Zero Punctuation: Oblivion

[Lord Chaos 2]

Got to remember that Yahtzee didn't really get into Morrowind either. (neither did I really)

And really, Oblivion isn't as "one dimensional" areawise as people claim. A lot of the time that comes from people who didn't really get into it and thus didn't get very far with it or see anything interesting. Also Oblivion only takes place in one main area, so of course it would resemble eachother. But there are swamp areas, under water areas, basic area, snowy mountains, several different dungeon styles, different city styles (and very detailed ones), etc.

I found Oblivion to be a very satisifying experience in most aspects.

 

[eltonborges]

Please. PLEASE, I´m from Brazil, and if you don´t know, is a huge mass of land(5 of the 5 bigger in this planet called World or Earth)and I really try hard every new ZP launched and all, but my english is a bit sloooow so its really hard to keep it up with you Yahtzee. But if you could be a more merciful, put the whole text, so even deaf people could keep it up, what do you think?
And good review and real good choice of musics, since Hot Fuzz I don´t listen Village Green.

 

[UpInSmoke]

Please. PLEASE, I´m from Brazil, and if you don´t know, is a huge mass of land(5 of the 5 bigger in this planet called World or Earth)and I really try hard every new ZP launched and all, but my english is a bit sloooow so its really hard to keep it up with you Yahtzee. But if you could be a more merciful, put the whole text, so even deaf people could keep it up, what do you think?
And good review and real good choice of musics, since Hot Fuzz I don´t listen Village Green.

I think someone usually posts the text transcript within the first few pages of the thread.

I can't imagine trying to follow ZP with limited English comprehension. Good luck to you.

 

[Sennz0r]

Awesome review, right on the money, Yahtzee. Again.

I loved Morrowind, but Oblivion was such a lame follow-up. ("Follow-down" might be more accurate.)

That's exactly our biggest complaint - the scenery. Might sound picky to someone after a dungeon-crawl hack-slash, but to me and mine, we like immersion. Morrowind had it. Someone in the art department spent an aeon on morrowind, figuring out what plants grew in what regions, what fungus resembled what other fungus, the types of plants and vegetation that would grow in each separate region, and that is a level of detail I really appreciate. That, Oblivion was totally without.

Ditto to the characters. We LIKED that Morrowind had people ambling about saying "outlander, you are wounded," or "we welcome you freely" or whatever, as you walked past. But in Oblivion they just talk without being asked - "i saw a mud crab recently." My god, call the feds. Who, on any planet, talks like that?

Also, if they rendered the cities from the outside we could have still had levitate spells. And WTF was up with the telekinesis in Ob?? I loved it in Morrowind. It nearly killed me in Oblivion.

Horses were cool, but who cares - if you can't fight from the back of a horse, you don't want a horse. (Plus it kept getting gored by minotaurs and periodically running away anyway.)

enchantment was retarded in oblivion, but excellent in morrowind.

I read somewhere about the development of Oblivion, with the AI causing problems such as guards on duty would get hungry and abandon their posts and go hunting... and so other guards would arrest them for deserting and so on. Or they would steal apples and get arrested... THAT sounds like a game i want to play. Why did they take that out? It sounds awesome.

I bought Oblivion the minute it was available. I mean, i was down there at midnight when the store had them on the day the xbox arrived and all, because i thought it would surpass Morrowind. But i got a bit over it a bit quick. Mod up Morrowind a bit and it's still light years ahead. Man, i'm STILL playing morrowind. I've been throught the main story a hundred times over, but it's still fun to waltz about in that world. There are still things in there that surprise me.

Anyway, to cut a fat story thing, i dug the review, and i wholeheartedly agree with the whole thing.

cheers.

You are dead on with your Morrowind/Oblivion comparison. I'm one of those weird people who played Oblivion first, and then went back to play Morrowind. THANK GOD I DID. I don't think I could have enjoyed Oblivion as much as I did in 2006 if I knew how inferior/nerfed the game is when compared to Morrowind.

Anybody who has played both games and prefers Oblivion is clearly judging the games on style, not substance.

I agree with both of you completely, I even think you could have taken it further with saying that the world in Morrowind actually had depth. I mean Me reading books in that game might add up to 3 complete hours of gameplay in total, I loved all the info you could gather. Also the people that told you about specific stuff, they could give you hints about treasure being somewhere or a person who could do this and this, but it never gave you a journal update or a quest marker. It made me feel like the game was saying; "you're big enough to figure this out on your own", and it made me feel proud when I did figure it out.
The limitations of factions to join was also a big plus, it forced you to specialise just like in real life, you can't do everything there is to do, you might be the protagonist, you're still not god.
Damn I love this game so much that if my graphics card wasn't fucked it would probably be the only RPG I'd play until the end of time, since everything coming out now is so capitalised and mainstream (you know, like Oblivion) that it's just plain dull.
I even made an essay on Morrowind for school (come on if my teacher lets me I'm gonna take that opportunity, call me freak I don't care xD).

