I will say this...that soundtrack hasnt and will not age a day as opposed to the graphics...classical music still emotes and conveys so much even now in 2020..

The music. My God, the music is exceptional. Jeremy Soule absolutely killed it. Even when the graphics or physics get silly or weird, that score just brings it back and ties it all together.

Mom: "Why are you starring at digital bricks". Me: Even if I tell you, you will never understand.

Runs fine on the ol 256MB Version of the card. I can verify

DF has never done a video breakdown of Stalker. Please fix this.

I got a “broken” gateway desktop from a buddy for free in like 2012 I think with these exact specs. I remember it booting up but having graphical problems. I learned about the famous 8800gt baking trick and it brought the computer back to life. I used to play oblivion maxed out and Skyrim on that computer at medium setting 1080p 60fps and that’s how I got into pc gaming

I love how everything glows in oblivion, it's just appealing to me. The environments might be a little sparse now but when it came out Oblivion was easily the best looking game i had ever seen.

The beautiful music of Oblivion always takes me back. Well, must be time to start a new game....... for the 1000th time!

12:15 I almost had a heart attack 😂

Oblivion was the first 360 game I played. I was blown away at the time. Then I played Dead Rising. That generation was a pronounced improvement from the previous.

Patrick Stewart's voice for the Emperor was such a perfect choice

By Azura! By Azura! By Azura! It's the Digital Foundry!

can we talk about the circa-2005 business casual attire seen at 2:35? Hoodie AND a blazer!

Ah loved this game so much. My favorite Elder Scrolls, and I know I am a minority but the world, guilds, story, the way every character can be different meaning that you don't have a player that just can do everything perfect like in Skyrim, so it encourage you to actually play certain classes to better fit what you have to do for say guilds. I hope they bring back acrobatics, athleticism, and much better conjuration and quest building. Also, being a gladiator is badass and would like to see what they can do with today's talent/technology. Lastly, they definitely need to bring back repairing your weapons and armor. Especially with the smithing capabilities of Skyrim, it doesn't make sense that they took it out.

As someone who lived through it. No one thought the character models were good. They were criticized for bad models from release. But the graphics for items and landscape were praised.

Alex and John, you guys are an absolute treasure. Love the commentary and nostalgia

This game has probably the most nostalgic soundtrack ever.

I love these kinds of videos from you guys, my favorite channel on youtube by far. On the weekends if i don't have anything planned and i'm not in the mood to play any games i usually just watch a lot of your guys videos. Thanks for all the work you guys do, it's appreciated.

One of the greatest games of all time. Will never forget when this came out and reading through the strategy guide for Xbox.

Hearing that music, I'm back there. I'm back playing this game those years ago and I feel so comfortable.

These videos are so fascinating, you should do more of these DF! Seeing old games with modern testing methods is cool

Objects left outside of a non player owned home disappear after around three days to prevent "Save file balooning." This helped to decrease memory usage and increase stability as well. Skyrim does this too, but at a different timing. I read so much about Oblivion's development before release because I was too hyped. XD Anyway, save file balooning was such an issue in Skyrim that once your save hit 10MB, the game started having tons of memory management issues. That combined with memory leaks, led to textures never fully loading, constant stuttering and increased crash rates. This is what they were trying to avoid.

The moment when you step outside of the Imperial prison and are greeted with that view is one of my favourite moments in gaming. Spent hours exploring and looting before I even started the first quest. This may look dated now but in 2006, I was completely in awe. I enjoyed Skyrim but I never connected with it like I did with this game. So many memories

Oblivion was my first love, the first open World game I ever played. No other game had such an impact on me. The mystery, the freedom, the stories - it was an epic tale and my biggest gaming adventure.

I didnt liked this game, thats why played it just 2300 hours.

I played this game last year as first time, damn looked good. They did a terrific work! I missed a lot of elements present in Oblivion, when played Skyrim again.

Most important mod: OOO, Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. Fixes level scaling and makes the general gameplay, AI and everything a lot better.

I was blown away by the game… when you got out of the sewers and you see those rolling green hills and you could explore it all, it was just great. 👌

4:45 You could leave items about a house! I filled out my house in Skingrad on the 360 with my unique items that I wasn't using. I was able to have them displayed about the rooms without putting them into chests or storage!

