Author's note: For the following, I'd like to note that I loved both Oblivion and Skyrim. Both of them are great games that have given me countless hours of entertainment. I'm not going to bring up silly Skyrim logic, or conversely anything like that in Oblivion, to make an example of which game is better or not. I get that video game logic is kind of dumb (about the same as comic book logic, really) and they?re both guilty of stupidity all around. A lot of this is just personal feelings that I've been mulling over for the past month and have the need to blurb out at someone, anyone, everyone. And that means you, my fellow Escapists, get to hear me ramble on about the games. Finally, this story is mostly about me acknowledging doubts and mistakes in assumptions that I'd made about two games.
From what I've seen, Oblivion and Skyrim aren't like Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. They're not like Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2. They're not like Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2, or if you want to bring it up Mass Effect 3. They're not like Final Fantasy 6, 7, and 9. They're not like KOTOR and KOTOR II. They're not going to invoke rigorous, hard debates over which one was better because their fandoms aren?t in such stark contrast. Most Oblivion fans will like Skyrim and most Skyrim fans will like Oblivion, and sometimes this isn't the case with these other games. But that's what I'm here to do right now. I want to spark debate on one of my favorite game series, get people talking about this like they do with FO3 and FO:NV.
Oblivion was one of the first games I got when I got my original PS3 Fatty (the one that I still have and love <3 I?d hug the bastard if it wasn?t so fat). I liked it enough that I got it for the PC instead after having heard about the modding community (thought I was a bit too derpy to figure out how to work most of them at the time since I was quite young and computers were new and shiny things to me). It was a phenomenal game. It was like nothing I'd ever played before. Before Oblivion, RPG meant, to me, games like KOTOR. I was taken away by Oblivion and I had so much fun. Of course, as time wore on, I had my few gripes. There were some things that I didn't like. A lot of the mechanics were quite annoying at times and as a young teen of thirteen years old, it frustrated me.
The story was a bit bland at times, but it was propped up by marvelous side quests of the guilds (and also horse armor). Seeing Oblivion Gates pop up on the map always brought a great big sigh of "Another one?" from me. Over time even more, my opinion of it worsened. Mind you, I still recognized it as the great game it was, but I thought there were so many improvements to make, especially when it came to the mechanics. By the time Skyrim came out, my opinion on Oblivion was that it was good, but bland. Bland, bland, bland, bland, bland.
And then Skyrim came out.
When Skyrim first came out, I almost marveled at how superior it was over Oblivion. The mechanics were crisper, they made a lot more sense, and that damn level-scaling was a lot better. Leveling up wasn't crazily dependent on the skills I'd only done before the level up, which sometimes made it so that you were crippled heavily if you weren't careful about what you were doing. I rode on high about the dwarven lore, eagerly learning more. Combat was better. Embedding my axe in someone's skull for the first time was so satisfying that I nearly creamed my pants. I killed my fair share of dragons, did my guild quests and all the Daedra ones. I searched high and low for everything that I could do, just as I had done to Oblivion. It was bigger, it was better. There were *less* recycled environments (though Skyrim still had a decent amount, even if it wasn't as bad as Oblivion and? Dragon Age 2). There were so many characters. You chose a faction. You saved the world!
Or you did, at least. I didn't. All while I played the game, there was something just nagging at me that I couldn't help, something that I noted once with a direct comparison to Oblivion, the same game I'd already compared it to a few weeks before and said it was far superior. It was something I refused to acknowledge at the time, so I mostly ignore it and went on with my time, but as these things are, it gnawed at me and gnawed at me and gnawed at me until I was forced to come to a conclusion ? a rather explosive conclusion that had me quit the game, even if I had enjoyed it as thoroughly as I did. Okay, so maybe it wasn't quite explosive, but I'd like to think of it as sort of climactic! Maybe! ...just a little?
Mind you, I'd almost gotten to the end. Most of the main quest has been beaten.
