Review Oblivion review at Firing Squad - 60%

[Vault Dweller]

Tags: Bethesda Softworks; Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

There is an interesting <a href=http://news.firingsquad.com/matrix/blog.asp/61969/76/Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion_Review>Oblivion review</a> at <a href=http://www.firingsquad.com>Firing Squad</a>. The review lists many of the game's flaws and awards the game 60%.
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<blockquote>Another “addition” to the game is horseback riding, if you want to call it an addition. I shelled out 5,000 dollars in one town for what were called the “best horses in Cyrodill”. Within moments, both my budget and my heart were both broken. Horseback riding in Oblivion flat out sucks. First of all, when you press forward, the horse goes almost instantly to max speed. When you release the forward key, the horse instantly stops. There is no feeling of weight or inertia to the horse at all. This is totally unacceptable. Also, the fact that you cannot attack, use magic or items, or do anything at all while on horseback really makes me just never want to use my horse. It’s much better to be on foot and be able to attack things, jump around, pick harvest plants, and just feel in touch with the world. In an interview, a Bethesda team member said that the reason you cannot attack from horseback in Oblivion is because it would be imbalanced, what with you being able to circle an opponent and keep slashing him as you run by. First of all, there were ways they could have balanced it, and secondly, I think he was lying. The horse’s lack of animations tell me that this team definitely got lazy. So horses are a disappointment and I find myself not using them, but there’s an even bigger reason for that…
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In terms of lore, I must say it’s a lot less rich than in Morrowind. Most of the books are recycled from previous games. Story is a strong point in general for these games, however with Oblivion, the focus around power-gaming as opposed to role playing really can take you out of it. A huge factor taking me out of the story and out of the roleplaying mood is:
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AI. They said so many things about what the AI would be in this game, and really, it’s none of those. The 12 voice actors for the game did a shaky job at best, however, because there are only 12 voice actors and around 1,000 NPCs, you end up hearing the same pieces of dialogue, the same voices, all over the place. Hearing the same voice for a vendor in one town as I do in 5 other towns really takes me out of it. Also, there are frequent bugs involving different voice actors playing different parts of an NPC’s speech. So you could be talking to a beggar, and he’s got a kind of old man voice, “Ehhh shunny, could you spare a coin?”, and then suddenly you ask him about the Emperor and it’s the Guard voice, super stern and powerful going into this big speech! What could take you out of the role playing experience more than that? Horrible! Also, the AI is nothing new. The only real advancement in AI would be that they have extremely shallow “routines” that they follow, basically a path that they walk every day. They don’t pick up objects, create things, organize their stores (even if you trash the store, go back a month later, its still trashed), or any of the things that NPCs did in the “Ultima 7”. That’s just shameful. Really, still the only interactions you can have with AI’s are: 1. Kill them. 2. Get quests from them 3. Steal from them 4. Use the embarrassingly bad “persuasion” system on them. Yes, the new system for persuasion is crap. It has everything to do with powergaming and nothing to do with roleplaying.</blockquote>Some people are so negative... Hopefully, Bethesda will blacklist this site ASAP!
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[Nutcracker]

A good piece really, one of the few genuine and intelligent reviews ive seen of Oblivion.

 

[Volourn]

Because you agree with it. Yeah. Otherwise, you'd hate it. Yeah.

 

[Nutcracker]

Pretty much.

LOLOLOLOLOLOLLIPOP!

 

[LCJr.]

Yes VD Oblivion was a bad game. We get the point already.

 

[taxacaria]

oh - someone has found what players know since release date

 

[merry andrew]

I still have hope that Oblivion is a great game. For that reason, I'll never play it.

 

[FrancoTAU]

Yes VD Oblivion was a bad game. We get the point already.

Says the man who whines about not enough news posts here? I'm sure VD giggled while posting it up but he's just doing what you asked of the site.

 

[Twinfalls]

A good piece really, one of the few genuine and intelligent reviews ive seen of Oblivion.

You have got to be kidding. Whatever may be felt about Oblivion, that 'review' is garbage. Written in the manner of an utterly spoilt 12 year old brat, it's complaints are principally about graphics and that the AI isn't 'immursive' enough for his 'roleplaying'. The credibility he seeks in invoking U7 is shot down when he describes the painting quest as 'innovative'(!). The summary, 'go get Morrowind instead' - indicates the mentality at play here. A Morrowind fanboy.

PS Firingsquad editors, plurals don't get apostrophes.

 

[LCJr.]

Yes VD Oblivion was a bad game. We get the point already.

Says the man who whines about not enough news posts here? I'm sure VD giggled while posting it up but he's just doing what you asked of the site.

