Review Four Fat Chicks complain about Oblivion

[Vault Dweller]

Tags: Bethesda Softworks; Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

<a href=http://www.fourfatchicks.com>Four Fat Chicks</a> site has posted an <a href=http://www.fourfatchicks.com/Reviews/Oblivion/Oblivion.shtml>Oblivion review</a> that questions some of the game's finest qualities:
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<blockquote>Oblivion is awesome ... and it sucks. There's such a split personality associated with this game that it almost feels like two titles, not one. The first is an incredibly engaging and well-designed roleplaying experience with stunning visuals and fascinating technology. The second is a frustrating and obnoxious pain that goes out of its way to constrain your actions, sacrifices gameplay to show off cool tech and includes "features" that make you feel like you're part of a secret government experiment to see how infuriated people can become before they explode.
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I have two major complaints. The first is the enormous collection of little things that ruin the game experience—not bugs, but quirks and idiosyncrasies; design decisions so half-assed that they have no right being in a game this good. More on those in a minute.
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The second is that no matter how hard I tried, I never felt like I was part of the world of Oblivion. I could not immerse. It felt not like a living place but like a disconnected series of questlets. And that's a serious problem, but it's also a very subjective one.</blockquote>They are, obviously, biased. Everyone knows that Oblivion is the most immersive game, liek, evar.
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Thanks, Abernathy
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[REX]

So true

it lags personality and has clearly been designed for the huge crowd of console users that has the same level of intelligens as slime, with no kind of imagination and therefore no ability to roleplay.

 

[Thrawn05]

Aftering play OB for a couple of hours, I felt MW was a breath of fresh air when I reinstalled it a couple of weeks ago.

 

[Dopey]

it lags personality and has clearly been designed for the huge crowd of console users that has the same level of intelligens as slime, with no kind of imagination and therefore no ability to roleplay.

Makes one wonder if that 100% chameleon equals god mode is a designed feature. Quite sad.

Anyway, cheers guys.

 

[Dopey]

Jeez, 2005. I wonder to whom I got so angry at that I actually felt a need to post. Can't complain there are not more than enough options though *st*

 

[dipdipdip]

Wow, power to the Fat Chicks. I don't believe I've ever read a critical view coming from that site. They usually seem to find something to like about everything.

 

[bryce777]

"The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is history now. And whether or not you personally liked it, it's widely accepted as one of those games that changed the world. Opinions on how "good" or "fun" it is differ. But it is unquestionably among the most important video games ever made" I can't even believe someone could say this in seriousness.

The fact that such obvious uberfangirls hate it is pretty sad.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Jeez, 2005. I wonder to whom I got so angry at that I actually felt a need to post. Can't complain there are not more than enough options though *st*

If you'd posted two months earlier, it'd have been exactly one year after you signed up.

 

[damaged_drone]

wow, what a great review.

 

[The Internets]

Thinking I'd come up with a clever way around that, I killed a guy to steal his house (so sue me, I needed a house). I was professional. No one saw me do it. And yet despite possession being nine-tenths of the law, touching anything in my new home was still a "crime." If I put anything in "his" cabinets, getting them out again marked them as stolen property. I couldn't sleep in the beds because I was "trespassing." There was a corpse that I couldn't get rid of on my living room floor. And my stuff still disappeared if I left it there for too long. In a game intelligent enough to assign unique objectives to every one of a thousand NPCs, it's not unreasonable to expect it to be able to reset possession when the original owner dies.

Look, house theft is probably not something that you'd get away with in real life. And if the townspeople, with their vaunted Radiant AI, had suddenly started wondering where the guy was and checked his house and found me there, that would have been okay. But no one did. No one missed him. The game decreed that I couldn't have the house. In fact, the game's habit of doing stuff simply to mess with me, and its habit of forgetting important things I owned or did, contribute massively to my frustrations.

Exactly my sentiments. Oblivion seems to go out of the way to confuse you. Of course this stuff is perplexing until you realize what it is: terrible game design because of lazy scripting.

 

[Section8]

With regard to the dodgy containers, the trick is to just dump objects, rather than trying to put them into containers. I've got a bunch of random stuff just on the floor of the store I fast travel to whenever I pawn stuff, and it's persisted for weeks of game time.

I think the problem would be containers auto generating new contents every few days. the only time I've experienced something similar was when I stored stuff in various containers around MY fucking house in Anvil, only to have it all disappear when I completed the associated quest. The scary thing was, I anticipated exactly that happening, and so I was sure to have a handy save game before doing the QA Bethesda neglected to do themselves.

 

[Twinfalls]

And Bethesda's fans at their own forum are just loving those 'Wait till you see em!' Oblivion Gates:

http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/inde ... pic=417664

I think they also do not fit into Oblivions overall style. They look like some Quake3 deathmatch level. Always the same, you can choose to kill em all or just rush to the sigil stone. Some have a few levers to pull that's it. When exploring and I suddenly see a gate in the distance, I say to myself, oooh noooees not another one! And turn away.