The music. My God, the music is exceptional. Jeremy Soule absolutely killed it. Even when the graphics or physics get silly or weird, that score just brings it back and ties it all together.
When walking through valleys while listening to through the valleys never gets old and what would the world be without oblivion town music memes anyway
He's my favorite game composer and a big inspiration for me as a musician. This isn't about Oblivion vs Skyrim, but I feel like in Skyrim he did his best work, but Oblivion is a close second.
I will say this...that soundtrack hasnt and will not age a day as opposed to the graphics...classical music still emotes and conveys so much even now in 2020..
Fitting soundtracks and a great story don't age. It's one of the arguments for why graphics aren't important, though it doesn't hurt if your World looks as beautiful as the original creator imagines it. I still jam to the soundtrack of 'Gain Ground' from 1988... and I love classical music too.
Daemonshade I would that, within reason, graphics can be tuned not to age. Art style is key however. Final Fantasy XII and Valkyria Chronicles, while not great on a technical level, still looks amazing because they nailed their intended art direction. Oblivion falls short in my opinion, but not by much, which is no less impressive given the sheer scale achieved. It’s really the lighting and character shaders that I find to be lacking as they seem disappointingly flat. I feel it didn’t quite hit the i tended art direction. Music is highly underrated in video games. Some of my favorite songs have come from Croc, Legend of the Gobbos. 😝
I got a “broken” gateway desktop from a buddy for free in like 2012 I think with these exact specs. I remember it booting up but having graphical problems. I learned about the famous 8800gt baking trick and it brought the computer back to life. I used to play oblivion maxed out and Skyrim on that computer at medium setting 1080p 60fps and that’s how I got into pc gaming
@@xXBlackAngelDoomXx i think he is talking about putting the graphics card on the oven, it's a trick that some people do when the graphics card is artifacting (but this is not recommended, just in extreme cases, if it's not the case, just take it to a IT technician)
I love how everything glows in oblivion, it's just appealing to me. The environments might be a little sparse now but when it came out Oblivion was easily the best looking game i had ever seen.
Oblivion was the first 360 game I played. I was blown away at the time. Then I played Dead Rising. That generation was a pronounced improvement from the previous.
Was one of my very firsts too. Along with gears of war and splinter cell double agent. Those consoles were indeed an impressive machines for their time. Shame they were squeezed for too long as they were choking in their late years with bad performance and sub hd visuals.
Psych0technic Sub hd or not Alan Wake looked amazing Gears 3 ran great and more the consoles lasted a while because they were built on higher spec when pc gamers were using single core cpus in 2005 the 360 launched with a triple core 6 thread cpu.
But still absolute dogshit compared to gaming PC's. imagine how PC gamers felt, having hundreds of amazing franchises built on PC over the years, to have the industry sell them out to console gamers with dumbed down gameplay, mechanics, and terrible graphics running at awful framerates. And that was when the "golden age" of gaming ended, and all we have had since is commercial shite on outdated console hardware.
@Spiral Sure! :D Yet the Radeon 1950XT was around 2x faster than the 128-bit 20gb/s bandwidth of the 360 GPU. And an FX 57 CPU is around 3x faster than the 360 CPU! The 360 compared to mid range gaming PC's on release, but cost half what a brand new mid range PC would cost. Yet, console gamers then had to pay twice as much for games. The 360 and PS3 were the strongest console releases until the Xbox X. Still nowhere near a top end gaming PC, however. They never will be. AMD / ATI / Nvidia / Intel are never going to hold back their cutting edge tech for TWO YEARS development time it takes to make a console. PC gamers will always have access to the latest stuff, as it is cut.
Ah loved this game so much. My favorite Elder Scrolls, and I know I am a minority but the world, guilds, story, the way every character can be different meaning that you don't have a player that just can do everything perfect like in Skyrim, so it encourage you to actually play certain classes to better fit what you have to do for say guilds. I hope they bring back acrobatics, athleticism, and much better conjuration and quest building. Also, being a gladiator is badass and would like to see what they can do with today's talent/technology. Lastly, they definitely need to bring back repairing your weapons and armor. Especially with the smithing capabilities of Skyrim, it doesn't make sense that they took it out.
Have to disagree on the repairing - that was an annoying hassle in Oblivion. Also, I only played through Oblivion once and did pretty much everything in the game so you definitely didn't need to 'role-play' in any strict sense.
@@mononoke721 Meh, I disagree with you on that. In Oblivion items lasted a pretty long while before breaking with a few items in the game being class cannons to a degree, epic dmg but not the best durability. I found it to be a good mechanic and missed it when Skyrim removed it. I don't even fast travel and even I get into towns often enough to pay for repairs before items are 100% broke.
@@OGPatriot03 I tried repaying Oblivion not too long ago and my weapon would pretty consistently be on the verge of breaking about half way through missions. I had to install a mod that slowed down weapon degradation. I think I already had a mod that made enemies less damage-spongey too. I really don't see how it added anything to the game.
@@Dr.WhetFarts The engine itself is worth DF's attention. So much mess, so much potential... Good thing that Anomaly mod and 64bit engine dealt with most issues like stuttering and random hickups.
@@Dr.WhetFarts Because Digital Foundry's purpose is to discuss gaming technology, both hardware and software. At the time it came out, nothing could compete with Stalker visually (it's also a great game, but I'll allow your ignorance). Also, since when does it matter whether or not a game is any good for DF to analyze it? As John referenced in this Oblivion video, they once did a breakdown of LICHDOM:BATTLEMAGE, which I have played and can confirm is the worst game released this millennium.
@@Riddlewire lol, theres always that one first comment reply that is just a few words, and it's overwhelming negative, but with no accompanying argument.. just "shits trash" and they return to the abyss lol
As someone who lived through it. No one thought the character models were good. They were criticized for bad models from release. But the graphics for items and landscape were praised.
The first time I heard the term "potato-face" is because of Oblivion. I'm sure it was used before the game, but it so perfectly described a lot of the NPC's here.
@@infinitysynthesis Yeah. Shame they blew their entire voice budget on those two, and had to get about 6 people from around the Bethesda office to do ALL the other voices.
I played Oblivion on my Xbox 360. And I enjoyed it, despite the flaws (which, to be fair, at this time didn't even register as flaws). Looking back, this now reminds me of simpler times, when there was no debate on how a game runs on different platforms, different setups, which one would be the best, how to improve performance, visual fidelity, etc. etc. I put the disc into the console, and that was it. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of pure excitement, that would turn into unforgettable memories. And all that on a 360.
Objects left outside of a non player owned home disappear after around three days to prevent "Save file balooning." This helped to decrease memory usage and increase stability as well. Skyrim does this too, but at a different timing. I read so much about Oblivion's development before release because I was too hyped. XD Anyway, save file balooning was such an issue in Skyrim that once your save hit 10MB, the game started having tons of memory management issues. That combined with memory leaks, led to textures never fully loading, constant stuttering and increased crash rates. This is what they were trying to avoid.
