Oblivion is impossible!

[foolish snails]

Stick with it! it gets much better.

The reason that you can't beat the oblivion gate is the enemies are always the same level as you, or a few levels below depending on how hard the mission is supposed to be. (or so i've heard, correct me if i'm wrong)

Don't make the mistake of abandoning the main questline and powerleveling. Then you will really learn what it feels like to be out of your depth. Stick with it, if it gets too hard turn the difficulty down.

If you are bothered by the fact that enemies are always the same lvl as you, don't fret. In skyrim, they supposedly have implemented a system where they're the same level as you the first time you encounter them, and if you can't beat them then you can leave and train. When you come back later, they'll still be the same level as when you first encountered them. This won't be everywhere, more just in quests and dungeons.

 

[Cenequus]

Well if people told you Elder Scrolls is your average kill 10 goblins to level up RPG you should punch them. It's not that it's an RPG in the real sense of the word. Whatever you choose to be you can role play it to a certain level.

As for the difficulty creatures have weaknesses, also having a shield it's not for good looking you have to actually block with it. Once you learn to fight it gets very fluid and enjoyable. The leveling is both in game and out of game,yes you can choose to get 10 points in acrobatics or speech but will that make you char better in what you choosed to be? Having free choice of how you want your char to grow relates to that. That means having a choice,thing is many people get blocked and don't know what to do with that choice.

Also there is no difference if you complete the main story at level 4 or 40 it's all about the roleplay factor.

 

[II2]

Here's a few pointers on Oblivion that might help you "get" it, both vibe and controls:

- Levelling is non-standard. You level up by getting 10 points (in one or more) different skills per level. The governing attributes of the skills you use get bonuses to the ones you tag to increase when you SLEEP IN A BED to actually level up once you've met the reqs. It's a bit weird, but you get used to it. You can mod it on the PC if you're truly dissatisfied.

- Monster encounters scale to your level range. This can be good or bad depending on your mindset, one major pitfall is that if you level a bunch of non combat skills you're going to be viciously savaged the next time you enter a new level bracket.

- Archery, while fun, is mostly useless. Unless you're playing a concept character, have modded the game, or are an experienced EScrolls / Oblivion player, focus on melee your first playthrough.

- You can only drink 4 health potions per accessing the menu, but you can access the menu again immediately and drink 4 more, rinse repeat. Annoying but it works in a jam.

- On your first playthrough, if you're doing melee, you want to take the cautious approach: lots of potions - heavy armor - and a one handed weapon + shield. The shield boosts your AC statistically by itself, but it also stuns (most of) the enemies who attack you. Block, wait for them to attack, then smack them when they're stunned, resume block, repeat.

It's far from a perfect game, but with the right state of mind, it's a hell of a lot of fun.

 

[Gauntes]

I played it as wood elf who specializes in bow and stealth the first time around
it was difficult until you figure out how to do sneak attack
which is very early
..
in fact, during tutorial

 

[Duskflamer]

It takes some getting used to but the game can be fun, you just can't play it the way you would play most games on the market. I'll give a few pointers, some of which some people have said already.

1) Skills level up with use. Using a sword to cut enemies to pieces will level up your blade skill, but not your blunt or hand to hand, and it will have absolutely no impact on your ability to cast spells or sneak around.

2) Level ups are still important because that's when you can improve your stats. Every time you level up a skill during a given level, a point is added to the attribute that skill belongs to. When you rest to level up, you can turn these points into gains on three attributes of your choice. So if you level up Blade and only Blade on a given level, you can get the highest Strength boost you can, but minimal gain on other stats.

2.5) To take advantage of this, take the time to level up minor skills during a level, so you can get better level ups.

3) Don't just charge into battle like a maniac, even if you're just using a sword and shild, it's important to think about what you're doing. Most importantly, USE THAT SHIELD. Hold block, wait for it to deflect an opponent's attack. Once you do, the enemy will stagger for a moment in which you can attack without fear of being blocked yourself. Adding magic to the lineup can make things even more interesting, though it can be a bit confusing for a newbie. The most important thing to keep in mind is that if you blindly charge into battle, you're charging to your doom.

For the side discussion: I haven't used any unofficial mods, though I do have all of the official plug ins.

 

[Blondi3]

Umm get mods. If you are playing a Bethesda game and you CAN get mods, GET THEM AS SOON AS POSSIBLE and in MASSIVE NUMBERS.

 

[Meanmoose]

You should murder a random person in the game and then sleep. Wonderful things will happen! =D

I tried, they got up and beat me to death. Stupid Orcs >.<

They? It's a lot easier killing just one. break into a little bosmers(wood elf)house and slit his throat. I know you can do it! Your murder should be observed by mysterious forces! XD Oblivions guild quests and side quests are generally a bit more fun than the main quest line IMHO.

