despite being a huge ES fan it's the only game i never really played much of (besides Arena and Daggerfall) so i'm revisiting the game right now all modded out
i really regret not playing the game around the time it came out. i'm sure it would've blown my head off.
definitely aged the worse of the three modern elder scrolls but still pretty great. had a lot of fun on my short time with it on 360, warts and all
This is a good point well made. I love Oblivion, but I've also spent time with Morrowind and Skyrim. Lots of people rag on Oblivion for moving too far but Morrowind, but at least it still has obvious RPG-ness in pretty much everything you do. Skyrim feels exponentially more streamlined.It's a lot easier to credit Oblivion for making sane accessibility decisions in a post-Skyrim, post-Fallout 4 world. When I think about what changed from IV->V, what was lost from III->IV doesn't seem nearly as bad.
In regards to setting I think it's probably the worst TES game (though I've barely touched Arena). But I still have a real fondness for this game, I played a whole lot of it during a really happy period of my life, so it's hard not to associate those good feelings with the game automatically.
That said there are a few things I think it does really well. Some of the questlines in Oblivion are really good, and I actually think it does a better job of making the quest's feel more involved than other games in the series. The Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild are great all around.
The playable space in Morrowind is smaller than that of Oblivion.
The Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood questlines are probably the two best in all Bethesda games.
However, when it comes time to actually sit-down and play it, Oblivion has a strange place in my memories. When compared to the mechanical depth of Morrowind which preceded it, and the gameplay refinements in Skyrim which followed on from it, Oblivion from a purely gameplay standpoint is perhaps the weakest Elder Scrolls game, combat in Skyrim is of the brain dead variety, but it almost seems more honest that way, a sort of admission from Bethesda that they know they cant do melee combat and have just given up by letting you play whack a mole. Oblivions gameplay by contrast is stuck in the middle, between satisfying the hard statistical underpinnings present in Morrowind and the action combat which Skyrim would build itself around. Oblivion is a wonderful game to reminisce about, but playing it involves wading through lumpy, leaden combat with a needlessly simplified version of Morrowinds crafting and magic system.
Oblivion, warts and all (and it has some nasty Gamebyro looking ones) is perhaps the Elder Scrolls game I am least likely to replay, but it paradoxically holds the warmest memories that I have of any Elder Scrolls. It was massive, it was hyped to high heavens and every time the game gets brought up Im reminded of the excitement I felt when seeing those first screenshots on Gamespy all those years ago;
So Neogaf, what are your memories of Oblivion over the last decade?
To me, Oblivion is the worse Elder Scrolls game of the past three released (Morrowind 1, Skyrim 2). The only people I usually see saying it's "the best" were people who had never played an ES game prior to it.
Really was a generational leap for consoles. I didn't have a 7th gen console until December 2008, so I played Oblivion on my PC. This was a PC created from old parts slapped together for very little by my dad. Pentium 4 3Ghz, 1GB DDR RAM, something like a GTX 660, and an AGP motherboard. Could play Oblivion on High settings for the most part iirc...those were good times.
Although, for the most part I think I just enjoyed using console cheats and running amok rather than doing the story, which I have yet to complete despite buying the GOTY edition on PS3 last year...
On the subject of Morrowind and Oblivion, Ken Rolston was one of the designers for both games and both Morrowind and Oblivion used the same leveling mechanics of needing to raise a specific number of skills 10 times to raise a primary attribute.
Ken Rolston left Bethesda shortly after Oblivion's release and I think this attributed to some of the RPG mechanics being lessened during the transition over to Skyrim being more emphasis on action and less dice roll mechanics in the background also less emphasis on stats and just narrowing it down to perks with three major attributes of Health, Magicka, and Stamina
I would like to see Oblivion remade (not remastered), at a proper scale. The Imperial City is supposed to be about the size of Omashu in "Avatar: the Last Airbender", with thousands of people in it, and instead there's maybe 50-100 NPCs and you can run across the entire city in a few minutes.