does this mean I can only ever do a little +1 to my Int when I level, and I'll never be able to do +5?

I'm not even level 2 and I'm thinking of rerolling >.< lawlz

Tube

Whether a skill is major or minor, if you level it the system puts a check next to it's stat. If you get ten checks, you will get a plus 5 modifier in this stat. Since you only raise your major skills by ten points to level, this means you can't get +5 modifiers if you don't level your minor skills

STOP WORRYING ABOUT IT. Almost all the advice in this thread is stupid. Just play the game. It's sometimes hard, because it's a hard game. That doesn't mean your character is borked. Stop under levelling and over thinking and just play. You can always make a world beating character some other time.

Arikado

I just started replaying this game after not wanting to go back to my Bard.

RedThorn

You can still level your intellect even without a major skill contributing to it, because minor skills contribute to the stat increases on leveling.

And yes, stop worrying so much about the leveling and enjoy the game.

(I started playing my mage again and I just found the most awesome thing ever, if you use a damage strength spell on enemies with a lot of heavy gear you can make them too encumbered to move. Cue me standing just outside this poor maruaders reach slowly killing him with 6 damage fireballs while he swings madly at me. I think I might be evil in more than just the game.)