Oblivion, as it Was

[tiredinnuendo]

I liked the review and agree on everything. I was wondering when I first played why I only saw little impthings, how could those manage to take out an entire city? I never finished Oblivion because of its repititive nature and lack of interesting story/things to do. The most fun I had were actually the poison arrows where you saw people getting killed slowwwwwwwwwwwly, only to find I somehow killed the dark brotherhoofd catguy that sold them.. only to find he had none of the stuff he sold on him or in his chestst..anywhere!

Well you see, that's because in Morrowind, if a shopkeeper had an item for sale, that item would be either on his person or in the store somewhere. This was incredibly unrealistic because it allowed "thief" themed characters to occasionally steal good stuff. In Oblivion, all shops' actual inventory is stored in a chest that hangs in empty space, outside the game world. This allows Bethesda to not have to try so hard when making their game, see?

- J

 

[TSED]

I liked the review and agree on everything. I was wondering when I first played why I only saw little impthings, how could those manage to take out an entire city? I never finished Oblivion because of its repititive nature and lack of interesting story/things to do. The most fun I had were actually the poison arrows where you saw people getting killed slowwwwwwwwwwwly, only to find I somehow killed the dark brotherhoofd catguy that sold them.. only to find he had none of the stuff he sold on him or in his chestst..anywhere!

Well you see, that's because in Morrowind, if a shopkeeper had an item for sale, that item would be either on his person or in the store somewhere. This was incredibly unrealistic because it allowed "thief" themed characters to occasionally steal good stuff. In Oblivion, all shops' actual inventory is stored in a chest that hangs in empty space, outside the game world. This allows Bethesda to not have to try so hard when making their game, see?

- J

How exactly is a thief being able to pull off a big heist unrealistic?

 

[ilves7]

Yea... oblivion was a big disappointment for me after Morrowind. As stated before, my main gripes about the game were in regards to the game world itself. There was no point in exploring for good stuff or loot. Nothing in the game is static, its so dynamic that you can't get anything good until you level, which I think is stupid. In Morrowind I played a thief character most of the time and I could sneak around dungeons (that were actually DIFFERENT from one another) and steal some good stuff or kill a high level monster that existed when I was low level... there was actually a challenge. In Oblivion the only static element that I can think of with good loot was Umbra. You couldn't even do the Daedra quests without being a certain level. The whole experience was way too controlled. In Morrowind I loved finding all the different dungeons because some of them had some awesome architecture (large, open caves, giant waterfalls/pools, none of which Oblivion had) and design. Oblivion had none of that, it was all cookie-cutter scaled so there was no joy in FINDING anything. I also played a thief character in Oblivion, but because all my stealth skills and bow were leveled, but not my health or strenght or battle skills at much, at higher levels I literally couldn't take on Ogres or Oblivion plane enemies without getting my ass handed to me, so I had to sneak/snipe everything which took hours. Plus the main quests, along with the guild and side quests, were pretty horrible and waaaaay too short in comparison. Only the assassins guild was decent.

If the volcano/blight area of Morrowind exited in Oblivion you could just saunter in there at level 1 and take out everything. In Morrowind you couldn't take on anything there for a while, which was GREAT because it added to the actual atmosphere that this blight thing was actually dangerous. I wouldn't go past those force fields unless I had to and only later in the game, and even then the monsters were challenging... if the same exited in Oblivion I could've used a rusty dagger to take out the final boss.

 

[tiredinnuendo]

How exactly is a thief being able to pull off a big heist unrealistic?

Today, we're going to learn a new word.

The word is:

sarcasm

sar·casm
Pronunciation: \ˈsär-ˌka-zəm\
Function: noun
Etymology: French or Late Latin; French sarcasme, from Late Latin sarcasmos, from Greek sarkasmos, from sarkazein to tear flesh, bite the lips in rage, sneer, from sark-, sarx flesh; probably akin to Avestan thwarəs- to cut
Date: 1550
1: a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain
2 a: a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual b: the use or language of sarcasm

Tomorrow, we'll do ironic.

