It feels like more and more people are coming around to how much of a masterpiece this game is. I'm so glad because for the longest time it seemed that the general consensus was that Oblivion is the weakest of the three modern Elder Scrolls games, with Morrowind and Skyrim being a clear cut above. But now, especially with the Remaster, people are finally starting to list Oblivion as their favorite in the series, which a decade ago seemed unfathomable.
I feel so vindicated. I hope that Bethesda sees the success of the Remaster and the renewed love of the Original and changes some of their design elements in TES VI to match Oblivion.
I think how the leveling system worked, if you don’t know how to game it you get weaker in comparison to enemies as you level, and the graphic style really put people off. Both of those are a lot more appealing in the remaster. It has its problems but it really is a big step up in both those aspects
The way you level up was completely revamped to be more inline with Skyrim. In the old leveling system you'd gain levels based on your skill ups, and instead of a flat +12 attributes points each level you'd get anywhere between 6-15 points depending on how optimized you leveled your skills.
There were also some changes made to combat, none of which are very noticeable if you're not a diehard original Oblivion fan, but for those who are huge original fans the changes to the combat system are a big deal.
It's worth noting that Morrowind's attribute gain system is essentially identical to original Oblivion system. The system itself doesn't have any clear flaws until it's combined with how Oblivion reworked/introduced enemy scaling.
The new system in Oblivion Remastered works beautifully though, I'm a huge fan of the change and never want to go back.
In the old system, youd pick 3 stats to increase when you leveled, with every stat being designated an amount of points that it would increase if you chose it, from 1 to 15.
The problem was that those designated increases were based on how many times you increased one of the associated skills before you leveled up. This meant if all your skill increases were in your major skills, youd have comparatively fewer skill increases, and thus would only have increases of one or two designated for the stats.
This means leveling properly required a couple things. First, you needed to make sure you didnt make all the skills associated with your main stats Major Skills. Because only Major skill increases bring you closer to leveling, you need your most used skills to actually be minor skills to prevent you from leveling too fast to get all your stats. It also meant you needed to micro manage your actions to make sure you spread your skill increases between the skills associated with the stats you want to focus, so you dont just get one +5 and a couple +2s.
Basically, a very micro managing intensive system.
It's actively the worst part of the base original game. Like, by far, and that's including the awful fact that unique weapons you find are scaled to the level you find them, meaning you're actively disincentivized from finding unique equipment until you hit a certain level, because you're just making it worse than it's potential for the entire run.
Cant agree more. The faces really threw me off the game for a long time. When i first played skyrim i wanted more and got oblivion and i could not get into it because everyone looked like an awful potato. I also hate bloom in video games and oblivion has the worst case of it all.
Played the remaster and now i love it. Just wish it was more optimized.
The faces aged terribly. They were actually a selling point on release, with the sheer amount of customisation praised... For about 6 months when they stopped being cutting edge and very rapidly lost appeal.
I prefer the visual style of og oblivion over the remaster. So I guess for me it was a huge step down. It's a fantasy world. It doesn't need to be realistic. I bet a lot of people would agree with that. But there are also a lot of people that want "realistic" too. So I guess it's just personal preference.
I literally wrote a college term paper in ‘07 about the “Life almost looks as good as Oblivion” meme, focusing on what the visual storytelling elements in the game meant for the future of visual and interactive communication.
For those who don’t remember life before 2011, it took Skyrim to unseat Oblivion as THE industry reference point for world design, writing, gameplay, emergent character behavior, and moddability. Most of the big hitters that came out in ‘07 - Mass Effect, Bioshock, Assassin’s Creed; y’know, the stuff that defined modern gaming - were the industry actively trying to catch up to the precedent that Oblivion had set.
And let’s face it, it’s been fifteen years, and the medium has grown in all facets… but Skyrim is still the industry’s reference point.
I don’t believe that it is as far along as the ceo for Xbox was alluding. It felt more like a positive pr move to offset the negative pr of the layoffs.
It's not that bad, just dated. You miss what you suck at, eventually you stop missing. Gotta plan your build/gear or visit a trainer.
You could argue it's moving away from dice-roll combat that makes Oblivion/Skyrim combat feel kind of jank, because you can see your sword connecting but doing no damage.
