The Geek Crew - Morrowind: Oblivion

b0b GeekCrew Administrator FTP Server Offline The revolution will not be televised. Posts: 7464 Battle Creek, Michigan Gender:	Re: Morrowind: Oblivion Reply #15 - Apr 9^th, 2006 at 4:58pm I'm not sure what the problem was, but it seems to have corrected itself. Level three and nearly done with the mage guild recommendations, w00t! -b0b (...needs to spend some of his character's kizzash.)
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Re: Morrowind: Oblivion
Reply #16 - Apr 10^th, 2006 at 3:28pm

Hey, are any of you planning on buying the premium content plugins that are coming out? The horse armor looks pretty retarded, but I think I'll buy the mage tower. I haven't heard much about the Orrery plugin, but if it's a decent full-length quest, I might pick that up, too.

http://obliviondownloads.com/StoreCatalog_ProductList.aspx?SubCategoryId=1

-b0b
(...needs to get a house.)

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b0b GeekCrew Administrator FTP Server Offline The revolution will not be televised. Posts: 7464 Battle Creek, Michigan Gender:	Re: Morrowind: Oblivion Reply #17 - Apr 10^th, 2006 at 3:45pm Oh, and if you really want the horse armor... http://www.mininova.org/tor/272804 Ignore the 0 seeders, it's actually quite heavily seeded. Considering it's only 3.84MB, it only took 8-10 seconds to download. -b0b (...will have to try it out this afternoon.)
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Re: Morrowind: Oblivion
Reply #18 - Apr 10^th, 2006 at 4:11pm

Here's more information on the Orrery and Mage Tower plugins...

Quote:

The Orrery
The Orrery allows you to help the Mages Guild of Cyrodiil repair the Imperial Orrery, an ancient dwarven machine with mystical properties. Bandits have stolen a shipment of parts destined for the Arcane University; if you can return them, the Orrery will function once more.

Features

* A new, full-featured quest, including dialogue, journals, and rewards
* Access to the Imperial Orrery in the Arcane University, an incredible mechanical marvel
* New powers available for your character based on the phases of the moons

The Wizards Tower
Located high in the Jeral Mountains of Cyrodiil away from prying eyes, this Wizard's Tower, Frostcrag Spire, will become available. Packed with numerous useful enhancements, this structure will prove invaluable to magic-oriented characters.

Features

* A fully detailed tower for you to explore
* A breathtaking view of Cyrodiil from the highest point in the land
* Simple furnishings including a bed for leveling up
* An indoor botanical garden with over 130 specimens... including Oblivion-native herbs!
* Summon Atronach Familiars that obey your commands
* Instant teleports to every Mages Guild in Cyrodiil
* New Spell and Recharge vendor in the Imperial City
* Fully upgrade the furnishings in your lair to suit your needs
* Upgrade to a fully functional Enchanting and Spellmaking station with no need to join Mages Guild
* Upgrade to a laboratory that buffs your Alchemy skill

-b0b
(...is somewhat interested.)

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MediaMaster GeekCrew Administrator FTP Server Offline Holy Xenu! Posts: 1884 Detroit Gender:	Re: Morrowind: Oblivion Reply #19 - Apr 10^th, 2006 at 4:21pm Pretty cool!! The mages guild quests are awesome, i finally finished em lol
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b0b GeekCrew Administrator FTP Server Offline The revolution will not be televised. Posts: 7464 Battle Creek, Michigan Gender:	Re: Morrowind: Oblivion Reply #20 - Apr 10^th, 2006 at 4:42pm So you're the archmage now? YOU SUCK. -b0b (...hasn't even finished with his recommendations yet.)
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Re: Morrowind: Oblivion
Reply #21 - Apr 11^th, 2006 at 11:05am

For the record, the horse armor mod is pretty lame and definitely not worth $2.00. You only get the two types of armor shown, and one - the elf armor - is just freakin' ugly. The steel armor is pretty sweet looking.

I unzipped the files and dropped them into my Oblivion\Data directory. Upon starting the game, it gave me a brief note about letter I'd found entitling me to a free set of horse armor.

If you travel to the stables (the name of which escapes me at the moment) just outside of the Imperial City and talk to the green woman (ogre or orc, I forget which) she'll hook you up with free pony garb in your choice of style. I went with the steel armor, which luckily didn't slow down my already painfully slow paint horse.

This isn't an item. When you buy your armor, it just changes the model for your horse. In other words, when your horse dies, so does your armor. When you buy a new horse, you can buy a new set of armor for the low, low price of 500 Septims.

One thing I can't figure out is whether or not the armor actually keeps your horse safe. When you view your horse, the word (Armored) is appended beneath it. However, I didn't have a chance to get into any fights while mounted, so I'm not real sure if the armor is actually useful or not. If any of you figure this out before I do, be sure to let me know.

-b0b
(...will try to post a screenshot one of these days.)

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Stick Wootzor von Leetenhaxor FTP Server Offline Stick is back Posts: 501 Michgan Gender:	Re: Morrowind: Oblivion Reply #22 - Apr 12^th, 2006 at 10:30am yea post more screenshots! Stick (worthless post)
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b0b GeekCrew Administrator FTP Server Offline The revolution will not be televised. Posts: 7464 Battle Creek, Michigan Gender:	Re: Morrowind: Oblivion Reply #23 - Apr 12^th, 2006 at 10:50am Have you played this yet, Stick? If not, you MUST. If you can't download it, come to my house and get it! Holy crap, you need this game! How about you, Pat. Have you played it yet? Surely you've pirated it for your ubërtron 4000 computer, right? -b0b (...wonders where the %$&$&*@ Wes is.)
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Re: Morrowind: Oblivion
Reply #24 - Apr 12^th, 2006 at 8:22pm

My 32mb radeon 7500 in my laptop probably can't handle it.
I should dip into my 5 digit stock fund for a workstation(gaming) desktop.