@@retrosimon9843 the GTS 320 is older and could run it kiiiinda ok-ish. Just no AA of course. It was the midrange card before the GT came out. I was happy with mine because I was using a 1440x900 monitor so the low vmem wasn't a huge burden most of the time. Actually played Oblivion for the first time with that card and an overclocked X2 3800 with 4gb of DDR1. The CPU and vmem held me back from running the highest settings, but it was good at mostly very high and a couple highs. Back then I didn't care quite as much about hitting a solid 60 fps, but it was close.
For a fair comparison they should be using an x1900xtx or 7900gtx since no dx10 cards were out when this game came out. Then they'd be stuck at 30 fps like the consoles showing that $500 pc gpus are never worth it. Oh wait you can no longer get a flagship card for $500.
I love these kinds of videos from you guys, my favorite channel on youtube by far. On the weekends if i don't have anything planned and i'm not in the mood to play any games i usually just watch a lot of your guys videos. Thanks for all the work you guys do, it's appreciated.
4:45 You could leave items about a house! I filled out my house in Skingrad on the 360 with my unique items that I wasn't using. I was able to have them displayed about the rooms without putting them into chests or storage!
Thanking you for verifying that. I wanted to say my friend did that in a few houses in Oblivion. I believe on the 360 or PS3 if you put your cross hair over an object and hold RB or R1 you can move the object around. Maybe it's through the menu and then the UI drops and you take control of the objects. I just dumped all my items at the chest in the blades training room at Cloud Ruler Temple. Once I had a ton of stuff in there it took a bit to load the contents of the chest.
I played this game last year as first time, damn looked good. They did a terrific work! I missed a lot of elements present in Oblivion, when played Skyrim again.
Oblivion was my first love, the first open World game I ever played. No other game had such an impact on me. The mystery, the freedom, the stories - it was an epic tale and my biggest gaming adventure.
19:50 It's so weird (and obviously a limitation) that he has only 1 shadow so the sun shadow rotates and becomes the fireball shadow and when the effect is over, the shadow takes its place back as a sun shadow... I don't recall seing that anywhere else.
Not that weird, pretty sure the light from the fireball would somewhat illuminate the shadow cast from the sun because it's way closer and super bright.
The moment when you step outside of the Imperial prison and are greeted with that view is one of my favourite moments in gaming. Spent hours exploring and looting before I even started the first quest. This may look dated now but in 2006, I was completely in awe. I enjoyed Skyrim but I never connected with it like I did with this game. So many memories
21:30 You would probably enjoy Daggerfall Unity. It is a port of Daggerfall to the Unity engine, allowing it to be run natively on Windows and Linux. It is also moddable.
This game still looks great. Just look at the grass, bushes and flowers when going through the wood. This is not modded version and vegetation looks straight up better than vanilla Skyrim. I just like the look of Oblivion in general. Bloom makes it look like a true magical place. Another game where bloom level really jumps out when you first start playing is Guild Wars 1.
I love Oblivion and Skyrim, but Skyrim's vegetation definitely looks better than Oblivion's, especially on the Special Edition. Trees are the biggest change as they aren't just 15 leaf bundles that move independently, but look at stuff like alchemical plants. Nightshade and Deathbell alone blow Oblivion out of the water.
Q6600 was a chip way ahead of its time. The best aging CPU I've ever owned. Then, after 10 years or so, I got i5 6600 and it got old (slow) very soon after the launch.
@@ggzii The thing was, back in the day, many games were still made to run on a single core CPU, some would benefit from dual core chips. The Q6600 was alright for that, perhaps a bit slower in comparison with core 2 duo chips, that were clocked faster out of the box. Then however, the game developers started using multiple threads in their games, so while the dual core chips got obsolete, the Q6600 finally got fully utiliazed. There also came games, that would not even run on dual core CPUs anymore. That's why the Q6600 aged well. Also the Xbox 360 and PS3 held back the game devs, which also helped to prolong the gaming life of the Q6600.
Q6600 was an excellent chip but soon was outperformed significantly by new "I" series. I have it for 12 years and didn't upgrade it but bought a new PC with i9. That was a real difference in performance!
5:19 You COULD leave items in your house in Oblivion, In Skyrim you had to drop the items on the floor, leave, and then come back in to place them but in Oblivion you could just place them anywhere you wanted. The items dropped by bandits when you kill them in the open world actually remain.
Right? that function goes hand in hand with the infamous "Save Bloat" that all legacy bugs built in the Gamebryo engine share, all the way to FO4 and 76.
Recently tried the game out again into and it pulled me in right away. The music, bright colours, sense of mystery are so strong, I think they make up for the aged mechanics and bugs.
Ah Oblivion, I was so happy that with a patch I was able to lower the graphics and resolution so it would be sort of playable, didn't know what FPS was and nor did I care. It was a beautiful time. Now if it's not 1080p/60, I get very unhappy. (unless it's on consoles) :P
@@Two49 me too, sometimes I'll pop an old game in on console and I'll be all like, I don't know how I use to play it like this! But the truth is I used to play it just fine. Fps and resolution didn't even exist to me, there was only the game and I miss that a lot.
Same! When the game came out I payed it on my 6800GT and Athlon 64 3200+ (Single Core) with 1GB of Ram. I'm sure you also spent hours tweaking everything in the ini file and overclocking just to get every last frame you could. Fun times.
Damn, i had a 6600GT and played this at 1024x768 on a 17" CRT. I was in high school and obviously had no money for upgrades, but this rig got me through so many games. I have amazing memories of those times.
I had a 6800GT. Doom 3 was a slideshow and I couldn't play my new copy of The Sims 3 due to the card not having pixel shader or something. Upgraded to a EVGA 9800GT and didn't look back. Good times
Honestly Graphically skyrim was one step forward two steps back, While it had better textures and models for characters weapons and armors, the lighting, Objects, the world texture's and even world models such as rocks and mountains, took a huge hit
My favourite memory of playing Oblivion back in 2012/2014? Getting out of the prison isle for the fourth or fifth time, at the time, and coming across a guard running somewhere. So I follow the guy for what feels like five minutes, and he finally arrives at the beach just to punt a mudcrab. I don't know why. It just always makes me crack up to remember that particular moment.
What are you all talking about with non persistent dropped items in a home? Maybe it only applies to your own home in the game but I most definitely had a house that would drag my FPS to the floor on the 360 because I would line the shelves with Sigil Stones. Those noisy glowing balls did not disappear. Now trying to rely on a barrel or something to store goods out in a city (e.g. stashing stolen items) would disappear due to the loot pools in them resetting at specific time intervals.
OK this was awesome, well done guys. Super listenable, very well presented and fair to all platforms IMO. ROCK on Alex, well done John. Mapping this one to the Like button.
Edit: For all the zoomers out there make sure you first download the qarl III texture pack. It's essential. This game is something else when it comes to running it. Ryzen 3600 and GTX1070 and can get like 40 fps in cities while nothing is being utilised. Also editing the .ini file can enable a lot of cool stuff, like water reflections of...well everything, making the torch cast shadows and letting the game use more ram, etc. Poured so many hours into Oblivion back in the day.
Morrowind was big, but Oblivion put Elder Scrolls on the map at least for me, it was the first one I played and I was mesmerized. I’d hit signs with my sword and watch them swing back and forth. It was such a next-gen experience for middle school me.
