Oblivion, as it Was

ComradeJim270

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Nov 24, 2007
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I have made it no secret that I have a serious problem with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. More often than not, I will jump on any chance to make a negative comment on it, or those who developed it. But I have never gone into real detail about just how deep the rabbit hole goes, or where it leads. I have never explained the history behind and the nature of these feelings in full detail. Now that we have a forum specifically for user reviews, I see a new opportunity to do so.

Let me first explain that I didn't jump on the bandwagon with the Oblivion criticisms... I always at least try to finish a game before even discussing it, to avoid spoilers and the like, and to develop my own independent opinion. When I did finish Oblivion, and went online to discuss it, I instead found myself cursing the bandwagon for not being nearly big enough, as well as lacking some kind of horrific and murderous device on the front to aid in cutting a bloody swathe through the fanboys, whose lack of taste made my stomach churn.

This review is "Oblivion, as it Was" because I am stating the way I felt about it when it was still new... an easy task, as my feelings towards the game itself have not changed.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is, of course, the sequel to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, a game which I thoroughly enjoyed and praised, and for all its faults, was, in my self-righteous and freely-provided opinion, very good overall, especially with an active modding community to correct the aforementioned faults. True, the dialogue system was reminiscent of a visit to Wikipedia without using the 'search' function, and it wasn't the prettiest game around, but it's a bit silly to expect a steak will not have some gristle in it... and the non-gristly parts of this steak were juicy and delicious. With all the wondrous things Bethesda showed us and told us before Oblivion came out, I expected the next course in the Elder Scrolls meal would be just as yummy, if not more.

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.

Shrugging off this change to one of my favorite video game themes as lamentable but ultimately minor, I proceeded to make a new character. Since the unmodded faces in Morrowind looked like they had been worked on by a mildly retarded plastic surgeon with poor eyesight, I was pleased to see I could now customize my character's facial appearance. While my efforts to give my character a beard failed, due to the fact Bethesda apparently thinks making my character look like someone carefully cuffed him around the jaw with a baseball bat will work for that purpose, I was ultimately pleased with the result. I didn't start to subconsciously notice what would turn out to be further foreshadowing of Oblivion's craptasticness until I began looking around the jail cell I found myself in.

Everything around me appeared to have higher graphical quality than the face I had just spent... too damn long, I guess... working on. It all looked very nice, as I had expected from screenshots and video previews. Walls, objects, clothing... very good graphics, except my character's face, which appeared, in contrast, to be of the quality level which would have gotten the same reaction sometime in 2002 or so. I shrugged this off, and decided I had spent enough time indulging my autistic tendencies by fucking around with the face of a character I would mostly be playing as in first-person.

Next thing I noticed? Someone was speaking to me. This was cool, I thought, and preferable to Wikipedia at this point. But then I saw he was a Dark Elf. Why did he sound like C-3P0 with PMS, instead of the awesome "I just swallowed a handful of gravel and chased it down with a quart of gasoline" voice the male dunmer had in Morrowind? Oh well, I've only seen one NPC so far, anyhow, I thought, and his silver-tongued insults were nicely atmospheric despite his voice being as it was. More characters arriving added to this delightful sense of atmosphere I hoped would continue for the whole game... the voice acting itself was well-done and believable, and made the NPCs feel more alive than the cardboard cutouts in Morrowind. They still looked like someone had assailed them with an ugly stick, but oh well... I don't play RPGs for flashy graphics, and they still looked way better than Morrowind characters.

Unforunately, my enjoyment of the game couldn't even escape unscathed from that jail you start in. Though Patrick Stewart's voicing of the also ass-ugly Emperor was top-notch, I felt like I was talking to a senile old fart, not a respected leader of an entire continent. Yes, the Elder Scrolls lore says he was probably 80-something, but it's no fun when he acts like it by responding to my character in a manner that screams "We didn't bother to record him responding differently when you say different things", which left me worried the dialogue in the game would continue to be half-assed and to rattle my suspension of disbelief. This was only in the back of my mind, though. I was still eager to play, mostly dismissive of my worries, and overall fairly impressed with what I had seen.