Anyone see the new quad SLi with the new 7900gtx's? We're talking 80fps on farcry at 2560x1600 on a 30" display. The tech is rumored to be sponsored by Dell and maybe exclusively bought through them.

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Re: Morrowind: Oblivion
Reply #25 - Apr 13^th, 2006 at 8:58am

Are those the boxes with the $10,000 price tag? I'll take a pass, thank you very much. Their original XPS 600 (with four 7800GTX-512's) series sold just 31 units, which just goes to show that Dell is using these systems to advertise their new gaming systems, not to actually sell them for a profit. I'm guessing Dell probably lost a hefty chunk of change on that line of computers once you consider their R&D costs for hardware, development costs for drivers, licensing fees for exclusive rights to quad SLI from nVidia, and advertising fees.

With Dell buying Alienware, they really want to clean up their image for the high-performance gaming crowd. Dell is seen as a value brand that primarily caters to business clients and "families," with a poor reputation for building high-end gaming rigs. The whole point of these obscenely expensive gaming systems is to rebuild their reputation by selling the biggest, baddest gaming system on the block (Falcon Northwest not withstanding). They've gotten a ridiculous amount of free advertising and have been featured on virtually every gaming magazine cover, hardware website, PC related TV show, and geek gamer blog on the face of the planet. That is where the payoff comes from.

-b0b
(...would eat an entire salad to get one of those rigs.)

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Re: Morrowind: Oblivion
Reply #26 - Apr 13^th, 2006 at 9:32am

So yesterday I was playing Oblivion, and I realized I had probably put 15-20 hours into the game, yet I was still level 3. That struck me as rather funny, considering I know other people that are in the high 20's level-wise, yet I know they haven't put 75-100 hours into the game.

So, I started digging around on the Interweb, trying to figure out just how the level system works, since the game didn't discuss the issue at all during character-creation, and I didn't play Morrowind enough to figure out how that system worked, either.

Leveling is based on your seven major attributes, which are automatically picked for you if you choose a pre-made class. I had chosen Archer, but I only ever used 3 of my 7 major attributes, which was making level progression painfully slow. I never use Armorer, Blade, Blunt or Hand-to-Hand so they were effectively preventing me from leveling without spending a ridiculous amount of time on Sneak and Marksman. I don't get hit very often since I can do 3x damage with archery by sneaking, so even Light Armor wasn't going to help me much unless I purposely allowed myself to get hit, which destroys the suspension of disbelief in my opinion.

Since I had pretty much FUBAR'ed my character and would never be able to progress without spending a ridiculous amount of time on Sneak and Marksman, I decided to change my class. After putting so many hours into the character already (especially into alchemy), I decided to change his class "on the fly" to replace the unused attributes with some that might actually see some use.

I tried using ShowClassMenu from the console prompt, but it reset all of my skills, which was totally unacceptable. I already had alchemy up to 76 and can see all four item attributes, so having it reset to 25 and redoing hours of alchemy work all over again was definitely not an option. So, I went back to the Webtron and did some additional searching, where I found this mod...

http://www.tessource.net/files/file.php?id=2072

Of course, when I downloaded the mod last night, it didn't have the pretty pictures, so I had to find the teeny-tiny little amulet on my own with only the poorly-written instructions that were bundled with the mod to help me. The mod creates an amulet that you can equip to change your race, class, and birthsign. When you change your class with it, though, it keeps your skills at their existing levels. It wipes any progression you've made through your current skill level and character level, but that's not a huge issue. I made a custom class focused on stealth that I called "Arrow Mage" and went with the following attributes...

Marksman
Sneak
Security
Light Armor
Restoration
Destruction
Alchemy

Since my alchemy skill is already up to 78 or so, I won't have to worry about that artificially inflating my level and screwing up my character.

All in all, I think this will let me get some levels under my belt much more quickly than I have over the past week, so I can start getting better equipment. Otherwise, I'd be a master at alchemy and still using novice equipment, or an expert at archery and still using a steel bow. Lame!

-b0b
(...wishes the game would've describe the leveling system during initial class selection.)

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Re: Morrowind: Oblivion
Reply #27 - Apr 13^th, 2006 at 10:01am

By the way, if you have an Audigy sound card and are experiencing occassional lockups, sound corruption or Oblivion randomly crashes to the desktop, you might try a little tweak I found. Search your computer for DXDiag.exe, run it, go under the sound tab, and turn Sound Acceleration back a notch.

I only played for a couple hours last night after making the change, but Oblivion ran much smoother and I didn't experience any program faults.

-b0b
(...just thought he'd throw that in.)

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Re: Morrowind: Oblivion
Reply #28 - Apr 21^st, 2006 at 10:46am

The Orrery mod came out Tuesday. I didn't have a chance to play this week, so I just downloaded it this morning. I'll try to play either tonight or tomorrow and let you know if it is worthwhile.

http://www.mininova.org/tor/285901

If any of you find a real review for it online, let me know.

-b0b
(...thinks it'll be much better than stupid horse armor.)

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