Zero Punctuation: Oblivion

[emytzu]

Nice and well done review.Though I hope Yahtzee will get affected again by the planets, because I want him review Fable 2, he all ready did it with the first one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYQLR7dE5k4)I personally loved it. XD
Oh and if anyone already wrote something like this, sorry for writing it again but I'm not fucking going to read all 239 comments before posting. ¬¬ XD

 

[Hajmola]

Although I do admit that oblivion looks like it plays in the meadows for the most part, there are other parts of it in the north which is cold, and swamp like near bravil. I dont think you should be able to criticize a game for that since how often would you find a cold tundra or something similar right next to a desert or a volcano.

As far as fast travel is concerned, some people just don't like to walk around so they have made fast travel for them and for those of us who enjoy walking to places, they have that feature build as well.

PS oblivion is ment to be played with mods and more based on side quests rather than main storyline.

PC Oblivion by any chance? If PS Oblivion had mods I'd weep with joy. Blasted Sony being tight, whiney cunts with the imagination of a baked sponge. How do you translate "User generate content isnt evil" into moron. Then into **** for microsoft.

thats the problem with console oblivion
its crap

 

[Zallomallo]

ROFL AT THE ENDING!
Lol a movie trailer of, "When Young People F--k". XD

 

[Zallomallo]

While I do think Yahtzee hit the nail on the head with most of his points, I think he missed out on the game's biggest flaw; its 'leveling up' system.

The game gives absolutely no motivation to level up, as the world's NPCs infuriatingly level up with the protagonist... a serious flaw in an RPG.

In an RPG, it always feels good to go back and dominate those NPCs that had given you a tough time earlier in the game. In Oblivion, even at level 20, you will still have your ass handed to you by meager street bandits. Heck, you will have as much difficulty in killing a beggar, as you did at level 1.

In great CRPGs like Baludr's Gate II, you could often go back and kill those creatures that had been too powerful for you to handle at lower levels.

In fact, in an early chapter of BG2, you encounter two separate dragons, both of which are almost invulnerable to your attacks at that stage, and are better left ignored. However, the game returns to the same location in chapter six, allowing you another crack at them, and thus letting you enjoy character's growth.

Unfortunately, none of these experiences are possible in Oblivion, largely because of its pathetic XP mechanics.

Baldur's Gate 2, perhaps the best RPG of ALL TIME!

 

[Rath709]

Baldur's Gate 2, perhaps the best RPG of ALL TIME!

Pfft. Chrono Trigger.

 

[Modus Pwnens]

Did anyone else notice that yahtzee, when talking about the developers taking 200 square yards of mideival country side and copy pasting them, showed a diagram of countryside that was 200 yards by 200 yards?

200 yards by 200 yards is not 200 square yards.

its 40,000 square yards.

its okay, its only 20,000% the correct area...

 

[GordonFawx]

Whelp, this doesn't surprise me at all. I will admit that the game has a lot of character flaws (oh god does it) but I'm surprised at the dig at the landscape! oh and the lack of dig at the balance issues.

The fact that you're pretty much encourage, ENCOURAGED, to stay as weak as possible throught the plot so it's still easy enough to hack through deeply dissapointed and disturbed me when I first played through it so long ago. By sheer coincidence I bought a new laptop capable of running it and started playing it somewhere that is very booring and you're not normally allowed to play games. Oh GOD it was booring, but the plot's done so I can feel free to level again; not like I didn't since I can just turn the dificulty down and get one-shot kills from stealth again.

Perhaps our dear dice game didn't level enough to notice this but about the time you hit level 25 bandits are wandering around in full daedric armour in the bowels of ruins when they could realistically be attacking the imperial city and probably WINNING. And that's every bandit, not just the odd one. Perhaps this falls into the immersion issues (which it most assuredly does) but I kinda wish there'd been a little segue about that.

Ah well, good review otherwise.

 

[SolaceAvatar]

Yeah, I agree with emersion being it's one huge, glaring flaw, come to think of it... I've been dissatisfied with the game for a while and only now figured out why. In most games, when you're the epic savior, there's a reason. Either you end up dual-wielding a minigun and a rocket launcher, or get ordained with magic powers from the true oracle, or wear the only prototype alien power armor, or wield the magic sword of kickassity, or... whatever. But in Oblivion, all I do is kill stuff to get better equipment, and there's no reason anyone couldn't do that... or at least start wearing all the seventeen sets of the second-best armor in the game I keep selling off. It's the closest to a single-player MMO I've ever played; I should be the mystic savior of Cyrodill, but for some reason I still feel like stormtrooper #718.

 

[144_v1legacy]

Did anyone else notice that yahtzee, when talking about the developers taking 200 square yards of mideival country side and copy pasting them, showed a diagram of countryside that was 200 yards by 200 yards?

200 yards by 200 yards is not 200 square yards.

its 40,000 square yards.

its okay, its only 20,000% the correct area...

...I noticed. It must be a math nerd thing. But it wasn't until the 2nd time through that I did notice.

 

[Esure]

Ah I remember Oblivion; it was a game that i never re-played and I think Yahtzee nailed the whole immersion criteria. I think the biggest flaws were the never changing world, extremely easily exploitable magic system, 4 voice actors and just generaly badly written/constructed programming like model design or sword combat.

 

[UpInSmoke]

Stop doing a review every single week. Take time play the games a little more thoroughly. Twice a month would be plenty. Your flux capacitor is straining, and I think it's starting to show in the quality of your work.

 

[FerroMancer]

200 yards x 200 yards =40000 square yards.

200 yards by 200 yards is not 200 square yards.
its 40,000 square yards.