- J

 

[Easykill]

I dont mind Oblivion, altough it's obviously worse than Morrowind, it does still manage to be fun in parts. My main gripe about it is that after training so long to be a master of alchemy so I could create the ultimate poison of death from the poison apples, it made it into a potion instead of a poison. I didn't notice, and accidentaly killed myself. Which was stupid. There are only like five of those apples in the game anyways, either let me use them as I see fit or delete them altogether. Dont punish me for having a clever idea.

 

[ShadowFlex]

Starting up the game for the first time, I immediately found myself confronted by what I can now call a sort of cruel foreshadowing. The slow, moving, and epic theme of Morrowind was replaced by a perverted version of itself that made me imagine Jeremy Soule snorting crushed Ritalin while chugging triple espressos... the same thing it now seems everyone involved in making the game did. I suppose it was supposed to be more powerful, more urgent, more epic, but instead it sounds like the guy running the recording equipment had severe diarrhea and could only let them have a few minutes at a time before running back to the crapper again. This is personal preference here, of course, but as I said... also foreshadowing, because this ADD-friendly characteristic does not end here.

Ha no wonder you hated the game, I'm surprised you enjoy games! When you load your game up for the first time do you sit back with a notebook and a pen thinking up the longest and most Obscure way to describe what's happening in front of you.

It's hard to take your review seriously, as you just criticise everything for no just reason. Okay so it never sounded like classic Morrowind. Well if thats your pie maybe you should just only buy one game from every franchise, as you appear to have a problem with change.

We all know Oblivion had it's faults "Hey this is only like the one thousandth gate to hell." trust me as a fan of the series I get it. However your frustrations shouldn't over look the amazing time and effort that went into this game. and that is shown throughout the many hours of game play and depth.

Let go of Mr. Grumpy.

 

[stinkypitz]

I love this review. I may have thoroughly enjoyed oblivion, but this is hilarity/truth in a bundle of writing goodness.

 

[ComradeJim270]

Ha no wonder you hated the game, I'm surprised you enjoy games! When you load your game up for the first time do you sit back with a notebook and a pen thinking up the longest and most Obscure way to describe what's happening in front of you.

It's hard to take your review seriously, as you just criticise everything for no just reason. Okay so it never sounded like classic Morrowind. Well if thats your pie maybe you should just only buy one game from every franchise, as you appear to have a problem with change.

We all know Oblivion had it's faults "Hey this is only like the one thousandth gate to hell." trust me as a fan of the series I get it. However your frustrations shouldn't over look the amazing time and effort that went into this game. and that is shown throughout the many hours of game play and depth.

Let go of Mr. Grumpy.

1. Don't take reviews so personally, I'm not insulting your family or something.
2. This whole thing is tongue-in-cheek and should not be taken as seriously as more objective reviews... I already stated this IN THE REVIEW, sorry if I was too subtle for you. Nice work picking perhaps the least serious and least important paragraph in the whole review, by the way.
3. How does one criticize something for no reason? I don't think that's even possible.
4. I have no problem with change, so long as it is for the better. I do have a problem when changes are made which are negative or detrimental, especially when they could have been easily predicted and avoided or their effects easily mitigated (i.e. most of the changes from Morrowind).
5. The "many hours of gameplay" you mention struck me as repititious and mediocre, and if you think Oblivion is deep, you need to play more RPGs. Or perhaps you need a dictionary. I believe Merriam-Webster has a free online one.
6. I don't care how much time and effort they put into it, because it doesn't show. If you take a six-hour dump, the result is still shit. Nothing will change that.

Let go of Mr. Fanboy.

I love this review. I may have thoroughly enjoyed oblivion, but this is hilarity/truth in a bundle of writing goodness.

Great to hear it, I try my best, and it's especially good to hear that SOME people can feel differently than me, yet still consider and even enjoy what I have to say.

If there are other games people would like me to review (on 360, PC, or PSP), I'm open to suggestions. If I have them, or can easily get them, I'd love to try my hand at this again, since some people see, to really like my style, and I enjoyed writing this.

 

[stinkypitz]

oblivion was a gateway for me into the elder scrolls series, and when i played the heck out of it, i thought it was the best. Then i decided to go back in the series and try morrowind. I find myself far more challenged by morrowind, but far more immersed as well. It just seems like theres a whole lot more meat to the game.

