bah like stealing wasn't hard enough anyway #cough#buggedsneak#cough#

meh....so now the guards have special powers that let them look into your pockets and notice those potions are stolen? Sounds lame, actually. Stealing's enough of a bitch. And how the hell is a shopkeeper going to know something is stolen? I know that existed in Morrowind, but always bothered me there, too.

I hope I can mod out that behaviour.

thats what i thought when i heard it satis. Now if you're wearing it, ok, but not if its just in your inventory. And I can kinda let them off on having 'fences' to sell your stolen goods to. I mean it's always possible that they have makers marks or some such crap.

I think what it should be is if the item is worth < given amount, only traders in the same town it was stolen from will call guards on you. If its > given amount, then its either a rare item and everyone would know anyway, or the person you nicked it from would put out a 'world wide' call to get it back, given a reason for merchants to say "wait a minute... guards!" But the whole idea is sounding kinda retarded.

Well, to be fair, guards could magically see which item in your inventory was stolen and which wasn't back in Morrowind too, when/if they arrested you.

I don't suppose it'll be that simple, that they'll just spot a stolen toenailclipper in the bottom of your rucksack from 50 metres away. Well, I hope. I guess they'll make it more supple and realistics...as far as fantasy RPG's go. Besides, with the actual day/night cycle, radiantAI (NPC's sleeping and locking up stores/houses) and the physics (catburglary), it should be the point that you sneak into a house at night and steal what you can steal...then vanish into the night. I think that they mostly wanted to stop the "looting" syndrome of Morrowind: if you were any good at stealing/sneaking, you could pretty much grab anything you want from under the faces of NPC's, in broad daylight. I have friends who took EVERYHTING they came across, as long as it wasn't too heavy. So...hehe.


Anyway...if you have some time to kill (I did), check out this 50-minute audio interview with Pete Hines. Nothing spectacular, but he goes in on the delay, removal of complete soft shadows, myths surrounding Oblivion, etc. Good stuff.

http://www.poweruser.tv/podcasts/neowin/Neocast3.mp3

It's 28 mb if you're gonna download it.

listening now...

some new pics:

http://www.gamereactor.se/bilder/?texti ... 90b57b35ea

Very nice!

newgamingradio are releasing an hour-long(ish) video interview at about 1200GMT.

Register:

http://www.newgamingradio.com

FFS...I've been writing two entire preview-riddled posts but first IE crashed and then I stupidly chose "paste" instead of "copy" when I had the final result in front of me. And I'm already ill-tempered as it is, bah.

So, I present you, a list of hands-on previews released since the embargo of yesterday was lifted. In order of importance...check out the first 2 or 3 if you want.

http://www.gamingtrend.com/Articles/art ... D=130&pg=1
http://pc.ign.com/articles/691/691594p1.html
http://www.gamingnexus.com/Default.aspx ... cle&I=1008
http://previews.teamxbox.com/xbox-360/1 ... livion/p1/
http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/22390

Audio interviews

http://www.gamingsteve.com/podcasts/Gam ... -02-20.mp3 (save as)
http://files.filefront.com/ngrcom_podca ... einfo.html

Then as an extra, guild ranks for Oblivion

http://www.elderscrolls.net/oblivion/guilds.php

Dark Brotherhood ftw!


Oh, and last but not least: my gaming mag pretty much announced the full review of Oblivion for it's issue of next month (around the end of March), which means the game is close, really close.

24th march close.

Eye candy overload!!! I can honestly say, ive never anticipated a game this much before.

"Consumer site estimates put the release date at March 20th right now (as does the Microsoft product page) but Bethesda has yet to announce it officially. Either way, the release is nigh."

-from the IGN article

yeah we've had it listed at 24th march for ages but that can easily change any time. Til its on the official site I won't hold my breath; previously it was "TBC" and before that it was 25th Nov. But this is the longest it's held a date.

Some new screens


http://www.xbox2-newz.de/v2/index.php?s ... in&id=1444

The removal of that shadow effect thingy should make the whole game go easier on our systems, but i read that some guy was having a nightmare with the Xbox360 draw distance. Not only do i hope that it's just an xbox problem, but also a beta problem.

Good screens.