At the end of the dungeon, of course, an NPC reccomended a class to me, at which point I followed in the grand Elder Scrolls tradition and told him to go fuck himself, because all the built-in classes were bogged down with useless skills and I wanted to make my own. This took me even longer than making my face, because now you could only pick 7 skills of equal importance, instead of 5 major and 5 minor ones like in Morrowind... I didn't mind too much, especially since they cut out some skills, and consolidated others into a single skill, I'm just indecisive.

After I finished with that guy, who would not let me take the Emperor's stuff in spite of the fact he had just entrusted me with a sacred imperial artifact and told me to haul my grubby, just-pardoned-from-prison ass off an a mission of utmost importance, I continued through the sewers, fighting suspisciously weak goblins with the game's improved but still underwhelming combat system (more on that later), I finally stepped outside, hoping to see the lush jungles of Cyrodiil described in previous Elder Scrolls lore, but instead getting... generic fantasy shit. Oh well, I must have just not found the jungles and stuff yet, right? I didn't see them in the intro movie, and this is a developed area anyhow! Whatever... now to the Imperial City... oh boy, let's see this "Radiant AI" at work!

Oh, what disappointment... remember when I said that the underwhelming faces were foreshadowing? They were foreshadowing the fact that Oblivion seems to expect you will spend more time looking at things than people... in a ROLE-PLAYING GAME. It's a game about playing the role of a character, interacting with other characters... but the NPCs aren't even half-assed... more like... I dunno, quarter-assed, at best. Despite all dialogue being voiced, they apparently fired a bunch of the voice actors at Bethesda, because there are FEWER voice actors now than in Morrowind, where they had a tiny fraction of the number of lines. All male elves sound like the first you see, with that fucked up, achingly sterotypical British accent (female elves lack a British accent, for some reason, just like male Imperials, and unlike female Imperials). Their social interactions are also unbelievably akward and absurd, like they grew up in their abusive step-father's closet, so you basically hear the same few voices saying the same shit all the damn time. When YOU talk to them, it's still like Wikipedia, except now there are 90% fewer articles, voice instead of text, and each article is limited to one paragraph in length, probably so the 13 year olds apparently targeted by this game don't get bored.

The faces are ugly because you'll want to spend as little time as possible looking at them, and even if you didn't, they run out of things to say almost immediately... except to each other, because they love to make jarringly unnatural small talk. It's like listening to especially eloquent retards carrying on about stuff that doesn't even concern them.

Also, everyone walks like a woman in high heels, with their hips swaying wildly, but since my character did this too, I pushed it to the back of my mind, and reminded myself that in Morrowind, they walked like they were trying to goose-step but didn't quite know how, and ran like... I dunno, Flashdance. So it was still an improvement, and I'd play female characters in the future.

Understandably, I was quick to leave the city, perhaps to encounter something more socially adept, such as a starving, rabid wolf. Lucky for me, that's the first thing I ran into. I was frightened by this at first, recalling how simple wildlife in Morrowind would maul my starting character like he was made out of leftover meat by a deranged butcher whose favorite book was Frankenstein, but thankfully, combat in Oblivion is much better. If you swing a weapon at something, and you are close enough, it will hit. Rather than determining if you hit or miss, the corresponding skill determines how much damage is done. You also manually control blocking, and can do it with any weapon. A hit is assured, as is a block... so my craptacular weapons and blocking skill was sufficient to slay the wolf. I also tried some spells, which are actually very useful now that magicka (you use it to cast spells) actually regenerates, instead of waiting for you to take a nap when it runs out every 15 minutes, like you were 90 years old or something. Spells also work 100% of the time now, with the related skill determining how much it costs to cast them, and whether you are sufficiently skilled to use then in the first place. If you need to be level 50 in the skill to use a spell, it will work 0% of the time until you reach that level, and 100% of the time afterwards. Very cool, and it gives you a real sense of progress in these skills, at least.

