Topic: Oblivion (Read 2020 times)

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Saw this mentioned in the Fallout 3 topic as being dated and inferior, so I thought I would mention that I recently just started playing this game for the first time and I'm actually enjoying it quite a bit.  Don't get me wrong - wondering about in post-nucular-apocalyptica in what essentially amounts to a loin cloth gunning down muscly mutant freaks with a Chinese assault rifle is ranked pretty high on my list of joyous video game memories.  However, Oblivion seems pretty cool so far too!

I've only just begun with the game, i.e. saved the emperor's heir from Kvatch and delivered him safely the Cloudy Dick Island or whatever the place was.  Right now I'm hot on the trail of the amulet of kings, but I'm also taking a bit of time to do sidequests here and there.  My favorite so far was discovering the slimy merchant fuck who was buying his goods from a graverobber. 

Right now I am playing as a character modeled roughly after Alhazred from the Necronomicon, and I even created a custom Necromancer class for him with all sorts of tasty magical abilities.  It probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense to anyone else, but the game seems to envelope me that much more to imagine it as one of Alhazred's untold adventures.

Playing through it you can really tell that it is a dated game, as some of the textures are grainy and NPC character models sometimes seem disproportionate when compared to the sexier Fallout 3 models, however, I find the general landscape more refreshing than Fallout because, you know, there are actual colors.  The overall atmosphere of the game is enhanced by being able to go from endless flowing fields of grain and happy clouds to musty, festering dungeons filled with oddly sexy arachnid women and imps.  Fallout, save for the sidequest was consistently dark and grungy.

So yeah, let's discuss this discrepancy further and perhaps your cool memories from Oblivion (as I'm sure I'm probably the only person here who hasn't played it for at least 10 hours yet).
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have you played morrowind?
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Nope.
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i left the main quests as soon as i could because the open world parts are much more fun.
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play morrowind, it is waaay better than oblivion and fallout 3 adn ts like s superaw esome game alrighT!!!!!
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Oblivion was and still is a beautiful game, in my opinion. The landscapes are vibrant and beg you to explore them, there's a lot of freedom, lots of character customization, a good soundtrack(though probably not quite as good as Morrowind's). With all of the good things said, I definitely had my gripes with the game. For one, I dont, and never did like randomly generated dungeons. I realize the developers include it so the player experiences something new each time they enter a dungeon, but for me it takes away from the experience. Why not include inaccessible areas that you can only get to later, instead? That gives you an incentive to go back to the dungeon, and with new areas to explore instead of having something different solely because it's generated with a different layout.

The scaling of monster levels is also a pretty bad idea. I always enjoy the feeling of discovering a new area, meeting the menacing creatures it has to offer, and being knocked around to the point of realizing my own mortality the hard way. I level up, come back and taunt them with my own combat experience.
I know that finding better armor, stronger weapons, and learning more powerful spells counts collectively towards your character's finesse in combat, but the feeling of accomplishment is less substantial after leveling up for hours on end.

The fast travel feature, although entirely optional, sucks a moderate bit of the fun out of exploration. Sure you can't fast travel everywhere, but even to those places where you can, you would always have more fun discovering the area on your own and being able to fast travel from that point forward. This is probably my smallest gripe with the game, though, seeing as how you can only transport to the more major locations.

And the Oblivion realm. Yes, the entire centerpoint of The Elderscrolls IV itself, is probably one of the most irritating concepts in the game. The hellish area is entirely too repetitive, and going through a gate to lock it often really gets old after a few times. This is definitely the biggest aspect that I dreaded about the game, after around my 4th time and 2-3 minutes after walking into the gate I tell myself "Ughh ive been here done this already. At least make each subsequent visit different enough to capture my interest." But nothing ever changed, alas at least I felt great after locking each gate.

With all of this said, im not sure if I could call the game dated, at least it isn't dated enough to drag it down a lot. It runs off of the same engine and is slightly less prettier than Fallout 3. Though, this is entirely from a technical standpoint seeing as how Oblivion, in my opinion, has a much better art direction. Like you pointed out, Oblivion is colorful and not a dull wasteland as in Fallout 3. But the biggest errors in the game have little to do with it's age and more to do with sour ideas on the Bethesda's part.
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Tried to get into this twice but I never quite managed to make in into the "open world" just ended up thinking "fuck swordplay" about 30 mins in then quitting out. Fallout 3 was a totally different story. Binged on that for days.

I was the same with Bioshock. Maybe I need to get some beers in and try these again.
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Oh wow, I did not know that the dungeons are randomly generated.  I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this yet.

