Private Custard said:
Actually, sod it, I'm wound up now so I have to expand!! I'll copy and paste from 2 posts I made on the official forums.
I want:
1) More items, especially candles and lamps to decorate my house.
You know, I suppose there are obviously people who desperately want houses and bases in these games. Hell, one of the coolest mods for Fallout 3 was simply a really, really awesome home for my character. But, to be honest, I don't find myself fussing over them much. In the previously mentioned mod, sure I put my weapons and ammunition in the armory as it auto sorted them and placed them on display shelves and whatnot, but in Oblivion I just dumped all my potions in one chest, my unused armor in another, and my weapons in a third. I so rarely went back to these to get a particular item that I eventually stopped worrying altogether. In morrowind, I just dumped everything in a big pile and hoped for the best.
A huge part of Morrowind for me, and many many others, was the immersion. The ability to 'sculpt' a property into something personalised, something that really felt like a home to come back to after days of exploring and fighting was important. It just felt like I was squatting in my houses in Oblivion!
Private Custard said:
2) Some way to place items where I want them without worrying that the Havok physics engine is going to fling them all over the place if I look at them funny.
I will say that one of the more annoying and persistent bugs in these games is the propensity of items to fall through a table after I so much as look at them. More than once some terribly important mcguffin was lost forever because it fell in such a way that I couldn't pick it up.
One day in my Chorroll house, I saw a glowing item in the floor. I picked it up and was surrounded by an explosion of hundreds and hundreds of items that had disappeared into the walls one day when I just dumped them there!
Private Custard said:
3) Skills. Longblade, shortblade, axe, spear etc etc etc... I hate the dumbing down of Oblivion, it spread to every aspect of the game and should have been sub-titled 'My First RPG'
I don't know if this is entirely fair. Without spending a terrific amount of time, a player is only going to be really good with one kind of weapon. And, aside from some variation in damage done when sneaking and fatigue drain with each attack, most melee weapons act more or less the same as the others. Sure, I liked using a Spear in Morrowind. It was my chosen weapon. But it was functionally identical to a sword in the long run. I suppose I'd like to have had the choice to use a spear but I don't think that not having such a choice dumbed the game down even slightly as the combat inherent in their usage was identical. I didn't get a range advantage for using a spear for example, so why would I use it when some two handed sword did twice the damage?
Because Bethesda set themselves a benchmark, and then failed to meet it with far superior hardware. Choice is good, more choice is better, less choice when something is supposedly more advanced is undeniably worse
Private Custard said:
4) All houses should be available to live in, without worrying about re-spawning crates etc... It's one of the things that made Morrowind brilliant, the ability to choose your own house.
Morrowind had the same problem with re spawning containers if memory serves. If the container was empty, it was generally safe to put stuff in. If you found stuff in there it was not safe to put stuff in.
Not true. I had crates all over Balmora, Vivec, Sadrith Mora, Tel Vos and Dagon Fel, all filled with my own stuff. I never lost a thing due to a re-spawning crate.
Private Custard said:
5) New artifacts and special weapons, not just rip-offs from Morrowind. Oblivion stole, amongst other things, Azuras Star, Necromancers Amulet, Umbra......and on and on and on...
Given that so little in the game changed mechanically, any change in these items would be entirely cosmetic. Perhaps the better complaint is that so much was identical and you simply resent the things that called attention to that fact. A fireball is a fireball. A glass dagger is a glass dagger.
Azuras Star is Azuras Star......which my character in Morrowind already possesed. The same goes for the other copy/paste artifacts. Also, how did Umbra suddenly become a weak-assed one handed sword when it used to be a monster two handed claymore?
Laziness and lack of ideas. Bethesda knew that most people playing Oblivion would never have played Morrowind and so decided to cheap out
Private Custard said:
6) More spells. Again Oblivion failed on a massive scale. We want the fun spells, Jump, slowfall, levitate, mark, recall etc etc
Levitate was not included precisely because it would have broken many parts of the game (specifically any part that took place in oblivion). The AI also doesn't really react well when you levitate. Mark and recall had little purpose when fast travel exists (a point you will later decry oddly enough when these spells represent the same exact thing). Slowfall was likely cut for the same reason as levitate.
