It's still got better combat than Morrowind
Sick of this meme. Morrowind's implementation of dice-roll real time action combat is bad, but Oblivion's floaty damage sponge combat is worse. At least when you hit in Morrowind it manages to do a decent amount of damage. Oblivion may have a continuous feeling of "challenge" thanks to bloated health bars and poor balance which encourages powerlevelling of non-class skills in order to max Endurance as soon as possible, but it also lacks any sort of feeling of progression. There is no arc for your character, they never overcome anything, they somehow manage to remain static in a world that continues to change around them. Morrowind becomes exponentially less difficult with each level up, but at least that imparts a feeling of progress and encourages you to actually go out and do things because there's
a reason to do things.
Jarl, I've called Oblivion one of the worst games ever made. But it's still better than Morrowind because its level scaling keeps the challenge up, and its combat is better. Morrowind is challengeless and therefore meaningless to those who don't play RPGs for ripped-off Tolkien lore / hiking.
Except Morrowind is more difficult at the beginning of the game than Oblivion is, especially without metagaming knowledge. To imply that Morrowind's itemization somehow makes it easier, as I expect you to, is essentially the same as saying that reading the strategy guide for a game makes it easy.
In Oblivion, the game can still be a challenge at 30th level. Not so in Morrowind or Skyrim.
Unless you include the expansions, which you talk about below. Also Skyrim can be perfectly "difficult" at Level 30 in the exact same way as Oblivion, especially since Skyrim's levelling curve is explicitly different to Oblivion's, as is Morrowind's. Vanilla Morrowind arguably caps out at Level 23, as this is the highest value found in any of the levelled lists for equipment or monster spawns, applying to the ranom spawning of Ascended Sleepers in Sixth House cells. Golden Saint and Winged Twilight spawns in the overworld are set for Level 22. The spawns for Daedric Warhammers, Claymores and Dai-Katanas on Dremora Lords is set for Level 18, and that is the very tippy-top for equipment. Oblivion does indeed cap out at level 30 as best I remember, with most new enemy variants remaining static as Level 22ish, and then only having increasing health pools etc. and the best variants of items spawning at level 30. Skyrim is totally different, with a levelling curve set up for an endgame PC level of around 50. Basic levelled items top out at level 40+ in lists, but the strongest enemies such as Dremora Valkynaz do not spawn until level 46, Volkihar Vampires at Level 48, Ancient Dragons at level 50, Falmer Shadowmasters at Level 54. So to compare Skyrim at Level 30 to Oblivion is comparing apples and oranges, since Glass weapons have only just begun spawning on enemies, the equivalent of a
Level 12 weapon in Oblivion.
Skyrim also has the advantage of being technically more difficult at the beginning of the game, with certain encounter zones such as all Dragon Priest Lairs being set up for a minimum PC level of 24, and Falmer caves and Dwarven ruins being set up for a minimum PC level of 16-18. Giants and Mammoths also exist in the overworld, with the former being able to famously one-shot players until the mid-game, and the latter being able to team up alongside Giants to actually kill wild Dragon spawns until well past the mid game. The only equivalent in Oblivion is the ruins containing Umbra. Morrowind also has a lot of this, with static NPC levels and some static creature spawns in places like Ibar-Dad locking off locations that are only meant to be for mid-late game.
Honestly, you're talking out of your ass. I get the feeling that you haven't spent a significant amount of time with any of these games, because it appears that you do not understand any of their intricacies.
Also, Oblivion questing is not as poor as Morrowind. I cite Dark Brotherhood. Moreover, Shivering Isles is 10 times the expansion Tribunal and Bloodmoon are.
That's all anyone talks about in Oblivion - the Dark Brotherhood, and it really is a very nice questline, but it also plays out exactly the same every single time and in exactly the same order. People also only talk about the Dark Brotherhood because the other questlines are
fucking dreadful. There's also only four of them in total, compared to ten factions in Morrowind, all of them catering to slightly different character archetypes and allowing for different forms of player expression and
roleplaying~! House Redoran, the Imperial Legion and the Fighter's Guild all fulfill the role of melee combat-based factions, but they are also three radically different factions with differing political and ideological outlooks. The Tribunal Temple and Imperial Cult exist as counterparts for religion-based characters, also mixing into the realm of the magical and the martial. House Hlaluu, the Thieves Guild and the Morag Tong are all technically stealth-based, but they are radically different, offering opportunities for players interested primarily in commerce and speech, in thieving, or in assassination. And finally, Magic is represented by the diametrically opposed Imperial Guild of Mages and the nativist House Telvanni, who bitterly dislike each other, with members of each suffering the largest Disposition hit in the game with members of the other. Members of the Mages Guild dislike Telvanni as much as the Temple dislikes Vampires, and vice versa.
So the quests themselves in Morrowind are fairly basic, but there is a larger variety of them, and they are no more basic than many of the quests in the Fighters or Mages Guild in Oblivion. Oblivion's only avenue for player expression is the choice between the Thieves Guild and the Dark Brotherhood for stealth characters. Of course there's no reason not to do both, since there is no interaction between factions. Oblivion is obviously a game made for people to play through every little bit of content available to them with a single character, hence the lack of skill requirements for guilds or interactions between them (remember in Morrowind how an early Fighter's Guild quest can lock you out of the Thieves Guild? Remember how you could only join one Great House?) Morrowind's lower effective level cap is eased by the fact that you probably want to create multiple characters to experience the different factions, since even completing a couple of them alongside the Main Quest will probably only have you at about Level 20 or so by the end of things.
The only thing I would agree without about is that Shivering Isles is better than Tribunal and Bloodmoon, but that's only because Tribunal and Bloodmoon are preludes to the design decisions which define Oblivion.
