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What makes Oblivion so bad?

Santander02

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Sep 29, 2009
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I find it quite interesting that its universally agreed that Oblivion is shit-tier game, but that people always have different reasons for it. My personal favorite is - its a fucking plain as hell forgettable re-skin of Morrowind.

What are your reasons?

https://sites.google.com/site/damicat/

/Thread

Of all those, the utter rape of the stablished ES lore for the sake of attracting the konsolentarden is what makes me rage like an Ordinator comming across sixth house cultists preforming a corprus infested orgy inside a tribunal temple. Cyrodil is a generic fantasy forest and not a jungle? Imperial cult temples that look like Christian Churches? WTF happened to the warring counties of Nibey and Colovia? and the roman inspired religion with temple prostitutes priestess of Dibella?! Manimarco no longer a god and killed by level 5 warior??:rage:
 
Last edited:

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
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Anyone tried that acoustic overhaul?

Yes. Morrowind Acoustic Overhaul (MAO) is kind of neat, but sometimes I like the charm of the repetitive vanilla sounds.

I feel MAO sounds a bit too realistic for a game that looks very blocky, so the vanilla sounds suit Morrowind just fine. I just wish it had more varied clunky sounds.

MGE XE is very performance intensive. I used these settings.

If you can easily run The Witcher 3, you could try using ALL shaders and cranking up that Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering to the max.
 

Wayward Son

Fails to keep valuable team members alive
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I agree. The only bad part of the graphics imo is the character models and animations. The backgrounds and environment models are actually really well done.
 

Alexios

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You just have shit taste if you think Oblivion is more aesthetically pleasing than Morrowind. It may be a matter of opinion but that doesn't change the fact that you enjoy eating shit.
 

Eriador

Arbiter
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Jan 18, 2014
Messages
423
I agree. The only bad part of the graphics imo is the character models and animations. The backgrounds and environment models are actually really well done.
True, the faces are pretty bad.

C5BDTpV.jpg
 

TheHeroOfTime

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If you ask in this forum, everything about the game is bad. But in my opinion, the worse things about Oblivion are the level scaling and the dungeon design. The level scaling trivializes both enemy enconters and loot, and the copy&past of structures of the dungeons make them hard to enjoy. I found the game enjoyable in other regards, but the true is that those elements by themselves are a heavy stone above the game if you remember that is an Open world action RPG.
 

DavidBVal

4 Dimension Games
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Don't forget how generic it was. The world was so uninsteresting, I never felt compelled to explore or even stop to think about the locations around me. It's especially painful when you compare it to Morrowind.
 

Alkarl

Learned
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Oct 9, 2016
Messages
472
Oblivion, gameplay wise, is actually very similar to Daggerfall. Generic, recycled dungeon layouts, goofy npcs, level scaling. Just swap out levitation for voice acting. Oh, and the whole main quest consequences, ya know, cause there are none in Oblivion. I find Oblivion less offensive than Skyrim, and I can squeeze some fun out of it when I try.
Maybe ya'll are just playing it wrong:

https://youtu.be/mwPI5xxByp4

:troll:
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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There are many reasons why Oblivion is bad, but the number one thing I hate the game for is destroying The Elder Scrolls as it had been before. Daggerfall and Morrowind were very different games, but they shared their basic design principles, and they both provided a good roleplaying experience in an interesting world with cool lore.

Oblivion utterly destroyed that.

All the terrible gameplay and balance issues, such as horrid level scaling, can be fixed with mods, and I enjoy modded Oblivion as a decent-tier action RPG. Heck, Oblivion even gave birth to the total conversion mod Nehrim, which is legitimately good.

But it absolutely shat on EVERYTHING The Elder Scrolls stood for, and what's even worse, it introduced horrible decline features into the action RPG genre as a whole, features which crawled into non-RPG genres like the open world shooter, too. I'm not 100% sure on the timeline of it all, but I think Oblivian started some of these trends.