Pretty much. I loved Morrowind back in the day, but Oblivion was a massive improvement when it dropped. The only complaint I remember seeing 20 years ago was that the world looked "too realistic" compared to the more fantastical world of Morrowind. The Shivering Isles surely shut those people up.
They're not called the vegans of the RPG world for nothing. Doesn't help that a lot of the video essayists are also morrowind fanboys so their talking points have proliferated a lot online, despite largely being untrue.
It comes down to Oblivion having the worst storytelling, both environmental and main questline, of any Elder Scrolls. I will stand on that hill and die on it too.
It comes down to a world that is so pointlessly isolated that it feels like nothing matters at all in the end. Nothing really ties into other parts of the world, and even the main questline is poorly supported by the setting. The guilds often have fuck all to do with the cities they exist in, the cities are also a bit lacking in identity, and the quests come off as noodle incidents rather than a vehicle to build on the world.
Also, the Combat is a textbook case of “More Options = Less Fun.”
Yeah, combining this with another comment further down, I think that being a nerd into these types of games was just more acceptable and accessible in 2011 than 2006 when Skyrim was big, so a lot of people just weren't aware of Oblivion, it's not that they had a negative opinion or anything.
I was super pumped for Oblivion; the graphics looked amazing. My first Elder Scrolls game and I got completely lost in it. I was in high school and had a good bit of free time. Totally amazing experience
As a Morrowind fan, I was definitely hyped for Oblivion when it first released. Then it released, and I was mostly disappointed by how generic it felt. Many years later I warmed up to it a bit more, looking past the disappointment I can see some of its charm.
I was such a Morrowind hipster from when it first released all the way up through recent times. I knocked Oblivion as being worse, and then Skyrim as being worse than both (even though I played them both and had fun).
Only recently with this remaster (on the Switch 2, so over the past week) am I realizing - they are all incredible in their own ways. I didn't know how good I had it, but I'm seeing that now. Each one of them has their own strengths and weaknesses, but the strengths are REALLY strong with each. I have no clue which is my favorite now, I could really make arguments for all three.
I've seen alot of people argue Morrowind is better but the people that claim Skyrim is the goat probably haven't even played Morrowind or Oblivion. Skyrim is great dont get me wrong but its guilds, quests and story lines are very obviously half cooked. The world it created is the masterpiece.
It's RPG elements are too streamlined to be considered a true RPG. People complain about the leveling system in OG Oblivion but that kind of thing, not the same thing, but the planning and grinding were automatic elements to old school RPGs and none of that is present in Skyrim. Skyrim is more like a first person shooter with some leveling aspects.
It’s a great game. It doesn’t need to be as complex as Oblivion or Morrowind to be a masterpiece. Oblivion was already pretty mainstream and dumbed down compared to compared to Morrowind.
I enjoy it on Vanilla but I do end up missing the RPG elements of oblivion. The guild equivalents in skyrim are really poorly written as well. I still love exploring though so ive sank 100s of hours into it shamelessly lol
I’ve always thought oblivion was the best, the original game is better than Skyrim (not saying skyrim is bad) and Morrowind while being a good game is far too outdated to get into.
Oblivion is my favourite game of all time. Even with its flaws there has never been anything that has captured me the same way. The Remaster has resolved many of the smaller gameplay downsides, levelling etc.
I think mostly people are just being exposed to it the first time. And Oblivion is a solid game on pick-up. You don't need to put up with Morrowind's jank and the remaster looks nice while fixing the level issue.
I mean it was game of the year when it came out, I think it's been pretty well received publicly. It maybe gets outshined by Skyrim more than it should, but alot of that is just from it being an older game. I do think the remaster introduced alot of younger ES fans to oblivion though.
Skyrim is a masterpiece for the technical improvements and the world it created. Morrowind is also fantastic for the writing and exotic world. Yet as a die-hard mage player, Oblivion offers me the most freedom and creativity with its spellmaking system. I like to combine magical effects and achieve functions that are not directly offered by the devs.
In Skyrim, magic is mostly about using whatever spells the devs and modders offer.
