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[jop12]

QUOTE

You Asked, Todd Answered
Before heading off to Washington D.C., I asked Xbox gamers at Xbox365.com for their questions about Oblivion and Bethesda. Oblivion's Executive Producer, Todd Howard, answered. By the way guys, he was very impressed with your questions.

cigaretsNcoffee: What types of punishments can we look forward to when breaking laws in Oblivion?

Todd: All the guards come and if you have the money to pay your fine you don't have to go to jail. They will take any of your stolen items. We're pretty mean when you get caught. But you can break out of jail. You can steal keys from a guard, or if you had a lock pick when you got arrested you can use that.

Forsaken77: Do you see future RPGs lacking in the serious length department in the upcoming generation of games? Previously most RPGs ran 50-60 hours, but lately the good ones have ended on a shorter note. And why is that?

Todd: Length is coming down in all genres due to development time. RPGs are on the long end, and we want every hour to be good. The main Oblivion quest should take 20-25 hours. If you play all the quests it's like 200+ hours.

Vieri: Are you planning on adding any new races to the game that will be playable and not just NPCs?

Todd: No. There are the 10 classic Elder Scrolls races.

Darkmaster09: Any chance we will be able to buy our own homes in the game? I mean in Morrowind you can kill a shop owner or a home owner and then it's basically yours, but will there be a 'legal,' more official way to do this in this go round?

Todd: Yes, there are lots of houses to buy and decorate. You can even buy furniture.

Luketh: I personally felt that the combat was the weakest part of the third Elder Scrolls game. What are you doing, if anything, to improve the combat for Oblivion?

Todd: It's been completely re-done. Blocking is under your control. There are special moves. As your character gets better, you get new moves for your weapon. We spent a long time on that. When we started the game, we wanted to redo the combat and A.I.



Erin Losi, PR and Marketing Master.

CANTINUELO: Do you think that Oblivion will fit on a DVD-9 or do you plan on having it on more than one DVD and then installing it on an Xbox 360 Hard Drive?

Todd: It'll be one DVD. There are 25 hours of recorded voice.

Mister K: A lot of reports are saying the multi-core/multi-thread structure will be useless for the next two years, as developers still don't have the resources to use that structure. For Oblivion, are you running on a single core or are you already including some multithread processing?

"Our goal with Xbox 360 is to get all three
cores talking to each other as fast as possible."
—Executive Producer Todd Howard


Todd: We use all three cores. It's different and scary. You can get a lot of power out of that thing, but the profiler's always telling you there's more power available. The goal is to get all three cores talking to each other as fast as possible.

American Psycho: Will there still be challenging enemies to face after you've reached a pretty high level?

Todd: Absolutely. We level most of our enemies. If you're thirtieth level, you'll run into a thirtieth level enemy. The treasure also levels like in Diablo and Diablo 2.

[cage]TF: Is there any Xbox Live® functionality? If so, what?

Todd: Xbox Live-aware and Marketplace. We're going to do a lot of Marketplace stuff. If not on day one, very soon. We're good at this … we've done plug-ins with Morrowind.

TokyoFunk: Is the A.I. going to react to their defeats or wins against you? For instance, if I start to defeat a knight or fighter and he feels he can't win, will he run or beg for mercy?

Todd: Yes. They will also ask you to yield, or you can yield to them.

TokyoFunk: I've seen the physics being put to use in the trailer; are there a lot of instances where physics can aid me?

Todd: Yes, we use physics a lot. In traps, in dungeons and in all the items. This helps when you're a thief or use telekinesis magic. It creates a more believable world.

[jop12]

Well, if you read on, it says that the goal is to try and get the three cores to talk to eachother rapidly, and im sure, since this is the new and therefore complex technology to them, they probably were limited with knowledge and experience in achieving this goal to its upmost extent.

Yeah im obviosly    so ill  

lol this is  funny, but one of the side effects of some sleeping pills I found in my cabinet is    and fear, and tremours.  I feel 9 years old all over again after taking them.