I am sure I had piles of items visible in ES4. It became increasingly glitchy (as with ES5), but I threw piles of shiny weapons into my fireplaces, and filled the wizard’s tower with dozens of staffs strewn about and jewels throughout the garden.
This was the first Elder Scrolls game I played on PC (built it for Battlefield 3 a bit over 9 years back or so), and took a few days to get everything set up. Ohh how pleasantly surprised I was with this game with Beautiful Cities, unique landscapes, ambient wildlife, advanced weather packages, advanced guard AI, clear water and more made this mug feel like a sequel. Wonderful experience
I had my first PC built just for this game as a teenager. The bump mapping that was used everywhere and the gorgeous graphics. Was really something special
Going from the likes of The Prince of Persia (any of the big three) to Oblivion one Christmas night in 2006 was utterly mind blowing and will forever be with me as one of the happiest moments of my life. My gran got me it, who sadly passed this year and every time i hear that damn OST i start to tear up. Thank you Bethesda for this, and I love you gran.
My dad's PC is a mash of parts up to 20 years old. I don't even know if he has a graphics card or if it's on-board, I never asked him. All I know is it "works" for what he uses it for, which is pretty much facebook, downloading apps for his raspberry pi, and UA-cam which 1080p60 lags hard for him, he has to watch on 720p lol.
watching them play 1st person with keyboard/ mouse hurts my eyes.., so jankey / un- smooth moving and turning of the camera.. atmospheric 1st person games should be played with 2 Analog sticks
4:45 You could leave items out in Morrowind but if you dropped too many items on the ground in a house, you'd come back and everything would be put in the various crates, dressers, and other containers in the game. I remember there was one house I would always use as my home and I would essentially make it into a museum of unique artifacts and items I didn't want to sell. After a while, they'd all disappear and I'd find them in all the containers.
Remember seeing this game at a friends house on his Xbox 360. This, Skyrim, and New Vegas were some of the first games i picked up when i got my gaming computer in 2013
Dude I remember when magic stacking was still a thing and my friend and I boosted a character's Acrobatics to some ridiculous level and jumped. We left the game on for a veeeery long time and the character was still in the air.
BTW that "POM" you guys are talking about isn't POM, but the simpler parallax solution. It goes by several names, Offset mapping, offset parallax mapping, or just parallax mapping. Just like POM, Relief, and other texture displacement mapping techniques, it displaces the UV coordinated of a texture based on a height map. But unlike POM or Relief mapping, it doesn't build it's displacement based on tracing rays into the texture. The regular old parallax mapping was used in several games back in the mid to late 2000's. I remember Halo 3 through Reach used it on the wheels and tracks on vehicles for the bumps and stuff.
6:30 this is actually not true. Outside of the prison cell, barely any surface in the game actually uses parallax layers. They claimed this to be the case in the 2005 E3 showcase, but this was likely one of those features they axed in the final game for performance reasons, and they probably left the assets in the prison to make a stronger first impression. I've done quite a bit of texture mods for the game so I'm pretty familiar with where it is and isn't being used. Ironically, Skyrim axed parallax functionality altogether so Oblivion actually has a leg up in the tech there and allows you to natively mod in parallax textures without any third party hacks or workarounds.
This comment is not true. - You can play the game and see it for yourself. Every time I play I'm always pleasantly surprised with the fact, Texture mods usually leave them out btw. You can see it on the rocks in game, and the base game has high quality normals that mods struggle with. One place you can see the effect is on the walls in Chorrol which is where I'm currently living in game.
A specific subset of the Chorrol walls and some of the landscape rocks are among the few exceptions, while the overwhelming majority of environmental textures in the game use no parallax. The way it works is that they bake the height map as an alpha layer into the diffuse texture (and then also set a flag on the surface in the metadata of the mesh file). So if you can preview .dds files as thumbnails it's very easy to peruse the folders and see which have alpha and which don't (and this of course also excludes any textures that simply use the alpha for transparency instead).
@@savagedregime8176 As stated they're not on every texture (though HQ normals are) but they are present and you will notice them. For instances, on the rockets that you'll see very often.
@@OGPatriot03 Yes, but this is specifically in response to the claim that nearly every texture in the game have parallax maps. It was never a question about normals.
I really enjoy this. Alex and John play very well together and I would love to see more and longer content like this where they just play a game describing stuff and talking about whatever. It's not realistic but I can dream.
You guys could compare final version with first E3 gameplay trailer that had soft shadows for all geometry and the infamous radiant AI...great video btw, I can't wait for you guys to revisit Far Cry 1 (please do the 64bit comparison and make sure you run it on Win XP for proper water reflections). You can also revisit Splinter Cell 1/PT and address the issues that it has with modern cards (mandatory 6xxx or 7xxx nvidia cards to have proper lights / shadows in those games).
I still remember everything like they are describing it. From the amazing metal reflections on the armors in the early screenshots to the smooth stone bricks inside the tombs... Ah the memories... Now I realize I could have learned a couple of languages in the same time XD
But by inspiring people to learn how to mod their game, they've created new CG artists, game developers, and I'm sure people were even inspired by the music.
i remember going to the local games store asking for something to stress my new budget gaming pc. they gave me this "oblivion". at the Beginning, in the dungeon, I thought the guy from the store knew nothing about games. boy, was I wrong when I walked out and cranked those graphic sliders all the way. damn.
I like how in the intro video all of the characters are drastically the wrong scale. They're the same size as the doors and battlements that are the size of three men in game.
a cool thing you could do for this series is reload the games up on a new PC and run some reshade colourgrading and RTGI to see how much you can improve it with minimal tweaking
What an interesting analysis of the technological and graphical aspects of this iconic game. When the game was released, my brothers and I had a very underpowered PC for running it. Later around 2007 I built a PC with 8800 GTS 320 MB and Core 2 Duo E4500. Obviously in light of this video the CPU would have bottlenecked the setup quite a bit especially for this game. However, back then I wouldn't even dare expect very smooth or consistent gameplay. This era of gaming lives forever in my heart, and the HDR bloom effects make them feel even more like beautiful flashes from the past. Xbox 360 and PS3 were also extremely iconic and the console war was very interesting to follow.
Completely agree on sentiments about a leveling world, especially with how broken it was in this game without exploitation or mods; i.e., picking a class with primary/major skills you rarely use, manipulating the difficulty slider, or leveraging the stacking mechanics in spells.
I remember when this came out and I got it for my 360 and I said "these are the best graphics I've ever seen!" and my dad at one point said "In ten years people will be laughing at how this game looks." I was pretty mad, but somehow he was right (in areas.) The game aged about as bad as Skyrim, but as they pointed out there, there is some real "wow factor" still in this title. I'll never get tired of it.
This game still holds up for me. And it’s crazy how much headroom we have over it right now, and games still manages to run like absolute shit. Even OG Skyrim ran at a locked 60fps on my old GTX460. The fact that we have games still not hitting 60fps on like a 970 is baffling to me.
