'Cause I'm too lazy to figure out where else to put it. Some of this is obvious repeatery, but my commentary is always invaluable. 
Seriously, I haven't posted here in for, like, EVAR, but I figured it would be diverting to drop by and see what everyone's thinking of BethSoft's latest masterpiece. I picked it up the other day, and I was particularly relishing the thought of coming here in full fanboi regalia and telling you all that you missed the second coming of the RPG Christ - that you're all 100% wrong about Oblivion, and that history will not judge kindly your shallow oldsk00l prejudices.
Only problem is, I'd be full of field-ripe feces.
Before my mini-review, an apologia: I got a promotion, just cashed a new paycheck, and after finishing Avernum 4 I was itching to try any non-FPS with some extended play time. Besides, I was already in EB buying Metroid Prime: Hunters. So really, if I hadn't purchased Oblivion, the terrorists would have won.
Also, a caveat: I liked Morrowind. It was a terrible RPG - but even as a combat-heavy adventure game with piss-poor social interaction, it suited part of my gaming style pretty well. I tend to explore every nook and cranny in the game world, and I love finding out-of-the-way caves or dungeons or canyons or mountains or whatever, and Morrowind was actually rewarding for that kind of approach. I hated the walking Wikis, I was bored by the combat, I was irritated by the idiotically-scaled monsters and the insipid quest design . . . but I got a kick out of exploring every square inch of the game world. In Tribunal, in fact, the dungeon crawling was among the best I've ever seen (outside of the ludicrously bad final dungeon).
Without further ado, my impressions based on the first hours of the game, with the negatives first (since I know that's the only reason you're reading it anyway).
THE BAD
1. Draw distance and texture LOD.
Yes, Virginia, it really and truly sucks. I was floored by the incredibly low texture quality past the LOD horizon, and some vistas which could have been magnificent end up looking laughable: they're low-quality and poorly tiled to boot, which can make that hillside across the river look about as snazzy as a preschooler's scribbles with dun-colored sidewalk chalk. On top of the execrably poor texture quality at a distance, geometry/object pop-in is a real issue. Buildings on the other side of the lake don't even draw in until you've dog-paddled halfway to their shore.
Keep in mind that my experience is based on playing the game at 1600x1200 with everything except shadows at max. I tried the .ini tweaks mentioned in the Elder Scrolls forum, and I found them to cause a significant framerate hit on my Athlon 64 3500+ and ATI Radeon X850XT (not a bleeding-edge rig anymore, but definitely not a slouch). And they didn't really solve the problem anyway; they only moved the LOD cutoff to about 50% of my view distance, rather than 30%. There's still a lot of ugliness out there before your eyes get to the horizon.
So, yeah - as bad as all that? Absolutely.
I'm undecided about whether I prefer Gothic's (or Morrowind's) serious world draw-in to this mess. That draw-in is ugly, but at least you know there's something out there you can't see; in Oblivion, there might be ruins in that clearing, or it might just be another peaceful forest clearing. And it's still just as ugly as Gothic's draw-in, maybe more so. In any case, Oblivion clearly doesn't get a pass here. Moronites at the ES forums seem to like pointing out that this problem is unavoidable for such a messianic game, but c'mon already - Far Cry handled this challenge with aplomb, all of two fucking years ago. Get some real programmers, Beth.
2. Texture quality
The textures are disappointing, basically low-res crap wallpapered with lots of normal mapping. It honestly doesn't bother me, but please - I'm supposed to believe this is next-gen?
3. Animation
I don't have any complaints about the NPC and monster animations. When viewed in 3rd-person perspective, tho, the PC animations are no better than Morrowind's. And that's really, really awful, placing Oblivion in the lowest tier of premiere titles being released today. I don't get it: with all the capital flowing into a game like Oblivion, can they really not afford better than this?
4. Automap
The automap is extremely disappointing. Maybe I just haven't figured it out in my first hours of play, but the default scale is too close to be useful and I haven't divined how to adjust the scale. And to make it even less useful, Beth seems to have decided the automap should only record data in about a 10-foot radius around your character.
With a scalable map and a larger mapping radius, this would have been perfect. As is, it's almost worthless.
5. Character interaction
The only significant improvement over Morrowind seems to be
Wait, there's absolutely no improvement over Morrowind.
