Apr 30, 2008
Oblivion Spells Won’t Help You
by windshell
You’re wandering through the world of Oblivion, armed with enough potions and scrolls. Your Magicka is full, Health restored, Speed and Strength over the top, but suddenly you hit the wall where Oblivion spells cannot help you anymore.
That wall is not a monster or stronger enemy, yet simple gameplay problems like stone blocks that cause you stumble again and again.
Repeated crashes, graphics issues and problems with sound can turn one wonderful gaming afternoon into nightmare and well of frustration.
However player’s frustration soon becomes desperation when players will logically turn to official explanation and ask for support.
Players will receive a lot of useful explanations from the staff as well as inevitable suggestion that they should buy new pieces of hardware in order to play Oblivion smoothly.
General conclusion is that just buying a game is not enough to play it. You’ll need a new PC.
However, there are a couple of examples from official Game Wiki page for technical issues.
As a postulate on the top stands General Crash Advice. It says that the nature of Oblivion is such that it will crash occasionally, no matter what you do. Still, some ways to minimize stability issues do exist, say the folks from the tech support.
“The first way is to give it more system resources by freeing up existing system resources and/or upgrading your computer hardware. Freeing up existing resources means closing out of programs such as Anti-Virus scanners, Instant Messengers, Internet Browsers, and Peer-to-Peer software before running the game. Upgrading your computer will require knowledge and you to pick out a new hardware.”
That’s a bit hypocritical, don’t you think
It’s possible to ‘kill’ all background processes to prevent crashing, like through the tweaking Oblivion.ini for less detail and extras.
You’ll have to save the game positions a lot to avoid frustration and repeating playing same parts endlessly due to crashes.
Besides crashing, there are still potential problems with graphics and sound during the gameplay.
Graphics Problems
The most common problem is White screen with GUI when Starting Oblivion.That probably means that your graphics card does not support pixel shaders 2.0.
Solution for the problem
There are two different solutions; the cheaper of the two is to download Oldblivion, which will allow you to play on some Pixel shader 1.x cards.
The other solution is to buy a new video card.
Ok, you decided to buy new video card. But you still have problem. This time with Black Screen.
Folks from the Tech Staff say that this problem appears mostly on computers running Nvidia's Geforce 7xxx and 8xxx series video cards (you bought 8800).
Now, according to their explanation you were naughty and you overclocked your video card.
WTF? I just bought it and place it in the slot. – Your response.
Well Staff say that you should change the video card's driver because it seems to fix this problem on most computers. Additionally, you may disable the HDR feature and AGP fast writes on AGP-based video cards, which may fix this glitch as well. Setting "int shadows" to 0 solve this problem when using HDR (tested on a GeForce 8800 GTX overclocked from PNY).
Or more simple, you should hit the tilde key (~) to bring up the console. Type CAL and hit enter. Hit the tilde key again. Resets the game's graphics and brings the game screen back.
If anything of above helped, buy a new card.
Also, it seems that Geforce FX cards have a problem with slow performance in Oblivion. This is because Oblivion uses 2.0 shaders for almost all its graphics and Geforce FX series has a very bad implementation of the 2.0 shader and as a result Oblivion will not run at any acceptable speed.
Solution 1
You may try to edit the Oblivion INI Settings and turning off specular, diffuse and ambient lighting, which will solve almost all the performance issues resulting from the slow shaders.
Solution 2
Use a graphics card not from the FX series, i.e. buy a new card.
Sound Problems
Sound problems appear in the three common forms: When there’s no music in the game, when game freezes on music track change or where you receive no greeting from NPCs.
Staff recommends reinstallation of the game, or changing drivers or codecs, or simply buying a new sound card.
They say:
“Oblivion can be extremely picky about sound processing on both high end sound cards and low end on board sound. In some cases, the only solution may be to buy a new sound card. This can be especially annoying on laptops where buying a new sound card is not an option, so the only workaround that exists is to turn on subtitles. The first step in trouble shooting any sound problem is to update your sound card's drivers (If you card was made by Creative, this can be done here). If that fails to solve the problem, you may need a new sound card.”
Oh, good to know about all issues, now after I bought a game.
However, as you can see. No matter how much Magicka do you have or Restoration potions and magic Scrolls, there are some problem that cannot be solved so simply, with simple use of Divine Intervention.
In my humble opinion, this is what is called hypocrisy. I understand the will for improvement, for making each game better than its predecessor. But, in most cases that will is not justified, because interests of players are not taken into consideration.
Basically, improvement means that every new game will require new piece of hardware, radical changes, such as tweaks and overclocks, even change of your PC.
So what if you bought your PC three months ago and if your new graphics card is only two weeks old. What that means if you cannot play your favourite new game?
You invested a bag of bucks, but that’s obviously not enough.
Games are no longer being made for gamers.
That’s a sad but true fact.
*Article inspired by simple afternoon gaming frustration
Links
|
|
|
|
ARTICLE RATING
[ 4 voters ]
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