You were the same with Bioshock in the sense that you got about 30 minutes in and quit, or you binged for days?  Because yeah, I thought Bioshock was fucking great!  It was one of the few first person shooters I've ever played where in between instances of fighting for my life and trying to determine where the creepy disembodied voices are coming from I was actually having fun exploring the areas and seeing the sights.
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I guess I played Bioshock for about 3 or 4 hours. I am gonna get it for PS3 after my 1st semester exams in January and give it another go because I know I didn't do it justice.
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Yeah it's kinda sad you played the main quest so early - not only have you opened Oblivion gates fuckin everywhere now, but the Kvatch part is much cooler if higher level daedra are there.

Also choosing abilities you actually use as main abilities = no in this and Morrowind. You level up when you get 10 points in your main abilities, and any stat modifiers (ie: Strength +3) that you get to pick at level up are decided by skillups you get BEFORE you get the "level up, go to bed now" message. So.. if you get 10 blunt and 10 speechcraft skillups, you can choose strength + 3 and um.. charisma(?) +3 at level up, but if blunt is one of your main abilities you'll level up as soon as you get the 10 blunt skill, meaning you can't pick +3 charisma too.

This probably doesn't make much sense so I suggest you go read a skill/level up guide somewhere, im sure whoever wrote those didn't write them at midnight after finishing a 9 hour shift geez im tired
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I bought Oblivion shortly after launch, but only played for a month. Not because I didn't like it, but because it literally exploded my PSU. Yeah!! Even after replacing it with a more powerful unit, my old-ass computer would automatically power-down after a few minutes of playing, so I just decided not to chance it anymore.

It's been sitting next to my monitor in the original packaging ever since. Sometimes, while I'm waiting for a huge batch of files to transfer over to my external hard drive, I will flip through the manual and sigh wistfully

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For one, I dont, and never did like randomly generated dungeons.

Oblivion doesn't have randomly-generated dungeons and I'm not sure how you got the idea that it did. Dungeon loot tables are random, but that's about it.
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i left the main quests as soon as i could because the open world parts are much more fun.

Agree, I couldn't bring myself to play the main quest right through. I've done the majority of the side missions and exploring the game is really fun but the fact that each NPC looks similar and has one of ten voices put me off after a while. To be fair I did really enjoy the game when I first got it but I don't think it has alot of replay value just because of the lack of variation in NPC's. The Arena stuff is pretty fun and the vampire ability is a cool concept though.

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The hellish area is entirely too repetitive, and going through a gate to lock it often really gets old after a few times.

This was the main thing that put me off, I ended up just running past every enemy right to the end.
Last Edit: December 23, 2009, 01:42:02 am by Afura
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i thought oblivion was kinda neat for the first hours too. but then i started doing sidequests and the oblivion realm sections and the sense of wonder was replaced with this overwhelming boredom. exploring is pretty neat, but the game doesn't really have any substance whatsoever so it's really just a matter of finding dungeons and picking up more worthless items.

i didn't play the other games in the elder scrolls series, and really don't care to, as oblivion just isn't a very good game. the only thing the game really has going for it is the size of the world. the fundamental design of the game's systems is not too rewarding or sharp, the story trite and meaningless, and the voice acting of the noticeably poorest quality i've ever heard in a video game. the voice acting really bothered me in particular, as they had 4 voice actors responsible for voicing around a thousand different people. the actors they chose are not bad, but they overextended them to a point i've actually never seen before in acting. the world is populated almost exclusively with these remarkably shallow carbon copies of a few general character molds. it's a profoundly irritating thing to experience after a short while.

when it comes down to it, the fundamental flaw with oblivion is that there is absolutely no attention to detail whatsoever. they wanted to make this enormous world but were not committed to making any of it interesting, or actually fleshing out ANY ideas that could have been present in it. you don't notice it within the first few hours, but after playing the game at length you begin to realize that the game legitimately does not have the substance to warrant more than a couple hours of your life. it's pretty clear that they were aware that they were doing this, since this really wasn't the case in fallout 3.


i've actually suspected that it was mainly ken rolston, the lead designer of the elder scrolls games, that was holding bethesda back from making a quality sandbox game. he left bethesda to go ruin bighugegames right around the start of fallout's development, at which point you actually saw bethesda take the basic oblivion formula, fix all the problems with it, and turn it into the most worthwhile game of this generation. right around when bighugegames hired rolston and announced his new SUPER HUGE RIDICULOUS RPG, they started going downhill and eventually had to sell themselves to THQ, who later abandoned the studio entirely. this resulted in their firing two thirds of their staff, cancelling all projects, and eventually having to rely on goddamn piece of trash curt schilling to come bail them out(no joke, you could look it up). before rolston joined, big huge games was a quality, mostly self-sustained developer that set realistic goals for themselves and did a lot of good things despite not having a huge corporate presence or some SLAVE STAFF mindlessly churning shit out. bethesda, meanwhile, has suddenly become the industry juggernaut after really not being that much more than an industry peripheral player for a long time.