 

[Forgetitnow344]

Psh, you guys who modded the game have no sense of adventure. I played vanilla on Xbox for over 500 hours. Actually, I think it was closer to 1,000, but I don't feel like turning on the Xbox to check for sure and 500 seems like a safer estimate.

 

[Duskflamer]

You earn more experience for using skills your class focuses one, less for their secondary ones, and (I think) a minor amount for ones your class doesn't need.

That's...not exactly how it works, but close. The deal is, each class has a set of 7 major skills, as well as a general specialization in either Combat, Magic, or Stealth. When you choose your class, you get an initial bonus to all the skills this covers, and it doesn't take as much skill XP to level up the skill. To quote from the Wiki [http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Increasing_Skills]:

Skills that are not part of your class are base skills and require the most experience points to advance.
For the seven skills that are associated with your class specialization (Combat, Magic, or Stealth), only 75% of the base experience is needed.
For the seven major skills, only 60% of the base experience is needed.
For any skills that are both specialization skills and major skills, only 45% of the base experience is needed.

So, a combat focused character with Blade as a major skill will level it up twice as fast as, say, healing magic that isn't a class skill, but it's still very much worth leveling up non-class skills for a multitude of reasons.

 

[chaosyoshimage]

...Is this...is it real?

1. The enemies have health bars, it's that curved line above your crosshairs.

I put like 200 hours into this game and did not know that. I'm serious.

Anyway, I honestly found the combat pretty hard too, I never lowered the difficulty past Normal (Or Default or whatever it was). I mostly focused on Stealth and enjoyed the game that way. Everything just took so long to kill and didn't really go all to far to leveling me up. My mian beefs with this game were the characters and story, something Shivering Isles fixed and I'm hoping Skyrim repeats.

 

[Signa]

1> Get soul trap, drain health, weakness to magicka spells
2> Get Asura's Star
3> Join Mage's guild to access enchanting
4> Enchant dagger with Drain 100HP for 1 second, Soul Trap 1 Second, Weakness to Magicka 100% for 1 second

Win game.

I'm sure a lot of that doesn't make sense at first glance, but all it takes is just hunting for those few spells (faqs and wikis will help you) and a common iron dagger to win the game. Every strike you land on an enemy momentarily reduces his HP, but every strike after (if within 1 second) reduces it by 2x the last strike. First it's -200HP, then -400, then -800, -1600.... it doesn't take much to kill the strongest enemies in the game. And the soul trap effect will allow you to keep this going for every non-human/humanlike demon you kill.

 

[synobal]

I'll never know how people play vanilla, there are soo many fantastic mods and now years after it's release I can get texture and model replacements for just about everything. The only thing my oblivion resembles wit the vanilla is the over all geography.

 

[Inithra]

To the person who mentioned poisons: I bought the game on release, played it through half-way (gave up in frustration with the levelled enemies and loot), then bought it again on Xbox (lost the disc for pc) and completed it.
Yet it was only this week on a third playthrough, on PC again,that I even discovered poisons, and even THAT was by accident (made one - thinking it would just hurt me when I drank it - purely to help with levelling alchemy)

To the OP: I really would make a new character and start again, after thinking about what skills you have been using the most and selecting those as your major ones, either by creating a custom class or by picking a premade that uses most if not all of the ones you have been using.
If you go the custom class route, though, I personally would not select Alchemy as a major skill, because you might not be able to find enough ingredients that make it really viable in combat, but YOU will find a bunch of food and make fatigue potions a lot, then end up being a high level character with weak combat skills, and you WILL get destroyed.

 

[Duskflamer]

1> Get soul trap, drain health, weakness to magicka spells
2> Get Asura's Star
3> Join Mage's guild to access enchanting
4> Enchant dagger with Drain 100HP for 1 second, Soul Trap 1 Second, Weakness to Magicka 100% for 1 second

Win game.

I'm sure a lot of that doesn't make sense at first glance, but all it takes is just hunting for those few spells (faqs and wikis will help you) and a common iron dagger to win the game. Every strike you land on an enemy momentarily reduces his HP, but every strike after (if within 1 second) reduces it by 2x the last strike. First it's -200HP, then -400, then -800, -1600.... it doesn't take much to kill the strongest enemies in the game. And the soul trap effect will allow you to keep this going for every non-human/humanlike demon you kill.

Problem: you can only enchant an item with one magic effect at a time. You could make a spell with that effect but then you'd be constrained by your magicka.