Within the first hour of play, I'd already seen some glaring recurrences of the worst problems from Morrowind's character interaction mechanics. To whit:
- When you invade the privacy of someone's home, they yell at you to leave. Try engaging them in conversation, tho, and their facial disposition frequently becomes a smile. Their Wiki-style responses are exactly the same whether you've just picked the lock on their door in the middle of the night or are politely questioning them on the street in broad daylight.
- Different phrases from the same character sound as if they're voiced by different actors. This could also be a consequence of the fact that some Wiki responses sound angry while others sound exceedingly mellow, even when you've broken into an NPC's home and pocketed all of their cutlery right in front of their eyes.
- Different responses from the same character actually contradict each other. In one response, Character X will dismissively voice her belief that Gray Fox is simply a rumor; in the very next response, she'll tell you with total credulity that the Thieves Guild is led by Gray Fox, and she'll describe him with what actually sounds like fear.
Just as moronic are the random interactions between NPCs. Here's a pretty representative sample of the kind of stuff you'll overhear:
Man: "Good day to you, good citizen!"
Woman: "Hail to you!"
Man: "I hear the Fighter's Guild is recruiting."
Woman: "Oh!"
Man: "Farewell to you."
Woman: "Goodbye!"
I'm not exaggerating the extent of the insipidity; that's an actual paraphrase from the very first inter-NPC conversation I encountered after leaving the tutorial dungeon. In fact, it's a fairly kind example when compared to some of the conversations I've overheard since then - at least it makes sense.
If anything, Oblivion's system so far seems worse than Morrowind's, just because Beth decided to jack up the font size for the console kiddies. In other words, the character interaction is just as poorly-designed, but the ratio between content and screen real estate is now much worse.
6. Speechcraft
Special mention goes to the new Speechcraft minigame. I'm a native English speaker and a pretty decent writer with a few awards to my credit, but I can't even begin to imagine a vocabulary for the extent to which this minigame is utter horseshit. Besides being an incredibly stupid design idea without even a tangential relation to real social interaction (something with which most players probably have at least a modicum of real-world experience), it simply doesn't make sense.
I think it's probably fair to suggest that the system sucks if I can't grasp it within about 5 seconds. I'm a reasonably intelligent guy, but the more important point is that this is supposed to analogize ordinary human conversation.
7. Interface
Oblivion's interface is a huge step backward from Morrowind's, which was already deeply flawed.
Oblivion's interface is organized around hierarchical nesting of menus, which makes a lot of sense if you're using a console gamepad. Indeed, this is de rigeur for console menu design, and it works fine in, say, Resident Evil 4. The problem here is twofold:
First, Beth doesn't effectively implement a good hierarchical structure. My biggest complaint is that, tho menus are hierarchically nested, you can't navigate back to the previous menu using the Esc key (or any other key that I've been able to discover); instead, you have to actually choose the "Return" option on the menu. It's frustrating as hell and imposes a totally unnecessary level of interface latency. And I assume it's not structured this way in the XBox 360 version, since the console world is basically standardized on hitting "B" to travel up (back) one menu level.
Second, Beth is foisting a hierchical scheme on an entire user population whose UI everywhere outside of the game is spatial rather than hierarchical. I'm not saying spatial is necessarily better; I'm just saying it's what everyone uses in the non-console world, and it makes no fucking sense to force your players to use an alien organizational scheme when there's a totally effective model with which your entire fucking user base is already 100% fluent. Grow up.
The problem is even larger than that, of course. The conflict isn't just between the Oblivion UI and that of the rest of the Windows universe; games frequently deviate from familiar mouse-driven interface, sometimes very effectively. The more significant conflict is between the way you interact with Oblivion's game world and the way you interact with Oblivion's game interface: the first is mouse-and-keyboard-driven, standard FPS fare, while the second is downright inimical to mouse use. I'm thinking of buying a wireless mouse just so I can throw it across the room every time I need to open the goddamn menu.
It's also worth mentioning that the game offers neither interface tooltips nor the ability to name your saved games; Beth seems to have forgotten about both mice and keyboards. Oh, and they also never learned about scaling UI to higher resolutions (or they forgot that functionality since including it in Morrowind). The level of grade-school bullshit here is downright baffling.
