Zero Punctuation: Oblivion

TaboriHK

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Sep 15, 2008
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The game was boring, and the developers gave you too many things to focus on at once. Which would be fine, except for point one.
 

Furious George

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Sep 23, 2008
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i loved this game, but i couldnt find myself able to pick it up again, and play it again, not that its to long, i just had no intrest in doing it again. the only time i repeated the game was when my ps3 pooped out on me and i had to buy a new one, and i wasnt able to keep any of the memory from my old one. plus, when i bought the goty edition, i only played the shivering ilse part, took it to gamestop, and sold it there so i could by condemed 2
 

BBQ Platypus

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Sep 23, 2008
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Man, was I disappointed by this game when it came out. It was not only catering to console gamers instead of me, it was catering more to action game fans. I mean, did I pay for the right game? Where's the RPG I paid for? A game where absolutely everything is leveled and combat mechanics are emphasized over storyline, openness, and immersion is not an RPG at all.

I wouldn't be quite as bothered by it if it were a good or particularly challenging action game. But really, it doesn't work all that well on that level, either. I still thought the game was decent, but there's a reason I went back to playing Glastonbury - er, I mean, Morrowind.
 

suck it trebek

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Sep 12, 2008
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star_topology post=6.61330.491008 said:
I am saddened that I am yet to finish this game...
I have beaten the game, every side quest, and every expansion.


What irritates me the most is the voice acting. I talk to a damn begger about the grey fox and they respond in a quasi-fitting voice for their character, I hand them a coin and they all say "thank you kind sir!" in that fucking mono-toned voice. The only way it could be less believable is if they popped out a shitty little toy in a plastic ball
 

Orkimond

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Oct 3, 2008
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I mostly aggree with the problems of imersion, but i found morrowind very imersive, which i still play
 

SimuLord

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Aug 20, 2008
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Unknower post=6.61330.542225 said:
Why hasn't anyone said anything about the user interface? That was bad. I was going to write down reasons why, but it seems this guy already did that:

http://damicat.googlepages.com/whyoblivionsucks

In short, Morrowind's interface: simple, quick and good. You see almost all you need with one button.

Oblivion: complicated, slow and bad. You need to navigate through lots of tabs, which all takes lots of time.

Damicat has a whole list of Oblivion's flaws: http://damicat.googlepages.com/

Bethesda's design principle, "make a new game from scratch", seems to mean they don't learn anything from their past games.

Furthermore, I didn't see anyone complaining from the plainness and ugliness of the NPCs. Maybe Bethesda thought that making most NPCs plain-looking would make your character stand out more, make him more unique. Or maybe they were just lazy with faces. There's like a couple of good-looking characters in one city and all the others are mostly plain. Especially Orcs, Khajiits and Argonians. Maybe the Orcs are supposed to look like barbarians, but even for barbarians they look too ugly. Having to zoom to NPC faces when talking to them certainly doesn't help.

mrverbal said:
However, as for your point about their being 'at least 100 voice actors'...

I'm sorry, what the fuck? I think other than people on the main quest (which account for maybe half a dozen voice actors) their are probably substantially less than 20. Heck, probably no more than about another 6 or so. And the voice acting is AWFUL. If you saw a movie with acting this bad that wasn't made by george lucas you'd puke.
One voice actor for one race-gender is ridiculously low. Actually, Oblivion had less, some of the actors voiced more than 1 race. Nord-woman and Orc-woman at least had the same actor and if I'm not mistaken, Bosmer-man and Dunmer-man.

Patrick Stewart, Sean Penn and Terence Stamp don't make up for that. I wonder how many professional voice actors Bethesda could have hired instead. I highly doubt the celebrity actors received the same wages.
I read damicat's diarrhea of the pen and my main thought was that he can shove his rant up his ass. I played Oblivion to death. 400-plus hours across three major characters, in fact. While I agree the UI could've been more intuitive, it doesn't make much sense to complain that the game's dumbed down and that information is hard-to-find in the same paragraph.

Was it immersive (Yahtzee's complaint)? In the city, fuck no. In the countryside? Oh, you bet your ass it was immersive. I spent hours just hunting for alchemy ingredients and shooting animals like Cabela's Medieval Deer Hunter and had a blast. I played it modded out the ass and the immersion was even better (and if you're going to complain that a game shouldn't need mods, why are you PC gaming?)
 

