Yep,
@CriticalGaming has put it the best; A relic of a past, just with a fresh coat of paint. And since most of the quest objectives are at the fast travel points, exploration of the open world indeed feels pointless.
I just closed the first oblivion gate, aka the Kvatch gate. And for the most part, it sure looks hellish enough. The clouds turning red and strange lightning storm looming over you is still dramatic. I was a bit disappointed with the gate designs; the "preview" of the oblivion realm is just a jpg image, and not the surreal rendered outline that I was hoping.
The oblivion realms themselves look amazing, but it feels so.... generic. Like, if you played any games that involved hell, lava, volcano, or demon realm, this feels awfully familiar. But I guess you can't really make hell any more different.
Large group battles are still clusterf*ck mess; You will constantly hit and get hit by your allies, them getting in the way of your shots, then blame YOU for it, and the sounds of spells and weapon swings drowning the background music. Actually, I'd like to think this is how battles in ancient times went, minus ths stupid allies getting in your way.
The guild quests are still fun tho! The Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild questlines still makes to get into interesting scenarios. Way better put together than how it was done in Skyrim.
I wanted to an alchemy buiild for this run, and the environment designs can be so confusing when trying to harvest ingredients; because the plants that you are allowed to harvest looks the same as the scenery. You have no idea how often I hopelessly mashed the harvest button because a flower looked like one of the ingredients that I was looking for, only to find out it's part of the background.
Speaking of which, alchemy is still a slow starter skill, that eventually gets op. I honestly prefer Skyrim's Alchemy mechanic, in this regard; there, the effect output was determined by your alchemy level, the skills in the tree, and the quality of the ingredient. Here, it's all based on your alchemy level and the tools that you carry with you; You can put together four ingredients with damage to health, but if your alchemy is low, you just end up with 3 dps for 12 seconds. Really wish the same effects would stack, so the numbers go up. You can always stack other damage-dealing effects with it, but man that can take a while sometimes.
The render distance feels really short; Maybe it's something I need to tinker in the settings, but I swear the render distance for trees, rocks, flowers, etc are exactly the same as the original.
And of course, it's not a Bethesda game without glitches!
- The vampire dude in the first Dark Brotherhood sanctuary will sometimes be bald, hilariously giving me the Nosferatu vibe
- In 3rd person view, when you use chameleon spell twice, your body will appear to be visible, when the game clearly indicates that you aren't
- Sometimes my shadow doesn't get rendered, and the only shadow i see is the quiver
- Crashed about 4 times so far. Not too bad, but annoying.
- Of course they kept the physics the same; an apple suddenly launched into my face, killing me.
- some of the shaders on npc will flicker
- when going into dialog, sometimes the NPCs will be looking at an random direction
The strangest part of it all is, I still can't stop playing this game, well maybe except to make a post on the escapist forum. However, if something breaks me away from this game for a few days, I feel I won't look back.
