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@@TheBrandicus If they changed the character faces I would never play Skyblivon. (If it ever comes out). Period. Scenery graphic? Fine. Character looks? Never in my book. It would no longer be one of the main reasons I play Oblivion. The Oblivion NPC's are wonderfully unique. Last thing I want is for them to start looking like the horrible looking Skyrim NPC's.
I'm honestly convinced it's intentional to some degree, given there are some characters in Oblivion that genuinely have good looking faces such as Reynald Jemane, and then you have very exaggerated faces like Rowley with that shady smirk, offering you shady goods. I can't walk by thinking that's not intentional 😂 In any case, it makes it pretty easy to distinguish NPCs from one another. Maybe that was the aim. Still goofy aah tho
Oblivion npcs are so memorable because of their faces. When you consider there's only like 3 voice actors for the entire game, having those faces makes it so much easier to tell each of them apart.
I believe the software for the faces Bethesda got for Oblivion was originally for making background NPCs, stuff like sports games for the people close enough to the pitch that just doing a flat image wouldn't work. Something I'd have to double check though as it's something I vaguely remember from a many a true nerd video a long while back.
Important to keep in mind, this was one of the first games to even let you customize your face in such a way as opposed to just picking a pre made face model
Hackdirt NPCs would only make sense for the bulging eyes, everything else had to have been intentionally put in. Especially since they made sure those faces would work with every race, not just the Imperials/Bretons of Hackdirt
I didn't even register that anything was weird about them when I first played the game. I think they looked pretty good for the time it released. It's much more obvious looking back 15+ years later that something's odd.
Honestly, the whole reason why oblivion's character creation is so special compared to skyrim's is because you have so much freedom I feel like oblivion was a playgrounds to see how wild they could go with the new engine, and then in slyrim, tgey decided to go serious
What are you even talking about? Skyrim has way more freedom and choices with creating a character. If you want to play a game to see how stupid you can make the faces look than play gmod or something.
Lol my character creator skills are either - preset face, just change the hair (cause let's be honest it's the only thing you're ever gonna see lol), OR when I feel like making a ridiculous character it boils down to moving the sliders all the way left or right lol. Some of the things people do in the character creators is nuts, really impressive. I'm not one of those people lol. (And not just specifically talking about oblivion of course, just creators in general)
More info on shape keys: Shape keys usually, at least now-a-days, range from 0 to 1 in 'strength.' This is sometimes represented as 0% and 100%. 0 would be the original face model and 1 would the the altered version. You can then use a 'Lerp' (Google 'Linear Interpolation') to figure out where all the parts of the model would be at, say, 0.5. This is really useful in a lot of circumstances, but it also lets you infer what -1 or 10 might look like. I'm not familiar with the Oblivion engine or dev-kit, but the shape key slider was labelled '-10' to '10' which I imagine was to give the character designers a wider control over exactly what the characters looked like in case they wanted to make something strange, but seems much more limited in the in-game editor as not to produce such... abominations! Although maybe they were still pretty generous. Also, this means you could go to 100 or -100 with these, and a similar system is probably (I don't know, educated guess) for the Fallout 4 exaggerated facial expressions mod. Source: Professional Game Dev with a background in Technical Art
What makes me laugh is when you make a butt ugly character and Tiber Septim is like, "You're the one I saw in my dreams." suggesting he was not having a nightmare after all lol.
I feel like it just wasn't their priority at the time. They just plopped in some numbers that made their clay people look vaguely human shaped and then called it a day. Like you said, a lot goes into game development and especially games of this size leave so much work to do you just can't dwell on something small and silly like the maximum or minimum numbers for the sliders. Besides, it ended up fitting the style of the game perfectly, wouldn't have it any other way.
Or even just a "Oh hey, that looks MUCH better than the previous prototype, let's work this one in instead!" Cause let's face it, when Oblivion was new, there was a looot of... questionable video game character models out there. At least Oblivions looked organic instead of hard edged.
it's a fantasy game with multiple races that have distinct facial features... like we Asian tend to have pronounced cheeks and Africans a more pronounced jawline, same thing goes for Oblivion races, which is why the customization is so flexible
Really digging this type of content from you, Cantina! I can hear the passion you have for the craft as well as the game when you speak about the behind the scenes stuff. Keep up the great work!
Too bad. The orginal character faces MAKE Oblivion head and shoulders above the looks in any other game. Like Skyrim sucks with it's NPC's. Makes the beast folk ugly and the elves all look alike so you can't tell them apart. I hate what they did to NPC's in Skyrim. None of them are memorable.
@@greenscheme2040 lol Nope. Skyrim impressed the hell out of me on how well they made the Elves transition into HD instead of the Troll Dolls that infest Oblivion!
Maybe they made it so they don't have to set separate values for the different races, you can morph a nord's face into a khajit or an orc and vice versa.
Definitely seems intentional. Having the possibility of going extra exaggerated really helps giving you all the tools to give nuance to a face's appearance. You might notice in skyrim the faces look a lot more samey than in oblivion. Similairly when drawing you gotta exaggerate facial features to sell the look of a unique face. Very lovely video btw :)
While the character creator can be a nightmare to deal with, actually managing to make something that looks good after a while is intensely satisfying, and you very well might insist on never wearing a helmet for your entire playthrough just so that the hours spent in character creation don't go to waste.
The terrible character faces honestly add so much to the charm of Oblivion. They're so ugly even when they look kinda normal and I absolutely love it. Oblivion was such a great game.