Only question I have; who do you mean by 'we'?
I'd join the 'we'...

 

[Olivia75]

"we" = my dorky little nerd herd. the morrowind/obliv gripe has come up in conversation more than once, so i figured i was ok to speak in the fp plural.

i forgot to mention that WE also didn't dig the levelling up of monsters along with our own levelling. damn did that get old fast. for ages you'd see nothing but goblins - goblins, as far as you travelled, nothing but bloody goblins. then level up (in something un-warrior-like, such as mercantile, sneak or speechcraft) and wham, minotaur are suddenly the monstre-du-jour. and they're showing up every bloody where. kicking your ass until you can get some longsword training or something. painful. and DULL. I mean really, seen one, seen 'em all. Variety is the spice of life. Etc etc.

i realise that the landscape isn't identical everywhere, but compared to the depth of detail in morrowind, it is. I'm not for a second suggesting that the caves look even remotely like the hills. I'm not blind. But generally, all the hills look the same. All the caves look the same. Unlike Morrowind, where you could tell by the scenery what region you were in. And you wouldn't find trama root growing in Pelegiad. Or Ebony sprouting in Seyda Neen. Or gold kanet growing in a cave. Or hypha facia in the ashlands. THAT's what i'm getting at. Different regions had distinct colour schemes, distinct people/race types, distinct flora (and fauna, e.g. nix hounds like green lands, hungers like ashlands, you want a mud crab, lurk on the coastlines. you want a cliff racer, find some mountains.) If the whole world is just goblins at every turn, yes, it gets samey. And if the trees all look the bloody same, it looks samey. Morrowind didn't do that. Oblivion does it to the nth degree.

The point can be well illustrated by the fact that most players would be able to recognise a snapshot of any place in Morrowind and have at least a rough idea of where that was... and could probably name 3 alchemical items that were unique to that region. whereas in Oblivion, you could really only differentiate between city, country, cave, underwater, snow. And even then the content of each scene would be reasonably similar.

It's dull, that's all i'm saying.

 

[Olivia75]

and by dull, i mean "compared to morrowind". It still shits on most RPGs.

 

[unknowngamer]

They definitely screwed up the dialog. Hell, they didn't even bother editing some of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaHoihnmXKA

 

[Kaewt]

I'm not a hack and slash fanboi, I just preferred diablo 2 over most rpg's since its immencity is something oblivion can only aspire to. If you travel through the whole of diablo, the maps change every single time you start a new game.

You have hundreds if not thousands of individual boss type of monsters to kill. Thousands of items to collect.

The hack-and-slash game is not nearly as narrow as you might want to believe......

 

[CTU_Agent24]

OBLIVION IS CRAP

(sorry, did i say that outloud?)

 

[BLERGER]

Good show, Yahtzee! A very good review and a very TRUE review.

I was waiting for him to do this game =D
So many design flaws, so little time...

 

[AshuraSpeaks]

Right, so maybe there was a flaw in my game, but one of the most off-putting things about Morrowind for me is that my character spent the first two hours of gameplay moving at a pace somewhere around two yards per minute. Try going that fast in real life, while running in place. This would have been forgiven, if it weren't for the "oops you missed again" fighting system. When you see your dagger impale a mud crab, before your very eyes, you expect it to do some damage. However, because it leaned on the D&D system like a crutch, you could stab that crab twenty times, and only "hit" it once.

Both of these were fixed in Oblivion, which made me love it so much that the lack of immersion did not make me sad in the slightest.

World of Warcraft has even less immersion, I would say. Yes, you can argue about land, people, items, and so on, but considering the people who frequent the realms (even the Role Playing servers!), it's about as immersive as walking into an impromptu LARP session.

I also like the idea that you were thrown in jail for killing all the children. It explains there absence, and why everything is trying to kill you. [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EverythingTryingToKillYou]

Speaking of Modding, if Yahtzee is going to talk about the PC gaming community like it's a superior race, he really ought to mention that the list of tweaks for Oblivion could fill a small country. Modina or something.

ETA: And on that note, I'm also shocked he hasn't mentioned Chris Livingston's brilliant Living in Oblivion blog, wherein he tries to make a living as an NPC (Nondrick P. Cairk'tir)
eking out a living collecting ingredients and selling them. He uses a few crucial mods to this end (notably the Crowded Roads mod) and is probably the best person to make an interesting blog on not doing quests.

Why am I shocked?

On April 24th, 2008 (fullyramblomatic.com):
I just noticed the other day that Chris Livingston of What do you know, I did. [http://www.hlcomic.com/]

-Ash

 

[franzuu]

Two quick replies.

