From The offical Forums and Pete Hines

Patch/Update
We are working on a patch/update for both the PC and Xbox 360. It will address a number of issues that we have found and ones that have been reported to us and confirmed. It is our plan to first release it as a beta patch for the PC when it has cleared our initial testing cycles internally. Since it’s a beta patch you should be aware that issues may come up that we haven’t found yet and we strongly recommend you backup save games and understand it may be necessary to reinstall the game when the final patch comes out.

We are also looking into the localization issues that have come up in Europe and are working to address some of those issues. A European Patch/Update will be available after the English versions.

We’re doing both of these things as fast as we can and will let everyone know as soon as they are available.

Downloadable Content
We have been working on downloadable content since we finished the game in February, and we continue to feel this is a great avenue for us to continue to add to the Oblivion experience.

We have already announced two of them:

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


We hope to have The Orrery available for purchase next week. This plugin will cost 150pts on Xbox, and $1.89 on the PC. The Horse Armor Pack has been very popular, and exceeded what we thought it would sell. Despite that, we’re still trying to find the right spot, so we’re putting a much larger plugin out for less than the last one and we'll see what happens. Your feedback as we move forward in this is invaluable. Tell us what you want to see, how much of it, and what it might be worth to you. No, don’t say you want it free, because these plugins take a surprising amount of time to create, polish, and test (much more then Morrowind's).

Finally, thank you to everyone who has supported not just Oblivion, but Bethesda Softworks over the years. Oblivion has been a tremendous success for us, and we thank you all for making that happen. We hope we continue to earn your gaming time.

Pete (and Todd)

Yeah, I had seen mention of this yesterday. Cheap plugins to be sure but it's just the fact of needing a method to purchase online that deters many people. Still, gotta hand it to them for at least bringing down the price.

I hope it will fix that horrible 'fast talking' issue I have with NPC's sometimes as I miss alot of the text and speech for quests when it happens and have to go looking in my log.

Oh yeah, did we mention that horse armor plain sucked and the orrery isn't something to gawk at either? In stead of full-blown quest they could have said 'bland killthis-getthat quest without new dialogue and standard boring journal additions'

Has anyone been having something like a memory leak problem? Where the game starts getting slower and slower the longer you play it?

Yes. I exit, wait, then reboot the game and take it from there. Theres a console command that frees up the cache so I hear but I have found that these manual commands forcing textures and data out only serve to make things worse or spawn errors. Nothing beats a fresh restart of the game. I hope the fix it too.

Ermm... I'm pretty sure this is old news, the Orrery has already been realeased... and as expected, it is crap ;)

Fifty Septims says we're gonna have to pay for it.

SpiritWarrior has the best solution!!! I noticed this slow down after playing for better than 4 hours. When I came out of one of the Oblivion Gates just after closeing it. I was or my character was moving in S-L-O-W----M-O-T-I-O-N and I thought I had been hexed or hit by a spell and looked at the game clock speed and it was running real fast and the trouble shooter said "Game in loop suggest restart" on my game clock speed monitor. I saved the game and hit EXIT GAME then restarted and then I reopened the game I had just saved and everything was back to normal.
I also have been reading that if you turn off the footstep sounds in the game ini file this slow down will also be discontinued. I checked my ini file and found I already had the footsteps changed from =1 to =0 so I switched it back to =1, that didn't apear to be the slow down problem.

Notice that with the new patch comming they tell you to copy your save games file before you add the patch then uninstall the game and then reinstall and patch the game afterward then transfer the copied save game file back into the new save game file.
This sounds like it will be a very large Patch

[ 04-22-2006, 07:24 AM: Message edited by: TheCrimsomBlade ]

SpiritWarrior has the best solution!!! I noticed this slow down after playing for better than 4 hours. When I came out one of the Oblivion Gates just after closeing it I was, or my character was moving in S-L-O-W----M-O-T-I-O-N and I thought I had been hexed or hit by a spell and looked at the game clock speed and it was running real fast and the trouble shooter said "Game in loop suggest restart" on my game clock speed monitor. I saved the game and hit EXIT GAME then restarted and then I reopened the game I had just save and everything was back to normal.
I also have been reading that if you turn off the footstep sounds in the game ini file this slow down will also be discontinued. </font>[/QUOTE]Hmm, I doubt it's related to hardware, as both you and I have high end systems, yet I don't encounter any slow down, even after 5+ hours of playing, could it be a game setting?

heheh, bet your right :(

I just check my virtual memmory and for so reasom it was set at 125 so I put it it on 5k .
I have no Idea if this has anything to do with the slow down but I haven't had any slow down before the
gate exit slow down and haven't any since it did slow down ?
so I really don't know why it slowed down. Ghost in the PC maybe :D

So what exactly is this 'Phases of the moon" business that it mentioned with the Orrey?