Oblivion was perfect game to show off next gen capabilities. It was mind blowing game at its time, the only problem on consoles was that crazy grass pop in every few meters, kind of ruined little bit of graphical experience, but otherwise it was insane game and most people got 360 just because of it :)
I played so much Oblivion (and still do, alllll of the mods) back in the day that I don't think numbers can properly convey how many hours I put into it 20:58 Iirc, there are mods that change the levelling system back to something more traditional rather than world levels as you do, a lot of stuff had to be changed and tweaked to make it work but it was great
I remember being totally amaze with that cirodyl shot at the begining of the game, man I loved that game to death back in 06, I played it with an nvidia 6600 and an athlon 64 3000+
Just kind of a fun fact guys, you can download a frame rate ulocker mod for Fallout 4 on the Xbox One, thus on the X and it runs - at 4K, near solid 60 many times, and very, very smooth most of the time. It's incredibly surprising. Would love to see you guys maybe look at it or at least just try it yourselves on your own time (john, Alex and team) - as it blew my mind. Evidently the Jaguars weren't as bottlenecking in THAT case as many thought, including myself Also, you may want to download some 'Fallout 4 performance mods" too, which is just one I DL that reduces some shadow res's and material debris etc. - You guys will have fun, it's incredibly surprising to see. Again, fantastic video. Seriously.
I loved my Q6600 back in the day, was my first self build PC and all the money I saved to get it. :D Overclocked that thing to 3.3GHz and it was awesome.
The only real change i need from a new Elder Scrolls is some actual impact when hitting enemies. Its ridiculous to me how I can dual wield 2 badass looking maces and swing them like a madman on a thin ass zombie and the only indication of hitting it is a weak sound effect going "kssh" and their life bar dropping while they are still swinging at me like nothing happened.
18:35 this is exactly when I stopped playing! The oblivion gates were so repetitive. Still love the game and I've spent a lot of time playing outside the main story
I used a GeForce 8600 GTS for the longest time. Not even an 8800, but it ran Source and Unreal engine games great. What an excellent generation of cards (not including the 8400 GS, obviously).
You can increase the distance that foliage renders in the options menu. I remember hating how closely in front of you it draws in but increasing it had a massive impact on framerate back in the day
I recently built a Windows XP gaming PC mostly with parts I found locally on FB marketplace. It's running a Core 2 Duo E8600 and an 8800GTX. It runs super cool surprisingly and slays any games up to like 2009. I paired it with a 19inch CRT at 85hz refresh rate. It's awesome experiencing all those games I couldn't play when I was younger.
My worst memory of this game was - every time you were wondering around the beautiful landscape with the amazing score playing in the background, there would be some tiny, insignificant creature crawl within your vicinity and this ‘encounter’ would cue the battle music and totally break the moment and disrupt the feels I was just getting from the score.
Dell sold this exact same configuration back in the day of which included the Q6600 CPU & 8800GT GPU as I think it was around $1200 dollar’s, and might’ve included a small monitor for the price !
The music. My God, the music is exceptional. Jeremy Soule absolutely killed it. Even when the graphics or physics get silly or weird, that score just brings it back and ties it all together.
When walking through valleys while listening to through the valleys never gets old and what would the world be without oblivion town music memes anyway
He's my favorite game composer and a big inspiration for me as a musician. This isn't about Oblivion vs Skyrim, but I feel like in Skyrim he did his best work, but Oblivion is a close second.
I’d argue Morrowind had the best music and even atmosphere of ALL the Elder Scrolls games.
Mystic Dan it does indeed
This game has amazing music but Skyrim is even better.
I will say this...that soundtrack hasnt and will not age a day as opposed to the graphics...classical music still emotes and conveys so much even now in 2020..
Fitting soundtracks and a great story don't age. It's one of the arguments for why graphics aren't important, though it doesn't hurt if your World looks as beautiful as the original creator imagines it. I still jam to the soundtrack of 'Gain Ground' from 1988... and I love classical music too.
There are still songs on the SNES that sound incredible. Nintendo really put a good sound chip in there.
harvest dawn. love that track
The sound track to Oblivion is marvelous still to this day.
Daemonshade I would that, within reason, graphics can be tuned not to age. Art style is key however. Final Fantasy XII and Valkyria Chronicles, while not great on a technical level, still looks amazing because they nailed their intended art direction.
Oblivion falls short in my opinion, but not by much, which is no less impressive given the sheer scale achieved. It’s really the lighting and character shaders that I find to be lacking as they seem disappointingly flat. I feel it didn’t quite hit the i tended art direction.
Music is highly underrated in video games. Some of my favorite songs have come from Croc, Legend of the Gobbos. 😝
Mom: "Why are you starring at digital bricks".
Me: Even if I tell you, you will never understand.
"Mom, pull my sack out like a hairy pancake. We'll keep our jewelry here."
@@chestinawaterloo2696 wtf
Runs fine on the ol 256MB Version of the card. I can verify
Yes
@Test You 'avin a stroke there mate?
@Test You're right it isn't running it at PS3 levels. This card can keep a stable 30Fps 👉😎👉
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial well said. Specially skyrim that thing was broken on ps3
@Test Look at this guy, shaking his head, smh
I got a “broken” gateway desktop from a buddy for free in like 2012 I think with these exact specs. I remember it booting up but having graphical problems. I learned about the famous 8800gt baking trick and it brought the computer back to life. I used to play oblivion maxed out and Skyrim on that computer at medium setting 1080p 60fps and that’s how I got into pc gaming
what's the trick?
@@xXBlackAngelDoomXx i think he is talking about putting the graphics card on the oven, it's a trick that some people do when the graphics card is artifacting (but this is not recommended, just in extreme cases, if it's not the case, just take it to a IT technician)
How pathetic.
@@nathaniliescu4597 ?
@@nathaniliescu4597how pathetic.
I love how everything glows in oblivion, it's just appealing to me. The environments might be a little sparse now but when it came out Oblivion was easily the best looking game i had ever seen.
Oblivion was the first 360 game I played. I was blown away at the time. Then I played Dead Rising. That generation was a pronounced improvement from the previous.
Push boundaries
Was one of my very firsts too. Along with gears of war and splinter cell double agent. Those consoles were indeed an impressive machines for their time. Shame they were squeezed for too long as they were choking in their late years with bad performance and sub hd visuals.
Psych0technic Sub hd or not Alan Wake looked amazing Gears 3 ran great and more the consoles lasted a while because they were built on higher spec when pc gamers were using single core cpus in 2005 the 360 launched with a triple core 6 thread cpu.
But still absolute dogshit compared to gaming PC's.
imagine how PC gamers felt, having hundreds of amazing franchises built on PC over the years, to have the industry sell them out to console gamers with dumbed down gameplay, mechanics, and terrible graphics running at awful framerates.
And that was when the "golden age" of gaming ended, and all we have had since is commercial shite on outdated console hardware.
@Spiral Sure! :D Yet the Radeon 1950XT was around 2x faster than the 128-bit 20gb/s bandwidth of the 360 GPU. And an FX 57 CPU is around 3x faster than the 360 CPU!
The 360 compared to mid range gaming PC's on release, but cost half what a brand new mid range PC would cost. Yet, console gamers then had to pay twice as much for games.