Phew. Now that I've gotten that out of the way, I can get to the real meat of the ordeal, but before I do that, please remember that I like both games! They're great, and if you prefer one over the other, I respect your opinion! Different strokes for different folks, really. Neither are, in my opinion, bad games. I just sometimes suffer from this terrible habit that I can't really put a word to, but I can describe: I played FFIX before FFVII and in my opinion, 9 was far better than 7 and I couldn't, for the life of me, continue on with 7 with 9 so freshly in my mind. I just couldn't do it. But enough of that example, this is about Skyrim and Oblivion. I just needed the perfect example to tell you all to explain why I didn't finish Skyrim.
I didn't finish Skyrim because it made Oblivion so fresh in my mind and the more I played Skyrim, the more that nagging thought came back to me. I still think the mechanics are better in Skyrim, that it's a functionally better game, but the conclusion that came to me was: Oblivion was better. Judge me if you will for letting such a thing get in the way of enjoying Skyrim, that's fine. I already judge myself for that quite harshly and realize it's a mistake upon my person, but that doesn't change things. That doesn't change that ?
Oblivion was better. The mechanics sucked. They still kind of do. But they were charming in their own right and hey, they made some sense for what they were. They're frustrating, but in a believable way, and I'm older and smarter now so I know how to best take advantage of them like I didn't when I was thirteen and fourteen. But the story. The story that I had once thought so bland and thought gave me so little motivation to go through at least got me through it and that final battle scene was pretty epic, if I do say so myself.
It wasn't the greatest of stories, but I was motivated to finish it, spurred on by superior guild quests that had me at the heart of the world, championing many a cause. Yes, it was silly that I could become Archmage with only having to utter one spell, but that didn't matter to me. A lot of the world may have been recycled, but it was rich and deep. Shivering Isles to this day is still the prime example of exactly how you're supposed to do an expansion (or a DLC; let's not fight over semantics, guys) and it was quite fun to see a Daedra's utter madness in such a unique world.
The story may have been bland, but it was no less generic than many other games that I love, such as Dragon Age: Origins (which is known for recently having been elected the mayor of generic-ville for the fourth term in a row), but also have deep worlds laying underneath just waiting for you to crack at. It felt a bit empty at times, but that didn't matter too much to me. The quests were usually different enough to keep my attention going, to keep it far off in another world. And hey, Kvatch was pretty intense at the time. I still think of it as intense, really.
Skyrim started off on the same note. "Holy shit, motherfucking dragons!" Running for your life while carnage goes all around you just moments after your head was about to be chopped off. Seeing that first Draugr pop up took me by surprise. It was great. Then, a monster started to rear its ugly head, that same monster of emptiness that?s found in Oblivion, but can mostly be beaten back. That monster immediately attacked my motivation and left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.
Oblivion was empty, but Skyrim was far worse. Oblivion knew it was empty, but it didn't need to do anything about it. Skyrim knew it was empty, but its own solution was to just fill its world with more meaningless stuff. Never-ending quests, they said. Great, I said, after finishing the fifth 'uh, so, go to someone's house and kill the monster that's in their basement.? The characterization was worse; a lot of the important characters coming off as husks, much more so than Oblivion's, and the non important ones no better than a pole. It's not that much better in Oblivion, but it's enough that I?ll make mention of it.
The guild quests were far more boring; I mean, for the love of god, Oblivion had that quest where, as an assassin, you turned an entire house against one another through fear, panic, and cunning! You stole an Elder Scroll from the clutches of the Imperials and gave a man his life back! You stopped the most powerful necromancer in the world ? and you restored the dark brotherhood to its glory so personally through a series of crazy, downright anxious quests of a mistake because of one man's creepy obsession with revenge! In Skyrim, when you restored the dark brotherhood to its glory, it was rather anticlimactic. You just did it. It was just there. It was just whatever. Props to Cicero, though. The Thieves guild was even worse. We went from working up and up and up to that perfect climax of stealing a motherfucking Elder Scroll, to? stopping your ex-leader from stealing some shiny eyes. The Mage's one wasn't too much worse than Oblivion's. Oblivion's mage section always felt the weakest to me, but it was still enjoyable, and so was Skyrim?s, for the most part, even if it didn't have the same build up and satisfying conclusion. I won't even get to the other guild quests, like the werewolves. That was just snoozeville.
