Sorry your browser is not supported!

So getting hyped up for skyrim i decided to beat shivering isles expansion which i never got around to but there seemes to be a weird problem with it.

I know there are quite a few TES fans here so i am betting someone here is familiar with it.

Shivering isles is divided into 2 halves, "Mania" and "Dementia" Now Dementia has no problem rinning at like 100fps especially on my rig which (untill now) i was convinced it can run anything without lag. but whenever i enter the Mania territory of the shivering isles it just slows down to a crawl, Even with ALL SETTINGS AT MAX LOW! theres gotta be something whrong here. My mashine is a quadcore phenom2 3.4ghz black edition, 8 gb of DDR3 ram, an Asus crosshair 3 motherboard latest revision a 620 W corsair PSU, and a radeon 5870 1gb. There is no overheating at all, my case has a lot of industrial grade case fans that will chop your fingers off (hacked off a small chunk of flesh out of my finger once) the heatsinks and the graphics card are cool to the toch when running lthe game. so there has to be some weird problem with the game.

I am seraching this on google now, havent found anything yet, but i thought maybe someone here might help, wont hurt to ask. I have other videocards which are more than enough to run this game but i dont feel like reinstalling the GPU, plus i have a hunch that GPU and the drivers have nothing to do with this problem.

so yeah

I haven't experienced this personally, but I play with the unofficial patches (which you can get from here). Maybe give them a shot and see if it helps.

Yes definatley will. Because i found out that there might be some weird scaling problem or something, like a bug where it makes duplicates of all the models maybe, There was a thing like this in morrowind back in the day, Ill try it out thank.


[EDIT!]
Awesome Benjamin it worked! Thanks man, it took me a while to try to remember my old fileplanet account (which didnt work for some reason, i havent used fileplanet account in at least 2 years) i tried creating a new account (getting prepared for all those skyrom mods ) which i still couldnt use because the gamespy system just refused to recognise me and the caphas for some reason just didnt repond no matter how many times or how correctly i typed it. Finally i realised that unlike in the old days, you can now download the stuff without having an account. got the unofficial patch and all of shivering isles are now running real smooth on full settings at an over 9000 FPS (lol)

so um, as a desperate attempt to keep this thread open ahem... ITS PAGAN RANT TIME EVERYBODY!

i would love to say that shivering isles is a totally kickass expantion (can you believe it that i never got around to play it untill now!

I reinstalled Oblivion a week ago, first i beat all the faction quests, beat a lot of sidequests, grinded a lot getting my guy to lvl 60 all major skills maxed out at 100 (some even more trough enchanted objects).

after i joined the arcane univercity, i waisted all my money on powerful spells, but there is one kickass thing i made too!

I crated an array of a bunch of fortify intellegence spells each next one more powerful than the other, It got my Magika up to 3000 for like 10 seconds, so if i am fast enough and dont get hit, while powering up my intellegence, i can unleash 1 or 2 incredibly powerful spells which do like 500 damage (over a period of a few seconds of course as maximum damage you cam make is 100 exept for a few quest scripted spells that do 200 damage which i couldnt cast without this powerup anyway)

Then i beat the entire oblivion main quest in 1 sitting (about a day at the computer) and get this!, i defeated [spoiler alert]

Just to add in a weird little thing, the first time i played oblivion, I hated Martin septum, He annoyed the hell out of me (and martin hated me back for me constantly hurting him) But this time (my second time i beat oblivion main quest) Idk maybe i grew up a little, but i actually got attached to him and [spoiler alert]

then it took me a few hours to beat knights of the 9 (quite a dissapointing questline i expected better and yes i havent even tried knights of the 9 untill yesturday).