I know in my own experience making character creators, at least in Blender, you can actually bring the shape keys to values beyond what you actually designed. So for example I always set my maximum weight for any shape key to 1.0, and that's always represents the most extreme it can get. But if I manually set the value in Blender to 10.0, or -20.35, I'll make an inhuman monster that I had no part in creating (aside from typing in the numbers and making the base model). I think a lot of these strange shapes may be something like that, a procedural continuation of the artist's actual work that wasn't actually designed.
It has a major drawback: they removed the Random button. I used to click it until I got something marginally not ugly and roll with it, now I have to select a marginally not ugly preset, which is boring, but it's not going to get me to actually make a face myself.
@@Glumpsy You really putting no effort into creating your character huh, ok that's your choice. they have 15 presets which is the randomized faces in a way and you can choose one of them, they definitely would look better than randomized nightmare
Having experience working with 3D modeling i can assure you this was intentional, and for a good reason. This was a tool they used to make all the characters in the game so it needed to be very flexible, since it was just a binary slider to have a maximum ammount of creative freedom they made each states very extreme. That allowed more variety, now have a somewhat decent modeler use this tool to create interesting faces and you can make a lot of them without them looking too horible. Also we need to remember that at the time people were much more forgiving with 3D because of the technical limitations. So for them it was fire.
If were to explain it why they looked all like that being lore accurate, i will say The Hero of Kvatch was already crazy and under influence of Sheagorath before even going out of jail.
Not sure if this was the case, but as game developers we sometimes take some ridiculous shortcuts. For example it isn't uncommon to deform the body in ridiculous ways to fit into armor models. I'm not closely familiar with oblivion, but is there a chance, that the sliders were made to go that far inside the edit tool because even some of the basic faces might've been clipping through certain equipments or in certain scripted moments. In which case just mashing it all in is a valid option! But maybe not
From what I remember the whole thing about Oblivions was it used a middlewre called facegen and was essentially suppose to be made for smaller less extreme edits.
my brother and i found an exploit when we were kids that if a slider lowered and also raised other sliders you could push it past where the game wanted you to stop, great to have an explaination
They were still a huge improvement over Morrowinds NPCs, i thing tbey were si impressed with themselves finally getting the technology they ran out of development time and just shipped it. I noted the NPCs in Shivering Isles looked noticeably better and by Fallout 3 were perfected. Bethesda does have this tradition of taking so long to develop games they always look outdated when finally released.
was about to mention on how that elf looked like a blueberry, and then saw the name for it, and laugh that was the intended look, also, the orc looks like a pickle, as long as said orc was facing you
Aren't Oblivion's faces handled by some piece of middleware they licensed? It'd be interesting to look at a version of that middleware from around Oblivion's development and see if the default shape keys are just weird and bad, or if Bethesda went out of their way to mess them up.
I always thought the best face maker is to have a tempered version of facegen and equip things like nose and mouth the same way you would with an inventory item. Adjust the height and size of the equipped facial features and you've got a decent looking character. Kinda what they did for Skyrim I guess?
argonians have the most attractive faces in oblivion mostly because they don't have to follow a typical humanoid shape, partly because argonians are naturally sexy
Weirdly Argonians in Oblivion have the most compassionate eyes. Especially the females. How can you not go off to rescue Dar-Ma. And the beautiful, almost shimmering colors on their faces are all unique patters and colors. Argonians in Skyrim are hideous and ugly by contrast.
@@greenscheme2040 their friendly personalities make up for it, especially if you play as one. and the voice on the male argonians in skyrim...absolute perfection.
@@penguinmaster7 Eh I prefer the Oblivion Argonian voice actors better. To each their own. Though teh female Argonian voice is a bit better with the voice actor making them sound like they smoked 3 packs a day but still were very sweet and caring. That was great voice acting. And the Argonians in Oblivion are pretty much all really super friendly and even caring. Well not the one in the Blackwood company obviously. But I loved the one who refused to be an assassin you are sent to kill. I actually admire he followed his conscience and refused to be "used" by the powers that be so I just take the spare heart on the dead guy to complete the quest and get the jumping boots.
Actually I think they just wanted people to have as much fun as possible with the character creation, and realized some people would want to make a really crazy looking guy.
I could not agree with you more! I remember so many Oblivion NPC's because so many are so unique. Personality, looks, even voice with the same voice actor making them sound different. Skyrim had the worst NPC's of the "Big 3" Elder Scrolls NPC's. Even a good number of Morrowind's NPCs are unforgettable. Skyrim? Can't remember a one other than a Khajiit at what was their version of a Mages Guild. But that was because I tried really hard to take him along and find some NPC interesting. Alas even he faded from memory pretty quickly.
I don't remember anyone thinking the faces looked odd back when the game first game out (at least me and my friends didn't). Maybe our standards were a lot lower in 2006.
Im working off of memory so I could be getting this wrong but Oblviions face key software and all that was not intended for oblivion, I dont even think Bethesda made it originally, it was from what I remember a 3rd party company intended for background characters in games, like a cheap way to generate 40 characters that a player will never get too close to see
Oblivion uses a software sdk called FaceGen so I'm not sure how much the crazy sliders were from Bethesda or the software. The same software is used by From Software in all their games including Elden Ring. It's funny how both games end up with people creating the most insane creations ever.
My line of thinking is that whoever made Oblivion, particularly when making the character models and the sliding scale you use in order to make your own character, they were on some Skooma or something.
Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood quests are probably the best of many many great quests in the game. Oblivion is known to have the best quests of any Elder Scrolls game.
On my first try, I was somehow able to make a handsome male Nord. A bit younger looking than I'd meant to, but it was fine. Some time later, I went back to the character creator to play around and absolutely could NOT make a "normal" looking character. I have no idea how I got so lucky that first time, lol.