1) To the guy who thinks that the Oblivion hatefest is a new thing, try popping over to the Bethesda forums sometime. It was hated before it even appeared. (see also "Fallout3 - Pete Hines lies repeatedly about a steampunk FPS". Not sure if that's the real subtitle but it's close enough)

2) The necrophilia woman is in a shop in the town with the crazy paranoid guy behind the church (I haven't played it for months and months so can't remember the name). Anyway she's one of the lizard things and you need to talk to here as if you were a necrophiliac, then she'll tell you all. So strictly speaking you aren't jailed for that at the start, but the guy who said you were obviously thought he was

VB

youtube video of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyvbdacj7gw

how would a person who isn't a necrophile know stuff like that + there are more hints
that do not point at necrophilia but this makes all of it fall in place.

 

[Mack Attack]

i was sad when i first started seeing your videos because it seemed that u only reviewed new games and that you would never review this one, but now im happy. so thanks. i l¢¾ve you.

 

[rapidoud]

To people thinking yahtzee's losing his touch, pfft.
In most games he goes off at them unfairly and if you had bothered playing any of the games he's reviewed then you'd know.
The combat in Painkiller is bad but he still loved the game.
The only difference is now he's actually hitting the main issues as much as they should be hit.
The rest were like, if you were jsut about to finish the game and the power cut off.
More of anger issues.

 

[catfish17]

Oh my god! o_o You actually did it. I totally was not expecting that. Nice review as always, Yahtzee. XD

 

[Battlefrank]

Some good points there but it's a shame he either missed out (or not commenting it for the sake of the console version) the modding community.

Most of these problems have been either just patched or in some cases pathed to the point perfection. There are mods that spice up the combat (decapitating and throat sliting), the lore (at least 100+ new books with interesting stories), the quests (some worthy of an Oscar), the landscape (most of the map regions now have at least one large and unique patch of space) and the enemies (60+ new ones that varie in personality and size and the original ones now also vary in personality and size).

Although the problem with bland common NPC's still remain there are some mods that add really interesting personalities and i think he missed out the dark brotherhood questline since he specialized in maiming things instead of stealth. The original oblivion is boring but the modded one makes it so much better than any other RPG.

I would have LOVED to do dark brotherhood but there was a shitty fucking glitch at that door.

 

[Battlefrank]

I remember the magic system. I was at the last mages guild quest where you kill the SUPER POWERFUL NECROMANCER!!! And then I killed him with one super spell I made.

 

[Itami]

I have to agree, as much fun as I had playing Oblivion it wasn't that great of a game and didn't have much depth. At least not as much as Morrowind, which despite all it's flaws, had the kind of depth you could spend a life time playing, and the scenery changed occasionally too.

Upside that Oblivion has over Morrowind though is that the magic classes actually work(and the UI is all around easier to handle). You can be a spell caster or a mixed class and not die horribly. And lobing fireballs and making things run around on fire is terribly funny in addition to be fairly effective.

 

[wadark]

I have to say this is one of the most bullseye comments yahtzee's had yet. This is the reason I stopped playing Oblivion 3 hours in. I couldn't put it better myself: "It might as well be taking place in the same meadow."

After a couple hours playing I was so bored from running slowly from one end of the map to the other but somewhere down inside I felt almost ashamed to use the fast travel, it felt like cheating or something.

The other huge issue I've had with this game, and several other RPGs lately, is that they seem to be trying to cash in on the "MUMMORPUGER" audience. Oblivion, FFXII, the Witcher (shudder), are all single-player games that seem to be running on a MMO style of gameplay and combat. I do play World of Warcraft so its not that I don't like that style of gameplay. But this style of gameplay just doesn't work in a single-player, and more importantly a close-ended story line, game. In WoW, though the quests might all be the same 6 variants, at least you're always doing something. Whereas in single-player games, there are a relative low number of quests, and its up to the main story to drive the game. In these single-player games, the vast, open-ended worlds don't lend themselves to keeping up with the main story, which is basically the only reason for playing these games.

 

[Anaphyis]

Surprisingly good for a RPG review by Yahtzee. What I like about ZP is the way he produces 5 minutes of pure bile and still is able to zero in on a games weaknesses, making the column both funny and true. The other RPG reviews however, especially The Witcher but Mass Effect as well, turned out to be more like a general "Why Yahtzee doesn't like RPG's" metacritical rant.

Still, I don't see it as an essential bad thing Oblivion doesn't mix landscapes like Word of Warcraft. I mean for gods sake, take a look at http://mapwow.com and tell me this doesn't look like a quilt of bad design choices. A snowy rural area right beside a volcanic and magma-strewn wasteland? Heard that sound? That was a geologists head exploding.