Selective memory FrancoTau? What I asked for was less, or more like enough already, of the Oblivion/Gothic 3 crap and more coverage of indies or mainstream projects people might actually be interested in. If you care to search find aweigh's "Since the Codex is dead" thread. I don't recall ever "whining" about their not being enough news. In fact I'd rather see a blank newspage over flogging the dead horse that is Oblivion. I think a year of whipping on the big O is more than enough.

 

[enchanted_eyeball]

well, that's not the site review, the firingsquad review can be found here:
http://firingsquad.com/games/oblivion_review/

The best review I have seen was this:

(some very good points taken out)

The Beginning of Steerpike's Review

Oblivion is awesome ... and it sucks. There's such a split personality associated with this game that it almost feels like two titles, not one. The first is an incredibly engaging and well-designed roleplaying experience with stunning visuals and fascinating technology. The second is a frustrating and obnoxious pain that goes out of its way to constrain your actions, sacrifices gameplay to show off cool tech and includes "features" that make you feel like you're part of a secret government experiment to see how infuriated people can become before they explode.

I have two major complaints. The first is the enormous collection of little things that ruin the game experience—not bugs, but quirks and idiosyncrasies; design decisions so half-assed that they have no right being in a game this good. More on those in a minute.

The second is that no matter how hard I tried, I never felt like I was part of the world of Oblivion. I could not immerse. It felt not like a living place but like a disconnected series of questlets. And that's a serious problem, but it's also a very subjective one.

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That Works Fine. We'd Better Fix It.

I think Bethesda believed a lot of things to be broken in Morrowind when they really weren't, which is the only way I can explain some of the more imprudent design decisions found in this game. Despite grandiose promises, Oblivion is a highly structured, regimented experience that makes little effort to conceal the massive checks and constraints on player liberty. Though nonlinear and freeform in a global sense, Oblivion denies the player the small freedoms that are the heart and soul of a truly open game.

For example, if you touch the wrong thing at the wrong time (like the door of a shop after hours), it's a "crime," even if it's just an accident, even if you make no effort to pick the lock. I can't count how many times I got tossed in the slammer because I tried to enter a merchant's shop without realizing that it was closed. The cursor turns red when some action is criminal, but if you're in a hurry or not paying close attention, it's easy to miss it. How about a warning dialog?

If you leave stuff in chests or cabinets, it vanishes after a few days. Were the effect limited to public places, I'd be fine with it—I wouldn't leave my stuff in a box at Taco Bell, after all. But it's everywhere, even places that should be secure. And you simply can't carry all of the stuff you need all of the time. Your only solution is to mod the game or buy a house, which, as you can imagine, is a rather pricey alternative.

Thinking I'd come up with a clever way around that, I killed a guy to steal his house (so sue me, I needed a house). I was professional. No one saw me do it. And yet despite possession being nine-tenths of the law, touching anything in my new home was still a "crime." If I put anything in "his" cabinets, getting them out again marked them as stolen property. I couldn't sleep in the beds because I was "trespassing." There was a corpse that I couldn't get rid of on my living room floor. And my stuff still disappeared if I left it there for too long. In a game intelligent enough to assign unique objectives to every one of a thousand NPCs, it's not unreasonable to expect it to be able to reset possession when the original owner dies.

Look, house theft is probably not something that you'd get away with in real life. And if the townspeople, with their vaunted Radiant AI, had suddenly started wondering where the guy was and checked his house and found me there, that would have been okay. But no one did. No one missed him. The game decreed that I couldn't have the house. In fact, the game's habit of doing stuff simply to mess with me, and its habit of forgetting important things I owned or did, contribute massively to my frustrations.

There are also simply asinine mistakes. Apparently no one at Bethesda bothered to download Mount & Blade before implementing an appalling horse system so grossly and inexcusably dreadful that whoever's responsible for it ought to be whipped. As if to counter that, you can fast-travel to any location on the map at any time, turning the game experience into a series of disparate segments and excluding the player from the linear thread of a world.

The addition of minigames for speechcraft and lockpicking tasks is a good idea in theory, but the execution of both games is trite and ultimately frustrating. It's impossible to lose the speechcraft game once you figure it out, no matter your character's speechcraft rank. And once they finish whipping whoever did the horses, they should turn the whip on whatever malice-driven gremlin implemented the shockingly exasperating lockpick game. Minigames for tasks are fine, but if you're going to do it, do it right.

Here's another example of stupidity rampaging through an otherwise undeserving game: using their personal psychic twinkle, legitimate merchants just magically know if you're carrying stolen goods, and they won't buy them. If you're not a member of the Thieves Guild with access to their fences, you simply can't make a living as a thief. Guards automatically know what property is stolen, so if you get arrested, all your stolen stuff is taken away, even if you quite literally stole it five years ago a thousand miles away and were never ever suspected of the crime.