anyway, i went on to the shivering isles and just WOW, its like a whole new game! I was getting bored with Cyrodils generic grassy foresty happy classical medeval europe setting where everything just looks the same

what i loved about morowind dungeons is even if they were also kindof generic and simple the simplicity of it gave tons of room for customization, the layouts werent too complicated, some dungeons were long and complicated, some were more simple and straight forward some had water, others had lava, stuff like crystals, wooden bridges, elements of dadric/ dwemer ruins or even pieces of buried dunmer strongholds, different lighting in each dungeon, you can tell that morowind was handcrafted and you can almost tell which dungeon youre in by seeing the little details as above. You can definatley tell morrowind was hadcrafted, while Cyrodil was procedirually generated based on some parameters which randomised stuff as it saw fit creating a boaring monotonus atmosphere. all caves had a greenish glow to them and all caves were detailed enough to easily notice same pipeces of the cave repeated all over again and the layouts of most caves/ dungeons was pretty much the same, usually 3 levels and all somewhat complex but unlike morrowind, these were just no fun to explore since almost every time you know what lies ahead... more duplicate caves as the last 50 you explored. There were a few pretty uniqe ones tho but too few of those.

Anyway The shivering Isles! I can tell it has been handcrafted and not procedurally generated (if i am wrong that would be quite a surprise to know that beth got so good at random procedural generation thing). The shivering isles are FRIGGING BEAUTIFUL!
One of my few dissapointments is the golden saints looked a lot cooler in morrowind in my opinion, they werent completley golden (had some green in them if i remember correctly) Shivering Isles golden saints looked a bit intimidating but pretty ugly compared to morrowinds version. The dark seducers looked really badass tho my only complaint is they could have made their faces look prettier well the facegen thing was pretty bad for oblivion anyway (read some interview with Beths artists and they admit that they dint like the oblivions facegen, they dubbed "generate random face button" - the "ugly button" lol) They said they did a lot of tweaking up on the facegen for skyrim and from what i have seen, skyrims faces dont look like any random button was used and everyone was facecrafted, and they tweaked each race for more accurate racial facial features. Dunmer actually look more similar to morrowinds version which is scary and intimidating (i love that! dunmer is my favorite race, the only reason i like playing as altmer is better magic abilities) Even the Bosmer actually look badass in skyrim



(i am guessing Beth faced the reality that they will eventually need to make a Valenwood elder scrolls game and start getting serios about wood elves instead of making them the joke of the the whole TES series like fargoth, ganeor, the adoring fan, and other numerous bosmer charecters that were obviosly either put there as a joke, or made to suffer in the game because i think beth dosent like woodelves lol)

anyway, i hope dunmer in skyrim will have similar griddy/scary voices as they did in morrowind (as opposed to high class snooty aristocratic british voiced dark elves they had in oblivion)

So the shivering isles just amazed me beyond belief and its just so bizzare in an awesome way (or awesome in a bizzare sort of way hmm?)

I was a big fan of Sheogorath since Morrowind (the dadric statues of sheogorath looked cool in morrowind), but actually meeting him in shivering isles just blew me away!. This charecter is awesome I literally LOLED and sometimes even ROFLED while talking to him. quote: I AM SO HAPPY TO SEE YOU I CAN JUST... RIP OUT YOUR INTESTINCE AND STRANCLE YOU WITH THEM! That had me lauging for 10 minutes i had to pause the game. a very bright charecter and unlike the common assumptions that dedra princes are evil (some princes are evil yes) Sheogorath is actually a good guy! very insame but a good guy nevertheless, What really surprised me is he actually cares a lot about wellbeing of his citizens and is even concerned about their "fragile mental state of being" (since most of his citizens are insane) Its really hard to call him evil. And actually taming the normally chaotic dedra beings like golden saints to be servants (or act as servants) of mortal humans (most of who are insane or screwed up in one way or another) I have a lot of respect for Sheogorath, He is now my #1 favorite dedra prince! (i also have a friend who has a very similar bizzare personality as Sheogorath)

In morowind when i came across dadric shriens of sheogorath, the statues of sheogorath looked a bit too modern for the setting, but maybe its just me but here take a look



just the way he is dressed he looks kinda like he belongs in the late 1800s of our time. So i always thought seogorath would be somewhat a bit modern on technology, Maybe he would utilise some dwemer steam tech, that would be really cool, but they decided to make him more suitable for the setting, Well I still love this guy the way he is.