Really, aside from those, you really aren't missing any spells that I can recall. And while an argument could be made that they could have redesigned segments to get around the various problems, Oblivion already had plenty of problems when it came to people encountering stuff before they are supposed to without them. Including these features would almost certainly cause more problems for an already troubled game.
They could have inserted some kind of anti-levitation rule when in Oblivion realms, same as they did when, in Morrowind, you were in Mournold.
Slowfall made exploring without breaking your legs a lot easier. Mark and recall, combined with stilt striders, boats, mages guild transports and propylon chambers, made travelling the world a lot more involved than merely clicking on the map just to avoid the tedium of the world of Oblivion
Private Custard said:
7) The ability to wear clothes under armour and robes over the top, or just mix and match. Another of Oblivions fail points.
Except, the fact that you could enchant clothing as well simply meant a player could become even more unstoppably powerful. I distinctly remember the mystical set of fancy clothing that I wore under my enchanted ebony armor in Morrowind. I also recall being an unstoppable killing machine by level 10 as a result of exploiting this and other loopholes.
Sure there were other solutions to the problem, which I suspect is your real gripe much of the time. That Bethesda solved problems in ways you do not agree with, or rather solved problems that you enjoyed exploiting.
Oblivion wasn't really much of a challenge, so why remove an element of the game that would make that lack of a challenge a little more fun?
Bethesda didn't solve any problems with Oblivion, they merely hacked off a load of the interesting and fun elements for as yet unexplained reasons
Private Custard said:
8) More unique dungeons and caves. So many of Oblivions caves were copy and paste jobs, crates were always found on the raised bits in the corners surrounded by stalagtites and stalagmites.
Really? Because I recall LOTS of copy pasted interiors in Morrowind. Lots and lots of them. In fact, I seem to recall that the game had perhaps four kinds of things. You had the caves, you had the dwarven ruins, you had those other ruins, and then you had the local buildings. Sure there were lots of really cool set pieces you ran into along the way but morrowind was just as full of stupid copy paste dungeons as Oblivion.
I'm not talking about a set type of area, I'm actually talking about absolutely identical layouts being copied and pasted between different caves etc..
You're in a cave, you reach a point where the cave opens out into a larger chamber, you look to the corner of the chamber and see a raised section of rock with a slope leading up to it. Covering the near-corner of this raised section is a rock pillar, with a couple of unconnected stalagmites and stalagtites. Behind these copy/pasted rock formations is a wooden chest containing a generic enchanted weapon and possibly some gold.
Sound familiar?
I could still talk people around the various Oblivion realms without seeing the screen, all they need to do is describe what they're doing.
It's this kind of laziness that is immersion breaking. All I was thinking when exploriong caves and dungeons was 'de ja vu'.
Private Custard said:
9) No more scaled levelling. To make it so you can take over the world as a level 1 character renders the entire levelling system null and void, meaning the game isn't full RPG. Remember in Morrowind when you accidentally made it to red mountain as a level 5 character and suddenly got worried for your safety?!
I can agree with this. I mean, the game was easier to beat at level 1 than level 25. And there were points where the sudden spike in difficulty was absurd. Those god damn mountain lions at level 10 for example. You couldn't outrun them, they easily attacked through your block and you couldn't do much more than scratch the things. Without a good supply of health and stamina potions, you were pretty much screwed if you ran into one on foot at level 10.
Worryingly, I heard from Bethesda that they actually though scaled levelling was a good thing, and are planning to continue down that path!!
Private Custard said:
10) More easter eggs, things like Indiana Jones's note, the mudcrab merchant, the message in a bottle.............fishy sticks!! Things that make you want to go out and explore. Oblivion never offered much in the way of special items, and when it awarded them to you, it quite often wanted you to give them away to complete quests (garridans tears, artifacts etc..)
