Oblivion Redux

Well, it looks like somebody in the GA forums (Hi!) picked up my Oblivion posting and ran it as a discussion topic. Which is okay by itself, but instead of discussing the points that I made in my opinion, the thread mostly degenerated into a discussion about my motives for posting what I posted in the first place. After all I work for a gaming company that’s creating what seems to be a fantasy title!

Guys, I understand the need for internet drama as much as the next person. I’ve been following and enjoying it for the better part of my internet career. But please – if you want to report on this story, please do it without prejudice. In which case it would go something like this (Warning, attack of the commas!):

Matthias Worch, who happens to work for a game company, today, in his private blog, posted an opinion of the PC version of Oblivion, a game that he admittedly only played for an hour and that several of his friends and former coworkers at Bethesda contributed artwork to.

Because really, that’s all I was trying to do, and it’s what I have been doing for the last 10 years. By turning this into a public debate with an implied undercurrent of “console war” you’re now forcing me to make the disclaimer that this is a private blog and that the opinions offered here in no way represents the opinion of my employer, Factor 5. You’re also putting me in the difficult position of not being able to speak my mind in the future – even though this page here still amounts to a private blog that is mostly read by family and friends.

As I mentioned in the last post, I have great respect for Bethesda. My old company Legend was in the same geographical area and several of my friends work in the art department over there. I have played all games in the Elder Scrolls series religiously. As I said earlier, I also expect to play Oblivion religiously once I’ve had a chance to really get into it and get past the (mostly cosmetic) initial dislikes. All my friends have been sucked in!
But I did feel that I made valid, if subjective, observations of the first hour of gameplay (in which I bested the initial dungeon and ran around the world and city a bit). Please feel free to agree or disagree with them, that’s what I have my (rarely used) comments thingie for. But when doing so please do it without insinuating ulterior motives on my part. I was not comparing Oblivion to anything but its own predecessor, and comparisons to other games (especially the ones my company works on) are unfair and very much not in the intention of this blogger.

BTW, I liked this reply: “That guy can think whatever the heck he wants. I could not care less. *goes back to playing Oblivion*” Exactly!

Now Playing: Oblivion

This is going to be a negative post about Oblivion, and I expect that precisely 99.9% of my readers will disagree with me on this one. So before you read any further I need you to understand just how much I want to like Oblivion. I loved Morrowind (and I played Arena and Daggerfall extensively back in the days, too!), I’ve been looking forward to Oblivion for a long time.

With that out of the way, and with the express understanding that this is not a dig at Bethesda, I have to say that I am seriously under whelmed by Oblivion’s first hour of gameplay. The 3D just does not look all that good, the UI feels crippled to account for the Xbox version and the game runs like ass on my GeForce 6800 (at least as soon as a character appears on screen). In 800×600, I might add, with video settings that the game auto-detected itself.

I could deal with bad framerate any day if I felt that I was playing something seriously impressive. Unfortunately the overall presentation just leaves me unimpressed. The main menu, UI and loading screens look unfinished and stylistically bad – as if somebody was doing a bad impression of the “old parchment” look that the last game used. It’s trying to be medieval classy but bright and friendly at the same time, and that just ain’t working for me. (Then there’s UI issues like the fact that I can’t ESCape out of menues or right-click the inventory away, but that’s just a side note.) Textures are blurry even at the High setting with no detail textures, the faces look artificial and disproportionate. The terrain, supposedly one of Oblivion’s major selling points, doesn’t look very good even with details maxed out. Anything more than a kilometer away is a huge, blurry texture mess. Never mind that I had to go through six or seven dungeon levels just to get to the surface…

A lot of criticism to level against such a popular game, I know. I just felt like sharing my first and honest impressions. Of course I’ll keep playing, and I still expect to love the game as much as the last one. But I seem to have been way too hyped up about this game so that the first playing session inevitably led to a letdown.

GDC Slides?

I’ve received a few requests for the GDC 06 lecture slides, and as much as I’d like to do that – the truth is that there just isn’t that much to release! The Powerpoint itself was only about 10 pages, the rest was life program demos in XSI, similar to what I did in 05. Last year I compensated by recording videos of what I did, but that won’t be possible this year. I’ll look into what can be arranged, but in the end the demo was one of those unfortunate “had to be there” affairs, I’m afraid. Sorry!