ShadoCrytr

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Nov 1, 2008
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Best of Yahtzee's reviews, hands down. Completely true, and really funny. I do disagree with the immersion issues, though... except for the stupid NPC's. Just stay away from the towns and getting into the game is really easy.
 

Mr. Payne

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Aug 30, 2008
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Its not immersive unless you go around roleplaying, and psh, who does that. everything else though is right.. Although Ive never seen someone get stuck on a rock... Except myself when using speedhax :X... The terrain does change, it has five flavors: oblivion, grasslands, ruins, mountainous, and forest... But each mountain forest ruin grassy plain and oblivion dimension... Look exactly alike...
 

RufusMcLaser

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Mar 27, 2008
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Yeah, I was disappointed by the same-ness of the Oblivion worlds (leaving aside the final one) which were incredibly cookie-cutterized. Some randomized caves, sure- but that doesn't cut it.

In the game's defense, there were a few side-quests which really had creative environments. The dream quests? Cool. Also the world created by the sleeping wizard. Very creative.
 

BBQ Platypus

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Sep 23, 2008
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One last, absolutely FINAL thing I forgot to mention.

Morrowind made me forget the distinction between the game and real life. While playing (and even occasionally while not playing), I thought and behaved like everything in the game was real. Sure, the NPCs were basically static "conversation entities" that stood around and brought up a dialogue box. Sure, the map was only about 10 square miles. But in my head, I actually existed in that world where magic and all that crap is real. Since the inability to distinguish fantasy and reality technically fits one definition of insanity, it can be said that Morrowind turned me into a crazy person.

I was able to enjoy Oblivion (especially after modding the hell out of it), but I never got anything close to that feeling. It felt less unique, more "generic." I couldn't plug myself into it. And that, I think, was its ultimate failing.
 

PsykoDragon

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Aug 19, 2008
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Everyone knows that Morrowind had a big load of bugs shipped with it. I accepted that back then, because it's very hard to make something big without missing a few important points.

But Oblivion seemed to have forgotten that & had a proportional number of bugs & glitches.
 

cuddly_tomato

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Nov 12, 2008
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BBQ Platypus said:
I was able to enjoy Oblivion (especially after modding the hell out of it), but I never got anything close to that feeling. It felt less unique, more "generic." I couldn't plug myself into it. And that, I think, was its ultimate failing.
Agreed. Oblivion, after I literally installed over 200 mods, was enjoyable. But game developers should make a game that is enjoyable as soon you load it up. You shouldn't have to basically redesign the entire thing and go looking around mod sites seeing what else people made for it to be fun.

I think this game was another case of Yahtzee being a bit too lenient, as he didn't crucify this game on some of it's biggest flaws. Radiant AI, and some of the absolutely retarded gameplay decisions - that damn conversation minigame, the retarded quests that have no bearing on the world you exist in, the complete lack of RPG playing opportunities for RPG games... the entire thing was a mess.
 

Mr. Payne

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Aug 30, 2008
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ARG Im trying to terminate the reaper programming in the radiant AI's to get them to stop wasting data insanely and grow a brain... Although it may backfire completely and create the worlds first AI element... That wont be parasitic.
 

likalaruku

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Nov 29, 2008
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I plan to play this eventually, but like with Morrowind, I expect to spend about a month traveling, looting, & killing without ever (& I do mean never) getting into the story.
 

Solaris Paradox

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Apr 23, 2009
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Well, you nailed a lot of the key flaws, but you got one thing wrong, Yahtzee--you actually DO need to explore the landscape thoroughly, because apart from the major towns, none of the other game's locations are marked on your map until you actually reach them, although everafter they're click-to-travel-here blips on your awesome world-map of awesomeness.

Well, I do expect these flaws to bug you more than me, since I'm your polar opposite (I prefer swords over guns, always). Oblivion is my third-favorite game of all time, and I think it's just *awesome.* ^__^
 

Panzer_God

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Apr 29, 2009
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I must admit i liked this game but everything he said was true with a vengence and unfortunately i haven't liked this game as much since.
 

Yankmy Armoff

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Apr 22, 2009
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oblivion was great, just not a massively in depth experience. still, i got loads of amusement out of doing silly things like standing on white gold tower or getting a picture of me in the dragons mouth :p
 

bushwhacker2k

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Jan 27, 2009
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I preferred Morrowind except for a few things.

Oblivion was not bad, I enjoyed the stealth compared to Morrowind's stealth system, but all in all it wasn't that great.

It was blaringly easy, but I didn't mess with the difficulty slider, so that might have changed a thing or two.