The 360 and PS3 were the strongest console releases until the Xbox X. Still nowhere near a top end gaming PC, however.
They never will be. AMD / ATI / Nvidia / Intel are never going to hold back their cutting edge tech for TWO YEARS development time it takes to make a console. PC gamers will always have access to the latest stuff, as it is cut.
Ah loved this game so much. My favorite Elder Scrolls, and I know I am a minority but the world, guilds, story, the way every character can be different meaning that you don't have a player that just can do everything perfect like in Skyrim, so it encourage you to actually play certain classes to better fit what you have to do for say guilds. I hope they bring back acrobatics, athleticism, and much better conjuration and quest building. Also, being a gladiator is badass and would like to see what they can do with today's talent/technology. Lastly, they definitely need to bring back repairing your weapons and armor. Especially with the smithing capabilities of Skyrim, it doesn't make sense that they took it out.
Ditto
100% agreed
Have to disagree on the repairing - that was an annoying hassle in Oblivion. Also, I only played through Oblivion once and did pretty much everything in the game so you definitely didn't need to 'role-play' in any strict sense.
@@mononoke721 Meh, I disagree with you on that. In Oblivion items lasted a pretty long while before breaking with a few items in the game being class cannons to a degree, epic dmg but not the best durability.
I found it to be a good mechanic and missed it when Skyrim removed it.
I don't even fast travel and even I get into towns often enough to pay for repairs before items are 100% broke.
@@OGPatriot03 I tried repaying Oblivion not too long ago and my weapon would pretty consistently be on the verge of breaking about half way through missions. I had to install a mod that slowed down weapon degradation. I think I already had a mod that made enemies less damage-spongey too. I really don't see how it added anything to the game.
DF has never done a video breakdown of Stalker.
Please fix this.
why, the game is meh.
@@Dr.WhetFarts because, especially when thinking about mid to late 2000s PC titles, its hard not to think about Stalker.
@@Dr.WhetFarts The engine itself is worth DF's attention.
So much mess, so much potential...
Good thing that Anomaly mod and 64bit engine dealt with most issues like stuttering and random hickups.
@@Dr.WhetFarts Because Digital Foundry's purpose is to discuss gaming technology, both hardware and software. At the time it came out, nothing could compete with Stalker visually (it's also a great game, but I'll allow your ignorance).
Also, since when does it matter whether or not a game is any good for DF to analyze it? As John referenced in this Oblivion video, they once did a breakdown of LICHDOM:BATTLEMAGE, which I have played and can confirm is the worst game released this millennium.
@@Riddlewire lol, theres always that one first comment reply that is just a few words, and it's overwhelming negative, but with no accompanying argument.. just "shits trash" and they return to the abyss lol
The beautiful music of Oblivion always takes me back. Well, must be time to start a new game....... for the 1000th time!
Sounds like you didn’t play morrowind
can we talk about the circa-2005 business casual attire seen at 2:35? Hoodie AND a blazer!
You should watch full Xbox 360 presentation. There's some killer outfits there!
And those trousers haha... The days of the pseudo-flares.
As someone who lived through it. No one thought the character models were good. They were criticized for bad models from release. But the graphics for items and landscape were praised.
The first time I heard the term "potato-face" is because of Oblivion. I'm sure it was used before the game, but it so perfectly described a lot of the NPC's here.
Alex and John, you guys are an absolute treasure. Love the commentary and nostalgia
By Azura! By Azura! By Azura! It's the Digital Foundry!
Patrick Stewart's voice for the Emperor was such a perfect choice
The Martin character was voiced by Sean Bean 😄
@@infinitysynthesis Yeah. Shame they blew their entire voice budget on those two, and had to get about 6 people from around the Bethesda office to do ALL the other voices.
@@grizzlyhamster nothing changed with skyrim then lol, almost same amount of voice actors for 90% of game characters
@@JustOneGuy 1 guy does like 80% of them
One of the greatest games of all time. Will never forget when this came out and reading through the strategy guide for Xbox.
I played Oblivion on my Xbox 360. And I enjoyed it, despite the flaws (which, to be fair, at this time didn't even register as flaws).
Looking back, this now reminds me of simpler times, when there was no debate on how a game runs on different platforms, different setups, which one would be the best, how to improve performance, visual fidelity, etc. etc.
I put the disc into the console, and that was it. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of pure excitement, that would turn into unforgettable memories.
And all that on a 360.
I didnt liked this game, thats why played it just 2300 hours.
Yeah, just. God forbid you would played it a single hour more!!!
Yeah, I tend to play a lot of hours on games I hate too.
Do not write a review of it. You hardly spent the time needed to even do a first impression of the game. Shame!
yup i killed this game too
Probably didn't even make it out of the character creation menu!
12:15 I almost had a heart attack 😂
I'm half asleep chilling to this then this hits 😂
WHAT WAS THAT NOISE
My heart is still pounding. Had to check comments to make sure I wasn't the only one.
CRAB BATTLE!!
@@jrsomethingnumbers9704 The alert sound in Metal Gear Solid 5, It can be heard when you have been detected by guards
Objects left outside of a non player owned home disappear after around three days to prevent "Save file balooning." This helped to decrease memory usage and increase stability as well. Skyrim does this too, but at a different timing. I read so much about Oblivion's development before release because I was too hyped. XD
Anyway, save file balooning was such an issue in Skyrim that once your save hit 10MB, the game started having tons of memory management issues. That combined with memory leaks, led to textures never fully loading, constant stuttering and increased crash rates. This is what they were trying to avoid.
On the switch version, I left an armor at JarlBalgruff's Palace, finished the story and came back to find it at the exact same place?
Hearing that music, I'm back there. I'm back playing this game those years ago and I feel so comfortable.
This game has probably the most nostalgic soundtrack ever.
The GT came out in October 2007 so this is a late 2007 mid-end "beast", while the 8800GTX came out the year before and was better.
I remember the 8800 GT as being the first cheaper card that could finally run Crysis somewhat decent haha
@@retrosimon9843 the GTS 320 is older and could run it kiiiinda ok-ish. Just no AA of course. It was the midrange card before the GT came out. I was happy with mine because I was using a 1440x900 monitor so the low vmem wasn't a huge burden most of the time. Actually played Oblivion for the first time with that card and an overclocked X2 3800 with 4gb of DDR1. The CPU and vmem held me back from running the highest settings, but it was good at mostly very high and a couple highs. Back then I didn't care quite as much about hitting a solid 60 fps, but it was close.
@@jokerzwild00 I was using two 19 inch 2048x1536 monitors back then which I still have. The 8800GTS 512 was the best of the mid range ones.
For a fair comparison they should be using an x1900xtx or 7900gtx since no dx10 cards were out when this game came out. Then they'd be stuck at 30 fps like the consoles showing that $500 pc gpus are never worth it. Oh wait you can no longer get a flagship card for $500.
@@EcchiBANZAII-desu I was using a 7600gt and 1gb of ram and an x3800 x2 processor in 2006 midrange in middle of 2006 before any dx10 cards were out.
I love these kinds of videos from you guys, my favorite channel on youtube by far. On the weekends if i don't have anything planned and i'm not in the mood to play any games i usually just watch a lot of your guys videos. Thanks for all the work you guys do, it's appreciated.