Oh, thank God; someone else caught this.

I would have commented sooner, but I was out having sex with girls.

 

[Vitalix]

Stop doing a review every single week. Take time play the games a little more thoroughly. Twice a month would be plenty. Your flux capacitor is straining, and I think it's starting to show in the quality of your work.

I agree with that. Yahtzee's review sure is funny. They are usually entertaining. Yet I wonder whether he suppressed all the very good qualities that Oblivion has to offer. Yahtzee appears to be concerned that all we want to hear is the negatives, that somehow he can't possibly say anything nice about a game lest he lose his audience.

Oblivion offers a completely open world. Oblivion's leveling-system allows the player to complete quests at a challenging level no matter how far the player has proceeded in the game. If the developers didn't have the leveling mechanism, we'd hear complaints that the game stinks because you miss all the cool level one quests because you are too strong, etc. No, it's not perfect, but the weaknesses receive far too much attention.

Given that we are all fans of Yahtzee, there's a subconscious tendency to support what he says. We help Yahtzee and ourselves when we politely tell him when we disagree.

 

[Rucknar]

Great review, though I do agree some of the better bits do seem to have been slightly overlooked.

Take for instance the comment about the open world, as much as fast travel is the best way to get around the game, anyone who thinks that actually taking a horse from one town to another all the time is the best way, clearly has too much time on their hands, there are some advantages of not using it occasionally, as it does throw up some quests that have been hidden in the wilderness.

I will agree with all the comments though about the levelling system... its awful and makes the game stupidly easy.

 

[Sennz0r]

Stop doing a review every single week. Take time play the games a little more thoroughly. Twice a month would be plenty. Your flux capacitor is straining, and I think it's starting to show in the quality of your work.

If I recall Yahtzee's review on The Witcher; If I play a game for the first couple hours and don't enjoy myself I'm not going to sit around and try to labour myself through the game in the hope that it gets better. I think this is the same with Oblivion and Yahtzee. He won't stay around for the good bits to come around eventually, for who knows when they'll show up? Who knows if there are any good bits at all? I'm not going to drag myself through a dumpster full of shit in the hopes to eventually find the gem I was looking for when there's a perfectly good game on the town fair where I can win it AND have fun at the same time.

Plus, he's got a contract with the Escapist, and with this nifty little contract comes a deadline.
Oh and I almost forgot, he doesn't even pay for the games, so he doesn't have the problem that he wants value for his money so he's gonna finish the game and try and reanimate it by injecting the game with syringes full of mod.

 

[laikenf]

Stop doing a review every single week. Take time play the games a little more thoroughly. Twice a month would be plenty. Your flux capacitor is straining, and I think it's starting to show in the quality of your work.

I agree with that. Yahtzee's review sure is funny. They are usually entertaining. Yet I wonder whether he suppressed all the very good qualities that Oblivion has to offer. Yahtzee appears to be concerned that all we want to hear is the negatives, that somehow he can't possibly say anything nice about a game lest he lose his audience.

Oblivion offers a completely open world. Oblivion's leveling-system allows the player to complete quests at a challenging level no matter how far the player has proceeded in the game. If the developers didn't have the leveling mechanism, we'd hear complaints that the game stinks because you miss all the cool level one quests because you are too strong, etc. No, it's not perfect, but the weaknesses receive far too much attention.

Given that we are all fans of Yahtzee, there's a subconscious tendency to support what he says. We help Yahtzee and ourselves when we politely tell him when we disagree.

I tried disagreeing with him once on these boards (I think it was on the Witcher review) but I soon felt that a lot of posters where ganging up on me so I just told myslef "meh, this isn't worth the stress".

 

[madmax17]

Oblivion is shit on consoles, it's heaven on the pc with about 80 mods some of which are trying to replace every original, pathetic, landscape with interesting ones and of course "natural environment" which replaces every tree with a biiiig tree and also ads flowers, butterfly's, rainbows, different weathers etc. than you can call it immersive.

 

[Sennz0r]

Oblivion is shit on consoles, it's heaven on the pc with about 80 mods some of which are trying to replace every original, pathetic, landscape with interesting ones and of course "natural environment" which replaces every tree with a biiiig tree and also ads flowers, butterfly's, rainbows, different weathers etc. than you can call it immersive.

True, true, but if I have to download 80 mods and expand my Oblivion file size by 200% I'm not going to call the Oblivion; the way it was made, immersive or a good game. It should've been like that from the start. If the game was good it didn't need people who are not even getting paid for making the game great patching it up. And for all of you who are saying Bethesda made it so that people could add stuff are just defending Bethesda. People could've still added stuff without Bethesda fucking up the environment and leveling system. I mean Morrowind was also open for modding, even more so because there was an infinite sea around the island. What I'm saying is the environment in Morrowind was great and diverse, but still a lot of people made mods for Morrowind. Bethesda could've made a more diverse landscape from the start, instead of -according to you people- relying on the community to do most of the work for them. You said it yourself; Oblivion only gets real immersive after you have downloaded a shitload of non-official mods. That's not Oblivion by Bethesda anymore. That's Oblivion by everyone. Which is great, don't get me wrong, but that's not the original Oblivion, and this review is about the original.

 

[lonercs]

Yay!!! Thank you Yetzhee. I e-mailed him a...well email, it kind of goes without saying. And he review Oblivion, again it goes without saying but I have to, that I ask him to review Oblivion. I'm very happy now but, now I have to give him a blow job, not really. By the way if you want him to ever review a game email him ONCE and don't be a prick about it. If he doesn't review wait, I sent him the email a few months ago.