steph01a said:
(first person shooter people may object below)
Sorry to disappoint, but I'm not a first-person-shooter person. I have my steam stats to proove it, and all my 100-hour-plus games are RPGs. However, I've been playing RPGs long enough to know that Bethesda are just not very good at making them.
Each Elder Scrolls title out of the box is a perfect example of mismanaged creativity. Each is full of good. innovative, mould-breaking ideas, yet in each case they're executed so hamfistedly and with so little regard for basic roleplaying virtues like immersion, balance and storytelling that it's just silly.
Let's go over some key problems with Oblivion as an RPG:
1) The levelling system. There's a reason that most RPGs use a level up system based on defeating enemies and completing quests. It may not be very realistic, but it rewards you for progressing in the game and experiencing the most developed and fun content. This is not to say that the Oblivion 'learn by doing' system is bad, it's not an obstruction to gameplay and with the right mods it very easily does reward you for actually playing the game. The problem is that somewhere in development someone decided to keep that godawful system whereby when you level up your skill raises are transformed into attribute raises. It could have worked if there had been a cap on attribute raises at leach level (so that you always got +5 points regardless, for example), as it stands, playing the game as intended results in a severely gimped character, wheras micromanagement of skill gains with each level will result in a far more powerful and useful character much earlier, at the cost of not being able to actually do anything while levelling.
This is not just them being innovative and us not being ready for the future. It's a bad design choice. The system is so easily fixed, and there are so many mods out there which have done it with the most basic tweaks, that it's unforgivable that Bethesda didn't pick up on the problem. I understand they are reforming the system for Skyrim. Good, how long did it take? How many games did you release without working this problem out?
2) Choice. Oblivion as a game is devoid of meaningful choice. Every storyline, quest and zone is entirely independent, and there is no real consequence to any of them. Even Morrowind, with its competing Imperial and Dunmer factions and stat requirements, was far more integrated as a game. In Oblivion there's no reason not to join any faction, in fact the game seems to expect you will join them all as various vital services require faction membership. Oblivion doesn't even care which race or class you chose, it's a purely cosmetic choice which is never referenced and any statistical differences are meaningless as you max out all your stats and become good at everything anyway (and in fact, the levelling system rewards you for training non-class skills). Who cares if you're a meatheaded warrior who thinks magic is for sissies, you can still become archmage of the mage's guild.
This also sticks a massive knife in the actual thing we're supposed to be doing, which is roleplaying. Good roleplaying games, both classic and recent, reward you to some degree for consistent roleplay, and even those which don't generally make the optimal path invisible so that, short of having access to a wiki, the player cannot immediately predict the most 'optimal' outcome. Oblivion doesn't care. You can be Listener of the Dark Brotherhood and command the Knights of the Nine and noone on either side is going to bat an eyelid, in fact the game will just lavish rewards on you, letting you have your unkillable demon horse and holy relic armour. Your character is not a person, they do not have a role in a coherent storyline. They are a confused mess of heroic and antiheroic archetypes which each individual quest line will selectively reference and invoke without any regard for anything else in the game.
I could go on about bad voice acting and the broken spellcasting system and so forth, but this would turn into some kind of mega-rant. I know my opinions are not universal, after all I thought Dragon Age 2 was one of the best roleplaying games made in recent years and yet it was totally flawed up the wazoo and most people seem to have hated it. Maybe I have a strange or overly-romanticised view of what roleplaying in a computer game should mean. Regardless, I don't think Oblivion excuses its own mistakes. It's not immersive, it doesn't tell a story, it's not a game which encourages or rewards you for roleplaying. It's a game which lets you wander around a samey few square miles of countryside while slowly developing into some kind of titanic blob-monster of meaningless stats and skills who can do (by which I mean kill) anything you want, just don't expect anyone else (or the game itself) to notice.