4:45 You could leave items about a house! I filled out my house in Skingrad on the 360 with my unique items that I wasn't using. I was able to have them displayed about the rooms without putting them into chests or storage!
Thanking you for verifying that. I wanted to say my friend did that in a few houses in Oblivion. I believe on the 360 or PS3 if you put your cross hair over an object and hold RB or R1 you can move the object around. Maybe it's through the menu and then the UI drops and you take control of the objects. I just dumped all my items at the chest in the blades training room at Cloud Ruler Temple. Once I had a ton of stuff in there it took a bit to load the contents of the chest.
They also got the view distance wrong when you apply the highest settings you also have to crank up the view distances in the pause menu.
I played this game last year as first time, damn looked good. They did a terrific work! I missed a lot of elements present in Oblivion, when played Skyrim again.
Skyrim is a shallow game in comparison. Sad part is that Oblivion wasn't the most intricate rpg in the first place.
Oblivion was my first love, the first open World game I ever played. No other game had such an impact on me. The mystery, the freedom, the stories - it was an epic tale and my biggest gaming adventure.
Ditto. The majesty of it all remains completely unmatched IMO.
This is my favourite Elder Scrolls game. It just has such a great and magical atmosphere. It makes you wanna be in that world.
19:50 It's so weird (and obviously a limitation) that he has only 1 shadow so the sun shadow rotates and becomes the fireball shadow and when the effect is over, the shadow takes its place back as a sun shadow... I don't recall seing that anywhere else.
Wasn't that a limitation with all forward rendered games?
Not that weird, pretty sure the light from the fireball would somewhat illuminate the shadow cast from the sun because it's way closer and super bright.
The moment when you step outside of the Imperial prison and are greeted with that view is one of my favourite moments in gaming. Spent hours exploring and looting before I even started the first quest. This may look dated now but in 2006, I was completely in awe. I enjoyed Skyrim but I never connected with it like I did with this game. So many memories
21:30 You would probably enjoy Daggerfall Unity. It is a port of Daggerfall to the Unity engine, allowing it to be run natively on Windows and Linux. It is also moddable.
This game still looks great. Just look at the grass, bushes and flowers when going through the wood. This is not modded version and vegetation looks straight up better than vanilla Skyrim. I just like the look of Oblivion in general. Bloom makes it look like a true magical place. Another game where bloom level really jumps out when you first start playing is Guild Wars 1.
Counterstrike source was full of bloom also, which made aiming a pain in the ass on dust and dust 2, you were literally blind for 2s lol
@@Loundsify absolutely
I love Oblivion and Skyrim, but Skyrim's vegetation definitely looks better than Oblivion's, especially on the Special Edition. Trees are the biggest change as they aren't just 15 leaf bundles that move independently, but look at stuff like alchemical plants. Nightshade and Deathbell alone blow Oblivion out of the water.
Most important mod: OOO, Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. Fixes level scaling and makes the general gameplay, AI and everything a lot better.
Yup. I can't play without it. One of my mods was integrated into OOO, which allowed for a lot of the animal behavior you see. Really cool!
Best mod ever.
@Jordan Ghill What total bullshit. Most (non visual) mods increase difficulty and complexity.
@Jordan Ghill You could not be more closed minded...
Jordan Ghill worst take 2k20
I was blown away by the game… when you got out of the sewers and you see those rolling green hills and you could explore it all, it was just great. 👌
"Have you heard of the high elves?"
*[Hurts himself to death while eating an orange]*
Brgahw!
Q6600 was a chip way ahead of its time. The best aging CPU I've ever owned. Then, after 10 years or so, I got i5 6600 and it got old (slow) very soon after the launch.
Chips dont "stay fast". There just hasn't been advancements. Now there has so its gets "slow" quickly but its still fast
Philip Cooper I still use an i5 6600k daily and it kicks ass. Maybe you needed to change the thermal paste.
@@ggzii The thing was, back in the day, many games were still made to run on a single core CPU, some would benefit from dual core chips. The Q6600 was alright for that, perhaps a bit slower in comparison with core 2 duo chips, that were clocked faster out of the box. Then however, the game developers started using multiple threads in their games, so while the dual core chips got obsolete, the Q6600 finally got fully utiliazed. There also came games, that would not even run on dual core CPUs anymore.
That's why the Q6600 aged well. Also the Xbox 360 and PS3 held back the game devs, which also helped to prolong the gaming life of the Q6600.
@@AceTechHD Why would that help?
Q6600 was an excellent chip but soon was outperformed significantly by new "I" series. I have it for 12 years and didn't upgrade it but bought a new PC with i9. That was a real difference in performance!
5:19 You COULD leave items in your house in Oblivion, In Skyrim you had to drop the items on the floor, leave, and then come back in to place them but in Oblivion you could just place them anywhere you wanted.
The items dropped by bandits when you kill them in the open world actually remain.
Yeah I was like wtf are they talking about.
Right? that function goes hand in hand with the infamous "Save Bloat" that all legacy bugs built in the Gamebryo engine share, all the way to FO4 and 76.
Recently tried the game out again into and it pulled me in right away. The music, bright colours, sense of mystery are so strong, I think they make up for the aged mechanics and bugs.
Q6600 and 8800gt weren't out when this game was released. I'd be interested in seeing this game running on it's recommended requirements of the time.
Ah Oblivion, I was so happy that with a patch I was able to lower the graphics and resolution so it would be sort of playable, didn't know what FPS was and nor did I care. It was a beautiful time. Now if it's not 1080p/60, I get very unhappy. (unless it's on consoles) :P
I refuse to play anything below 90 FPS.
PC gaming has ruined me, honestly.
@@Two49 me too, sometimes I'll pop an old game in on console and I'll be all like, I don't know how I use to play it like this!
But the truth is I used to play it just fine. Fps and resolution didn't even exist to me, there was only the game and I miss that a lot.
Good Lord. My 6800GT remembers this game ! It was painful to say the least. Ended up playing it for real on my 8800gt. 1280*1024 it ran well enough.
8800 GTS. Same resolution. Good memories!
Same! When the game came out I payed it on my 6800GT and Athlon 64 3200+ (Single Core) with 1GB of Ram. I'm sure you also spent hours tweaking everything in the ini file and overclocking just to get every last frame you could. Fun times.
Damn, i had a 6600GT and played this at 1024x768 on a 17" CRT.
I was in high school and obviously had no money for upgrades, but this rig got me through so many games. I have amazing memories of those times.
I had a 6800GT. Doom 3 was a slideshow and I couldn't play my new copy of The Sims 3 due to the card not having pixel shader or something. Upgraded to a EVGA 9800GT and didn't look back. Good times
Honestly Graphically skyrim was one step forward two steps back, While it had better textures and models for characters weapons and armors, the lighting, Objects, the world texture's and even world models such as rocks and mountains, took a huge hit
My favourite memory of playing Oblivion back in 2012/2014?
Getting out of the prison isle for the fourth or fifth time, at the time, and coming across a guard running somewhere.
So I follow the guy for what feels like five minutes, and he finally arrives at the beach just to punt a mudcrab.