 

[zherkezi]

Oblivion may not have had such a well made gameplay, and it may have had a glitch every 5 seconds and have some major balancing issues, but it did have user frendliness, which morrowind does not have. Personally, they are bothe equally good ame, but because oblivion is so much more user frendly, especially with the journal, I think I like it better. Dont get me wrong, they are both great games, but if they simply replaced the journal with one that dosent suck, and mash all the quests together making it impossible to figure out where you are in certain quests and which ones you havent completed, then I would like it better simply for that reason. Trust me, with hundreds of quests, no sorting, and up to 1000 pages, its a kick in the balls.

 

[slyder35]

I think Oblivion, compared to much of the excrement on the market right now, is a marvelous game and incredible value for money. Sure, for RPG-purists it is bound to disappoint, and sure, some of the promises (Not-so-Radiant AI) were not fully delivered, but at the end of the day, it's very hard to find anything current-gen out there that gives such an open, sprawling, and interesting world to explore and save.

Instead of whining about it's shortfalls, why don't the whingers download one of the 100's of MODS out there that "fix" things for you? It would take me 3 minutes to find a mod that removes the enemy-scaling feature in the game. Bethesda allowed their game to be moddable for this very reason, and yet you still whinge about design flaws?

Next thing someone will start up a thread about Super Mario Galaxy being an awful game because the plot is too shallow and the polygon count is too low. Sheesh.

 

[Madlarkin]

Valid points there Comrade Jim, well said.
I bought Morrowind a few years ago and damn was it exciting to play, i nearly didn't buy it, but that GotY box sucked me into parting with my hard earned cash like a candy stored does to a small child who goes hyper off "the blue ones".
Bought it played it and found myself wasting hours exploring avenues and checking out uncharted regions.
Even a hill inspired the thoughts, "hmm, what's over there?" and dammit, i went.
As far as the combat system went on Morrowind, i'll be damned for saying this, but i liked it.
Yes, i know sometimes it was a giant pain in the arse not to stab the rat with your dagger and barbecue him and instead have to reload in the village and hope the local gossips aren't laughing at you for having your ankles gnawed.
I felt a challenge, it offered a threat in the game.

Someone mentioned those random daedric shrines that littered the muddy flats of Morrowind, i went into them as soon as i found them, and i assure you i was of low level.
I learnt that if i don't want too suffer through horrible load times, then staying out of those areas or near to them was a good idea.
I liked not hitting enemies when i swung my craptastic sword about or missing like a wizard with a cataract as my fireball slammed into the nearby tree behind me and not the mudcrab infront of me.
It felt like real character development.
Do i know how to swing a sword? Can i finally aim these fireballs?
No.
Then that bandits den is not the place for me.

Oblivion though, Ugh... i was suprised that my spells actually hit first time, i was taken aback when my wizard could wollop stuff with his staff immediately.
That's about two minutes into my game and i was already annoyed with it, as soon as i got outside, i'll give it credit. I was impressed.
Then it dawned on me, where the hell was i?
I checked the map and found everything was miles away from me, sod walking it.
I found Oblivion's world to swallow the player and i felt a great sense of being overwhelmed. As i stated i like to explore but when i found that too get to that damn mountain i can see would take me about twenty minutes.
control down, Xbox off.
Time to do something else i think.

Oblivion was a let down for me personally and frankly, i have no desire to get past the first half an hour.

 

[CriskaBean]

At first i couldn't get enough of oblivion. having played a lot of Morrowind (mainly just walking around and trying to level up rather than following the main quest) i was looking forward to a new Elder Scroll fix. But as soon as i realised the leveling up of the world around me i started to just not care anymore. Like many people have already said, 'why bother trying to become stronger when everything you fight will be proportionally as strong?', its a stupid feature to add to a game which is all about improving your characters' abilities.

Sure they could have got more voice actors (if they hadn't blown so much on Patrick Steward And Sean Bean) to make people seem like unique characters, but i'd have much prefered if they'd had MORE to say than just have a different voice actor, i forget about most of the not so essential characters anyway.

I used to struggle through the game with a low spec machine, but now have a 'crysis capable' one now so i can finally play the game maxed and with a blistering frame rate, i think the game can be pretty beautiful in places, though the 'tile-set' world (especially in caves/dungeons/frikken 'Plains' of Oblivion) makes all this kind of redundant. And don't get me started on that blinding HDR effect on stone walls/ruins... what were they thinking?