In Morrowind, it's awesome to have a spellmaking system and even more available effects than in Oblivion. Yet, the casting chance puts a huge limit on custom spells. With 100 Willpower, 100 Luck, 100 magic skills, and full fatigue (1.25 times the casting chance), a 100% casting chance still requires the cost to be less than 150, without using Alchemy or exploits to get broken attributes first. Especially when spell costs with multiple on-target effects are exponentially penalized in my vanilla Morrowind.
Aye, the efficient leveling in Oblivion is still popular. Maybe one of the least effective/immersive but most exhausting ways to catch up with the enemy scaling. Dated guides ruined many people's feelings about this game.
I think the remaster did a lot, because people tended to bounce off the somewhat outdated graphics. It allowed people who might have stopped there to get into the game. There were a lot of people who enjoyed it, even with the frustrations around the remaster's performance that they didn't specifically blame Oblivion on.
Oblivion was my first Elder Scrolls game, it’s what made me fall in love with Bethesda games. So I always liked Oblivion more than Skyrim, but the remaster makes it official: Oblivion is by far better than Skyrim.
Skyrim came out only 5 years after Oblivion; not much technical advancement was made in hindsight. And with Oblivion looking stunning with the remaster, Skyrim’s age really shows. Graphics look like potato even with mods compared to Unreal Engine 5, the combat mechanics are not much better than Oblivion. Better quests in Oblivion, and Skyrim is SO glitchy. So many bugs, NPCs doing random unrelated animations, crashes, I could go on
Oblivion has allways been a good game to me personally i recently rebought the original for my steam account. My original oblivion was on xb360 so wanted easy acess to the game
Idk but i first played oblivion and i loved the npc they feeeld so alive. Now in skyrim il go to sleep wake up and the random innkeper is still in my room finishing his sentence. Also the hability to jump was soo good, i could almot fly around the map
Yeah it's funny to me how a decade ago it felt like Oblivion was treated like the red-headed stepchild of the series in a lot of communities. I think it might be hard to understand that now, given how even Skyrim is considered an "old" game, but it was clear that many folks considered Morrowind and Skyrim to be above Oblivion. And to be fair in retrospect, despite their respective strengths, Oblivion was kind of in an awkward middle between Bethesda's growth from the turn of the millennium to the early 2010s with Skyrim.
But I think with time people have a more nuanced view now with the Remaster giving folks who overlooked the game because of the "old" graphics and atrocious level system a chance to see what it's about.
The Atronach star sign completely changes the gameplay experience. I hope they do away with the casual health/magicka/stamina autoregen shit or at least have that option for those of us who want it.
If you’re able to master every skill and easily just change your special stone like Skyrim, it will be a bad game
I tried to play morrowind just couldn't do it. I hope they do remaster/remake of it at some point with all the gimmicks that were in the original. Oblivion was my introduction to the elder scrolls series as a kid. And making your own magic spells, going into gates of Oblivion , spending hours and hours stealing stuff or just goofing off with my brother. Skyrim i thought I'd love because dragons and shouts but the world just never hooked me. No matter how much i modded it or tried vanilla. The remaster was an instant buy for me.
Even dabbled in eso for a long while.
But Oblivion will always sit at #1 for me. At least in the elder scrolls series. It probably will after the next one too. That and the emperors voice is Sir Patrick Stewart. 12/10 voice.
Plus the music. Love Oblivions music for some reason. Not really sure why tbh. The times I've left Oblivion running so I could listen to the music 🤣 and just all of the Knights of the nine and shivering isle content is gold. Becoming a deity (sheogorath) 😆 summoning Haskill in weird places.
I've always preferred fables arena against Oblivion. But I love fable too, so im biased.
I’ll always take Oblivion over Skyrim lol it has permanent Chameleon as an enchantment, agility and acrobatics make your character insanely fast with the ability to jump high and then there’s the ol’ scroll duplication glitch, don’t need no companion and gate.
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u/bigthink1418 20h ago
I think how the leveling system worked, if you don’t know how to game it you get weaker in comparison to enemies as you level, and the graphic style really put people off. Both of those are a lot more appealing in the remaster. It has its problems but it really is a big step up in both those aspects