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I'm genuinely amazed it's easier to miss Elder Scrolls games than to replay them

PhlebasIskander

Literate
Joined
Sep 7, 2016
Messages
30
Bethesda games may be what they are, but they sure do give lasting memories of fun emergent gameplay or just amusing quests/worldbuilding, especially if you were younger when you played them.

So naturally, I felt like installing and playing Oblivion again. It was an absolute chore, the slow, scripted sequences having to wait for the very slow royal group to make its way through boring assassin fights, loading zones, a terrible dungeon with constant pop-ups teaching you how to cast a fireball or do exciting stuff like eat a carrot you found in a well.

Even when you make it out of the sewer, you're finally thrown into the overworld but then the reward level scaling makes it so that you can't get that hilariously OP spell right off the bat through a quest, because if you did, it would be useful for killing goblins but you can pretty much forget about it past a certain level. Thanks Todd.

I'd say the best way to remember Oblivion, is simply to listen to the soundtrack .No combat music of course, it would actually make me remember all those great times when some invisible fish was stuck under the ground and following me everywhere through the game, making it impossible to do basic things like sleeping or would make all NPCs even more hilariously stupid than they usually are.

Good times.
 

HeroicBloodshed

Learned
Joined
Jul 8, 2016
Messages
129
Location
LARPing on the codex
For me the best memories came not from the game itself (which is shit) but the absurd events that would emerge from the simulation.
Watching guards stab a beggar to death or NPCs suddenly engage in fights to the death all while screaming ridiculous lines. T'was a masterpiece.
 

octavius

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 4, 2007
Messages
19,184
Location
Bjørgvin
I'm genuinely surprised that people still complain about the level scaling. Is installing mods too difficult, or do you play the X-Box version?
 

PhlebasIskander

Literate
Joined
Sep 7, 2016
Messages
30
I'm genuinely surprised that people still complain about the level scaling. Is installing mods too difficult, or do you play the X-Box version?

Sorry, I only enjoy the finest Elder Scrolls experience there is.

tQIaVJ6.png
 

shihonage

Subscribe to my OnlyFans
Patron
Joined
Jan 10, 2008
Messages
7,157
Location
location, location
Bubbles In Memoria
Bethesda games may be what they are, but they sure do give lasting memories of fun emergent gameplay or just amusing quests/worldbuilding, especially if you were younger a LARPer when you played them.

Fixed.

I'd say the best way to remember Oblivion, is simply to listen to the soundtrack

As demonstrated here, the key character quality of a LARPer is perpetual denial.
 

anvi

Prophet
Village Idiot
Joined
Oct 12, 2016
Messages
7,530
Location
Kelethin
It is just a bad game. A beautiful big budget bad game. So many of the core mechanics are just bad, bad design from the start. You can't just put no effort into balancing skills and spells and then pretending it will work itself out because the game has no classes and lets you pick whatever and hope for the best, and scale every enemy to save making any actual progression and world design. The result is I try to make a mage character and spend most of my time running backwards shooting piss poor weak spells that do no damage while getting chopped to death. Then I spend half an hour casting spells into a wall and suddenly I am an untouchable god for the rest of the game. There is zero depth to it as well, you win fights by shooting firebolt a few times and that's it. Or paralyze a target and then shoot him to death. Compare that to something like EverQuest from the 90s, where I have to make sure I never get touched by the enemies or I die, so I start with snare, then I cast a long disease based damage over time spell, then a faster poison based spell but uses more mana. Then as the enemy is about to reach me I cast fear on it, and send in my pet. Then I re-cast snare because it is about to wear off, then I cast lich because I need to recover some mana, and then I cast a lifetap because I need to recover the health from lich. Then I cast fear again because the first one broke. That is just a basic solo fight... Compared to Oblivilolz where I run around spamming one spell.

Also the world was boring and one dimensional. The quests were boring. Every dungeon was cut and paste with no interesting designs, or even close. The main quest could be completed in one sitting. The oblivion gates which was the biggest gimmick in the game, were all so repetitive and boring. It is just a shitty game posing as an ok one. It is sad that so many people are conned.