To sum up, in my personal opinion, i think Beth has a little pattern of making something really good, then getting their hands on some new technology but making something not quite as good, then learning from their mistakes making something again, but this time making it actually awesome like it was supposed to.

for example. The arena was kinda crappy, they then heavily modified the arena engine and made Daggerfall which was really kickass for the time and i am sure was a big hit for them (i was just a poor kid in 1996 who only thought computers existed in scifi movies) bud reading some game developer interviews, stuff like stalker and fallout 1/2 (might be wrong about fallout tho) were inspired by daggerfall. So after daggerfall, they went on with elder scrolls Adventures series which was pretty good and TES redguard was one of the first games to use real 3D (not the pseudo 3d of daggerfall) They were ok but thats not what the fans expected. then they went back to what they were good at and made morrowind (which is still getting more mods than oblivion to this day!)

btw: a fun fact- The original morrowind engine with all its mods and third party engine addons, third party scripting engines and third party engine modification not to mention running some heavily scripted and modified mods became a horrible frankenstien-like engine which is hardly stable. and somehow it still manages to run in a heavily modded state ignoring the hundreds of error messages during the loading sequence! This is why i have more respect for morrowind fan community than oblivions. They managed to frankenstile the almost 10yo MW engine to be capable of running oblivion quality graphics (some claim it even looks better than oblivion). But because they no longer can support the horribly deformed/unstable MW engine the modding community took up (as far as i know) 2 projects which are rewriting MW engine from scratch in open sourse with tons more engine/graphics and modding flexibilty than the original MW engine that supports modern graphics capabilities and is more compatible with most existing MW mods (exept for those that involve modified scripting and third party modifications which will be obsolete with the new engine! I dont think i know of any other 10yo game whose community was so dedicated they decided to rebuild the engine from scratch (there is even an engine rewrite project for daggerfall in open GL, i also know of an older (now abandoned) daggerfall engine rewrite project where they tried rewriting daggerfall in DARK BASIC!)

anyway i salute MW modding community for their heroic efforts

i used to be part of this community, made like 2 mods and published them. They were house mods.

Morrowind was a frigging masterpiece! that game changed my life made me into a computer addict i am! Then they got their hands on the new "next gen graphics engine" and while it was a big sales hit for them and was more popular than morrowind, To me, oblivion was kindof a dissapointment the only things i really liked is the graphics, interesting uniqe side quests and the combat, Almost everything else about oblivion sucked for me. Then i saw Beth get gradually better with their gamebyro engine with fallout 3 games, NPCs got less ugly, better quests, Better atmosphere, Less prosedural random generation, more uniqe and atmospheric environments and stuff. and once again, after what i consider kinda bad TESIV Oblivion, Beth learned from their mistakes trough trial and error and is about to come out with SKYRIM! which i am incredibly exited about! I have not been so exited about any game ever!, the closes was Oblivion, i was really exited for that, but i also had that bad feeling like Oblivion just wont be as good. But unlike Oblivion, I have very high expectations for Skyrim, i am more exited about Skyrim than i ever was about oblivion or any game i was ever exited about!

This rant is a testament to how exited i am about Skyrim!

I hope you are all exited about it too!

and i should change my nick from PAGAN to "Epic Rant-Man" or something (that was a joke mods, dont change my nick to Epic Rant-Man I wanna leave it as PAGAN!

god i am so exited about skyrim! even more than this guy:



But i can relate tho him too, All my clan friends will hate me after i drop out of "World of Tanks" to play Skyrim for the rest of the winter. Especially since i am among the very few clan members who actually has a decent lvl 8 tank, and we just got our first little victories in clan warfare which were impossible without my T-29... God i put so much money into the WoT premium account, seems like a waste after i start playing Skyrim!

Yes, this was also the main reason I lost interest in the game after completing shivering isles. There was just nothing to do left I didn't already see... I believe that they really shot themselves in the foot with all that computer genereated environment and the bland outdoor visuals. Morrowind did this better...in a more primitve, aged way...but it felt so much more real and engaging than Oblivion.

...and a lot more creative too.

Time for a little complaining from Uncle Wolf:

The things that where annoying me most in Oblivion and Shivering isles where:

*The Armor: I found the armor which I was wearing all throughout the game pretty much in the beginning. I enchanted it and it was just perfect. It was also the only lightarmor that didn't look ...you know...stupid. There where some awesome other armor designs like the madness ore armor or the daedric armor. I also really digged the imperial armor. Very bold and realistic design. Everything else? Well... I didn't like the sparkly, silver, greenish decorated colorfull fantasy stuff they where throwing at me and there was no other light armor set I liked.