Too bad that sense of progress doesn't extend far beyond this. The real reason I could kill wolves and such so easily is that the game makes itself easier for you. The first big battles I fought were disappointingly easy, because instead of nasty, apeshit, demonic invaders with swords as long as my leg, I fought bad guys who looked like the little fuckers in Gremlins... you know, that 1980's B-movie? The evil demon soldiers I faced were apparently interns or something, because I could have sneezed on them and killed them. All the NPCs were telling me "Oh shit, the evil demonic daedra are invading, and you have to stop them with that rusty sword", instilling a sense of foreboding at a presumably difficult battle ahead, but after killing some gremlins and going TO A BIGASS FORTRESS IN HELL, plowing through the bad guys (some gave me trouble, until I got used to the simplistic combat), and emerging victorious from a gigantic hell portal, all I could think was "That was it?".

I didn't know about the level scaling until a bit later, but I was righteously ticked off when I learned of it. Why can't I find better armor and weapons? Because nobody will drop them, and no loot container will have them until I reach an arbitrary level, then every bandit and his goldfish will head over to Honest Bob's Loot Emporium (We reserve the right to refuse service to player characters) for free shit (that costs YOU a fortune), then stuff it in chests, wear it, and wield it. Obviously, they will also use it against you, so the bad guys are always a match for you... no matter how hard you try, you will never be able to be powerful relative to the NPCs (the monsters level up too, weaker ones being replaced by more powerful ones), except by virtue of them having the intelligence and combat prowess of a slightly retarded Cocker Spaniel with severe cataracts. You will also never get really great loot before, say, level 20, because it won't exist. Even quest rewards are leveled, so you get the dollar store versions of them if you do the quest too soon... but I guess you could do the main quest in the meantime, right?

Wrong. Even stuff in the main quest is leveled. Some demonic invasion, their best troops are apparently AWOL until you hit level 20. Even their reservists patiently wait for you to enter their glowing orange gates of firey doom and kill them, rather than overwhelming the cities of Cyrodiil. The NPCs cry about how, any day now, a bunch of evil motherfuckers will swarm over the city wall, and URGENTLY beg you, and only you, to do something, but you can take as long as you like. Goodbye, suspension of disbelief!

When you do go into the hell gates, of which there are MANY (nearly all are optional), you are teleported to one of a comparatively tiny number of "Planes of Oblivion" repeated over and over, which you will have to drag your ass through to get to a stone at the top of a huge tower to close them. You get to keep the stones, and make cool stuff with them, as they create powerful (again, for your level, so it's best just to kill monsters for 20 levels if you want the best stuff) enchantments you can't quite match, otherwise.

Speaking of enchantments, you have to join the Mages' Guild and advance to a certain rank to do them yourself. This is not a problem, because the factions in Oblivion apparently have very low standards, and don't require you to be in any way qualified. You can finish the Mages' Guild questline, and advance to the top rank, without casting a single spell. You can finish the Fighter's Guild questline without using a weapon. You can finish the Theives' Guild questline with all the subtlety of a main battle tank driving through an art gallery displaying a blown glass collection. You can do all of this, and monopolize the fucking power structure of Oblivion. With one character. Especially since most of these quest lines are short, and you get a promotion after almost every mission, even though there are NPCs who are older than the fossilized dinosaur turd I used to have on my mantle, and have been trying to advance in rank for most of their lives.

Side quests, for the most part, are also a load of shit. Because Bethesda's writers apparently think diplomacy is for pussies, most quests, not counting the ones which you could more or less do in real life by getting a job with UPS, end in you killing someone or something. I suppose that's to be expected when most people in Cyrodiil are too stupid to actually speak... they have to stab each other instead.

That's another thing... there are NPCs you can't kill. Some of them are in escort missions (inexplicably, the hardest escort mission doesn't do this), but most of them are not. If you take their health down to 0, they faint, then shortly get back up. Just for kicks, I once shot about 30 arrows into an innkeeper (who went flying over tables and knocked stuff all over the place, showing off the Havok physics engine, one of the few good things in the game), until they were a walking pincushion, utterly unconcerned they had arrows sticking out of them from different angles all over their body. This is hardly immersive. What if I want to rob these assholes? So what if they give a quest later on! Bethesda harps about the freedom given to players, but won't let them kill a damn innkeeper.

