Oblivion: Was this a disappointment to anyone else?

[Aisyah Fatihah]

Well, a bit. I enjoyed it, but the level up system kinda suck... And the uncanny valley. And the limited cast for voice acting. And the generic RPG setting. And that I have to lower the difficulty every time I level up. The combat seems to work nicely for me, though.

Again, I enjoy the game, despite the flaws.

 

[DirgeNovak]

No. Oblivion was my first Bethesda game ever and it blew me away. Sure the dialogue sucked, but the combat system was awesome (and still is) and the immersion isn't that bad.

Other games have bested it in most regards, but back then it was awesome and today it's still totally great.

Now I was planning on finishing Catherine today, but I have to play Oblivion again because of you. I hope you're proud of yourself.

I think I'll be an Argonian this time...

The lack of variety regarding voice actors was a real immersion killer when talking to NPCs.

Whats even worse then only having five voice actors is when you are talking to somebody and they switch between three of them, especially when it changes from a guys voice to a girls.

That never happened to me in 200+ hours.

 

[Catchy Slogan]

I got it a few years ago, GOTY edition and no, not really. I didn't have that high of an expectation. I've had quite a bit of fun on it now and again, and I have still yet to finish it. I still find new things every time I play it. It was the best value for money I have ever had. And this is coming from the person who got Mass Effect for £5 last year.

 

[AlternatePFG]

Played Morrowind after Oblivion, I liked Morrowind better than Oblivion despite the worse graphics and combat. It doesn't treat the player like a moron, and let's them figure things out for themselves. Sure, sometimes the directions were ridiculously vague, but that's better than having an arrow point where you need to go at all times. But I only played both of them seriously like last year, so there wasn't any time for me to be disappointed.

 

[sketch_zeppelin]

I defantly didn't enjoy oblivion as much as i did morrowind. I loved the story and the enviorments but was annoyed with the descion to have enemies level up with you so even at level 60 two goblin shamens is all it took to kill you.

I also wasn't a fan of the restrictions they but on leveling up and enchanting. In morrowind if you worked the system right you could make a god like character and it was really cool. in Oblivion you have to cheat to do that.

I still enjoyed Oblivion much more than fallout. Mostly because i hated the enviorment in fallout and i felt the gun physics we're too wonky. I just don't like ovlivion as much as Morrowind...heres hoping for Skyrme

 

[Post Tenebrae Morte]

Meh. I liked Oblivion. Sure it wasn't as good as Morrowind, but honestly, it was still pretty good. If you think the combat is bad, go play Daggerfall or Arena, those games will eat you alive. Yes, the leveling loot system was a pain in the ass. But to be honest, it was easy as hell to gain levels. I got to 21 in 2, 6 hour playthroughs. That got me to a good point that the loot would be quite good.

For the voice actors: It didn't bother me. I played Morrowind to death, so I'm immune to being picky about stuff like that. Hell, I was missing the old Dunmer Male Voice Actor. But I digress, the VA wasn't as horrible as people would love to paint it.

Combat evolved better in Oblivion, Morrowind contained traces of the old Combat system, so it got bad at times regarding fighting.

Skyrim looks to be better than Morrowind and Oblivion, so no worries about the sequel.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

Oblivion was fun on the first few characters I made, most because they put in all the content and balancing with the first ten levels in mind. Then they went, "Well, we've got another forty levels - fuck it, let's just make all monsters scale." So initially I thought the game was fucking incredible when I was just riding around drooling at the environment and making a different character each to do the Main, Fighter, Mage, Thief and Dark Brotherhood quest chains. Then I tried doing more than one on a single character, and it just descended into tediously long battles with super-scaled enemies.

Morrowind was a lot better purely for the lack of level scaling. The problem with these third person RPGs though, like Gothic and The Witcher, is that the combat systems revolve too much around the same boring light attack/heavy attack/block mechanics. They're not as immersive as the developers would like you to believe. I'd seriously prefer that someone take up the Age of Conan mechanics of directionally based attacks and defenses, because that feels far more involved, and incredibly visceral when you get the timing right to land a special blow in the enemy's weak side.

 

[StBishop]

I did, but for one reason and one reason only: The level scaling.

How I despise it...

The leveling in Oblivion ruined not only the game but the entire year in which I played it. Yes, my entire year was ruined.

So no, op, you're not the only one who was disappointed with Oblivion.