8. Plot
I'm not going to get into any significant spoilers here, even tho it probably doesn't matter. But I will happily ruin the tutorial dungeon for you: just before perishing at the hands of shadowy (but laughably low-level) assassins, Emperor Patrick "Uriel" Stewarptim bequeaths to you the sacred amulet of his bloodline, to be conveyed to a secret heir. A few narrative problems become apparent if this scenario is subjected to even minor cognitive rigors:
First, the Blades - the hand-picked bodyguards of the holy emperor who leads an entire nation - are so low-level that two of them meet their (apparently scripted) deaths at the hands of assassins whom you can dispatch with relative ease. Their equipment also happens to be only marginally better than your starting gear. In other words, the idiocy of levelled monsters is painfully obvious within the first 5 minutes of playing the game. (The only reason you can't easily save the Emperor, and thus obviate the entire fucking storyline, is that the game literally freezes your controls while a new shadowy low-level attacker emerges from a monster closet to kill him. Uh, rofl?)
Second, the captain of the Blades is alive at the end of the fight which kills the Emperor, but he behaves as if he's just received a massive cranial trauma: he immediately trusts the Emperor's judgment in giving the Amulet of Kings to you, which is odd enough, but he also seems to think it's a good idea to send you - an escaped convict - alone into the world, with instructions to bring the Amulet to a distant town, in a nation where the emperor and all of his known heirs have been brutally assassinated and where the Amulet somehow seems to be the key to this.
See, he has to stay behind to guard the Emperor's lifeless corpse.
I'm not exaggerating this plot device. It really is that puerile. What strikes me most is that it didn't need to be puerile. It's not hard to cook up workaday narrative solutions for all of these plot idiocies, so I'm left with the conclusions that Beth's writers and designers are either really stupid, archly cynical about the stupidity of their audience, or simply lazy. None of those alternatives is particularly inspiring.
One of the few things I enjoyed about Morrowind was the narrative sophistication of some of the text. Hell, the main storyline was predicated on an obscure disagreement of textual interpretation, and the lit crit in me thought that was actually kind of cool (even tho the game was totally unable to deliver an effective overall narrative). The narrative sloppiness in the first 15 minutes of Oblivion is dismaying and really dampened my desire to see how the storyline develops.
THE GOOD
1. Loading times
They're a non-issue, at least on my rig. It's downright puzzling that BS chose to superimpose "Loading New Area" on the screen; if they hadn't announced it, I honestly wouldn't have noticed the loading at all, and I would have been suitably impressed with their area loading. (Contrast this with Morrowind, where even bleeding-edge rigs can stutter when every new outdoor cell is loaded.) And my hard drive setup isn't exactly tomorrow's tech; I'm running a single standard ATA drive, so I'm guessing my disk access should be pretty typical for most PCs running the game.
Otoh, the loading times will be a major issue on any rig where they're an issue at all, because I run into a loading message on average about every 15-20 seconds in the outdoor areas.
2. Stability
Oblivion has been rock-solid for me, other than the odd behavior of accessing my third-party x.264 codecs whenever it launches. (When I quit Oblivion after playing for an hour, I'll find 10 or more instances of the codec in my taskbar.) I can't fairly blame that on Beth because I haven't isolated the problem, but it never happened before.
BOTTOM LINE: RPG?
Noes.
Many of the quests are more interesting than Morrowind's, and Oblivion does a better job than Morrowind at offering the same sort of "role-playing" experience that you can get from, say, Deus Ex: the freedom to approach situations differently with different character types. I'm kind of role-playing a character, and the game doesn't generally force me into situations that don't work for that character. Otoh, it also doesn't present meaningful options for different responses based on character; BG2 had much better role-playing options than this, and that's damning with faint praise. And social interaction is at least as bad as in Morrowind, which sort of pre-emptively forecloses entire role-playing approaches.
As a stat-based, combat-heavy, exploration-focused adventure game, it's fun within its infuriating technical limitations. I'll probably enjoy it in the same way that I enjoyed Morrowind, and I don't really regret the purchase. But that doesn't mean I don't harbor genuine hatred for the game reviewers salivating over it. The inferior design elements of Oblivion are impossible to miss - they persistently interpose themselves between you and whatever positive experience you might eventually discover in parts of the game - and I can only shake my head and chalk this up as another lesson in the intellectual bankruptcy of game journalism.
As for BethSoft designers learning lessons from Morrowind...well, turns out they were pulling our leg. Surprise!