 

[Westaway]

1> Get soul trap, drain health, weakness to magicka spells
2> Get Asura's Star
3> Join Mage's guild to access enchanting
4> Enchant dagger with Drain 100HP for 1 second, Soul Trap 1 Second, Weakness to Magicka 100% for 1 second

Win game.

I'm sure a lot of that doesn't make sense at first glance, but all it takes is just hunting for those few spells (faqs and wikis will help you) and a common iron dagger to win the game. Every strike you land on an enemy momentarily reduces his HP, but every strike after (if within 1 second) reduces it by 2x the last strike. First it's -200HP, then -400, then -800, -1600.... it doesn't take much to kill the strongest enemies in the game. And the soul trap effect will allow you to keep this going for every non-human/humanlike demon you kill.

One problem: I'm not magic oriented at all.

 

[OManoghue]

Enemies do have health bars, you don't gain exp. because that's the way TES has always been, idk why, ask Todd Howard, and it's hard because it's a bit unbalanced before you hit level 8-ish. It's an older style of game so the difficulty is pretty high, Morrowind, it's predecessor is even harder.

 

[Westaway]

To the person who mentioned poisons: I bought the game on release, played it through half-way (gave up in frustration with the levelled enemies and loot), then bought it again on Xbox (lost the disc for pc) and completed it.
Yet it was only this week on a third playthrough, on PC again,that I even discovered poisons, and even THAT was by accident (made one - thinking it would just hurt me when I drank it - purely to help with levelling alchemy)

To the OP: I really would make a new character and start again, after thinking about what skills you have been using the most and selecting those as your major ones, either by creating a custom class or by picking a premade that uses most if not all of the ones you have been using.
If you go the custom class route, though, I personally would not select Alchemy as a major skill, because you might not be able to find enough ingredients that make it really viable in combat, but YOU will find a bunch of food and make fatigue potions a lot, then end up being a high level character with weak combat skills, and you WILL get destroyed.

I've also decided to make a new magic only char. Thanks for the tip.

 

[Timedraven 117]

So I bought Oblivion friday (late to the party, I know) because I was looking forward to Skyrim without ever playing a Elder Scroll game. I figured I'd check it out before I paid for Skyrim.
In short, I hate it. The combat is wierd. Why don't enimies has health bars? And whats up the with leveling system? I don't get expirience from killing things? You're telling me I can level up by increasing my acrobatics skill 10 times?
And why is it SO hard? I'm at the FIRST Oblivion gate! It's impossible. I got there at level 2 (because it's the second fukin mission) and now I'm level 4 and still can't come close to beating it. I have a iron bow and steel arrows, and a "fine steel longsword" I'm Aprentice in Archery and Blade. Why do people like this game? I think it will be the first game I give up on due to difficulty in years. Atleast I only spent $20 bucks on it.
Edit: Hey guys, thanks for all the replies. I was going to give another shot anyway, but for sure I'm going to lower the difficulty. Apparently archery sucks and or requires too much stratgie. I'll still to my blades and forget about archery all together. Does anyone know if there is a follower that could help me out this early?

played it too could not stand it i like fallout better but i will give skyrim a try

 

[Westaway]

So I bought Oblivion friday (late to the party, I know) because I was looking forward to Skyrim without ever playing a Elder Scroll game. I figured I'd check it out before I paid for Skyrim.
In short, I hate it. The combat is wierd. Why don't enimies has health bars? And whats up the with leveling system? I don't get expirience from killing things? You're telling me I can level up by increasing my acrobatics skill 10 times?
And why is it SO hard? I'm at the FIRST Oblivion gate! It's impossible. I got there at level 2 (because it's the second fukin mission) and now I'm level 4 and still can't come close to beating it. I have a iron bow and steel arrows, and a "fine steel longsword" I'm Aprentice in Archery and Blade. Why do people like this game? I think it will be the first game I give up on due to difficulty in years. Atleast I only spent $20 bucks on it.
Edit: Hey guys, thanks for all the replies. I was going to give another shot anyway, but for sure I'm going to lower the difficulty. Apparently archery sucks and or requires too much stratgie. I'll still to my blades and forget about archery all together. Does anyone know if there is a follower that could help me out this early?

played it too could not stand it i like fallout better but i will give skyrim a try

I also like Fallout, so I just presumed I'd like Oblivion. So far my main gripe is the auto scailing enemies, and what seems to be a empty world.

 

[Cridhe]

I'm with OP on this. I was level 5 when I happened upon the first oblivion gate and the game was impossibly difficult then, apparently because I didn't min/max my skills. I also don't feel I should have to crank down the default difficulty setting of the game to make it enjoyable.