Oblivion Blog

First off: If I owned an Xbox 360, I would have bought the Xbox 360 version of the game. I use keyboard and mouse all day at work, and way too much at home in the evenings, and playing Xbox games using the controller actually provides some welcome relief for my hands. But since this isn’t an option for me right now, I figured I’d try to find a way to play the game using a gamepad on the PC.

According to this article, Bethesda announced that the game supports the Xbox 360 controller on the PC out of the box, although the initial support will be incomplete. One of the first updates will include the Xbox 360 control scheme for the PC, which presumably will make a big difference in actually being able to play the game using a gamepad. Still, this was encouraging enough news for me to give this a shot. As I am planning to buy an Xbox 360 eventually, at which point I’ll need a second controller anyway, I went ahead and picked up an Xbox 360 controller for my PC. The PC recognized it immediately and prompted me to install the drivers, at which point I was able to successfully test the controller using the “Game Pads” feature in the control panel.

My initial attempt to play the game was less successful… I was able to move the character forward, back, left, and right, using the left stick on the controller, but I was unable to turn around using the right stick. After searching through the oblivion.ini file (which is normally found in My Documents\My Games\Oblivion\) for a solution, I noticed that the iJoystickLookUpDown and iJoystickLookLeftRight settings were set to 6 and 3 respectively, even though the comment right above suggests that they should actually be set to 5 (YRot) and 4 (XRot). After changing this, I still was not able to turn around until I also adjusted the fJoystickLookUDMult and fJoystickLookLRMult settings. These seem to control the vertical and horizontal sensitivity respectively and were initially set to extremely low values of 0.0020. After some experimentation, values of around 0.3 turned out to be ideal. So to summarize, these are the settings that (sort of) worked for me:


;X = 1, Y = 2, Z = 3, XRot = 4, YRot = 5, ZRot = 6
iJoystickMoveFrontBack=2
iJoystickMoveLeftRight=1
fJoystickMoveFBMult=1.0000
fJoystickMoveLRMult=1.0000
iJoystickLookUpDown=5
iJoystickLookLeftRight=4
fJoystickLookUDMult=0.3000
fJoystickLookLRMult=0.2500


Getting the buttons to work is a relatively simple matter of going into the Options menu and configuring them as desired.

In theory everything should have been working fine now. However, there are still a few major problems that I’ve been unable to solve:

1. Controller sensitivity: The Xbox 360 controller is extremely sensitive. This is generally a great thing, but since Oblivion doesn’t properly support the controller yet, it results in a very jerky and irregular response. In particular, there is no way to configure the deadspot for the analog sticks, which means that it is difficult to return the stick to a neutral position and stop the character from turning or moving. This is the main issue that prevents me from playing with the controller at this point.

2. Incomplete control scheme: While the controller (at least in theory) supports movement, view, and all buttons, I have been unable to use it to navigate the game menus. This means that the keyboard and mouse need to be used for this very frequent action (for example when looting bodies), which is obviously far from ideal. The same goes for shortcuts / quick keys, which are hardcoded to the number keys 1-8 on the keyboard and have no representation on the controller.

3. Interference with keyboard movement: After using the controller to move the character and returning the left stick to the neutral position in order to stop, the controller appears to still register a (negligibly small) forward movement (due to the aforementioned lack of deadspot control). When using the keyboard to move the character afterwards, the movement is extremely slow. This might not be a huge issue if the controller was a full replacement for the keyboard, but it is a significant annoyance regardless.

So for now I ended up disabling the controller by setting bUse Joystick to 0. I hope that the first update addresses these issues, as the game otherwise seems like it would be enjoyable via a controller (and obviously is in the Xbox 360 version).

I’ll keep you updated in case I find out anything new. In the mean time please leave a comment if you have any suggestions.

I’ve played computer role playing games for a good 20 years now, and in general I’ve gotten pretty relaxed about things like optimal character creation and leveling up and instead focus more on having a good time. However, things are slightly different in the Elder Scrolls games, where initial choices generally have a profound impact on the entire game experience. It is possible to play the game in many different ways, for example by relying on magic, stealth, or combat skills. On the one hand, it is tempting to create a “Jack of all trades” character that knows a little bit about everything and therefore (at least theoretically) allows you to experience the game from all perspectives. Realistically, this is not going to work, as you won’t get good enough in any particular set of skills to keep up with the rising enemy difficulty. While allowing for some diversity, the Elder Scrolls system encourages specialization and discourages redundant skills, i.e. skills that accomplish the same effect in different ways. In many ways the pure mage, warrior, or thief classes best capitalize on this, but they are also the least diverse.

Regardless of what I set out to do, I often get drawn to the stealth based classes, and the same happened this time. I played a Khajiit thief in Morrowind, so I originally thought I’d try a more magic oriented class this time. However, I generally find pure magic based classes boring and wanted to spice it up a bit with some combat and stealth skills. My first attempt at creating an Oblivion character resulted in an Argonian magic / stealth based class that combined the magic schools of Destruction, Conjuration, and Restoration with the stealth based skills of Blade, Light Armor, Athletics, and Acrobatics.

After thinking things through a bit more and skimming through the Oblivion Strategy Guide, I realized that this combination did make much sense. In the end, I decided to go with a more rogue oriented Wood Elf character instead, and mainly select the non-personality based stealth skills (Blade, Light Armor, Marksman, Security, Sneak), plus the magical skills of Conjuration and Alchemy. This should result in a pretty well balanced character, where all skills complement themselves without redundancies. Conjuration will come in handy to summon creatures to draw enemy fire, while I will be sneakily picking the enemies off from the distance with my bow. Alchemy is another perfect complement as it allows me to make health potions as well as poisons for my arrows. I do miss not having Destruction as a major skill, as the spell effects are really well done in the game and it is simply very gratifying to blow an enemy back with a fireball, but Marksman will be a powerful replacement, particularly as this already starts out high due to the Wood Elf’s +10 race bonus and the +10 bonus of the Stealth specialization that I selected to go with. I was debating whether to drop Security in favor of another magical discipline, but frankly I’ve always enjoyed stealing stuff in the Elder Scrolls games way too much…

Let’s see how this character ends up working out.

One piece of advice: Keep a save game around from right before you leave the prison that you begin the game in. Oblivion’s character creation was very well thought through in that it allows you to first experience various aspects of the game before committing to a character, and all aspects of your character can be modified right before you leave the prison. If you later (perhaps after the first few hours of real gameplay) decide to tweak your character after all, at least you’ll be able to start from your save game and skip the tutorial prison level.

Hello, and welcome to my Oblivion blog. I decided to start this blog to document my travels through Tamriel, post hints, talk about technical issues, and more. We’ll see about how long I’ll actually keep this up… I generally lose interest in any game pretty quickly, but the Elder Scrolls games are extremely immersive and have traditionally kept me interested for quite a while, so I’m hopeful.