Let's begin with how it ruined the systems and gameplay of Elder Scrolls games:

1. Daggerfall and Morrowind had incredibly detailed and varied equipment systems. In Morrowind, you could wear: boots, pants, skirt, greaves, cuirass, shirt, belt, robe, left gauntlet, right gauntlet, helmet, left pauldron, right pauldron, amulet, two rings. That's 16 equipment slots. You can wear clothes together with armor, and you can enchant every piece of equipment there is. Daggerfall also had a huge variety of equipment slots, allowing you to wear clothes and armor together (and up to this point in history, I think Daggerfall is the only RPG that lets you play a fashion criminal who wears socks with sandals!), and the only difference to Morrowind was that gauntlets came in pairs - so Morrowind expanded on Daggerfall's equipment system, giving you even more slots to mix and match. This was extremely conductive towards exploration, since getting the best armor in the game wasn't just a matter of finding one piece - you had to find multiple pieces before your armor was complete. You could play a heavily armored warrior wearing a daedric cuirass, greaves, boots, gauntlets, left pauldron... but you're still missing the right pauldron! And then, finally, in some dungeon you find it at last! It's a great sense of achievement to finally complete a piecemeal armor set, and the fact that you have to hunt down all the seperate pieces motivates you to explore.

Oblivion removed that. Not only have the amount of equipment slots been drastically reduced, you now can't wear armor and clothes together anymore - it's only either, or. This reduces equipment slots from Morrowind's 16 to torso, legs, feet, hands, head, rings, amulet - which is 8, only HALF the amount you could equip in Morrowind. Of course, enchanting also got dumbed down so you can no longer create your perfect magical enchanted apparel that gave you permanent bonuses to everything. You could experiment less. You could play around less. And of course, there was less to discover as a consequence. In Morrowind, when you're already wearing enchanted greaves and enchanted pants, you'd still be happy about finding an enchanted skirt! In Oblivion, you'd go "meh" because equipping the skirt would automatically un-equip your greaves. Fucking decline. They went from the coolest equipment system in RPGs to something horribly crippled and dumbed down. It's the one feature I miss the most in post-Morrowind Elder Scrolls games.

2. The quest and location compass. Oh boy, this is probably THE feature that ruined exploration-focused open world games the most. I may be wrong, but I think this was the first game to introduce this feature (GTA may have been earlier, but in GTA it made sense because GPS is a thing that really exists in our world... in a fantasy world, however?), and it fucking sucks. I replayed Morrowind only a few weeks ago, with the Graphics Extender mod that extremely expands the view distance. Exploration consists of spotting a thing in the distance, walking there, stumbling upon other cool things while you walk there, and you can actually get lost in Morrowind. You can end up in some wilderness area surrounded by mountains and there are no roads nearby and even if you check your compass and look at the map, you're not sure how to get back to the nearest city. And, heck, cities only appear on your map once you've visited them! You have to explore the world on your own, and the game allows you to get lost. Nothing points you to the nearest dungeon. Some of the coolest places in the game are, in fact, quite out of the way and you might never find them at all. You might miss them completely - unless you explore and keep your eyes on your surroundings, and go off the beaten path once in a while. One of the best cuirasses in the game is hidden in an underwater cave at the very edge of the map. Nothing points you to this location. Even some quest locations require some effort from the player to be found. The Ashlander camp you have to visit might get marked on your map, but you have to find your own way there. There is no compass marker to follow. Many dungeons you have to visit in the main quest don't even have a map marker, you're just told to "go west across the river, turn right after the bridge, walk up the mountain, the entrance is there". The Imperial Cult faction even has an entire questline that consists of giving you cryptic hints about the locations of artifacts you have to find. Their very concept would be ruined by the existence of quest markers on the compass.

In Oblivion, you're not allowed to get lost. You're not even allowed to explore on your own, to be surprised by a dungeon door you just spotted in the mountain side but didn't expect to be there, to wander around and stumble upon a cool place you didn't know was there. You have markers on your compass that always show you the nearby dungeons, and 99% of the quests in the game has a marker you can follow, always pointing you to the location of your quest goal no matter where you are. You don't even get descriptions like you got in Morrowind. Nobody tells you how to get to your quest location. All you get is that fucking marker to follow. Exploration is, therefore, essentially nonexistent. You don't get to explore anything. You only follow those stupid fucking markers.