Back to the quests... to do them, you follow a magical arrow which appears on your mystical fucking Compass of Omniscience (well, they don't acually give you an item like this, it's just part of your HUD thingy), which always knows exactly where to go to proceed with whatever you are doing. No exploration or exciting searching for a landmark in a dangerous (Hah! Not in this game!) place is needed, it even alerts you to dungeons 500 yards away. I suppose this is because those exciting jungles I mentioned much earlier don't exist, and the game just has: generic fantasy mountains, generic fantasy grasslands, generic fantasy coniferous forests, with hills and water here and there so Bethesda can make a claim of some variety being present. Hard to tell one area from another when it's all like that. Or maybe the compass is there because the quests are also half-assed, having about as much substance to them as a fart, from a role-playing perspective especially, but usually from a gameplay perspective, too.

You can't even decline quests, because your character is only marginally more verbal than most FPS protagonists. When offered a quest, you can only say (with minor variations here and there) "Yes" or "Maybe Later". When you eventually get bored with working for Ye Olde Fed-Ex, and say "Yes", your magical Journal of Telling You What to Do Because You Must Be Retarded will say exactly what's going on and what you're SUPPOSED to do in this game that is supposedly so big on player freedom. You want to turn in the Theives' Guild? Too fucking bad. The journal says you should join them. Ignore it and do nothing, or obey it. The journal says missionary with the lights out, so you better listen, or you don't get anything. What a *****!

Oh, you also get a horse. Your horse sucks. It can jump, but not very well, so you usually have to make several attempts to jump over anything, and you may as well try going around, instead. Enemies, no matter how fucking slow they are, will chase you and your horse for approximately the distance between New York and THE FUCKING MOON. If something gets in front of you, even if it's just a damn rat, your horse will run in place until it gets out of the way or you go around it, because apparently things that want to eat your toes have the right of way. Thankfully, there is a quick travel feature that lets you move in simulated real-time to places you have already been, or to cities and towns, though this is probably for the ritalin-popping crowd, and not because Bethesda realized the horses suck. You can't do this if "enemies are nearby" (for instance, if a small crab is within 100 yards and aware of your presence, prompting a slow kamikaze charge because a huge orc is invading it's turf, where non-crustaceans are pinched on sight), though... making the horse even more annoying. You could just skip the horse, because running doesn't even tire your Olympic athlete of a character, it only means that the fatigue of jumping and fighting wears off more slowly. Not sure if that's an improvement.

Now, it's not all bad. Like I said, most of the game looks good, and the combat is substantially better than in Morrowind. The few characters who have their own voice actors sound great, and on the rare occasions where I could manage suspension of disbelief, the main story was pretty good, with some really cool parts, and some which I'm sure would have been moving if not for the context (You can't fish a pie out of a cesspool and expect to enjoy it, no matter how nice a pie it would otherwise be). Some quests, particularly segments of the main quest, manage to shine through the dark river of Tdod Howard's excrement here and there, and are quite memorable. Skills and magic use have been tweaked or redone to be more fun and/or more useful, though the replacement of Speechcraft and Security skills being done by the game, to being mini-games, may annoy some, being too easy or too hard, or simply unappealing. There's also a lot to do, though most of it is not terribly exciting or interesting, so you can at least get quantity in terms of gameplay, even if quality is generally lacking. You can also turn off the game, then go try to pick every berry off a blackberry bush, I suppose, but will getting jabbed by thorns until your hands are terribly swollen and infected with some horrible flesh-eating pathogen be worth the effort of getting said berries?

I would not say Oblivion is neccesarily bad, at least not as a game. As an RPG specifically, it's a blight upon the whole genre, showing what I feel is precisely the wrong direction to go, but just as a game, it manages to have just enough going for it that it can be called decent, on the whole. There are many, many games you'd be better off playing, but it's not really an awful thing if you end up playing Oblivion instead. If you mod it, to at least try and fix the mistakes Bethesda still won't actually acknowledge. or to add some better quests and such, it may actually be quite good. I suppose part of my problem with it is just that I feel the whole thing is a big mistake that nobody will accept as such, but that's not the fault of the game itself.