I really enjoy this. Alex and John play very well together and I would love to see more and longer content like this where they just play a game describing stuff and talking about whatever. It's not realistic but I can dream.

The GT came out in October 2007 so this is a late 2007 mid-end "beast", while the 8800GTX came out the year before and was better.

19:50 It's so weird (and obviously a limitation) that he has only 1 shadow so the sun shadow rotates and becomes the fireball shadow and when the effect is over, the shadow takes its place back as a sun shadow... I don't recall seing that anywhere else.

Recently tried the game out again into and it pulled me in right away. The music, bright colours, sense of mystery are so strong, I think they make up for the aged mechanics and bugs.

OK this was awesome, well done guys. Super listenable, very well presented and fair to all platforms IMO. ROCK on Alex, well done John. Mapping this one to the Like button.

This is my favourite Elder Scrolls game. It just has such a great and magical atmosphere. It makes you wanna be in that world.

The comedic timing of "It doesn't look great" and the zoom in on the character model is perfect. Lol

My favourite memory of playing Oblivion back in 2012/2014? Getting out of the prison isle for the fourth or fifth time, at the time, and coming across a guard running somewhere. So I follow the guy for what feels like five minutes, and he finally arrives at the beach just to punt a mudcrab. I don't know why. It just always makes me crack up to remember that particular moment.

I had my first PC built just for this game as a teenager. The bump mapping that was used everywhere and the gorgeous graphics. Was really something special

21:30 You would probably enjoy Daggerfall Unity. It is a port of Daggerfall to the Unity engine, allowing it to be run natively on Windows and Linux. It is also moddable.

I am sure I had piles of items visible in ES4. It became increasingly glitchy (as with ES5), but I threw piles of shiny weapons into my fireplaces, and filled the wizard’s tower with dozens of staffs strewn about and jewels throughout the garden.

"Yesterday's pc", this is my pc today lool

I still remember everything like they are describing it. From the amazing metal reflections on the armors in the early screenshots to the smooth stone bricks inside the tombs... Ah the memories... Now I realize I could have learned a couple of languages in the same time XD

This game still looks great. Just look at the grass, bushes and flowers when going through the wood. This is not modded version and vegetation looks straight up better than vanilla Skyrim. I just like the look of Oblivion in general. Bloom makes it look like a true magical place. Another game where bloom level really jumps out when you first start playing is Guild Wars 1.

"Have you heard of the high elves?" *[Hurts himself to death while eating an orange]*

BTW that "POM" you guys are talking about isn't POM, but the simpler parallax solution. It goes by several names, Offset mapping, offset parallax mapping, or just parallax mapping. Just like POM, Relief, and other texture displacement mapping techniques, it displaces the UV coordinated of a texture based on a height map. But unlike POM or Relief mapping, it doesn't build it's displacement based on tracing rays into the texture. The regular old parallax mapping was used in several games back in the mid to late 2000's. I remember Halo 3 through Reach used it on the wheels and tracks on vehicles for the bumps and stuff.

Just watching this as I reinstall Oblivion and prepare to annihilate it with every mod known to man. Pray for my install folder.

Ah Oblivion, I was so happy that with a patch I was able to lower the graphics and resolution so it would be sort of playable, didn't know what FPS was and nor did I care. It was a beautiful time. Now if it's not 1080p/60, I get very unhappy. (unless it's on consoles) :P

Awesome stuff! Love the old RPG talk.

a cool thing you could do for this series is reload the games up on a new PC and run some reshade colourgrading and RTGI to see how much you can improve it with minimal tweaking

You can increase the distance that foliage renders in the options menu. I remember hating how closely in front of you it draws in but increasing it had a massive impact on framerate back in the day

I remember being totally amaze with that cirodyl shot at the begining of the game, man I loved that game to death back in 06, I played it with an nvidia 6600 and an athlon 64 3000+

Q6600 was a chip way ahead of its time. The best aging CPU I've ever owned. Then, after 10 years or so, I got i5 6600 and it got old (slow) very soon after the launch.

Also Morrowind was supposed to include the Mainland as well.

