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- May 29, 2010
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- 35,783
In one sentence: Better gameplay than Morrowind, and somewhat worse than Skyrim, though a few of the dungeons are unmatched.
Breaking it down: I had forgotten just how extraordinarily slow Morrowind's creeping/walking/running speed was even with high investment in speed until I checked it again after playing Oblivion. Even the walking in Oblivion is faster than a Morrowind run. A ~balance~ downside for this convenience is that they didn't slow down running while backwards, which makes playing an archer a bit easier than it should be (Skyrim fixed this).
The lockpicking and persuasion minigames are excruciatingly bad. I was glad I could just pay to persuade and acquire an unbreakable lockpick to skip it at level 10. Skyrim was right to replace lockpicking with Fallout 3's and replacing persuading with checks.
Given the reputation of the infamous quest compass, I was surprised to discover that there are a handful of quests where it's not there and you have to discover where to go on your own. That was swell.
I used the least-intrusive mod I could find to fix the messed-up level scaling, though I still took issue with a few of its changes. It spawned a couple of higher-level bears in a narrow cave that was otherwise easy to complete, so I had to deal with the tedium of kiting those damage sponges for quite a while. On that note, Oblivion's overall health values are too high for my liking given how many arrows it takes to kill creatures, even with stealth damage (though it was finally adjusted a bit more for my liking with the Shivering Isles content. Skyrim only had the damage sponge problem at the beginning). It didn't help matters any that stores didn't stock any bows or arrows greater than elven (I assume this is because of the mod, but I could be wrong; it also became a nonissue in Shivering Isles thanks to madness ore/amber). Lorewise, I can understand not having higher tier equipment available for purchase, but it doesn't make any sense statistically (ebony is only slightly better than elven, glass is only slightly better than ebony, daedric is only slightly better than glass).
A lot of caves were linear and samey, like Morrowind's and Skyrim's, though a few dungeons stood out with their dead ends and multiple paths. I enjoyed getting to the Oblivion towers, though the seen-one-seen-em-all towers not so much. Knights of the Nine had a few that were all right, but I would have felt ripped off if I had bought it full price on release. Shivering Isle's twisting tunnels were some of the best.
As far as I could tell, there's no role playing whatsoever in Oblivion's base content. I wouldn't call it an RPG using the Josh Sawyer definition; it's an action adventure. A notable sidequest where the lack of role playing really sticks out is one where a group of female bandits are seducing and robbing married men. If you're playing a woman yourself, they invite you to join the gang (instead of robbing you, if you were playing a man), but once you come to their hideout you can only kill them all for the city guard, even if that's not something your character would do. To its credit, Shivering Isles adds both role playing and more-interesting quests, though the choices are of course binary and largely cosmetic. Improvement is improvement nonetheless (which Skyrim continued).
So yeah, it wasn't the abomination so many of you said it was (NWN2, released that same year, is much, much worse), but it's certainly not great, and definitely not a good role playing game. Anyone who prefers Morrowind must be some loon who likes some walking sim investigation in their hiking sim. I can take or leave it.
Breaking it down: I had forgotten just how extraordinarily slow Morrowind's creeping/walking/running speed was even with high investment in speed until I checked it again after playing Oblivion. Even the walking in Oblivion is faster than a Morrowind run. A ~balance~ downside for this convenience is that they didn't slow down running while backwards, which makes playing an archer a bit easier than it should be (Skyrim fixed this).
The lockpicking and persuasion minigames are excruciatingly bad. I was glad I could just pay to persuade and acquire an unbreakable lockpick to skip it at level 10. Skyrim was right to replace lockpicking with Fallout 3's and replacing persuading with checks.
Given the reputation of the infamous quest compass, I was surprised to discover that there are a handful of quests where it's not there and you have to discover where to go on your own. That was swell.
I used the least-intrusive mod I could find to fix the messed-up level scaling, though I still took issue with a few of its changes. It spawned a couple of higher-level bears in a narrow cave that was otherwise easy to complete, so I had to deal with the tedium of kiting those damage sponges for quite a while. On that note, Oblivion's overall health values are too high for my liking given how many arrows it takes to kill creatures, even with stealth damage (though it was finally adjusted a bit more for my liking with the Shivering Isles content. Skyrim only had the damage sponge problem at the beginning). It didn't help matters any that stores didn't stock any bows or arrows greater than elven (I assume this is because of the mod, but I could be wrong; it also became a nonissue in Shivering Isles thanks to madness ore/amber). Lorewise, I can understand not having higher tier equipment available for purchase, but it doesn't make any sense statistically (ebony is only slightly better than elven, glass is only slightly better than ebony, daedric is only slightly better than glass).
A lot of caves were linear and samey, like Morrowind's and Skyrim's, though a few dungeons stood out with their dead ends and multiple paths. I enjoyed getting to the Oblivion towers, though the seen-one-seen-em-all towers not so much. Knights of the Nine had a few that were all right, but I would have felt ripped off if I had bought it full price on release. Shivering Isle's twisting tunnels were some of the best.
As far as I could tell, there's no role playing whatsoever in Oblivion's base content. I wouldn't call it an RPG using the Josh Sawyer definition; it's an action adventure. A notable sidequest where the lack of role playing really sticks out is one where a group of female bandits are seducing and robbing married men. If you're playing a woman yourself, they invite you to join the gang (instead of robbing you, if you were playing a man), but once you come to their hideout you can only kill them all for the city guard, even if that's not something your character would do. To its credit, Shivering Isles adds both role playing and more-interesting quests, though the choices are of course binary and largely cosmetic. Improvement is improvement nonetheless (which Skyrim continued).
So yeah, it wasn't the abomination so many of you said it was (NWN2, released that same year, is much, much worse), but it's certainly not great, and definitely not a good role playing game. Anyone who prefers Morrowind must be some loon who likes some walking sim investigation in their hiking sim. I can take or leave it.