I don't know why.
It just always makes me crack up to remember that particular moment.
What are you all talking about with non persistent dropped items in a home? Maybe it only applies to your own home in the game but I most definitely had a house that would drag my FPS to the floor on the 360 because I would line the shelves with Sigil Stones. Those noisy glowing balls did not disappear.
Now trying to rely on a barrel or something to store goods out in a city (e.g. stashing stolen items) would disappear due to the loot pools in them resetting at specific time intervals.
OK this was awesome, well done guys. Super listenable, very well presented and fair to all platforms IMO. ROCK on Alex, well done John. Mapping this one to the Like button.
They got details wrong though, specifically the fact that you can indeed place items anywhere in the world especially including homes.
@@OGPatriot03 That's fine, things happen, but they nail details right 10x better than other channels. Nothings perfect.
Edit: For all the zoomers out there make sure you first download the qarl III texture pack. It's essential.
This game is something else when it comes to running it. Ryzen 3600 and GTX1070 and can get like 40 fps in cities while nothing is being utilised.
Also editing the .ini file can enable a lot of cool stuff, like water reflections of...well everything, making the torch cast shadows and letting the game use more ram, etc. Poured so many hours into Oblivion back in the day.
Morrowind was big, but Oblivion put Elder Scrolls on the map at least for me, it was the first one I played and I was mesmerized. I’d hit signs with my sword and watch them swing back and forth. It was such a next-gen experience for middle school me.
I am sure I had piles of items visible in ES4. It became increasingly glitchy (as with ES5), but I threw piles of shiny weapons into my fireplaces, and filled the wizard’s tower with dozens of staffs strewn about and jewels throughout the garden.
Yea, they got that wrong. Kinda sad because it was always an awesome feature in game that to this day many games don't care to include.
Just watching this as I reinstall Oblivion and prepare to annihilate it with every mod known to man. Pray for my install folder.
I used to install mods but then I took an arrow to the knee.
Amen!
Don't forget the unofficial fan patch
Mod it till it breaks (which was really easily achieved with Oblivion...)! xP
This was the first Elder Scrolls game I played on PC (built it for Battlefield 3 a bit over 9 years back or so), and took a few days to get everything set up.
Ohh how pleasantly surprised I was with this game with Beautiful Cities, unique landscapes, ambient wildlife, advanced weather packages, advanced guard AI, clear water and more made this mug feel like a sequel. Wonderful experience
I still have my old Gainward 8800GT with 1GB vram. It was fantastic back in the day.
I had my first PC built just for this game as a teenager. The bump mapping that was used everywhere and the gorgeous graphics. Was really something special
Going from the likes of The Prince of Persia (any of the big three) to Oblivion one Christmas night in 2006 was utterly mind blowing and will forever be with me as one of the happiest moments of my life. My gran got me it, who sadly passed this year and every time i hear that damn OST i start to tear up. Thank you Bethesda for this, and I love you gran.
"Yesterday's pc", this is my pc today lool
Still working to this date ? nice.
rip
My dad's PC is a mash of parts up to 20 years old. I don't even know if he has a graphics card or if it's on-board, I never asked him. All I know is it "works" for what he uses it for, which is pretty much facebook, downloading apps for his raspberry pi, and UA-cam which 1080p60 lags hard for him, he has to watch on 720p lol.
watching them play 1st person with keyboard/ mouse hurts my eyes.., so jankey / un- smooth moving and turning of the camera..
atmospheric 1st person games should be played with 2 Analog sticks
@@VampireNoblesse are you for real
The comedic timing of "It doesn't look great" and the zoom in on the character model is perfect. Lol
I hereby decree this the best channel on UA-cam!
4:45 You could leave items out in Morrowind but if you dropped too many items on the ground in a house, you'd come back and everything would be put in the various crates, dressers, and other containers in the game. I remember there was one house I would always use as my home and I would essentially make it into a museum of unique artifacts and items I didn't want to sell. After a while, they'd all disappear and I'd find them in all the containers.
Remember seeing this game at a friends house on his Xbox 360. This, Skyrim, and New Vegas were some of the first games i picked up when i got my gaming computer in 2013
Also Morrowind was supposed to include the Mainland as well.
24:45 oow that wish does not aged well at all 😂 starfield came out and it's basically just another fallout, with space combat added into the mix.
1:24 with Athletic/Acrobatics 100 you can see this ingame^^
No lol, it doesn't render the other districts when you're in one of them.
@@OGPatriot03 it was a joke because with very high stats you can pretty much jump as high as the city walls in TES IV
Dude I remember when magic stacking was still a thing and my friend and I boosted a character's Acrobatics to some ridiculous level and jumped. We left the game on for a veeeery long time and the character was still in the air.
These videos are so fascinating, you should do more of these DF! Seeing old games with modern testing methods is cool
While I've never been a big fan of the elder scrolls series. This game's music has some of the most memorable songs I've ever heard in a video game.
BTW that "POM" you guys are talking about isn't POM, but the simpler parallax solution. It goes by several names, Offset mapping, offset parallax mapping, or just parallax mapping.
Just like POM, Relief, and other texture displacement mapping techniques, it displaces the UV coordinated of a texture based on a height map.
But unlike POM or Relief mapping, it doesn't build it's displacement based on tracing rays into the texture.
The regular old parallax mapping was used in several games back in the mid to late 2000's.
I remember Halo 3 through Reach used it on the wheels and tracks on vehicles for the bumps and stuff.
6:30 this is actually not true. Outside of the prison cell, barely any surface in the game actually uses parallax layers. They claimed this to be the case in the 2005 E3 showcase, but this was likely one of those features they axed in the final game for performance reasons, and they probably left the assets in the prison to make a stronger first impression. I've done quite a bit of texture mods for the game so I'm pretty familiar with where it is and isn't being used.
Ironically, Skyrim axed parallax functionality altogether so Oblivion actually has a leg up in the tech there and allows you to natively mod in parallax textures without any third party hacks or workarounds.
This comment is not true. - You can play the game and see it for yourself.
Every time I play I'm always pleasantly surprised with the fact, Texture mods usually leave them out btw. You can see it on the rocks in game, and the base game has high quality normals that mods struggle with.
One place you can see the effect is on the walls in Chorrol which is where I'm currently living in game.
A specific subset of the Chorrol walls and some of the landscape rocks are among the few exceptions, while the overwhelming majority of environmental textures in the game use no parallax. The way it works is that they bake the height map as an alpha layer into the diffuse texture (and then also set a flag on the surface in the metadata of the mesh file). So if you can preview .dds files as thumbnails it's very easy to peruse the folders and see which have alpha and which don't (and this of course also excludes any textures that simply use the alpha for transparency instead).
@@savagedregime8176 As stated they're not on every texture (though HQ normals are) but they are present and you will notice them.
For instances, on the rockets that you'll see very often.
@@OGPatriot03 Yes, but this is specifically in response to the claim that nearly every texture in the game have parallax maps. It was never a question about normals.
My first game on the Xbox 360! I was blown away by the music and atmosphere at the time. Good times!
One of top games which I play now and then.