SpiritWarrior has the best solution!!! I noticed this slow down after playing for better than 4 hours. When I came out one of the Oblivion Gates just after closeing it I was, or my character was moving in S-L-O-W----M-O-T-I-O-N and I thought I had been hexed or hit by a spell and looked at the game clock speed and it was running real fast and the trouble shooter said "Game in loop suggest restart" on my game clock speed monitor. I saved the game and hit EXIT GAME then restarted and then I reopened the game I had just save and everything was back to normal.
I also have been reading that if you turn off the footstep sounds in the game ini file this slow down will also be discontinued. </font>[/QUOTE]Hmm, I doubt it's related to hardware, as both you and I have high end systems, yet I don't encounter any slow down, even after 5+ hours of playing, could it be a game setting? </font>[/QUOTE]I think it's just leaky code in certain areas. There was one house I went to and it was empty yet everytime I faced a certain wall it would slow my fps to single-digits. I explored all around the wall and never found out what it was.

This is what I've been doing. At least the load times between games aren't too long, though sometimes it takes forever to actually get to the Windows desktop.

That wizard tower does look pretty nice!

I've never seen the slowdown... but the game does take forever to exit and fairly regularly it crashes on exit. Also, I can't switch to desktop and back... it crashes the game 100% of the time.

Those add-on's are what... 2 bucks each? Seems like a lot to me for one additional quest or some pretty horsie graphics. The way I see it, there are something like 250 quests in the game, so if they cost 2 bucks each the game would cost 500...

single quest add-ons should be under a buck.

I don;t have a huge problem with the cost, but I believe the main problems people see with it is that there is nothing special about them, they do open new areas, but there is no unique equipment or anything :(

Personally, I do have a problem with the cost. I don't mind paying around €20-30 for an expansion which adds substantial content to a game, but I agree with Thoran that $2 for a single quest or a couple pieces of horse equipment is too much for too little. I won't miss any of those, not even the wizard's tower, when I choose not to buy them.

If this trend continues I wouldn't be surprised if we're going to have to pay for a patch in the future.

Takes 1 second to exit the game and return m to desktop. In that 1 second, there is about 73% chance of crash. After it exits, it continues to exit for another minute or two, using up my resources completely.

Are you using a paging file?

I have a gig of RAM and 2.4 gigs of a pagefile.
I've noticed the same trend in alot of the newer games(BFME2, CoD2, AoE3). Yet, somewhat older games still exite just fine(UT2k4, Dawn of War), even some newer(Civ4). The sluggishness gets to me sometimes, I think my PC has about until DX10 comes out, then another month or two at most.

They're just sellouts in my opinion. I'm not going to guy items and little quests for a game I already bought.

I pretty much lost all respect for that company.

I think they're hoping the low price will get folks to pay more over time for less content. Instead of paying 20 bucks for an expansion with 50 or 100 new quests they'll sell you 50 or 100 individual quests... at 2 bucks each.

Then once they've fleeced the suckers long enough they'll put out a 'combo pack' with all of em for... you guessed it... 20 bucks. That will suck in the rest of us and allow them to maximize their profit.

This happens to me too. I'm less concerned about this than the slowdown.

I have lost some respect for them too. It's all too "Sony" of them...

Ermmm dude, (im sure you do)you do know Windows cannot assign more than 2gig of memmory to a proccess right? Plus a Pagefile as large as that must cause severe slowdowns ;)

Yes, I know the limit, and hate it. I had a bunch of audio editing tools on my machine before(Soundforge etc.) that could do use a large pagefile to it's fullest, so that's what's left over from then. Come to think of it, I think it's time to shrink it down. The pagefile itself doesn't cause any problems, atleast none that I could see. I'll tone it down, see how it turns out.

I just say it becuase often Windows will use it before actual ram, and the speed difference can be.... annoying ;)

I just say it becuase often Windows will use it before actual ram, and the speed difference can be.... annoying ;) </font>[/QUOTE]Ouch! Is this mitigated by having a smaller pagefile or does Windows sometimes use it in preference regardless of the size?

Will the 2GB per process limit be overcome in Vista? It's not inconceivable that games might benefit from such in a couple of years...

I just say it becuase often Windows will use it before actual ram, and the speed difference can be.... annoying ;) </font>[/QUOTE]Ouch! Is this mitigated by having a smaller pagefile or does Windows sometimes use it in preference regardless of the size?

Will the 2GB per process limit be overcome in Vista? It's not inconceivable that games might benefit from such in a couple of years... </font>[/QUOTE]Well, to be more specific, 32-bit windows can only assign that much ;)
It's a bit different with 64-bit windows [img]smile.gif[/img]

A smaller pagefile won't solve the problem, just decrease the chance that widows will store stuff like game data in there (becasue there wont be enough space)

Thanks Hive [img]smile.gif[/img]