3. The level scaling, and especially the unrewarding, shit-tier loot. Others have already talked about how terrible it is, and luckily mods fix this, but in vanilla Oblivion it was just utterly, extremely shit. Worse than ending up with level scaled bandits wearing glass and daedric armor was the fact that every dungeon, no matter how cool it looked, contained only random, level-scaled loot. Morrowind was fun because you could find a unique artifact while delving into a dungeon, and it felt like exploring these places was worth it. If not an artifact, at least you'd find something expensive at the end, like a diamond or an emerald. In Oblivion, you'd open the chest at the end of a dungeon and find... 10 gold and a wooden fucking spoon. Fuck this. There's no point to going into a dungeon when you know for certain that you're not going to find anything worthwhile in it unless there is a quest connected to it. The only cool items you could get were quest rewards. Randomly exploring never gave you anything interesting.

But more than just the gameplay, Oblivion utterly destroyed the extremely cool, exotic and unique lore of the Elder Scrolls world. Daggerfall started the cool lore by having interesting political relations between all the factions, and having all those cool daedric lords. Battlespire really made the daedra much cooler than they already were. Redguard added massive amounts of lore about the Dwemer. And Morrowind had one of the most visually interesting game-worlds ever created in an RPG. You have the barren ashlands, the dangerous swamps of the west, mushroom trees growing everywhere, crazy wizards building their fucking houses from giant mushrooms, huge insects serving as the main means of transport... it's just such a cool place to explore.

There were also books, both in-game and out of game (as feelies in the box), that described the other provinces of Tamriel. The Imperial Province, Cyrodiil, was described in some detail in Redguard's supplemental "Pocket Guide to the Empire". It's a province with political intrigue like we've seen in Daggerfall, it's a province with cool visuals like Morrowind was, with the Imperial City being a pseduo-Venice with canals going through it, where the main way of moving from place to place is by boat. Large areas of the province were supposed to be a tropical jungle. It was a cool place, and whenever I read about the province as it was described in pre-Oblivion lore, I really want to explore the place because it sounds so interesting.

But Oblivion didn't transport the player into that place. Instead, it just gave us the most generic fantasy world ever created. Everything about Oblivion's visual design was generic. There was nothing fantastical about it as there was in Morrowind or its expansions - heck, even the Bloodmoon expansion with its nordic forests looked unique and interesting thanks to having a giant fortress made of ice and a gigantic glacier in its northernmost area. You don't have anything like that in Oblivion, no "holy shit this looks awesome!" moments as you explore the landscape. Everything looks just like the forest next to your town, and you could see the same kinds of landscapes by driving around with your car for half an hour. By the time of Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls had gone through almost a decade of intricate lore writing and cool design, and the result was an extremely interesting and exotic fantasy world that really beckoned you to explore it. Oblivion killed that. Oblivion retconned a cool province into the most generic fantasyland ever made, and everything is banal and boring - there isn't even the basic political tension between lords that we've seen in Daggerfall. Even that was taken out.

Oblivion killed one of my favourite fantasy RPG series of all time. I still wonder what Oblivion and Skyrim could have been like if Bethesda had stayed the same company it had been when it made Morrowind.

If I ever become a billionaire and for some reason Bethesda's IPs fall into my hands, the first thing I'd do is create a new "Elder Scrolls 4", but in the way it's meant to be created. With Cyrodiil being what it was described as in the pre-Oblivion lore. An actual cool place that invites you to explore it, rather than bland and boring genericland.

tl;dr: Oblivion killed my favourite fantasy RPG series. That makes it a terrible game because the previous games in the series showed a potential that Oblivion snuffed out while it was at its highest. Fuck Oblivion.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Don't forget how generic it was. The world was so uninsteresting, I never felt compelled to explore or even stop to think about the locations around me. It's especially painful when you compare it to Morrowind.