Seriously, I haven't posted here in for, like, EVAR, but I figured it would be diverting to drop by and see what everyone's thinking of BethSoft's latest masterpiece. I picked it up the other day, and I was particularly relishing the thought of coming here in full fanboi regalia and telling you all that you missed the second coming of the RPG Christ - that you're all 100% wrong about Oblivion, and that history will not judge kindly your shallow oldsk00l prejudices.
Only problem is, I'd be full of field-ripe feces.
Before my mini-review, an apologia: I got a promotion, just cashed a new paycheck, and after finishing Avernum 4 I was itching to try any non-FPS with some extended play time. Besides, I was already in EB buying Metroid Prime: Hunters. So really, if I hadn't purchased Oblivion, the terrorists would have won.
Also, a caveat: I liked Morrowind. It was a terrible RPG - but even as a combat-heavy adventure game with piss-poor social interaction, it suited part of my gaming style pretty well. I tend to explore every nook and cranny in the game world, and I love finding out-of-the-way caves or dungeons or canyons or mountains or whatever, and Morrowind was actually rewarding for that kind of approach. I hated the walking Wikis, I was bored by the combat, I was irritated by the idiotically-scaled monsters and the insipid quest design . . . but I got a kick out of exploring every square inch of the game world. In Tribunal, in fact, the dungeon crawling was among the best I've ever seen (outside of the ludicrously bad final dungeon).
Without further ado, my impressions based on the first hours of the game, with the negatives first (since I know that's the only reason you're reading it anyway).
THE BAD
1. Draw distance and texture LOD.
Yes, Virginia, it really and truly sucks. I was floored by the incredibly low texture quality past the LOD horizon, and some vistas which could have been magnificent end up looking laughable: they're low-quality and poorly tiled to boot, which can make that hillside across the river look about as snazzy as a preschooler's scribbles with dun-colored sidewalk chalk. On top of the execrably poor texture quality at a distance, geometry/object pop-in is a real issue. Buildings on the other side of the lake don't even draw in until you've dog-paddled halfway to their shore.
Keep in mind that my experience is based on playing the game at 1600x1200 with everything except shadows at max. I tried the .ini tweaks mentioned in the Elder Scrolls forum, and I found them to cause a significant framerate hit on my Athlon 64 3500+ and ATI Radeon X850XT (not a bleeding-edge rig anymore, but definitely not a slouch). And they didn't really solve the problem anyway; they only moved the LOD cutoff to about 50% of my view distance, rather than 30%. There's still a lot of ugliness out there before your eyes get to the horizon.
So, yeah - as bad as all that? Absolutely.
I'm undecided about whether I prefer Gothic's (or Morrowind's) serious world draw-in to this mess. That draw-in is ugly, but at least you know there's something out there you can't see; in Oblivion, there might be ruins in that clearing, or it might just be another peaceful forest clearing. And it's still just as ugly as Gothic's draw-in, maybe more so. In any case, Oblivion clearly doesn't get a pass here. Moronites at the ES forums seem to like pointing out that this problem is unavoidable for such a messianic game, but c'mon already - Far Cry handled this challenge with aplomb, all of two fucking years ago. Get some real programmers, Beth.
2. Texture quality
The textures are disappointing, basically low-res crap wallpapered with lots of normal mapping. It honestly doesn't bother me, but please - I'm supposed to believe this is next-gen?
3. Animation
I don't have any complaints about the NPC and monster animations. When viewed in 3rd-person perspective, tho, the PC animations are no better than Morrowind's. And that's really, really awful, placing Oblivion in the lowest tier of premiere titles being released today. I don't get it: with all the capital flowing into a game like Oblivion, can they really not afford better than this?
4. Automap
The automap is extremely disappointing. Maybe I just haven't figured it out in my first hours of play, but the default scale is too close to be useful and I haven't divined how to adjust the scale. And to make it even less useful, Beth seems to have decided the automap should only record data in about a 10-foot radius around your character.
With a scalable map and a larger mapping radius, this would have been perfect. As is, it's almost worthless.
5. Character interaction
The only significant improvement over Morrowind seems to be
Wait, there's absolutely no improvement over Morrowind.