Music gave me some nam flashbacks with how many incredible hours i put into this game : P
I really enjoy this. Alex and John play very well together and I would love to see more and longer content like this where they just play a game describing stuff and talking about whatever. It's not realistic but I can dream.
This is my favorite DF series right now.
You guys could compare final version with first E3 gameplay trailer that had soft shadows for all geometry and the infamous radiant AI...great video btw, I can't wait for you guys to revisit Far Cry 1 (please do the 64bit comparison and make sure you run it on Win XP for proper water reflections). You can also revisit Splinter Cell 1/PT and address the issues that it has with modern cards (mandatory 6xxx or 7xxx nvidia cards to have proper lights / shadows in those games).
I still remember everything like they are describing it. From the amazing metal reflections on the armors in the early screenshots to the smooth stone bricks inside the tombs... Ah the memories... Now I realize I could have learned a couple of languages in the same time XD
But by inspiring people to learn how to mod their game, they've created new CG artists, game developers, and I'm sure people were even inspired by the music.
I had the 9800m GTS, used to play at 1920x1200 on my laptop. Man did I love that old Gateway P7805u-FX!
i remember going to the local games store asking for something to stress my new budget gaming pc. they gave me this "oblivion". at the Beginning, in the dungeon, I thought the guy from the store knew nothing about games. boy, was I wrong when I walked out and cranked those graphic sliders all the way. damn.
I like how in the intro video all of the characters are drastically the wrong scale. They're the same size as the doors and battlements that are the size of three men in game.
Man. Idk how I haven’t watched these sorta podcast/gameplay vids. Really enjoying hearing two fellow geeks talking game details
12:19 I don't know if I'll leave this place alive! CRAB BATTLE!
a cool thing you could do for this series is reload the games up on a new PC and run some reshade colourgrading and RTGI to see how much you can improve it with minimal tweaking
What an interesting analysis of the technological and graphical aspects of this iconic game. When the game was released, my brothers and I had a very underpowered PC for running it. Later around 2007 I built a PC with 8800 GTS 320 MB and Core 2 Duo E4500. Obviously in light of this video the CPU would have bottlenecked the setup quite a bit especially for this game. However, back then I wouldn't even dare expect very smooth or consistent gameplay. This era of gaming lives forever in my heart, and the HDR bloom effects make them feel even more like beautiful flashes from the past. Xbox 360 and PS3 were also extremely iconic and the console war was very interesting to follow.
Completely agree on sentiments about a leveling world, especially with how broken it was in this game without exploitation or mods; i.e., picking a class with primary/major skills you rarely use, manipulating the difficulty slider, or leveraging the stacking mechanics in spells.
I remember when this came out and I got it for my 360 and I said "these are the best graphics I've ever seen!" and my dad at one point said "In ten years people will be laughing at how this game looks." I was pretty mad, but somehow he was right (in areas.)
The game aged about as bad as Skyrim, but as they pointed out there, there is some real "wow factor" still in this title. I'll never get tired of it.
to be honest, even when skyrim first came out in 2011, it didnt wow me back then the way oblivion did in 2006
Believe it or not the day will come when people think cyberpunk 2077 looks shit. It's just progress.
This game still holds up for me. And it’s crazy how much headroom we have over it right now, and games still manages to run like absolute shit. Even OG Skyrim ran at a locked 60fps on my old GTX460. The fact that we have games still not hitting 60fps on like a 970 is baffling to me.
old card
Oblivion was perfect game to show off next gen capabilities. It was mind blowing game at its time, the only problem on consoles was that crazy grass pop in every few meters, kind of ruined little bit of graphical experience, but otherwise it was insane game and most people got 360 just because of it :)
I specifically remember that pop in too as it drove me crazy lol it was almost impossible to ignore it
I played so much Oblivion (and still do, alllll of the mods) back in the day that I don't think numbers can properly convey how many hours I put into it
20:58 Iirc, there are mods that change the levelling system back to something more traditional rather than world levels as you do, a lot of stuff had to be changed and tweaked to make it work but it was great
Alex is doing exactly what I do every time I get my grubby hands on character creation.
I remember being totally amaze with that cirodyl shot at the begining of the game, man I loved that game to death back in 06, I played it with an nvidia 6600 and an athlon 64 3000+
Just kind of a fun fact guys, you can download a frame rate ulocker mod for Fallout 4 on the Xbox One, thus on the X and it runs - at 4K, near solid 60 many times, and very, very smooth most of the time. It's incredibly surprising. Would love to see you guys maybe look at it or at least just try it yourselves on your own time (john, Alex and team) - as it blew my mind. Evidently the Jaguars weren't as bottlenecking in THAT case as many thought, including myself
Also, you may want to download some 'Fallout 4 performance mods" too, which is just one I DL that reduces some shadow res's and material debris etc. - You guys will have fun, it's incredibly surprising to see.
Again, fantastic video. Seriously.
Never thought Digital Foundry would go back old school! So nice :)
I loved my Q6600 back in the day, was my first self build PC and all the money I saved to get it. :D
Overclocked that thing to 3.3GHz and it was awesome.
It is cool to hear them comment things I did not notice.
The only real change i need from a new Elder Scrolls is some actual impact when hitting enemies. Its ridiculous to me how I can dual wield 2 badass looking maces and swing them like a madman on a thin ass zombie and the only indication of hitting it is a weak sound effect going "kssh" and their life bar dropping while they are still swinging at me like nothing happened.
18:35 this is exactly when I stopped playing! The oblivion gates were so repetitive. Still love the game and I've spent a lot of time playing outside the main story
I used a GeForce 8600 GTS for the longest time. Not even an 8800, but it ran Source and Unreal engine games great. What an excellent generation of cards (not including the 8400 GS, obviously).
I love listening to you guys geek out. I had an overclocked quad q6600 and 2x 8800GTX in SLI at that time and yeah it could run Crysis!
Loved this on XBox 360...I got the special edition with the physical coin extra 😆 the HUD/GUI for items is way better here than Skyrim, agreed
Really enjoying this nostalgic series.
You can increase the distance that foliage renders in the options menu. I remember hating how closely in front of you it draws in but increasing it had a massive impact on framerate back in the day
I would love an Oblivion remaster!!
They need to hire me, I'm already working on re-creating the Imperial City in Blender with Procedural Materials and of course HQ models.
@@strangestecho5088 but he remade skyrim 100s of times
Oh, hell yeah!
I recently built a Windows XP gaming PC mostly with parts I found locally on FB marketplace. It's running a Core 2 Duo E8600 and an 8800GTX. It runs super cool surprisingly and slays any games up to like 2009. I paired it with a 19inch CRT at 85hz refresh rate. It's awesome experiencing all those games I couldn't play when I was younger.
My worst memory of this game was - every time you were wondering around the beautiful landscape with the amazing score playing in the background, there would be some tiny, insignificant creature crawl within your vicinity and this ‘encounter’ would cue the battle music and totally break the moment and disrupt the feels I was just getting from the score.
Dell sold this exact same configuration back in the day of which included the Q6600 CPU & 8800GT GPU as I think it was around $1200 dollar’s, and might’ve included a small monitor for the price !