I can agree with this. When I found some of those easter eggs in Morrowind, it actually seemed like I might have been the first person to do so. It seemed like my own private joke that the developer decided to tell me.
One of my favourites was the pool of forgetfulness!!
Morrowind felt like it had a personality and sense of humour, which was a nice contrast with the quite threatening surroundings you were usually in
Private Custard said:
11) Armour - By the time you reach level 20+ in Oblivion, pretty much every bandit is wearing full elven, glass, and laughably, Daedric armour. What makes certain armours special is their exclusivity, I don't want 50 sets of Daedric in my storage chests!!
This was true in Morrowind as well. But, your point stands regardless. Honestly, when I decided I wanted to build a set of Ebony armor in Oblivion because it looked far better than that terrible Daedric garbage, I had to go through hell and back because anyone wearing heavy armor was probably wearing Daedric thanks to the leveled list.
Glass and ebony armour I can understand due to the number of mines in the game, it was believable. But in Morrowind, only high-end characters wore these expensive items. Bandits still wore fur, steel, iron and bear/wolf armours.
And there was only about 2 sets of Daedric, one full set worn by Divayth Fyr and the rest scattered around the land in single pieces, some of which were already enchanted and named as artifacts
Private Custard said:
12) Draw distance - Yes Oblivion had good draw distance, but it didn't half make the world look small. If you're going to give a good draw distance, at least make places look far away.
That's hard to do when the world is only a few miles on a side.
being a photography nerd, I can understand the differences between shooting at 9mm and 11mm. There are ways to gain an effect of distance, but I guess it would have been a little work for them.
To be honest, I preferred the fog of Morrowind!
Private Custard said:
13) Voice acting - Four words "Thank you kind sir" !! The voice acting was an epic fail. Martin was about as exciting as a coma in a nunnery and the rest of the population comprised of probably less than 15 different voices. The one ray of light was Sheogorath...............although I'm pretty certain the Sheogorath that speaks to you on the shrine quest is not the fake Scottish accented Sheogorath in SI!
I can agree with this as well. If you're going to have voice acting at least try to ensure it adds something that the text boxes didn't.
Another immersion-killer really
Private Custard said:
14) AI - Just one example of laziness is the infinite arrows trick. Stand out the back of the Chorrol fighters guild when the Orc is doing his archery practice. Just keep taking his arrows off the target.............he'll never ask for them back!
The AI was just as stupid in Morrowind. And, to be fair, AI is also one of the most difficult kinds of algorithm to write. It also tends to be very computationally expensive and people are more impressed by shiny baubles than smart enemies. So people are content to marvel at careful scripting and whatnot that helps hide blisteringly stupid AI if it means they can get closer to photo realism. And, to be honest, for all the technical marvel inherent in the AI in oblivion, it was what lead directly to some of the biggest technical problems in the game!
Although to be honest, the AI stupidity led to a lot of the amusing moments in the game. But taking the piss out of a game like this is something I like to do after I've beaten it, not on first playthrough
Private Custard said:
15) Oblivion - If you can be bothered, try doing all the Oblivion gates, you'll soon realise that there are probably less than 10 individual 'Oblivions'. They repeated so often that I could guide a friend around them over voice chat!! This complaint could probably be lumped in with the repeating caves complaint I have.
This is entirely true but then you do realize that it takes a team of artists some amount of time to produce a minor variation in the world correct? That time is a limited resource and thus spending it in environments would detract from it's being used resolving some of your other complaints (Like the fact that entire categories of weapons were missing for example).
So why create 50 Oblivion gates if you're only going to model 10-15 of them and then repeat over and over? Surely they must have known people would notice and call them on it?
They should have created less realms, with more inside each one. Make them seem more epic rather than a ten minute rampage to the top of the tower!
Private Custard said:
16) Too much forest - the landscape had no variety, it was either mountains (with snow sometimes) or forests. Morrowind had Azuras Coast, The Ashlands, Mournhold, Solstheim (North and south), The Bitter Coast etc etc....
I can generally agree with this.
