This week's Cloud Monday video is part 1 of playing the PS3 version of Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.
I have tried to start The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion a few times across Xbox 360 and PS3, but i have never finished the game. during this video i find out that i had tried it when the service was PlayStation Now and still had no memory of it. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is a game i do want to play and explore and i picked it as part of Cloud Monday as i was curious if it's game design would allow for it.
It came out in a time where RPG's had a mix of fixed location saves and in-world saves. i couldn't remember which one this game had. I did remember the game had auto saves, but only in a negative way because on PlayStation 3 Bethesda games had an issue where if you played the game for hours and hours, the auto save file gets huge and then breaks. but i don't remember the details on that, just that i remember being told back around this time to manually save and to close the game after a few hours.
Even tho i had this negative memory of Bethesda on PS3, i still went in hopeful and even tho is this part 1 i still had a good time. The game makes it clear when it auto saves, and whilst i'd prefer it to be more frequent, loading the save was quick. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion also makes use of manual saves, so when you're free you can pause the game and save. this is an amazing feature for a game being played in the Cloud as Sony's Cloud Streaming Service only gives a 20 second warning. this means we can hit pause and save, quickly get through a conversation to either get an auto save or manual save, or hope that we did it fairly recently.
With any Bethesda game on PS3, i'd recommend saving regularly because of how buggy they were known to be. but this behaviour works well for games being played in the cloud and should be encouraged. Part 1 was mostly in confined spaces so saving and loading were quick so in part 2 it'll be interesting to see is saving times increase to the point where a save might be incomplete before we're kicked off the service if there is a streaming issue. But for now, even tho there are parts of the game dated, playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on PS3 in the cloud is a solid option to play the game.