 

[Bohemian Waltz]

While Morrowind has its share of flaws, I still find it far more immersive than Oblivion.

I remember on my first play of Morrowind....

I immediately left Seyda Neen and traveled north in search of adventure, determined not to be fenced in by society and it's rules and laws! Suddenly a crazy wizard fell to his death from high above the sky without any warning. This intrigued me.

Being a impatient fool I nicked his stuff as his fancy robe and wizard hat suited me. I didn't bother to read his journal so I threw that aside and decided that magic was more of a hands on sort of thing. I was far too brave to bother with understanding the mechanics of what I would soon learn to respect and fear. Look here I had been blessed with some nifty scrolls to try out my first incursion into the arcane arts.

So I took one and cast the spell balls to the wall without any idea of what it may or may not do. I'm a rebel gamer it's how I roll.

I stood there for a few moments wondering if it did anything. After some moments of looking around I figured it didn't do anything at all and nothing at all is certainly not important enough to warrant looking up the technical aspects of the arcane power I just impatiently released. The whole thing was too much hassle and started off back to town to sell the old mans stuff and buy a shiny new weapon, which might prove more amusing then scrolls that do nothing. I started on my journey to near certain riches with a hardy skip and a hop......

Suddenly I was flying though the air as my jump ability had increased a million fold! Bamboozled by my predicament I decided that I was an arcane superman able to leap mountains in a single bound. I was ever so quite pleased with myself that my mind swimmed filled with delusions of grandeur until I came to my senses put together why the old mage inexplicably had fallen to his death in the middle of a remote back-water swamp shortly before I hit the ground dying instantaneously a few hundred miles away.

'Now that's immersion.'

 

[Imbechile]

Oblivion was a piece of shit, you would be correct. There were plenty of people who found th game disappointing. Bethesda as a whole is one of the single most overrated, incompetent game developers in the history of the medium. I can't think of a single dev team who consistently releases so buggy, poorly designed, and poorly written products into the market, yet still somehow manages to somehow avoid massive berating from the journalists as well as the gaming community as a whole. I am sure that is partly thankful to its overly-devoted, almost fanatical fanbase that hates anyone who dares speak against Bethesda's work.

This!This!This!This!This!

Although Morrowind is my favorite game ever i do agree.
People who bash Obsidian often forget that Bethesda in it's 20 years of existence has never managed to deliver a bug-free, stable game. When I look at Bethesda's games i see a vast, greatly designed world that is meant to cover the game's rotten, putrid core.

 

[Rensenhito]

Just mod the ever-loving hell out of it. Also, if you really want some fun, play a stealth based character.

 

[Lawlhat]

I couldn't bring myself to play it for very long until just recently. I've recently enjoyed coming back as a stealth-based character (though it seems that when it comes to stealth, it's like all the enemies are both blind and deaf). I just came to the realization that you have to forget that there is even a main quest, because it's just so horrible.

 

[Goatmeat]

I played quite a bit of Oblivion but, honestly, I didn't think it was that great. It was fun for wasting time. At first I was really, really disappointed because I picked it up after people told me it was the best role playing game ever, and I started playing it and it was this odd sandboxy dungeon crawler with a gigantic world populated with idiots. So aside from the stats (which are ridiculously easy to manipulate), it just felt like it had nothing in common with RPGs I've played and enjoyed.

I installed it earlier this year, though, and now that I knew it was a combat-heavy loot-fest, I actually kinda enjoyed it. Sneaking about the countryside, hunting deer, and breaking into peoples houses and stealing their cheese was all good fun for a while. As an RPG it is absolutely terrible, but as a cheese thief simulator it's pretty fun.

I never completed it, though. I had so little interest in the storyline and hated every single NPC I met that I rarely did anything story-related. I eventually quit playing because... actually there's no reason I quit playing the game. I just got bored.

I'll probably pick up Skyrim second hand in January or something.

After that I didn't play Oblivion till 2009 on my PS3. Aside from the glitch that keeps you from curing your vampirism, I found that it is a really good game.

Oh Jesus Christ, I forgot about this. This is the most irritating and infuriating bug I've ever found in a game. I read up on it and apparently it was a bug that occurred on the PC and XBox versions, but got fixed before the PS3 version was even released.

