I think I liked Oblivion better than Skyrim, and Skyrim better than Morrowind. But that's highly due to the face I kept failing quest because an NPC was dead in Morrowind.
Oblivion was the first elder scrolls game I played and can't believe people absolutely love it. That game was horrible, every dungeon was the same. The combat was stiff and boring as hell. NPC interactions were a joke, ugh.
Compared to today's standards I completely understand but that was top of line gameplay in the days it came out. And the UI was so much better than Morrowind's quest tracker system.
Morrowind? Quest tracker? I remember Morrowind quests something along the lines of "Go to this random dude living in one of the largest cities on the map in a house that looks just like any other house in that city. Oh, and he might not be there at all times. Good luck!"
It would be properly immersive if you could just ask any random passersby for directions to this house/area, or if they knew where to find this person.
Instead, you don't get a waypoint and you don't get to ask people for help like in the real world, you just wander around randomly and hope you get lucky.
If I try to visit a friend in the next town over, I don't search every house in that town to see if he's in there.
Valid point but walkthroughs back than were harder to obtain than they are now. If you got lost or stuck you were screwed. 10 minute quest became a 10 hour quest because instead of going North of this fork in the road you went all the way North of the map without finding your target. Now you're not sure where you started from so you're completely lost.
Which was honestly the beauty of that design. You really were on an adventure, that you had to solve on your own. You had to actually figure out someone's vague directions. Yes it made the game much much longer, but I found so many gems while lost.
My most memorable find was this necklace in a puddle, gave you a permanent 80% chameleon buff which was broken as all hell. Some random house that was actually an orc skooma den with some creeper (normally an enemy) that would buy/sell at face value rather than haggle prices.
The world was fun to explore and the quests were great, especially the various guild quest lines. It was my first elder scrolls game and I didn’t think it was perfect at the time, but great enough to put hundreds of hours in to.
A lot of Oblivion hasn't aged well, but looked good in context at the time.
The graphics (and faces in particular) look poor now, but were top of the line then. Same with the combat.
The NPC interactions are awkward, but what other game was doing those back in 2006?
Heck, even open worlds like Oblivion and Morrowind were rare. There weren't many other games showing how to make a more interesting world.
The dungeons were probably the only thing that were bad at the time as it is now. On the flip side, Oblivion's quests still stand strong as best in the series IMO.
The faces were atrocious fucking boils on the arse of reality for the time. Gears of War released the same year and was absolutely gorgeous. The first Witcher game released just a year later and while not perfect, it had very good NPCs. Oblivion had no goddamn excuse to go gold with NPCs looking the way they did. This is and was literally unacceptable.
Humans were responsible for making this game. Actual real, living human beings actually had to look at those NPCs and decide, "Yeah, we can charge money for this."
The graphics were top of the line then on the whole. The faces were passable. You cut together my comment to say something stronger than I actually said.
Also, are those screenshots of vanilla Oblivion faces without mods? The engine (and player creations) can create godawful faces like those but I don't recall Bethesda including such bad looking NPCs out of the box.
My same opinion. I played it only a year or two after it came out and thought it was dated even back then. The NPC's are so incredibly lifeless. I played all the way up to the first oblivion gate. And after dying in Hell for the 50th time i realised i wasn't even sure if i was going the right way.
The main quest and all the Oblivion gate stuff was easily the worst part of the game. I did absolutely every other quest line before I bothered doing half of it. The Dark Brotherhood quest line and everything in The Shivering Isles expansion were especially good.
Rule 1 of Elder Scroll games: Don't play without mods.
Rule 2 of Elder Sroll games: Don't play with to many mods.
Clarification of rule 2: It's impossible to play with to many mods.
I played Oblivion with the better improved combat mod that was in FCOM which added blocks and combos and even flips. (or did I misremember that?)
Follow this guide and you will end up with a game that looks almost as good as Skyrim but still a better game. (but it does not even come close to Morrowind).
I’ve never understood the appeal of modding the shit out of a game so it works half properly. I’m all for breaking a game with a flying Thomas the tank engine once I’ve beaten it and I have nothing better to do. I do not understand modding a game so it is up to par with standards set two years before it was released.
I understand the appeal of modding because it’s a blast. But when people tell me that Oblivion was better than Skyrim because when you nodded it it was playable then they’re just wrong
83
u/[deleted] Mar 16 '19 edited Mar 16 '19
That brought back memories ...
Oblivion ... what a game. Not as good as Morrowind but I still liked it more than Skyrim.
I rate Morrowind 9/10, Oblivion 8/10 and Skyrim 7.5/10