GDC 2006

Well, that was an interesting GDC for sure. Take one part San Jose, one part company demo/deadline, two parts moving, and mix it with a healthy dose of GDC lecture. Bake it for a week and you have this year’s crazy schedule.

We’d been working on an internal Lair deadline that dragged into the wee hours of the GDC week, so when I arrived in San Jose on Wednesday morning I’d only had 8 hours of sleep for the last three days. Oh, and my talk – the talk that I had started mid-January to avoid any GDC stress – that talk wasn’t finished yet. I spent most of Wednesday in my hotel room – sleeping, working on the lecture and enjoying Victoria’s company, who had come down for emotional support.

The lecture was on Thursday morning, and it went over really well. The talk description hadn’t made it into the conference schedule (not even the white sheet addendum they add to the bags!) and I was worried that not many people would come. I mean, would you get to the show at 9 in the morning for something you didn’t even know existed? But surprisingly I had a full house and people had to be turned away at the door. Okay, it was a small room. But it’s still a nice feeling to have. I showed two Lair demos on my PS3 devkit and looked at various production assets in detail, fielded questions and even managed to finish on time (that’s a first for me!). From what I hear the feedback has been very positive, and Softimage seemed to be happy with it, as well.
After the talk Victoria and I drove back to Sonoma to move in some of her stuff because Vicky’s dad had come down to bring/hook up the washer and dryer. I unloaded some boxes, stopped by my (soon to be old) apartment to take care of the birds and drove back to San Jose for some…uhm, sophisticated GDC partying. Level 99 was fun, got to talk to some interesting people and got to catch up with my old boss, Bob Bates. Me and a bunch of F5 people tried to go to Bioware/Pandemic’s event next, but apparently the line to get in went around the corner of the building, and that didn’t seem to be worth it. We went straight to the GDC suite instead for more beer and socializing. I think I got back to my hotel room around 4 in the morning. Details are sketchy

On Friday I got up early to catch (most of) Clint Hocking’s talk (after all I’d gotten used to the 4 hour sleep thing), quickly walked the show floor to meet up with some (but not all) vendors I wanted to visit, and left San Jose early to drive back to Sonoma. More moving. We’ve started with my apartment today. I’ll hopefully have some pictures of the new house soon!

All in all not a bad GDC, but I’ll be damned if this wasn’t some of the most stressful time of my life. I met my share of cool people and got to see some cool stuff, but only managed to attend two sessions. Next year will have to be a lot less stressful again!

*YAWN*

Geez, what a week. Victoria and I are moving together and have to start packing our stuff (I already missed the weekend I wanted to move my furniture), I’m busy with a company deadline, and I have to finish my GDC talk. Not a lot of sleep in the last few days, I think I average 4 hours per night It’ll soon all be over, though, and I’ll try to hit a few parties in San Jose. I’ll probably arrive Wednesday morning and leave Friday night. Victoria will join me for Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

Updates?

I apologize for the recent lack of updates. I’m preparing for GDC, working a lot on our game and preparing for a move at the end of the month. More on all of that later.

GDC Talk

Softimage have published their GDC 2006 plans, among them the Visual Arts talk by yours truly:

FrankenDragon Flies Again! Creating Playstation 3 Art for Lair
Special Guest: Factor 5.

Location: Room C4
Time: 09:00-10:00AM
Presenter: Matthias Worch

A big part of the industry now knows what it means to create “next-generation content”, but many lessons that come with the new workflow are still learned the hard way. In this presentation, Matthias Worch from Factor 5 looks at the highly detailed creatures and environments of Lair, Factor 5′s upcoming Playstation 3 title, and how Factor 5 used SOFTIMAGE|XSI v.5.0 to solve various problems that cropped up during development.

About Factor 5:
Based in San Rafael, California, originally founded in Germany in 1987 and privately held, Factor 5 LLC is a leading developer of interactive entertainment software and technology for a variety of console and computer platforms. Among the company’s many successful titles is the multi-million selling Star Wars®: Rogue Squadron™ line of games for LucasArts Entertainment Company and the classic Turrican® series.
With the imminent arrival of the next generation of console and handheld technology Factor 5 has multiple game and technology projects in production for major console manufacturers.

For more information, visit www.factor5.com

Hope to see you there. The GDC page should be updated soon, as well.