In the end, I'm just one man with no say in the direction the gaming industry goes. I just hope that Oblivion is an evolutionary dead end... and that someday, I may be able to kick Bethesda in their collective balls and take all their wallets for tricking me into buying it with a mastery of bullshit that should impress even Peter Molyneaux... who knows, maybe it will happen!
 

Melaisis

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I enjoyed it. A bit ranty and totally unbalanced maybe, even when you were trying to give it positive marks by comparing it to Morrowind by never-the-less a half-decent review focusing on player interaction with characters, rather than anything else? You picked up on the points which I would not necessarily pick out myself, but are still very important.

Kudos.
 

ComradeJim270

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Nov 24, 2007
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Yeah, I was kind of going for a ranty and unbalanced tone, because there are plenty of objective reviews out there already, and I wanted to show how I personally felt about the game. I also tried to interject some humor here and there, so I'm curious if there are any parts you find notably amusing? Either way, thanks for the input.
 

richasr

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Dec 13, 2007
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That was a nice read, it did feel like you were whinging at times, but then again you don't like Oblivion, which is the point of the thread. Glad to see not everyone is a fanboy, a couple of friends of mine had 'capable' PCs to play this when it first came out and they were so protective of their new friend.

I finally got it on the 360 and I really enjoyed playing it, completing it and then leaving it, I gave it to a friend for his copy of FIFA 08 seeing as mine was scratched to death and i've not seen it since... the replay factor isn't so good I find, considering you can pack well over a hundred hours on one save.

Role on the next Elder Scrolls, and I hope Fallout isn't affected by the poor AI and conversational skills Oblivion has.
 

Lightbulb

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Oct 28, 2007
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Oh don't forget that if you pick 'jumping' or 'running' as a major skills you will level faster than you should and therefore will be unable to kill anything in less than 10 minutes.

Oh and the 'improved' combat consists of 'running around and around in circles' spamming crap spells at the enemies. Or alternatively if you are a fighter:

Do Fighting
right click, hold, release, left click, left click, left click
Loop

As a fun alternative to running around in circles you can jump on to a rock because the enemies will just run in to it while you click at them...
 

wilsonscrazybed

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Dec 16, 2007
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I appreciate what you did with the article. It might have worked better if you had taken a more neutral voice. Letting the facts speak for themselves. As the above commenter, I think the best part of this article is your interaction with the game. I wouldn't mind reading more of that stuff.

I am highly unqualified to tell you how to write humor, that's a pretty subjective area. Perhaps you might try avoiding excessive imagry, using capitalization to denote emphasis, and explicative as a humor device if not entirely, at least to a certain degree.

This is as good a place as any to rant, I like your candor. Even if it was a little on the 'agressive' side for me. There is genuinely some good stuff here, you just need to find your voice as a writer and turn the squelch down.
 

tiredinnuendo

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I didn't find your review inaccurate, though you picked out things I might not have and left off things that bothered me the most, which is good because it can give a fresh outlook. I actually enjoy the use of allegory, though some examples you chose weren't exactly my brand of humor. I was bothered that you didn't mention the computer-generated dungeons or the fact that most people had finished the game, by which I mean completed every quest, inside of a few weeks. I didn't play it excessively and I was totally done in two weeks.

Overall I enjoyed your review, but I'd have to see you review something you generally liked to decide whether I like your reviewing style.

- J
 

RabbitDynamite

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I can't bloody agree more mate. The scaling is a cock-up of a monumental scale that instills a sense of sanity-draining pointlessness in the player. Bethesda decided to give the player freedom by allowing them to do anything, but the whole point of freedom is for it to be freedom to explore a world. Oblivion doesn't have a world, it's some type of clay that moulds itself around the player. It also means that the entire game is the EXACT SAME only everything is a sprite swap of the game at a lower level, with everything having the same effect relative to your character, meaning that every dungeon plays the same with different graphics. I didn't find it particularly funny to be honest, but the passion made it worth reading. Affecting a "neutral voice" is all well and good, but how does one do that when face with such a disaster? I wasn't going "oh I say, how well educated, astute and well versed in the tactics of formal debate this fellow is in his fine assessment of this game" but I was cheering and shaking my fist with vigour during the whole thing. Leave nuanced analysis to others, you're a good gaming soapboxer. Oh and the flesh eating pathogen bit was genuinely funny. To extend some of your points further into the ridiculous would make it funnier to me, but it's all taste, so do what comes naturally.
 

shakeslol

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I'm suprised the diluted armour system wasn't targeted, as In morrowind the level to which you could mould your character was immense with armour, each piece having a left or right counterpart when pauldrons and gauntlets/bracers were concerned, which brings me to my next point... where were the pauldrons? why integrate them with the cuirass?