The civil war was underplayed, and both sides were generally just assholes enough that my motivation took enough of a hit as it was. I eventually sided with the Imperial milk-drinkers, because they're the ones who are the least idiotic. They may be assholes, but they're the assholes we need. Both sides were yawnsfest, though, but I'll give that the ending battles were at least nice on both sides. There?s a civil war going across all of the Empire, though, and for the most part we just keep on the down-low about it other than that one meeting. C'mon, let's get more going about those blasted high elves and what the hell they're doing.
And then comes the main quest. Dragons. Motherfucking Dragons. Taking their souls and yelling death at people. It was great, at first, but then it lost its novelty fast. Interwoven with an already bland civil war, the main quest suffers at least as much as Oblivion's does, but doesn't have the benefit of the rest of the world propping it up. I honestly never thought a world-ending Dragon could be as boring as it was, but it was. I won't say much more because I know Oblivion's main story sucks as well, but the rest of the game gave me the motivation to finish Oblivion's. It didn't do that with Skyrim.
I'll hand it to the Daedra quests, though. They were at least on par with the rest, although Sheogorath's, while it was nice seeing your Champion again, felt dull.
Skyrim was a great game and had better mechanics, for the most part, but in the end it tried to be too much and came off as empty. It tried to capture that 'it was bigger, and it was better' magic that I first felt with Oblivion, and fell flat on its butt with mostly meaningless characters, boring guild quests, and a civil war that should have been given a high priority. Oblivion, for all of its blandness that I thought it was and frustrating with its terrible mechanics, captured a fanciful magic that I still remember now and still think fondly of. Oblivion's world just came off a little deeper and was saved by some of the more outstanding quests in an RPG.
TL;DR: My English teacher said that while I'm great at being quite descriptive and saying all that I need to say, she also made mention of how much I suck at summarizing things. I guess I'm not a succinct kind of guy. So, suck it up and read my post! And remember, it doesn't matter whether you liked Oblivion or Skyrim more; your opinions are just as valid as mine!
For discussion, let's debate on the points, and mention which games you liked more. Obviously you know which one I liked more.
Edit: I'd like to emphasize that I know I'm quite biased, but the entire point of this is to get people talking like they do with the two latest Fallouts. Let's debate it out! If you like Skyrim, your opinion is just as valid as mine, and tell me why you think it's better!
From what I've seen, Oblivion and Skyrim aren't like Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. They're not like Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2. They're not like Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2, or if you want to bring it up Mass Effect 3. They're not like Final Fantasy 6, 7, and 9. They're not like KOTOR and KOTOR II. They're not going to invoke rigorous, hard debates over which one was better because their fandoms aren?t in such stark contrast. Most Oblivion fans will like Skyrim and most Skyrim fans will like Oblivion, and sometimes this isn't the case with these other games. But that's what I'm here to do right now. I want to spark debate on one of my favorite game series, get people talking about this like they do with FO3 and FO:NV.
Oblivion was one of the first games I got when I got my original PS3 Fatty (the one that I still have and love <3 I?d hug the bastard if it wasn?t so fat). I liked it enough that I got it for the PC instead after having heard about the modding community (thought I was a bit too derpy to figure out how to work most of them at the time since I was quite young and computers were new and shiny things to me). It was a phenomenal game. It was like nothing I'd ever played before. Before Oblivion, RPG meant, to me, games like KOTOR. I was taken away by Oblivion and I had so much fun. Of course, as time wore on, I had my few gripes. There were some things that I didn't like. A lot of the mechanics were quite annoying at times and as a young teen of thirteen years old, it frustrated me.
The story was a bit bland at times, but it was propped up by marvelous side quests of the guilds (and also horse armor). Seeing Oblivion Gates pop up on the map always brought a great big sigh of "Another one?" from me. Over time even more, my opinion of it worsened. Mind you, I still recognized it as the great game it was, but I thought there were so many improvements to make, especially when it came to the mechanics. By the time Skyrim came out, my opinion on Oblivion was that it was good, but bland. Bland, bland, bland, bland, bland.
