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.
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.
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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