It's especially painful if you consider that this:

1dac463aa36e846e5c826a46800abc05.jpg


Should have been this:

Refayj's famous declaration, "There is but one city in the Imperial Province,--" may strike the citizens of the Colovian west as mildly insulting, until perhaps they hear the rest of the remark, which continues, "--but one city in Tamriel, but one city in the World; that, my brothers, is the city of the Cyrodiils." From the shore it is hard to tell what is city and what is Palace, for it all rises from the islands of the lake towards the sky in a stretch of gold. Whole neighborhoods rest on the jeweled bridges that connect the islands together. Gondolas and river-ships sail along the watery avenues of its flooded lower dwellings. Moth-priests walk by in a cloud of ancestors; House Guards hold exceptionally long daikatanas crossed at intersections, adorned with ribbons and dragon-flags; and the newly arrived Western legionnaires sweat in the humid air. The river mouth is tainted red from the tinmi soil of the shore, and river dragons rust their hides in its waters. Across the lake the Imperial City continues, merging into the villages of the southern red river and ruins left from the Interregnum.
The Emperor's Palace is a crown of sun rays, surrounded by his magical gardens. One garden path is known as Green Emperor Road-here, topiaries of the heads of past Emperors have been shaped by sorcery and can speak. When one must advise Tiber Septim, birds are drawn to the hedgery head, using their songs as its voice and moving its branches for the needed expressions.
 
Joined
Apr 3, 2006
Messages
1,386
In Oblivion, you're not allowed to get lost. You're not even allowed to explore on your own, to be surprised by a dungeon door you just spotted in the mountain side but didn't expect to be there, to wander around and stumble upon a cool place you didn't know was there. You have markers on your compass that always show you the nearby dungeons, and 99% of the quests in the game has a marker you can follow, always pointing you to the location of your quest goal no matter where you are. You don't even get descriptions like you got in Morrowind. Nobody tells you how to get to your quest location. All you get is that fucking marker to follow. Exploration is, therefore, essentially nonexistent. You don't get to explore anything. You only follow those stupid fucking markers.
Together with the fast-travel anytime-anywhere feature, it's even more poisonous than this due to the lazy design it engenders. The impossibility of getting lost combined with the fact that distance is meaningless led to some spectacularly shitty quest design. I recall a fighter's guild assigning me a quest to clear out a mine located on the opposite side of the Cryodiil. Why did this specific guild have the commission to clear that mine when every other fighter's guild in the game was located closer to the mine? Because fast travel. It doesn't matter where anything is because fast travel. Why did the guild give me no directions to the mine whatsoever? Because quest compass. Meaningful quest descriptions don't matter because quest compass.

The only exception I can think of in the entire game is "Lifting the Vale" (http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Lifting_the_Vale). You're actually given proper instructions an a handdrawn map to follow in that one.
PalePassMap.jpg


Why couldn't the rest of the game be like this? It wouldn't have required that much effort. The game would still be shit, but at least they'd have been trying.
 
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Manimarco no longer a god and killed by level 5 warior??

The most likely explanation is that the guy we meet in Oblivion just took the name "Mannimarco, King of Worms" as a title since he was the current leader of the necromancers, but I like the theory that Daggerfall's Mannimarco did ascend and became the necromancers' god of sorts, and the guy we meet is an avatar (like Zenithar and Mara) spreading his influence in more pragmatic ways.

Even if he's an avatar, I would still have used Sheogorath's trick to use a lich's model to make him look more intimidating (a disguise is unecessary since he's not very discreet anyway).
 

Santander02

Arcane
Joined
Sep 29, 2009
Messages
3,363
If it was old beth writers I'd agree with you...

But you know that Tod Hogwarts doesn't care about lore, and probably just put the king of worms in that cave to be killed by any lvl 5 schmuck just because it's "cool":negative:
 

Carrion

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The only exception I can think of in the entire game is "Lifting the Vale" (http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Lifting_the_Vale). You're actually given proper instructions an a handdrawn map to follow in that one.
It should be noted that the landmarks on the map are located within a fifteen-second walk from each other, though, so getting lost is still impossible. Of course there's an in-game diary that describes it as an arduous journey that should take days to complete, but that's Oblivion for you.
 

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