And then Skyrim came out.
When Skyrim first came out, I almost marveled at how superior it was over Oblivion. The mechanics were crisper, they made a lot more sense, and that damn level-scaling was a lot better. Leveling up wasn't crazily dependent on the skills I'd only done before the level up, which sometimes made it so that you were crippled heavily if you weren't careful about what you were doing. I rode on high about the dwarven lore, eagerly learning more. Combat was better. Embedding my axe in someone's skull for the first time was so satisfying that I nearly creamed my pants. I killed my fair share of dragons, did my guild quests and all the Daedra ones. I searched high and low for everything that I could do, just as I had done to Oblivion. It was bigger, it was better. There were *less* recycled environments (though Skyrim still had a decent amount, even if it wasn't as bad as Oblivion and? Dragon Age 2). There were so many characters. You chose a faction. You saved the world!
Or you did, at least. I didn't. All while I played the game, there was something just nagging at me that I couldn't help, something that I noted once with a direct comparison to Oblivion, the same game I'd already compared it to a few weeks before and said it was far superior. It was something I refused to acknowledge at the time, so I mostly ignore it and went on with my time, but as these things are, it gnawed at me and gnawed at me and gnawed at me until I was forced to come to a conclusion ? a rather explosive conclusion that had me quit the game, even if I had enjoyed it as thoroughly as I did. Okay, so maybe it wasn't quite explosive, but I'd like to think of it as sort of climactic! Maybe! ...just a little?
Mind you, I'd almost gotten to the end. Most of the main quest has been beaten.
Phew. Now that I've gotten that out of the way, I can get to the real meat of the ordeal, but before I do that, please remember that I like both games! They're great, and if you prefer one over the other, I respect your opinion! Different strokes for different folks, really. Neither are, in my opinion, bad games. I just sometimes suffer from this terrible habit that I can't really put a word to, but I can describe: I played FFIX before FFVII and in my opinion, 9 was far better than 7 and I couldn't, for the life of me, continue on with 7 with 9 so freshly in my mind. I just couldn't do it. But enough of that example, this is about Skyrim and Oblivion. I just needed the perfect example to tell you all to explain why I didn't finish Skyrim.
I didn't finish Skyrim because it made Oblivion so fresh in my mind and the more I played Skyrim, the more that nagging thought came back to me. I still think the mechanics are better in Skyrim, that it's a functionally better game, but the conclusion that came to me was: Oblivion was better. Judge me if you will for letting such a thing get in the way of enjoying Skyrim, that's fine. I already judge myself for that quite harshly and realize it's a mistake upon my person, but that doesn't change things. That doesn't change that ?
Oblivion was better. The mechanics sucked. They still kind of do. But they were charming in their own right and hey, they made some sense for what they were. They're frustrating, but in a believable way, and I'm older and smarter now so I know how to best take advantage of them like I didn't when I was thirteen and fourteen. But the story. The story that I had once thought so bland and thought gave me so little motivation to go through at least got me through it and that final battle scene was pretty epic, if I do say so myself.
It wasn't the greatest of stories, but I was motivated to finish it, spurred on by superior guild quests that had me at the heart of the world, championing many a cause. Yes, it was silly that I could become Archmage with only having to utter one spell, but that didn't matter to me. A lot of the world may have been recycled, but it was rich and deep. Shivering Isles to this day is still the prime example of exactly how you're supposed to do an expansion (or a DLC; let's not fight over semantics, guys) and it was quite fun to see a Daedra's utter madness in such a unique world.
The story may have been bland, but it was no less generic than many other games that I love, such as Dragon Age: Origins (which is known for recently having been elected the mayor of generic-ville for the fourth term in a row), but also have deep worlds laying underneath just waiting for you to crack at. It felt a bit empty at times, but that didn't matter too much to me. The quests were usually different enough to keep my attention going, to keep it far off in another world. And hey, Kvatch was pretty intense at the time. I still think of it as intense, really.