Within the first hour of play, I'd already seen some glaring recurrences of the worst problems from Morrowind's character interaction mechanics. To whit:
- When you invade the privacy of someone's home, they yell at you to leave. Try engaging them in conversation, tho, and their facial disposition frequently becomes a smile. Their Wiki-style responses are exactly the same whether you've just picked the lock on their door in the middle of the night or are politely questioning them on the street in broad daylight.
- Different phrases from the same character sound as if they're voiced by different actors. This could also be a consequence of the fact that some Wiki responses sound angry while others sound exceedingly mellow, even when you've broken into an NPC's home and pocketed all of their cutlery right in front of their eyes.
- Different responses from the same character actually contradict each other. In one response, Character X will dismissively voice her belief that Gray Fox is simply a rumor; in the very next response, she'll tell you with total credulity that the Thieves Guild is led by Gray Fox, and she'll describe him with what actually sounds like fear.
Just as moronic are the random interactions between NPCs. Here's a pretty representative sample of the kind of stuff you'll overhear:
Man: "Good day to you, good citizen!"
Woman: "Hail to you!"
Man: "I hear the Fighter's Guild is recruiting."
Woman: "Oh!"
Man: "Farewell to you."
Woman: "Goodbye!"
I'm not exaggerating the extent of the insipidity; that's an actual paraphrase from the very first inter-NPC conversation I encountered after leaving the tutorial dungeon. In fact, it's a fairly kind example when compared to some of the conversations I've overheard since then - at least it makes sense.
If anything, Oblivion's system so far seems worse than Morrowind's, just because Beth decided to jack up the font size for the console kiddies. In other words, the character interaction is just as poorly-designed, but the ratio between content and screen real estate is now much worse.
6. Speechcraft
Special mention goes to the new Speechcraft minigame. I'm a native English speaker and a pretty decent writer with a few awards to my credit, but I can't even begin to imagine a vocabulary for the extent to which this minigame is utter horseshit. Besides being an incredibly stupid design idea without even a tangential relation to real social interaction (something with which most players probably have at least a modicum of real-world experience), it simply doesn't make sense.
I think it's probably fair to suggest that the system sucks if I can't grasp it within about 5 seconds. I'm a reasonably intelligent guy, but the more important point is that this is supposed to analogize ordinary human conversation.
7. Interface
Oblivion's interface is a huge step backward from Morrowind's, which was already deeply flawed.
Oblivion's interface is organized around hierarchical nesting of menus, which makes a lot of sense if you're using a console gamepad. Indeed, this is de rigeur for console menu design, and it works fine in, say, Resident Evil 4. The problem here is twofold:
First, Beth doesn't effectively implement a good hierarchical structure. My biggest complaint is that, tho menus are hierarchically nested, you can't navigate back to the previous menu using the Esc key (or any other key that I've been able to discover); instead, you have to actually choose the "Return" option on the menu. It's frustrating as hell and imposes a totally unnecessary level of interface latency. And I assume it's not structured this way in the XBox 360 version, since the console world is basically standardized on hitting "B" to travel up (back) one menu level.
Second, Beth is foisting a hierchical scheme on an entire user population whose UI everywhere outside of the game is spatial rather than hierarchical. I'm not saying spatial is necessarily better; I'm just saying it's what everyone uses in the non-console world, and it makes no fucking sense to force your players to use an alien organizational scheme when there's a totally effective model with which your entire fucking user base is already 100% fluent. Grow up.
The problem is even larger than that, of course. The conflict isn't just between the Oblivion UI and that of the rest of the Windows universe; games frequently deviate from familiar mouse-driven interface, sometimes very effectively. The more significant conflict is between the way you interact with Oblivion's game world and the way you interact with Oblivion's game interface: the first is mouse-and-keyboard-driven, standard FPS fare, while the second is downright inimical to mouse use. I'm thinking of buying a wireless mouse just so I can throw it across the room every time I need to open the goddamn menu.
It's also worth mentioning that the game offers neither interface tooltips nor the ability to name your saved games; Beth seems to have forgotten about both mice and keyboards. Oh, and they also never learned about scaling UI to higher resolutions (or they forgot that functionality since including it in Morrowind). The level of grade-school bullshit here is downright baffling.