They even managed to screw up the procedure for putting thing down, for crying out loud. If you "drop" an item, it falls to the ground at your feet and rolls away, or it gets kicked away when you move. If you try to "set down" the item by dragging it out of your inventory and into the game world, you fling it halfway across the room because the physics are on crystal meth. Why can't I simply arrange my objects in neat, orderly rows? Why provide bookshelves if it's nearly impossible to put books on them? Why? Honestly, we're talking about dropping stuff here; it's not a new game concept.

These are all little things, but, as I said before, it's the little things that bring Oblivion down. Examples like those above (and there are others, believe me) tarnish a game that actually has almost nothing wrong with its big picture.

the full review is here:
http://fourfatchicks.com/Reviews/Oblivi ... vion.shtml

 

[Twinfalls]

That review is even worse. Oblivion has serious flaws, but none of them are the ones bitched about here. An intelligent review is not constituted by whining about mechanisms that inhibit a player with a complete lack of imagination from powergaming and LARPing, or blithely throwing around the words 'stupidity' and 'asinine'. But then again, Steerpike is a blowhard whose opinion is of no consequence - this is the man who explained in his review of Thief 3 why it was an all-round fantastic game, only to change his opinion a few months later and call it rubbish and a travesty of the series.

 

[enchanted_eyeball]

That review is even worse. Oblivion has serious flaws, but none of them are the ones bitched about here. An intelligent review is not constituted by whining about mechanisms that inhibit a player with a complete lack of imagination from powergaming and LARPing, or blithely throwing around the words 'stupidity' and 'asinine'. But then again, Steerpike is a blowhard whose opinion is of no consequence - this is the man who explained in his review of Thief 3 why it was an all-round fantastic game, only to change his opinion a few months later and call it rubbish and a travesty of the series.

I understand completely, but You have to read these reviews as not some gamer who has played a lot of RPGs or have a clue about rpg at all, but these reviews are more of the causal-player reviews, who pick up small and obvious stuff and do not see the whole picture.

It's like a guy who goes to a mechanic , saying that his car has a funny smell while driving, but since has no clue about mechanics, he fails to realize that his Ferrari has a 2 stroke engine put in from an old VW beetle and all he notices that his car looks very nice and it says "ferrari " on it, and yet it's a piece of shit down below.

and forgot to add, that guy never driven a Ferrari before, so he has no clue what a Ferrari suppose to drive like.

 

[NeVeRLiFt]

I like that review.

Wonder why review sites like Gamespot could not give an honest review? :shock:

 

[zioburosky13]

Wonder why review sites like Gamespot could not give an honest review? :shock:

Because they get paid by developer...duh...

 

[Ahzaruuk]

I like that review.

Wonder why review sites like Gamespot could not give an honest review? :shock:

Because they think they'll be nailed to the cross by the masses if they give it less than an 90.

 

[taxacaria]

I like that review.

Wonder why review sites like Gamespot could not give an honest review? :shock:

Because they think they'll be nailed to the cross by the masses if they give it less than an 90.

there are several reasons :
fans don't want to read the truth about 'their' game. If rating is below their expectations, they tend to go to other sites or magazines - and that isn't wanted by a site. next is that contacts to the publishers and developers are nessessary to get some background info, preview materials and other marketing and fan stuff - and publishers need the sites to cover their games and to feed the hype, so we've a situation of giving and taking in both directions.
so many game sites and magazines have become part of the gaming industry, and their personal contacts to many PR clown and devs makes it difficult not to do a 'small favor' for their old friends. think about release parties etc...
next is that often bugs or other scaring stuff are not reported, because of promises that these things will be fixed 'til release date, of course.
the 'not fan' customers are half-arsed in this setting - they have only the chance to look for unfiltered info on few independent sites or word of mouth.here we found that more and more fansites are invaded by under cover virtual marketing agents - which can be to push a lame game or can be to bash business rivals.

 

[enchanted_eyeball]

Ironically, I always end up playing a game, that neither got a shiny review, or just not well known (for at least a while)

I have learned a while ago, how to read between the lines of reviews, and learn how to read the reviewers.
Back in the day of phone-internet and crap AOL, I didn't bother to read online-reviews, once because the phone-internet itself, the other is, because it was largely nonexistent.
Instead, I bought magazines and I filtered through at least 3-4 reviews for the same game and I got an overall score.

I have to say, that not once (and not twice) but many times, the reviews were off by far, or I found conflicting good vs. bad reviews, which just confused me even more. That time, I started not taking the reviews that seriously, although I always graded the Computer Gaming World opinion higher than PC Gamer, which was already biased towards certain companies and their games.