All the things people like about that game can be done in a real RPG with real gameplay, without all the dumb crap.
 

Luckmann

Arcane
Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 20, 2009
Messages
3,759
Location
Scandinavia
I'm genuinely surprised that people still complain about the level scaling. Is installing mods too difficult, or do you play the X-Box version?
It's one of those default assumptions that a game relies on, it can't be simply modded. Much like the shitty skills, spells and leveling, the best thing you can do is to put a band-aid on it, but it's much like putting perfume on a turd.
 

NotAGolfer

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 1, 2013
Messages
2,527
Location
Land of Bier and Bratwurst
Divinity: Original Sin 2
The best moment I had with this game was directly after I bought some new CPU and graphics card. I was so happy to finally be able to actually play it with these lush forests and that nice HDR lighting effect that no game I played before had. Everything was so pretty! That 15 fps slideshow finally turned into something playable.
:fuuyeah:

And then I played a bit. And it took less than 10 hours for it all to turn to shit. :negative:
Some of the quests were better than the unimaginative stuff in Skyrim though, I give you that. But that just showed me that I'm no storyfag. Because I couldn't care less since the basic gameplay and the gameworld were just too boring and unrewarding to carry on. Mods didn't fix it for me, I had OOO installed but that wasn't enough to salvage this turd.
 
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Self-Ejected

Drog Black Tooth

Self-Ejected
Joined
Feb 20, 2008
Messages
2,636
Honestly, my biggest beef with Oblivion were the dungeons. They made like 5 types of them, if that, and all of them were just combinations of pre-made set pieces. Once you've played the game for a bit, you know immediately what the next dungeon will be like, so you start to hate them. Unlike the level scaling which can be easily fixed with mods, this design decision is too fundemental to really do anything about.

But then I played Skyrim and its dungeons were just straight up hurr durr derpity derp, just one single corridor that loops together at the exit. The fuck...
 

Jack Of Owls

Arcane
Joined
May 23, 2014
Messages
4,279
Location
Massachusettes
To quote Herschel Gordon Lewis about his outre horror exploitation film of 1963 Blood Feast - "It's like a Walt Whitman poem... it may be no damn good, but it's the first of its kind." I felt the same way about Oblivion. It may be no damn good but it's the first of its kind. It was my first open-world game that gave me the illusion of freedom, spiced with addicting heroin-like visuals that forced me to acknowledge the graphics whore tendencies I had when I first played it. Of course, I would NEVER replay it today, unless it was modded into a special VR-edition where you could attached cyberskin "feelie" devices to your member and have sex with one of those Dark Seducers or those beautiful eerie Valkyrie-esque bitches in Shivering Isles with the fucked up golden eyes, weird voices and perfect female forms. I'm pretty sure this is John Carmack's ultimate goal in his VR obsessions too.
 
Joined
Jan 28, 2015
Messages
891
Location
Canuckistan
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
To quote Herschel Gordon Lewis about his outre horror exploitation film of 1963 Blood Feast - "It's like a Walt Whitman poem... it may be no damn good, but it's the first of its kind." I felt the same way about Oblivion. It may be no damn good but it's the first of its kind. It was my first open-world game that gave me the illusion of freedom, spiced with addicting heroin-like visuals that forced me to acknowledge the graphics whore tendencies I had when I first played it. Of course, I would NEVER replay it today, unless it was modded into a special VR-edition where you could attached cyberskin "feelie" devices to your member and have sex with one of those Dark Seducers or those beautiful eerie Valkyrie-esque bitches in Shivering Isles with the fucked up golden eyes, weird voices and perfect female forms. I'm pretty sure this is John Carmack's ultimate goal in his VR obsessions too.

I'd say this post is like a Walt Whitman poem, cause it is no damn good, but it ain't the first of its kind if LoversLab is anything to go by. Brofist for quoting HGL though.
 