[ILLusions0fGrander]

well.. i honestly cant wait to smash the door to my local retailer open the day this is released... if no copies left, someones getting lynched... ill of course put the 63 bucks on their corpse.

[Deftech]

do we know the real arrival date yet?

is this a "ship on monday, arrive in stores Tuesday" ?

or a "ship on tuesday, arrive in stores on Wednesday" like Recon?

[esc1]

Who wants to buy furniture?  

Hell leave that stuff to the sims.  

[Deftech]

QUOTE(pennywisdom @ Mar 14 2006, 02:26 AM)

hard to say. over on the elderscrolls forum, some guy is saying that best buy has it already.

check it out: http://www.elderscro...howtopic=263119

everyone is speculating that we may be able to pick it up in some stores on the 14th... which is today.

I call BS on that one.

I thought bethesda confirmed it would ship the week of the 20th?

if it was out in stores, every xbox site on the net would have posted it, yesterday  

[tonloc79]

QUOTE(pennywisdom @ Mar 14 2006, 08:26 AM)

hard to say. over on the elderscrolls forum, some guy is saying that best buy has it already.

check it out: http://www.elderscro...howtopic=263119

everyone is speculating that we may be able to pick it up in some stores on the 14th... which is today.

Here we go again? The game ships out to retailers on the 20th and we the consumers will be able to purchase it on the 21st. Please stop with the BS. We just went through this with GRAW.

[twistedsymphony]

QUOTE(pennywisdom @ Mar 14 2006, 02:26 AM)

hard to say. over on the elderscrolls forum, some guy is saying that best buy has it already.

check it out: http://www.elderscro...howtopic=263119

everyone is speculating that we may be able to pick it up in some stores on the 14th... which is today.

Total BS, I pre-order from BestBuy.com and the last email I got (a week or two ago) said I would recieve it on the 21st.

I've yet to get my "item has shipped" notification.

[lowendfrequency]

Yeah EBGames said that I could pick up my copy the 21st.  When I asked if there would be a midnight launch they straaight up laughed at me.  I was a little offended.

[KAGE360]

good read.  i dont know why so many people will ask them about how much of the CPU they are using but no one asks about how much of the GPU they are using.  in the podcast interview, they explained of how this game is far more GPU hungry the CPU.

we all know that writing for multi-core architecture is new and complex but im curious about how is it working on the new architecture of the GPU.  does it take a different kind of coding to specifically take advantage of the unified shaders or does normal shader code work as good?  with all the talk before launch of the benefits of unified shaders, it would be nice to hear what the developers actually think of it.

[brooksie48]

QUOTE(jop12 @ Mar 13 2006, 11:12 PM)

lol this is  funny, but one of the side effects of some sleeping pills I found in my cabinet is    and fear, and tremours.  I feel 9 years old all over again after taking them.

I took some on a trip to hawaii and I couldn't stop twitching. I will never take any again.

[twistedsymphony]

QUOTE(unclepauly @ Mar 14 2006, 12:04 AM)

hmmm....they use all three cores yet there are still framerate issues. He did say the profiler tells them more power is available though. Interesting....I wonder if devs are using that 10mb edram also. It's supposed to give free aa I've heard.

USING the things the 360 offers and UTILIZING them to their maximum potential are two completely different things.

Most Xbox 360 games DO use all 3 cores and the DO use all of the GPU and edram etc... The problem is they don't know how to best UTILIZE them yet. For instance I can have 100 things I need calculated and cut it up into 3 sections and send each section to a different core, that would use all three cores but unless I looked at what I was sending it and decided exactly which things worked well on the same core with which other things I wont be squeezing all the power out of it. Similarly: when you pack your luggage to go on a trip you could fill your luggage complete, but that doesn't mean you couldn't put more in there. If you stop and plan out how you're going to pack, and which things go where, and how you fold your clothes you can fit  A LOT more in there. The same way developers can use all 3 core but if they spend more time thinking about what to put where they can get more done with them.