All in all i'd plant the game somewhere in the 8/10 region purely because even though i kinda hate the game for its massive faults, i remember how amazed i was playing it first time through on my shed machine when it was first released. Oh and your review ConradeJim was a good read, nice one pal

 

[ComradeJim270]

I think Oblivion, compared to much of the excrement on the market right now, is a marvelous game and incredible value for money. Sure, for RPG-purists it is bound to disappoint, and sure, some of the promises (Not-so-Radiant AI) were not fully delivered, but at the end of the day, it's very hard to find anything current-gen out there that gives such an open, sprawling, and interesting world to explore and save.

Instead of whining about it's shortfalls, why don't the whingers download one of the 100's of MODS out there that "fix" things for you? It would take me 3 minutes to find a mod that removes the enemy-scaling feature in the game. Bethesda allowed their game to be moddable for this very reason, and yet you still whinge about design flaws?

Next thing someone will start up a thread about Super Mario Galaxy being an awful game because the plot is too shallow and the polygon count is too low. Sheesh.

Because none of those mods addresses some of the most important issues, like NPCs being about as interesting and reaslistic as a cardboard cutout. To do that would require more voice acting, for one thing, which puts it well out of reach of pretty much every modder not willing to risk getting sued by Bethesda for charging money to pay for their expensive-to-make mod. Redoing the story to... well... not suck, would also require a substantial investment. Fixing a flat tire doesn't help if you can't afford gas.

Your Mario analogy is also not hitting the mark, I fail to see the comparison. Nintendo never said Super Mario Galaxy woud be deep and have a high polygon count, and nobody expected such things, because not only did Nintendo not say to expect them, but they are not something that Mario games are known for, let alone loved for. That's very different from expecting what Bethesda promised, and expecting something that improves on Morrowind and gives us lots of new and exciting things, and getting... Oblivion.

Also, you misspelled 'whining' and 'whine'.

Oh and your review ConradeJim was a good read, nice one pal

Thanks.

 

[slyder35]

Also, you misspelled 'whining' and 'whine'.

Where did I say whine?

We are all entitled to our opinion, and I simply expressed mine, as you did yours - we aren't in a court of law, nobody is right or wrong really. As far as your verbal assault on Oblivion, the critical success of the game by reviewers (metacritic score of 94), and the average user score also on metacritic (7.7) shows a bit of a conflict of opinion on whether the game was really a "success" or not. Commercially though it certainly was.

An interesting thread, my comment although a bit blunt wasn't meant to incite an argument.

Did I make any more spelling mistakes?

 

[Booze Zombie]

I really enjoyed the review, Jim.

I have said this many times myself, but here I am, saying it again... All RPGs need to base themselves on Arx Fatalis. Why? Because Arx Fatalis rocks.

It has: Hitboxes, a manual spell casting system (you have to spell the symbols out with your mouse to cast them), spells actually obey the rules of gravity and existence and score hitbox shots as with every other weapon or attack, you must eat food to not die of hunger (a hidden stat) and to heal and restore your magic power, you can combine items and make your own food through a simple system of dropping your uncooked food item on a fire... AND you actually had to control a demon once you had summoned it.

All in all, though... the one thing I can never forgive Oblivion for, is lying to me. Necromancy is something I enjoy in video games, it's like "Hey, you suck... but no matter! You'll make a good meat puppet!" and the Mages' Guild spends it's entire time (unjustly) hunting this guys they call necromancers.

Once problem: We both can't raise the dead, we SUMMON the dead. Not a single necromancer in the game has cast a spell on a dead guy and used that dead guy (as he was) as a disposable minion, with his skills at my use as master of his enslaved soul and body.

THAT... ruined it for me.

 

[R Man]

I actually really liked Oblivion.

The radient AI doesn't bother me much. But that's because when you think about it, thats what normal people do. Just ordinary boring everyday stuff. They eat they sleep and they work for the most part.

The scalled enemies was a good idea as if they didn't scale then the game could be critisised for allowing the PC to slaughter minions like school children. It would be like a Lvl 20 DND character with all +5 equipment fighting Lvl 1 goblins. Hardly fun. The same for the equipment. Playing 20 levels to get ebony makes me seem like I've earned it.