Zarniwoop

TESTOSTERONIC As Fuck™
Patron
Joined
Nov 29, 2010
Messages
18,650
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Thread title is accurate. I missed Skyrim entirely. Installed, loaded it up, waved a sword like a paintbrush a few times and it was over.
 

Jack Of Owls

Arcane
Joined
May 23, 2014
Messages
4,279
Location
Massachusettes
To quote Herschel Gordon Lewis about his outre horror exploitation film of 1963 Blood Feast - "It's like a Walt Whitman poem... it may be no damn good, but it's the first of its kind." I felt the same way about Oblivion. It may be no damn good but it's the first of its kind. It was my first open-world game that gave me the illusion of freedom, spiced with addicting heroin-like visuals that forced me to acknowledge the graphics whore tendencies I had when I first played it. Of course, I would NEVER replay it today, unless it was modded into a special VR-edition where you could attached cyberskin "feelie" devices to your member and have sex with one of those Dark Seducers or those beautiful eerie Valkyrie-esque bitches in Shivering Isles with the fucked up golden eyes, weird voices and perfect female forms. I'm pretty sure this is John Carmack's ultimate goal in his VR obsessions too.

I'd say this post is like a Walt Whitman poem, cause it is no damn good, but it ain't the first of its kind if LoversLab is anything to go by. Brofist for quoting HGL though.

That you even know what LoversLab is is disgusting, you god-forsaken homophile. We can't help it if some of us like girls. Born this way, you know.
 

Daemongar

Arcane
Joined
Nov 21, 2010
Messages
4,706
Location
Wisconsin
Codex Year of the Donut
YES!!! It's about time someone posted something negative on Oblivion! Ok, good, I'm ready!!!!!!!!! I've been saving this joke for 6 years since it came out:

The best part of the game is uninstall.com!!!!!!

That game literally gave everyone cancer... of the ASS!!!

Everything about it sucked. It was decline. What was Patrick Swayze thinking doing the voice of Uriel Septum!? (Well, he's dead now so I won't go there. I'll admit he got robbed of the Oscar for his work in Roadhouse, if that's not a bannable offense.)

LEVELSCALING!!! WHAT?!!!! Who else didn't like that? Huh?! How about that!

Four Voice Actors!!! Nice job, Bethesda - probably worked those poor folks to death! I played the game and I could hear the NPC's get hoarser and hoarser as I went along, til at the end they all barely spoke in a whisper! They probably will never work again, they probably blew out their vocal chords! In the expansion pack, I don't think anyone said anything - they couldn't!!!

Personality wheel thingamabob?! What's that all about?! Don't think that's how it works in real life!

That corpophilia chick who wants to actually have intercourse with dead people?! Sick! No place in gaming! Stopped playing here!

Horse ARMOR!! ARGH! What is this world coming to? People paid for that stuff! I paid $5.99 and it barely worked!!! Think they patched it later, so I guess in the end it was $6 well spent!

Those damn Oblivion gates! Annoying!

Everyone has glass armor and only two hours ago, they had ebony or whatever armor!! What is there, some MAGIC armorsmith in the forest that makes things? Not likely!!!

The Ending! Can't comment on that because I've never seen it! Probably sucks liked the 200 hours it took me to get there!
 

Zarniwoop

TESTOSTERONIC As Fuck™
Patron
Joined
Nov 29, 2010
Messages
18,650
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
About time the Codex realized how shit Oblivion was.

Now it only has to realize the awesumness of Alpha Protocol :lol:
 

decaf

Learned
Joined
Apr 21, 2017
Messages
351
YES!!! It's about time someone posted something negative on Oblivion! Ok, good, I'm ready!!!!!!!!! I've been saving this joke for 6 years since it came out:
...
Your post gave me 'nam shit game flashbacks.
Derped around everywhere as level 1. Fucking level scaling, dem glass armor bandits, dem copypasta'd dungeons...
Only good questline was Dark Brotherhood and they only had like 6 people max in their tiny underground closet.
Never finished it either.
 

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