interesting coincidence, in my view, seeing how these two companies go in completely opposite directions when one guy known for making startlingly shallow games switches spots. it's possible i'm reading too much into this, but it is a curious turn of events.
Last Edit: December 23, 2009, 02:03:57 am by Hundley
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i didn't play the other games in the elder scrolls series, and really don't care to, as oblivion just isn't a very good game. the only thing the game really has going for it is the size of the world. the fundamental design of the game's systems is not too rewarding or sharp, the story trite and meaningless, and the voice acting of the noticeably poorest quality i've ever heard in a video game.
whilst the ridiculous limit of voice actors really ruined a lot of oblivion's immersiveness, you should go play two worlds. or at least find a video of the dialogue or whatever.

its an rpg in the same vein as gothic and i guess oblivion or whatever, but yeah it has the worst voice acting ive ever heard in a professional game.
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Impressive display of game industry knowledge hundley.
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whilst the ridiculous limit of voice actors really ruined a lot of oblivion's immersiveness, you should go play two worlds. or at least find a video of the dialogue or whatever.

its an rpg in the same vein as gothic and i guess oblivion or whatever, but yeah it has the worst voice acting ive ever heard in a professional game.
i don't know what you're talking about this game has great voice acting and dialogue:

Impressive display of game industry knowledge hundley.
i can't tell if you are being sarcastic here :(
i'm actually only interested in this subject because the headquarters of both big huge games and bethesda soft are located near where i live, and i have known people who worked for both. i'm kinda peripherally involved in the industry in this neck of the woods, so i'm always curious to see what the COMPETITION is up to.
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I think I enjoyed the Shivering Isles better than the main game because of it's environment. Also don't bother with Morrowind if you've play Fallout3/Oblivion. I bought Morrowind when it came out, played it, then played Oblivion and I just can't get back into Morrowind.

edit: and by that I mean, I was too spoiled by fast travel and stuff in oblivion
Last Edit: December 23, 2009, 04:44:48 am by Dale Gobbler
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morrowind's a lot more cleverly designed (the dungeons are not all the same series of rooms in different orders, every object as far as i know is hand-placed, no voice acting) and the setting is a lot more interesting. the island morrowind takes place on has swamps, big deserts of ash, weird mushroom trees, deadly mountain peaks, etc. and the human npcs are limited to mostly soldiers; the game takes place in an imperial colony and most of the indigenous people are orcs and dark elves, both of which have crazy architechture for their cities and a "lore" or whatever you'd call it that is more interesting than the typical tolkieny character of oblivion.

basically everything you're complaining about in oblivion exists less in morrowind. i don't love either but i enjoyed morrowind, i bet you would too for a while. the world will sustain your attention for much, much longer anyway.

edit:
was addressed to hundley
Last Edit: December 23, 2009, 04:12:07 am by bort
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morrowind's a lot more cleverly designed (the dungeons are not all the same series of rooms in different orders, every object as far as i know is hand-placed, no voice acting) and the setting is a lot more interesting. the island morrowind takes place on has swamps, big deserts of ash, weird mushroom trees, deadly mountain peaks, etc. and the human npcs are limited to mostly soldiers; the game takes place in an imperial colony and most of the indigenous people are orcs and dark elves, both of which have crazy architechture for their cities and a "lore" or whatever you'd call it that is more interesting than the typical tolkieny character of oblivion.

basically everything you're complaining about in oblivion exists less in morrowind. i don't love either but i enjoyed morrowind, i bet you would too for a while. the world will sustain your attention for much, much longer anyway.

edit:
was addressed to hundley

yeah thank you for articulating this better than me, i have typed so much stuff about HOW FUCKING GREAT morrowind is that i just can't think anymore. it still amazes me how well-designed and REALISTIC morrowind is with the whole imperial colonies vs. native ashlanders and their different cultures and the politics within the more "civilized" dark elves and i love the game a lot and everyone should play it because it's super cool!
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I don't know what you're talking about. Morrowind has fast travel between cities, a pair of spells that let you set a location to teleport to whenever you want, and a port to nearest temple spell for both religions that you can use to juggle between locations once you learn what temples each town has.

yeah but you have to work for those. there aren't silt striders to every town, some towns have different temples, you usually have to walk to small villages because there's no fast transport there etc.