Oblivion was one of the biggest disappointments of my gaming 'life'.
 

denright

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Jan 4, 2008
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The bottom line:

It was a successful and profitable game for Bethesda.

If you don't like it you can either not purchase further Bethesda products and/or go out and develop something you believe is a higher "quality" product according to your qualifications. A lot of the market actually like some of the iterations they made to the systems since Morrowind that are pointed out as negatives in your criticisms.

Criticisms aren't bad, my only advice is to remove the scathing "emotional" elements from future reviews and try to evaluate the pros and cons of the decisions made by the developers.
 

KurtNiisan

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denright said:
P.S. I bought it also, played it quite a bit, but have not completed it. I might complete the main story line, eventually, if I have the free time and nothing better to do.
- I'm in the same situation as you, and will probably not finish it for a while, as the last time I played Oblivion on my 360 was when we'd just moved into the new flat and had no Interbutt. As soon as we were connected to the Net, it was back onto the online FPSs ^^
 

Ranzel

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Oct 7, 2007
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denright said:
The bottom line:

It was a successful and profitable game for Bethesda.

If you don't like it you can either not purchase further Bethesda products and/or go out and develop something you believe is a higher "quality" product according to your qualifications.
Yes, lets round up everyone who has ever disliked a game, any game, and force them to produce their own game of higher standards solely because they disliked that one game. That makes total and complete sense.

Telling someone to go out and make a better game just because they disliked a particular game is a tell tale sign of fanboyism. People are aloud to dislike games, in case you didn't get the memo. The fact that he disliked this ONE Bethesda product also DOES NOT mean he should never buy a Bethseda product. He made many completely valid points, and if Bethseda doesn't fix those flaws they'd be fools.
 

runtheplacered

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Ranzel said:
denright said:
The bottom line:

It was a successful and profitable game for Bethesda.

If you don't like it you can either not purchase further Bethesda products and/or go out and develop something you believe is a higher "quality" product according to your qualifications.
Yes, lets round up everyone who has ever disliked a game, any game, and force them to produce their own game of higher standards solely because they disliked that one game. That makes total and complete sense.

Telling someone to go out and make a better game just because they disliked a particular game is a tell tale sign of fanboyism. People are aloud to dislike games, in case you didn't get the memo. The fact that he disliked this ONE Bethesda product also DOES NOT mean he should never buy a Bethseda product. He made many completely valid points, and if Bethseda doesn't fix those flaws they'd be fools.
I was about to say something very similar to denright. But you said it better then I would have.
 

DeathWyrmNexus

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Actually, I understand your annoyances and found a decent amount of your humor funny. However, with games like this I always end up making my own fun. Like a tool, I abused the dupe cheat but only for arrows and components for Alchemy.

When I got the chance, I made 100% chameleon gear and chased guards with my customized Big Fall spell that made 20' radius paralyze for 2 seconds. Or I would play pretend assassin against bandits with my poisoned arrows and see how much I could get away with while wearing only the Black Hand Robe and Cowl. Lots of fun for me at least.

In the regards of my tooling around, I found that I had lots of freedom. With my massive wads of poison and potion knowledge, I could kill guards early on and get their gear. I even managed to kill Umbra's user early in the game and wear Ebony at level 3.

You are right though, it is annoying to have enemies scale with you. Messes with the sense that you are a powerful warrior when you see almost Every Marauder wearing Ebony or Daedric. Takes away from the feeling of rarity.

I must say I enjoyed potion making and wished they would let me name my own potions. Also I was annoyed with item making. I could have sworn you could put multiple effects on an item in Morrowind.

