HEXUS.winners win4FREE competitions :: Oblivion on PS3!

[Steven W]

Fancy playing on the PS3 before it's released. Even better, fancy spending the day playing Oblivion on the PS3?

We're offering one lucky reader the chance to rub shoulders with the press of the gaming industry (oh the joy) and the folks from Bethseda at an exclusive event in London. You may even be unlucky enough to bump into HEXUS.gaming's very own Nick Haywood!

If you enter you must be able to attend and provide your own transport to the event. Full details will be provided.

Head over to the competition page for further details.

[kalniel]

So which lucky hexite won??

[Steven W]

Sorry, just waiting for Nick to get back from London so he can check his mail. The winner should know within the next couple of hours.

[kalniel]

Well looks like it wasn't me. Congrats to the winner, and I'm dead jealous, Oblivion fan-boy that I am

[moogle]

or maybe nick hasn't made it back to london yet :O - ah well, we'll find out tommorow

[kalniel]

It was me!

Nick's plummy tones informed me only this morning so it was a bit of a rush to get everything sorted and the time off work etc.

At least I made it though... unlike the Hexus guys

Was cool - Pete Hines is a very nice chap (and handsome too if any ladies get a chance to meet him ) but perhaps the most interesting thing for me was chatting to a guy from Ubisoft about all sorts of interesting and juicy things. Sadly a PR person collared me towards the end and told me that I wasn't allowed to publish any of that information or the photo's I took. I'll do a fuller report some time later - I am allowed to talk about Oblivion on the PS3 and what Pete said - though I didn't get a chance to have a one-on-one interview because I was waiting for the Hexus guys before booking my slot.

Any questions about OB on the PS3 though before I write up? I did get to play it a lot

[Steven W]

It was me!

Nick's plummy tones informed me only this morning so it was a bit of a rush to get everything sorted and the time off work etc.

At least I made it though... unlike the Hexus guys

Was cool - Pete Hines is a very nice chap (and handsome too if any ladies get a chance to meet him ) but perhaps the most interesting thing for me was chatting to a guy from Ubisoft about all sorts of interesting and juicy things. Sadly a PR person collared me towards the end and told me that I wasn't allowed to publish any of that information or the photo's I took. I'll do a fuller report some time later - I am allowed to talk about Oblivion on the PS3 and what Pete said - though I didn't get a chance to have a one-on-one interview because I was waiting for the Hexus guys before booking my slot.

Any questions about OB on the PS3 though before I write up? I did get to play it a lot

I got man flu, so couldn't make it. Sounds like you had fun! So what did you think of the PS3? or aren't you allowed to speak about that?

Have you played the Xbox 360 version? If so, were there any glaring differences?

[kalniel]

I can talk about my impressions of the game/console sure - it's only the stuff from Ubisoft that they got worried about - my questions were obviously a bit too juicy

The PS3 itself.. well first off the only console I own is a gamecube, so comparisons will be a bit limited. I thought I was actually using a PS2 controller but it turns out that that's just what the PS3 one is like. The console itself looks quite nice, has a pleasant very quiet fan whirring, and a mildly warm updraft can be felt if you put your hand over the vent at the top. I had to go right up to actually hear the unit at all over the background noise (of which there was a lot).

The consoles in the room were actually dev kits, not retail - though I was told there is no difference in peformance. What is different is that you can set up various hardware profiles on the dev kits - in our case that meant it was apparently a bit of a pain to get them working correctly with the monitors - you could set it to run 1080i but it would just jump back to 720p. They did manage to get some set up at 1080i and it makes a *huge* difference.

I can't really compare the PS3 game to X360 from first hand experience, but I could piece together some things from other people and what I already knew. The version we tested on the PS3 didn't have any anti-aliasing - I don't know if it's waiting to be added or not, this would have been my first question to ask Pete in the one-on-one interview but I didn't get the chance. As a result the 720p version did look extremely jaggy to my eyes, especially - however we were quite close and when you were looking from a distance it wasn't so bad. The 1080i version looked much better in this respect and from a distance looked very nice indeed.

I was informed by someone that the grass distance was further than the X360 version - personally the grass distance looks ok, but it's still only about half-way at best on the PC slider. Tree fade was very distant, but object fade wasn't so good compared to a high end PC. Specular distance was perfect - this also seemed to blend better than the PC version so the dungeon floors and surfaces actually look really good. There seems to be some kind of anisotropic filtering going on, as textures looked quite good, though there were noticable changes between mipmap levels.

Of course the main difference with the PS3 version is the new shader that blends low and high details - this does work really well in a lot of cases, and ok in a few. Sometimes you see what look like black dots in a speckled pattern in the blend area which doesn't look the best, but it's still a vast improvement over the sudden separation that occurs on the PC and X360.

Oh and the PS3 version gets all the download content, and having played through some of it, knights of the nine in particular, I'm tempted to go get some for the PC version

[kalniel]

update: The press pack has some screenshots showing the difference between the PS3 and X360 - it just shows the shader blend effect that I mentioned.

[Steven W]

Sounds good! Still being played on dev kits eh, always makes me worry.

[kalniel]

I was assured there are no hardware differences between the dev kit and the retail one - it's presumably just what Bethsoft brought with them rather than going out and buying retail kits. The Ubisoft guy reiterated that point later - it is no longer the case that dev kits are really different to retail, so even though developers may have got the PS3 kit later than they wanted (they will have wanted it at the same time as the X360 kit I'm sure) when they did get it it was more useful.