8. Plot
I'm not going to get into any significant spoilers here, even tho it probably doesn't matter. But I will happily ruin the tutorial dungeon for you: just before perishing at the hands of shadowy (but laughably low-level) assassins, Emperor Patrick "Uriel" Stewarptim bequeaths to you the sacred amulet of his bloodline, to be conveyed to a secret heir. A few narrative problems become apparent if this scenario is subjected to even minor cognitive rigors:
First, the Blades - the hand-picked bodyguards of the holy emperor who leads an entire nation - are so low-level that two of them meet their (apparently scripted) deaths at the hands of assassins whom you can dispatch with relative ease. Their equipment also happens to be only marginally better than your starting gear. In other words, the idiocy of levelled monsters is painfully obvious within the first 5 minutes of playing the game. (The only reason you can't easily save the Emperor, and thus obviate the entire fucking storyline, is that the game literally freezes your controls while a new shadowy low-level attacker emerges from a monster closet to kill him. Uh, rofl?)
Second, the captain of the Blades is alive at the end of the fight which kills the Emperor, but he behaves as if he's just received a massive cranial trauma: he immediately trusts the Emperor's judgment in giving the Amulet of Kings to you, which is odd enough, but he also seems to think it's a good idea to send you - an escaped convict - alone into the world, with instructions to bring the Amulet to a distant town, in a nation where the emperor and all of his known heirs have been brutally assassinated and where the Amulet somehow seems to be the key to this.
See, he has to stay behind to guard the Emperor's lifeless corpse.
I'm not exaggerating this plot device. It really is that puerile. What strikes me most is that it didn't need to be puerile. It's not hard to cook up workaday narrative solutions for all of these plot idiocies, so I'm left with the conclusions that Beth's writers and designers are either really stupid, archly cynical about the stupidity of their audience, or simply lazy. None of those alternatives is particularly inspiring.
One of the few things I enjoyed about Morrowind was the narrative sophistication of some of the text. Hell, the main storyline was predicated on an obscure disagreement of textual interpretation, and the lit crit in me thought that was actually kind of cool (even tho the game was totally unable to deliver an effective overall narrative). The narrative sloppiness in the first 15 minutes of Oblivion is dismaying and really dampened my desire to see how the storyline develops.
THE GOOD
1. Loading times
They're a non-issue, at least on my rig. It's downright puzzling that BS chose to superimpose "Loading New Area" on the screen; if they hadn't announced it, I honestly wouldn't have noticed the loading at all, and I would have been suitably impressed with their area loading. (Contrast this with Morrowind, where even bleeding-edge rigs can stutter when every new outdoor cell is loaded.) And my hard drive setup isn't exactly tomorrow's tech; I'm running a single standard ATA drive, so I'm guessing my disk access should be pretty typical for most PCs running the game.
Otoh, the loading times will be a major issue on any rig where they're an issue at all, because I run into a loading message on average about every 15-20 seconds in the outdoor areas.
2. Stability
Oblivion has been rock-solid for me, other than the odd behavior of accessing my third-party x.264 codecs whenever it launches. (When I quit Oblivion after playing for an hour, I'll find 10 or more instances of the codec in my taskbar.) I can't fairly blame that on Beth because I haven't isolated the problem, but it never happened before.
BOTTOM LINE: RPG?
Noes.
Many of the quests are more interesting than Morrowind's, and Oblivion does a better job than Morrowind at offering the same sort of "role-playing" experience that you can get from, say, Deus Ex: the freedom to approach situations differently with different character types. I'm kind of role-playing a character, and the game doesn't generally force me into situations that don't work for that character. Otoh, it also doesn't present meaningful options for different responses based on character; BG2 had much better role-playing options than this, and that's damning with faint praise. And social interaction is at least as bad as in Morrowind, which sort of pre-emptively forecloses entire role-playing approaches.
As a stat-based, combat-heavy, exploration-focused adventure game, it's fun within its infuriating technical limitations. I'll probably enjoy it in the same way that I enjoyed Morrowind, and I don't really regret the purchase. But that doesn't mean I don't harbor genuine hatred for the game reviewers salivating over it. The inferior design elements of Oblivion are impossible to miss - they persistently interpose themselves between you and whatever positive experience you might eventually discover in parts of the game - and I can only shake my head and chalk this up as another lesson in the intellectual bankruptcy of game journalism.
As for BethSoft designers learning lessons from Morrowind...well, turns out they were pulling our leg. Surprise!
Well, this thread looks a good a place as any to add my own first impressions.