*TheWeapons: The coolest weapons where the basic weapons. The iron and steel sets looked awesome. There where some really cool other weapons too... but a lot of them looked a bit silly and like plastic. Especially some enchanted weapons.

*The leveling enemies: Yeah, you know where this is going... but I'm typing it anyway: It was awful and ruined the game later on.
I mean come on? How believable is a fantasy world in which the enemies get tougher along with you...yeah its a good concept, but some burglars and bandits along the streets are supposed to have...equipment that people like that have... fur armor, leather armor, maybe some damaged iron armor. At a certain level, they had vulcanic glass and daedric armor. "Don't mind me wearing armor from another dimension that is worth a fortune...I'm homeless and I rob peasants."
This really nuked the fridge for me.



Me too man! I admit it...if they don't deliver the Disk on the 12th...if its not in the mail... oh boy, it will be like no presents at christmas



First time playing oblivion, I tried to create a character that looked exactly like me. It was just not possible...you had a lot of costumization possibilities but...no matter how hard you tried...it just looked like an oblivion character.

Being a big fan of the khajiit ( I was one in Morrowind too, as they where the slaverace and I really felt awesome liberating my own kind (I was young,folks) I decided to play one on my second go on the game. Sadly...everything in Morrowind was somehow peaceful. The dialogues...even the villains where polite enough to explain everything to you before you can assault them... and as soon as these oblivion gates where opening...nothing changed. The people where dressing nicely, they where wandering around and had chats with their neighbours. There was absolutely no sence of danger or crisis. Just some sauron's eye knock offs in the field. (Ever talked to a wanderer right next to an oblivion gate and he told you that he "heard" of gates opening and was wondering if it would be true? Ever had a quest to close one oblivion gate while another one was 10 feet behind it? Ever wondered how a handful of skamps and some clanfears could conquer a city?...me too...its called: Jumping the Shark)

The mainquest and battles where just flawed and didn't feel that important. Especially where you have to defeat Bruma... man! Even the medieval army of luxembourg was more impressive than that squad I was leading there)

That aside: the storys of the sidequest where better than the mainplot of some movies. I really enjoyed a lot of them. The thiefguild quests where fun, the guy trapped in his painting, the one lost in his dreams and that strange mission in the shivering isles where you had to kill the duke with drugs...it was really creative

Attached is my character Sharath.


With this equipment, he can run faster than any horse you can buy in the game and carry tons of stuff with him. I have pretty much every important/cool item available in the game...I was decorating my houses with them... yes! I was nuts enough to spend a few HOURS decorating my houses in oblivion...putting the items in the shelves...some flowers on the bed... you know, and then I looked around my room and ...it was a mess. I was really shocked about my own behaviour and started to clean my rooms immediately XD

Ummm...it's "foot."

Although I loved this quote as an advancement:


XD

I loved Oblivion, but eventually, it got extremely samey. Just never bothered to pick it up after I completed it. But Skyrim...oh boy, it's just...Skyrim!

oure luckier than i am, Beth didnt put russia on the preorder list!. Poland, Luthania and stuff will get skyrim, but not rissia

[EDIT]:
Btw, Speaking of oblivion being this whle classic medeval europe setting versul the alien wild east of morrowind, They say that todd howard was really inspired by lord of the rings so he wanted cyrodill to look all lushy and medeval. But according to the elder scrolls lore, Cyrodill was actually supposed to be a hot and tropical place. There is even a morrowind mod that attempts to recreate the province of cyrodill with lore accuracy.

Which would make more sence because it directly borders Blackmarsh, Hammerfell and Elsweyr.
They should have gone with that, it would have been much cooler.

But lets not complain all too much because it was a great game

yeah it was. It could have been better tho

Also according to Elder Scrolls lore, Cyrodiil was turned into a temperate place by Tiber Septim; so what we saw in Oblivion is perfect within the lore of the Elder Scrolls.