And when this happened, everyone was bitching about how New Vegas was the buggiest game ever and shame on Obsidian for releasing it half finished and so on and so forth, and it just seemed kinda sad to me that such a massive bug had never been patched on the PS3 version of the game. I mean, there's a workaround, but you have to change the system language to German to convince the annoying witch to take your Bloodgrass. I had to look it up for my brother, and we literally couldn't stop laughing at how ridiculous the whole thing was.

 

[Nieroshai]

You may have your opinion. I loved it.

 

[PPB]

I wouldn't go as far as saying it was a big disappointment for me, but it sure did not live up to my expectations. Of course it could be my fault for setting my expectations too high, but between being a fan of Morrowind and the advertisement campaign they put up for Oblivion, it was hard not to be excited about it.

Overall, I just found Morrowind to be much more interesting to explore. At first I really liked the lush forests of Oblivion (something I always thought was lacking a bit on Vvardenfell), but there really wasn't enough variety in the game world. The combination of steampunk dwemers and the ashlander culture in Morrowind also made the setting much more interesting to lose yourself into in my opinion. I always thought that Oblivion felt like a generic high fantasy with even less depth than the Forgotten Realms. And I won't even bother talking about the main quest.

As for things like voice over for dialogues, my opinion is that if you choose to have voice over in your game, you may as well do it well. I'd rather have no VO like in Morrowind than bad VO like in Oblivion. Then again, having a poor dialogue system doesn't help.

In the end, I did like the game and played it quite a lot. But I did learn my lesson and I try not to read much about Skyrim to keep my expectations baseline.

 

[quantum mechanic]

I liked some of the quest lines, like the Dark Brotherhood and the Mages' Guild, and I admit a certain amount of glee when taking down bandits in forts with well-aimed sneak attacks, but...

...the level scaling is annoying, the people are ugly and deep in the uncanny valley (and couldn't they have at least tried to do different voices for different characters?), the world is huge, but it's copy-pasted and brown, the attack animations are pretty boring, and I never got very into the main quest (mostly because it started involving more and more closing of Oblivion gates, and that got pretty tedious after about two).

In short, I had some fun with Oblivion, but it was still disappointing, especially in comparison to more polished games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age.

 

[Brutal Peanut]

No, I wasn't. I thoroughly enjoyed Oblivion. Then again, I was never really a huge fan of Morrowind to begin with.
Skyrim looks to be promising, and I'll probably enjoy playing that too.

 

[Goatmeat]

I wouldn't go as far as saying it was a big disappointment for me, but it sure did not live up to my expectations. Of course it could be my fault for setting my expectations too high, but between being a fan of Morrowind and the advertisement campaign they put up for Oblivion, it was hard not to be excited about it.

...

As for things like voice over for dialogues, my opinion is that if you choose to have voice over in your game, you may as well do it well. I'd rather have no VO like in Morrowind than bad VO like in Oblivion. Then again, having a poor dialogue system doesn't help.

To be fair, it's easy to let your expectations get too high if you listen to just about anything that Todd Howard comes out with. I remember him claiming that you couldn't do everything in a single playthrough and you would have to choose what faction you wanted to join and so on and so forth. I'd go on about it some more but wouldn't want to get sued.

And to be fair to them, I don't think that not including voice acting was an option for them. I don't think there's a AAA publisher that'll release a game where you have to read every line of dialogue these days. It's a double edged sword - it's good for people who just can't be bothered reading, can improve immersion (Bioshock and Red Dead Redemption were great for this), and makes emphasis and emotion easier to convey (if the actor is good), but ON THE OTHER HAND, it limits how much dialogue can be in a game (let's see them release something like Planescape: Torment now), if the voice acting is bad it can ruin decent writing, and if the writing itself is bad (like in Oblivion), having it read out to you just hammers home how awful it is. Not even Jean Luc Picard could make those awkward, obvious lines work for me.

 

[Jezzascmezza]

I loved Oblivion.
I still love it.
Then again, it was pretty much the first Western RPG I ever played, so I didn't have much to compare it to.

 

[cthulhumythos]

Oblivion was massively disappointing to me a well. Coming from Morrowind, it just feels like a massive step down in so many ways. There are some good changes it makes (melee and stealth, for instance), but I really don't see what other people see in it.

my feelings too. bluh- random loot. worst idea ever.

Morrowind felt handcrafted where oblivion feels simply boring. i hope they go back to putting specific items in certain things rather than making just about everything random and lifeness in skyrim.

huh. i didn't mean to rant but i guess this one of those 'opinion' thingys i keep hearing about.