Интервью с продюсером серии TES Гевином Картером на
TVG.
Особенности:
- The game begins with the Emperor suffering assassination by mysterious forces. The absence of a blood heir on the Dragon Throne loosens the magical bonds that shore up the barriers to the demon realms of Oblivion. As demons begin to swarm the land, you find yourself caught up in the hunt for the assassins, as well as a desperate search for a way to ‘close shut the jaws of Oblivion’. I think it’s fair to say that a game involving a demonic horde invasion qualifies as a dark game. The political landscape of the game world is highly fractured following the emperor’s assassination, and you will have to be cautious of the motives of those who would befriend you. There are even rumours circulating that in this black time, some have turned to the dark art of necromancy, and seek to raise armies of the dead for evil intentions.
- Character creation is similar to Morrowind in that you play through it as part of the game’s opening. We like this approach as it’s far less of an abstraction from the menu-based character creation most games seem to employ. You get a greater sense of how the different game systems work before you commit to a certain class archetype. The mechanics of our character creation system work very similarly to our previous games – you can choose a class or custom-tune your own by picking your major and minor stats. You also further enhance your character by choosing a birth sign, which grants advantages and disadvantages in some cases. We’ve also tied our face creation tools into the process, so you can play around a lot with how your character appears. This includes pulling on the face to create new looks, as well as picking eye colour, and hair colour and length. You can even age your character and change your complexion as well. The possibilities are just about endless.
- Skills have gotten a few tweaks here and there. Mainly we’re focusing on balance. There are now 21 skills total, with seven skills in each category – combat, magic, and stealth – which makes things a little easier to balance. The big addition is skill perks. These are added abilities that you get as you increase in skill. These can be very simple – such as the ability to repair an item all the way back to full health when you hit a certain skill in Armourer – or more involved – such as a chance to disarm your opponent at high weapon skills.
- On the more technical side, our shadow implementation is very impressive. At the highest detail level, the system provides for full soft-shadows on every object, including self-shadowing. It is really a sight to see!
- You will be able to acquire a horse in Oblivion, and ride it around to your heart’s content. Horses grant you a nice speed boost, as well as really help capture that feel of being a knight riding around on horseback. There are several different varieties of horses to get, each with varying stats and look. While in town, you can store your horse in the stables, and pick it up when you’re ready to go. NPCs can use horses as well. If you’re not careful, they may even steal yours!
- Improving the first person combat experience over Morrowind was a major focus of Oblivion from the very beginning. For starters, we’ve removed the ‘to-hit’ roll, meaning you better forget about random dice rolls and move if you don’t want to get smacked down by your enemy’s warhammer. We’ve changed block from a passive, random ability, like in Morrowind, into an active button press. When you block an enemy, they recoil for a moment, giving you an opening for attack. There are also staggers, where if you hit an enemy hard enough, they’ll stumble backwards. You yourself will also recoil and stagger as well, so it adds a bit of strategy into the action.
- We have a lot of control over the system through the use of NPC stats and AI packages. Packages are basically bundles of instructions that the NPC executes under conditions we specify. The dynamic nature of the system allows us to be as specific or generic with those instructions as we want. So we can tell a guy to go shopping at a specific hour and leave it at that. So he will set off toward the shop, and any number of things could happen – he might have a conversation with a passer-by. He might browse the shop items for a while. In rare cases, he might see a friend of his under attack from a monster, and run to help. We can override any of these behaviours whenever we see fit, so it allows for a great deal of variety in their behaviours.
- Richness and diversity is our middle name here at Bethesda. We’re working around the clock to make sure that this game, given its massive size, maintains a good deal of variety through the playing experience. Our landscapes vary from multiple types of forest environments, to mountainous regions, and even windswept fields and a swamp or two for good measure. We’ve got a wide variety of dungeons – ruined forts, ancient Elven ruins, caves, mines, and more – and every town features a unique look. And that’s all without mentioning the entirely alien landscape of the realm of Oblivion itself!
- Q:Thrown weapons have been removed in favour of bows and arrows. Can you explain the reason behind this decision, and does it represent an overall restriction to the fabulous sensation of ‘choice’ usually offered by the Elder Scrolls series?
A: There will always be an uproar whenever any feature that was present in previous games, no matter how small, is removed. But let’s face it - when you talk about ranged combat in an RPG, you’re talking about bows. We really wanted to focus all of our development efforts on bows and get the feel of those as close to perfect as possible. So we took bows and added in Havok physics, so arrows arc through the world and fall off with gravity. And we made arrows stick in enemies’ bodies, as well as in materials like wood, while they will bounce off things like stone. You can even pluck spent arrows out of your enemy’s body. We’ve added in a skill-based bow zoom to help out higher level characters pull off some slick sniper shots. Stealth bow attacks have their own animations. We’re really excited about our bow implementation and think players are going to really enjoy using them.
Ожидание TES IV: Oblivion, Обсуждение новостей
06.12.05 - 07:31 (Ответ #391)
).