There are quite a large variety of quests not all of which are hack n' slash. Some involve some quite interesting missions (especially the Deadric quests). Not only this but little things help. There have been several times when I was wanted but the guards offered to 'take care of the fine' for me. Being able to lead enemies into traps is also fun.

It's also good that NPC's talk to each other rather than just you. And it's also good how they talk about events in the world. There are some surprising things you can do too. If you steal or take a goblin tribal totem and them drop it in another goblin cave the tribes go to war. Or a village and the goblins will slaughter the town.

The combat wasn't very involved but it was still better than Morrowind and anyway that's closer to what real combat is like (mechanically, not graphically). None of this nonsesnse 'sword dancing'.

Now that's not to say the original review didn't have some good points. Morrowind did have a very interesting and fresh plot as well as a more dynamic atmosphere. Oblivions isn't bad in these, it's just basic. Morrowinds plot was definately superior. The voice acting is good for what it does, but lacked the variety to make it great. This however doesn't mean the idea was bad, it should have just been excecuted better.

I also liked the mix of major and minor skills that lacked in Oblivion but they (Bethseda) apparently left them out to perfect the physics (Or something) on swords and such so they might return in the next title.

When critising a game you can't just note the faults, you have to actually note what is also good, where trade off have been made and where it is actually not viable to have a feature included.

 

[Easykill]

Ummm... he was talking to Criscabean, Slyder35.

 

[ComradeJim270]

Also, you misspelled 'whining' and 'whine'.

Where did I say whine?

We are all entitled to our opinion, and I simply expressed mine, as you did yours - we aren't in a court of law, nobody is right or wrong really. As far as your verbal assault on Oblivion, the critical success of the game by reviewers (metacritic score of 94), and the average user score also on metacritic (7.7) shows a bit of a conflict of opinion on whether the game was really a "success" or not. Commercially though it certainly was.

An interesting thread, my comment although a bit blunt wasn't meant to incite an argument.

Did I make any more spelling mistakes?

I didn't look, because I thought that one was fun enough to point out already.

As for critics, I think they're all full of it. What's Halo 3's metacritic score? Higher than it should be, I'm sure. Most reviewers, I feel, give favorable treatment to big titles like this, perhaps in part due to a conflict of interest (you're reviewing games from companies that give you advertising money, this is not new, allegations that this caused Jeff Gerstmann's firing did not surprise me at all) and the use of numerical scores (like the ones metacritic uses to come up with its numbers) is also misleading in my view, because different publications and websites have different ideas of what is a 'good' score. I think 5 out of 10 should be average, but in most reviews, 5 out of 10 is below average, and 7 out of 10 is average, so a lot of scores are inflated. On top of this, we may end up with different scores if we evaluate a game based on how it will come off to a certain audience... in this case, I feel reviewers paid too little attention to how Oblivion could disappoint RPG fans who had been anticipating it (hence the comment in my last paragraph about it being 'bad' as an RPG but not neccesarily as a game).

As for being a commercial success, what I have to say about that is this: I hope that it doesn't happen again. When a half-assed game like this does well, it encourages more developers to make them (though I expect they may do even worse), and that's bad for gamers on the whole.

 

[ComradeJim270]

When critising a game you can't just note the faults, you have to actually note what is also good, where trade off have been made and where it is actually not viable to have a feature included.

I feel that's been done more than enough, with all kinds of reviews heaping praise upon the game and overlooking problems, so I just did the exact opposite, in a sort of satire. I do mention good things, but much like the reviews which I feel made the game sound better than it does, I mentioned them only briefly, or downplayed them. Funny thing is, I still feel this review is probably more accurate from the standpoint of a fan of Western RPGs.

You can probably expect this in future reviews from me, going into detail about things I feel were overlooked by many reviewers, but I'm not going to try and make a good game sound bad, or vice versa... more likely, I'll just try and cut everything down to size when I feel something is over-hyped. What you can expect from me are not reviews meant to stand on their own, but to stand against others, and in doing so provide the big picture, something I feel only a small portion of reviews actually do.

In short, the more hype and fanboy-ism surrounds something, the harsher I'm going to be towards it. If people say a game is great, I'm going to raise the bar they say it should be able to handle.