You guys could compare final version with first E3 gameplay trailer that had soft shadows for all geometry and the infamous radiant AI...great video btw, I can't wait for you guys to revisit Far Cry 1 (please do the 64bit comparison and make sure you run it on Win XP for proper water reflections). You can also revisit Splinter Cell 1/PT and address the issues that it has with modern cards (mandatory 6xxx or 7xxx nvidia cards to have proper lights / shadows in those games).

I had the 9800m GTS, used to play at 1920x1200 on my laptop. Man did I love that old Gateway P7805u-FX!

This is my favorite DF series right now.

Good Lord. My 6800GT remembers this game ! It was painful to say the least. Ended up playing it for real on my 8800gt. 1280*1024 it ran well enough.

5:19 You COULD leave items in your house in Oblivion, In Skyrim you had to drop the items on the floor, leave, and then come back in to place them but in Oblivion you could just place them anywhere you wanted. The items dropped by bandits when you kill them in the open world actually remain.

Remember seeing this game at a friends house on his Xbox 360. This, Skyrim, and New Vegas were some of the first games i picked up when i got my gaming computer in 2013

I love listening to you guys geek out. I had an overclocked quad q6600 and 2x 8800GTX in SLI at that time and yeah it could run Crysis!

My first game on the Xbox 360! I was blown away by the music and atmosphere at the time. Good times!

Edit: For all the zoomers out there make sure you first download the qarl III texture pack. It's essential. This game is something else when it comes to running it. Ryzen 3600 and GTX1070 and can get like 40 fps in cities while nothing is being utilised. Also editing the .ini file can enable a lot of cool stuff, like water reflections of...well everything, making the torch cast shadows and letting the game use more ram, etc. Poured so many hours into Oblivion back in the day.

It is cool to hear them comment things I did not notice.

Alex is doing exactly what I do every time I get my grubby hands on character creation.

I hereby decree this the best channel on KZfaq!

Music gave me some nam flashbacks with how many incredible hours i put into this game : P

Really enjoying this nostalgic series.

Never thought Digital Foundry would go back old school! So nice :)

Going from the likes of The Prince of Persia (any of the big three) to Oblivion one Christmas night in 2006 was utterly mind blowing and will forever be with me as one of the happiest moments of my life. My gran got me it, who sadly passed this year and every time i hear that damn OST i start to tear up. Thank you Bethesda for this, and I love you gran.

What are you all talking about with non persistent dropped items in a home? Maybe it only applies to your own home in the game but I most definitely had a house that would drag my FPS to the floor on the 360 because I would line the shelves with Sigil Stones. Those noisy glowing balls did not disappear. Now trying to rely on a barrel or something to store goods out in a city (e.g. stashing stolen items) would disappear due to the loot pools in them resetting at specific time intervals.

4:45 You could leave items out in Morrowind but if you dropped too many items on the ground in a house, you'd come back and everything would be put in the various crates, dressers, and other containers in the game. I remember there was one house I would always use as my home and I would essentially make it into a museum of unique artifacts and items I didn't want to sell. After a while, they'd all disappear and I'd find them in all the containers.

Im pretty sure, the first appearance of trees like that was in the 3D Mark 2001 Nature Scene. Im so sure, I'll even say you can quote me... and I have not googled this fact (yet).

Great vid from the dynamic duo

I do enjoy it when these two get together talking about a game

CRAB BATTLE!!! Thanks for reminding me of that great and insane mgs vid

Thanks for doing this!

What an interesting analysis of the technological and graphical aspects of this iconic game. When the game was released, my brothers and I had a very underpowered PC for running it. Later around 2007 I built a PC with 8800 GTS 320 MB and Core 2 Duo E4500. Obviously in light of this video the CPU would have bottlenecked the setup quite a bit especially for this game. However, back then I wouldn't even dare expect very smooth or consistent gameplay. This era of gaming lives forever in my heart, and the HDR bloom effects make them feel even more like beautiful flashes from the past. Xbox 360 and PS3 were also extremely iconic and the console war was very interesting to follow.

When Oblivion came out I’d just bought a Turion powered laptop. It ran it fairly well surprisingly, mid-settings at 720/768p. Impressive looking game, I remember the back of the box said something along the lines of “the next generation is here”!