Later on, even CGW lost my respect on following the bandwagon with the rest of the ass-kissing magazines , probably due to change of management or simply were not colorful as PCGamer (again, style over substance, even in magazines) , and since the rise of the internet reviews/sites really finished many of them off as the final stab.


Games that I played, regardless of bad reviews:

Operation Flashpoint
70% by PC Gamer
can be read here:
http://www.pcgamer.com/archives/2005/07 ... ash_1.html

Usually I would forfit games that would fall below the PC gamer 88%, but since I had to play the demo before the review, I started to ignore PC Gamer, which was completely and obviously biased towards the first Rainbow Six game (which was released the same time and got a 90%), and they had to trash the competition.

(OFP still stands as one of the most popular games with giant amount of fansites all over still, after almost 10 years and inspired games like Farcry and the Battlefield series, and later the Tom Clancy's series was largely influenced by it)

X2: the Threat (77%)
http://www.pcgamer.com/archives/2005/06 ... hreat.html

Despite the game has problems, Egosoft is known to be a very "unique" company, who listens to their fans. (I know, this must be a dying breed)

Even though they game weren't so great, It sure could deserved at least like 85%, ........this might sound familiar, but It was one of those games where "you don't have to do the main mission, in order to enjoy and play the game and it features such elements as the "npc" races and factions will do their business on their own (build bases, trade and wage war with other NPC or You, based on how you present yourself) , and you can interact with them in multiple ways,. even make one NPC change attitude towards other NPC factions. (SOUNDS FAMILIAR YET?)

And yet, X2 or any of the "X" series never claimed to be an "RPG" and it has more RPG elements that any of the current "RPG" games try to jump on you, it was called a "space exploration and trading simulation"-game, nowhere any letter to be found with the R the P and the G put anywhere.

The only difference was, that in X2, It is working. (compare to that other game )


These are just 2 examples, I got many more, but you get the picture:

Large- game review sites don't mean shit.

Even causal gamers start to realize this, and that's why they rather go to an unofficial forum and ask. There are no better way to adverstise than the word-of-mouth (hence Mount&Blade, and other various free games), because gamers tend to listen to other gamers who share their opinion on a voluntary basis and not because they got paid to do it.

Here is what I do:

Let's say I'm looking for a review of a game.

Google the ____(insert the game name)- review. and I ignore the first 10 pages that google gives me
(gamespot,gamespy,IGN and the rest of the shit)
, or at least don't take it seriously. Then I look for the ____(insert game name) -forum and read over most of the threads.

 

[hicksman]

extremism creates opposing extremism. OB sucks, but a 60% is definately not deserved just because it gets the highest rating of any game ever released on most other sites.

btw enchanted_eyeball, you should check out X3. Within the last few months they put out another patch that removes the starforce and fixes tons more of the crap that kills that game. It still kinda sucks, but its getting better.

 

[JarlFrank]

I'm going to post it on the ESF, just to see the reaction.
Going to be a fun flamefest.

 

[enchanted_eyeball]

I'm going to post it on the ESF, just to see the reaction.
Going to be a fun flamefest.

lol

here you go:

MrSmileyFaceDude
post Today, 12:47 PM
Post #21


Disciple
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Joined: 2-June 00


Every review out there is "honest," even the ones you disagree with. People are generally "honest" when they express their opinions, and not all of them are the same. A lot of time passed between Oblivion's release and all the Game of the Year awards it was nominated for and in some cases, won. Those clearly weren't knee-jerk reactions. A lot of people "honestly" like the game, whether you agree with them or not. The opinions of authors who gave Oblivion positive reviews are every bit as valid as this reviewer's.

"kne jerk reactions"- that reminded me something.

 

[suibhne]

Btw, that review is a user review, part of FiringSquad's "Editor" contest. I'll be joining that myself this weekend with my old Dark Messiah review and with a brand-spanking-new NWN2 review (also for here) in the next two weeks. :wink:

 

[Admiral Rimjob POOBUM]

Btw, that review is a user review, part of FiringSquad's "Editor" contest.

The score was 35% too low to give him even a remote chance of success.

 

[suibhne]

Yeah, that's where the whole contest is fatally flawed: it's based partly on reader ratings, which means the Oblivion fanboys (most of the [benighted] market) would downgrade a sensible review simply for being disagreeable. You don't improve the quality of journalism by pandering.

 

[Ahzaruuk]

I'm going to post it on the ESF, just to see the reaction.
Going to be a fun flamefest.

This just makes me wonder if I should really put any stock into the "warnings for no reason" meme.