Anyway, I liked the review and agreed with you on many points and to all you nitwits talking about making a better game. Seriously, if it was that easy we wouldn't even be here to bother with it. We would all be making our own shit and having too much fun to complain about other people's work.
 

PurpleRain

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TheNecroswanson said:
I actually liked Oblivion. But then again I was just so overjoyed that I was finally hitting something, blocking, surviving and finding places. So maybe I was just on the Oblivion LSD.
The points you brought up were good, and I just likes to think of Oblivion as being Trial and Error for the next Elder Scrolls game.
I hope so. They did a lot of good things in Morrowind, but that game stunk and was boring to myself. This game got rid of all the good bits from Morrowind for some reason. I would rather the next game a bit of a cross, and at least a little open ended.
 

RentCavalier

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Hmmm...this is a tough issue...

On one hand, I agree entirely that the actual NPCs in Oblivion are rather wooden--heavens, everyone seems to just be that same person after awhile, but...at the same time, because everyone sounded the same, it made me pay more attention to the dialogue itself--and the game's writing is really very, very good. A game this size has an enormous script, and even the lowly beggars have some interesting things to say, even if it is in the same voice.

Personally, I didn't mind all that. NPCs exist for me to either kill or get missions from. I wasn't playing Oblivion to get absorbed into some great and wonderous fantasy world--I was playing it to get a kick-ass sandbox RPG that took the craptastic combat of Morrowind and made it presentable. There's tons to do, and better yet, a lot of what you can do is actually rather DIFFERENT--in Morrowind, I found a lot of missions really just resulted in me picking up an item somewhere or killing somebody with a blunt instrument. This game gives us basic assassination missions, but with an added, optional incentive to do those missions differently, either by poisoning somebody instead of hacking them, avoiding detecting in a revisited labyrinth or by going in disguise and tricking somebody. Even the non-Guild related missions had flaire and charm, especially the one where you go inside a painting.

Sure, the characters are wooden adn blocky, but the game is MUCH fairer than Morrowind was--am I the only person who got pissed off when, after being able to kill every mudcrab from here to the Shivering Isles, I was just OHKO'd by some random Daedra near a shrine? I'm of the opinion that I'd rather have a steady challenge throughout the game, thus letting me have more freedom in what I do and less worry about getting overpowered, than I would have a game where every locked door could lead to an extremely cheap death while doing a nigh-identical task over and over and over and over again.

So, that's my defense. It ain't perfect, I don't think, but maybe I went into Oblivion with something different in mind. All I know is, if it's a game that lets me break out of prison, join a thieves guild, sneak around the docks and slaughter an entire crew of pirates, steal their swords and armor, and then go out and raid a tomb of its treasures, all the while discovering some ancient spellbook that lets me boost my magic stat to incredible heights, is a good time in my book.

Maybe it's our expectations that bring game experiences down, and not the games themselves.
 

ComradeJim270

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Nov 24, 2007
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Wow, this thread really took off. Anyway, thank you all for the input all of it is very helpful... except the "make your own game" crowd... come on, you guys, that sort of reasoning is ridiculous.

RentCavalier, I agree that expecations are a factor, but low expectations will not make a bad game good, and high expectations will not make a good game bad. Valid criticisms remain valid no matter how hyped or obscure a game is. I'm glad you at least enjoyed the game, though, I suppose. I hate feeling ripped off.

tiredinnuendo, I would consider reviewing a game I like, if you'd like to see my style under those conditions. I would consider doing a Mass Effect review, since I've been loving that game lately, but there are probably enough floating around already. Not sure how many of them have the pessimisstic, mean-spirited, nit-picking, bordering-on-outright-ranting tone that is usually present when I speak on a game, though, so if people would like to see what happens when I review something I like, I will. Not gonna do it without someone asking, though.

On an interesting note, this review was done in one sitting, with no actual drafting (I changed a few things like spelling errors after posting), so it's just off the top of my head, and I will probably do the same if I do a review again. It's just fun to take the stuff I learned in English classes and say "Yeah, I'll take that under advisement, now let's start typing stuff!" Make what you will of that.
 

Damn Dirty Ape

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Oct 10, 2007
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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!