12:19 I don't know if I'll leave this place alive! CRAB BATTLE!

While I've never been a big fan of the elder scrolls series. This game's music has some of the most memorable songs I've ever heard in a video game.

I always thought something was a little off with the lighting in oblivion. Especially the ruins being so bright white like they were glowing

The earliest example of parallax occlusion maps I remember seeing was SoulCalibur II. I had it on GCN and the level with the Yin Yang in the center of the floor uses it. It absolutely blew my 15-year-old mind

Dell sold this exact same configuration back in the day of which included the Q6600 CPU & 8800GT GPU as I think it was around $1200 dollar’s, and might’ve included a small monitor for the price !

love how ur sneak level keeps leveling in the start spot lol

11:35 these bushes from 2006 look better than the trees in Pokemon from 2019

Question please. ... I played on 8600M GT with 512MB of vRAM on a laptop. I was getting anywhere from 22fps up to maybe 45fps, using FRAPS. I didn't use V-sync, however what was odd is that I do not remember screen-tearing. Maybe I really just didn't remember it. However I do not remember screen tearing in Doom 3 either. I can't help thinking that I must have thought of sceen tearing as was what games did, and ignored it. What's confusing me now though, is that screen-tearing gets bad in some games. It can stop us playing if it gets bad enough. .... I just can't figure out what was happening back then. What it left me thinking was, why do monitors now pretty much need 60fps, even with adaptive-sync monitors. When way back then on a laptop screen (monitor), as long as I had over 24fps, it was smooth. Notably here when the frame rate dips under 60fps with v-sync on, there is not stuttering or screen-tear.

I wished this was longer! What's the rush?

This game still holds up for me. And it’s crazy how much headroom we have over it right now, and games still manages to run like absolute shit. Even OG Skyrim ran at a locked 60fps on my old GTX460. The fact that we have games still not hitting 60fps on like a 970 is baffling to me.

I remember playing this when it came out on a laptop with a Pentium M processor and Radeon X700 mobile graphics. But even in low details it still looked very good at that time, especially the dungeons and the foliage. And it was a step forward in gameplay.

I played Oblivion on my Xbox 360. And I enjoyed it, despite the flaws (which, to be fair, at this time didn't even register as flaws). Looking back, this now reminds me of simpler times, when there was no debate on how a game runs on different platforms, different setups, which one would be the best, how to improve performance, visual fidelity, etc. etc. I put the disc into the console, and that was it. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of pure excitement, that would turn into unforgettable memories. And all that on a 360.

Morrowind was big, but Oblivion put Elder Scrolls on the map at least for me, it was the first one I played and I was mesmerized. I’d hit signs with my sword and watch them swing back and forth. It was such a next-gen experience for middle school me.

This video was a surprise! A good surprise too!

i remember going to the local games store asking for something to stress my new budget gaming pc. they gave me this "oblivion". at the Beginning, in the dungeon, I thought the guy from the store knew nothing about games. boy, was I wrong when I walked out and cranked those graphic sliders all the way. damn.

There's more graphic settings in the options like grass, terrain, and tree sliders for view distance I don't think you turned up.

This was the game that got me excited about getting an Xbox 360, didn't have a pc at the time, & seeing screenshots in gaming mags I couldn't believe how good it looked and couldn't wait to get my 360! I was not disappointed.

My old GTX 770 keeps chugging along; i love still jumping into Oblivion in 2020.

Loved this on XBox 360...I got the special edition with the physical coin extra 😆 the HUD/GUI for items is way better here than Skyrim, agreed

Completely agree on sentiments about a leveling world, especially with how broken it was in this game without exploitation or mods; i.e., picking a class with primary/major skills you rarely use, manipulating the difficulty slider, or leveraging the stacking mechanics in spells.

1:24 with Athletic/Acrobatics 100 you can see this ingame^^

Does anyone know the specific term for that "rotating tree effect"? Just Cause did it too (which was understandable, given the scale), but was really taken by surprise when even Persona 5 used it, and more dissapointed to know that something as recent as Gran Turismo Sports and Driveclub implemented such "old tech"... It's also present in smaller fire effects on Resident Evil 3's Remake.