Skyrim started off on the same note. "Holy shit, motherfucking dragons!" Running for your life while carnage goes all around you just moments after your head was about to be chopped off. Seeing that first Draugr pop up took me by surprise. It was great. Then, a monster started to rear its ugly head, that same monster of emptiness that?s found in Oblivion, but can mostly be beaten back. That monster immediately attacked my motivation and left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.
Oblivion was empty, but Skyrim was far worse. Oblivion knew it was empty, but it didn't need to do anything about it. Skyrim knew it was empty, but its own solution was to just fill its world with more meaningless stuff. Never-ending quests, they said. Great, I said, after finishing the fifth 'uh, so, go to someone's house and kill the monster that's in their basement.? The characterization was worse; a lot of the important characters coming off as husks, much more so than Oblivion's, and the non important ones no better than a pole. It's not that much better in Oblivion, but it's enough that I?ll make mention of it.
The guild quests were far more boring; I mean, for the love of god, Oblivion had that quest where, as an assassin, you turned an entire house against one another through fear, panic, and cunning! You stole an Elder Scroll from the clutches of the Imperials and gave a man his life back! You stopped the most powerful necromancer in the world ? and you restored the dark brotherhood to its glory so personally through a series of crazy, downright anxious quests of a mistake because of one man's creepy obsession with revenge! In Skyrim, when you restored the dark brotherhood to its glory, it was rather anticlimactic. You just did it. It was just there. It was just whatever. Props to Cicero, though. The Thieves guild was even worse. We went from working up and up and up to that perfect climax of stealing a motherfucking Elder Scroll, to? stopping your ex-leader from stealing some shiny eyes. The Mage's one wasn't too much worse than Oblivion's. Oblivion's mage section always felt the weakest to me, but it was still enjoyable, and so was Skyrim?s, for the most part, even if it didn't have the same build up and satisfying conclusion. I won't even get to the other guild quests, like the werewolves. That was just snoozeville.
The civil war was underplayed, and both sides were generally just assholes enough that my motivation took enough of a hit as it was. I eventually sided with the Imperial milk-drinkers, because they're the ones who are the least idiotic. They may be assholes, but they're the assholes we need. Both sides were yawnsfest, though, but I'll give that the ending battles were at least nice on both sides. There?s a civil war going across all of the Empire, though, and for the most part we just keep on the down-low about it other than that one meeting. C'mon, let's get more going about those blasted high elves and what the hell they're doing.
And then comes the main quest. Dragons. Motherfucking Dragons. Taking their souls and yelling death at people. It was great, at first, but then it lost its novelty fast. Interwoven with an already bland civil war, the main quest suffers at least as much as Oblivion's does, but doesn't have the benefit of the rest of the world propping it up. I honestly never thought a world-ending Dragon could be as boring as it was, but it was. I won't say much more because I know Oblivion's main story sucks as well, but the rest of the game gave me the motivation to finish Oblivion's. It didn't do that with Skyrim.
I'll hand it to the Daedra quests, though. They were at least on par with the rest, although Sheogorath's, while it was nice seeing your Champion again, felt dull.
Skyrim was a great game and had better mechanics, for the most part, but in the end it tried to be too much and came off as empty. It tried to capture that 'it was bigger, and it was better' magic that I first felt with Oblivion, and fell flat on its butt with mostly meaningless characters, boring guild quests, and a civil war that should have been given a high priority. Oblivion, for all of its blandness that I thought it was and frustrating with its terrible mechanics, captured a fanciful magic that I still remember now and still think fondly of. Oblivion's world just came off a little deeper and was saved by some of the more outstanding quests in an RPG.
TL;DR: My English teacher said that while I'm great at being quite descriptive and saying all that I need to say, she also made mention of how much I suck at summarizing things. I guess I'm not a succinct kind of guy. So, suck it up and read my post! And remember, it doesn't matter whether you liked Oblivion or Skyrim more; your opinions are just as valid as mine!
For discussion, let's debate on the points, and mention which games you liked more. Obviously you know which one I liked more.
Edit: I'd like to emphasize that I know I'm quite biased, but the entire point of this is to get people talking like they do with the two latest Fallouts. Let's debate it out! If you like Skyrim, your opinion is just as valid as mine, and tell me why you think it's better!