Why do people hate Oblivion so much?

[Ash]

Very over saturated there, and I think morrowind, personally, had more variety in types and layouts of dungeons, some just existed as bad guy hideouts, slaver coves, vampires, necromancers, smugglers etc, it at least felt more varied to me in fights, layouts etc.

Morrowind dungeons were more like actual places that are only considered "dungeons" because of their arbitrary underground location. Take the Kwama mines for example... most egg-mines in Morrowind served no function whatsoever, but that's the point... the egg-mines weren't there for the players amusement, they weren't there to reward you with a big pile of loot once you'd wacked enough moles, they were there so the people of Vvardenfell had a food source. That was their purpose and it made Morrowind feel like a real place.

Eh...I mean yes, sure that's one factor. But, they actually do serve a pretty important gameplay purpose: that low level players (sub lvl 15), no matter which region of the map they go, have a low level training ground to level up sub 10 weapon/armor skills and the like. The queen doesn't even fight back and has a decent amount of health so it is perfect target to level your weakest skills, and the only target of this status in the entire game. You've all bare-hand fisted a bunch of Kwarma Queens, don't even lie.
Once this is out of the way, then yeah they are good immersion multipliers and otherwise serve no notable functional purpose except the occasional one with a related quest.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I didn't even know you could do that. I just went straight to catacombs, smuggler dens and minor daedric shrines.
I remember the first time I stumbled across a shrine and holy shit, it was a big fight. Those orc warriors can take a beating.

 

[Lemming42]

Morrowind dungeons were more like actual places that are only considered "dungeons" because of their arbitrary underground location. Take the Kwama mines for example... most egg-mines in Morrowind served no function whatsoever, but that's the point... the egg-mines weren't there for the players amusement, they weren't there to reward you with a big pile of loot once you'd wacked enough moles, they were there so the people of Vvardenfell had a food source. That was their purpose and it made Morrowind feel like a real place.

This would make sense if the game was like Fallout (where seeing Brahmin farms or w/e is cool worldbuilding) but it's not, it's a dungeon crawler which constantly threatens to become boring due to having shit combat and shit dungeons, same as Oblivion and Skyrim. Finding dull copypasted dungeons is mostly just disappointing, especially when it keeps happening over and over again as you enter samey cave/tomb/mine after samey cave/tomb/mine.

I don't buy it because it's not like MW even goes for versimilitude half the time, what with the haunted tombs next to main roads and bandit caves three meters away from towns. It feels like a heavily abstracted and surreal (not to mention entirely static) representation of a real place at best, so there's no excuse for half the world and its content being underwhelming in the name of "realism" or whatever. The game mechanics are built almost exclusively around travel and combat; there aren't any life-sim elements or whatever that would work with a realistic world (not that MW has a realistic world). Yeah I guess you could pick the eggs up and LARP being an "egg trader" but like most stuff in MW it'd be a case of the player messing around while the game completely fails to acknowledge it or react.

It works for a first playthrough where you can go "ooh aren't the kwarma weird," but as soon as that initial sheen wears off and you want to actually play a game rather than go sightseeing in a pretty world, you're in trouble. Same as Oblivion, you're constantly on the hunt for something to do but when you do finally find something, it's typically a letdown.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

Oblivion NPC. He's asking for his quest.

 

[Stavrophore]

If only oblivion didn't have the potato faces it would be instantly better than morrowind, because comparing both in their vanilla state oblivion is much more palatable. Morrowind you will get sleepy walking with molasse speed[unless you played the game and know where to exploit] but your sleep will be interrupted by the cliff racer attack. Oblivion rudimentary dialog system still better than no dialog at all in morrowind. Morrowind had less bullet spongy combat i think and more RPG instead of dexterity/action based like in oblivion. Overall, like with many developers experimenting with their later installments, in hindsight, they did two steps forward, one step back with some features. Oblivion still wins with their try to make the quests actual quests other than fetch quests.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

First time I fired up Oblivion the week it came out I was shocked by the giant font-size of the UI. I had only played PC games prior and didn't realize this is what happens when a game comes directly from consoles (or vice versa). Also, the fact that it ran like ass on my system with more micro-stutter than late stage cerebral palsy, combined with the horrible hackneyed encounter in the cell with the emperor seeing you as The Chosenone was too much to bear. I abandoned it for several months, maybe even over a year (until I got a better rig), but when I came back to it there were all the faults again. However, I found a mod (that DarkUI or whatever it was called - one of the first mods I ever installed in any game) and at least I was able to finish it without feeling like a consoltard. Played it one more time after that several years later with the special Wanderers Edition mod or whatever it was called then put it aside until I got back in a few years later with various tweaks, OOO and texture packs that crashed the game regularly, like, literally every few minutes, in the heat of main quest battles. Haven't looked back since..

 

[Konjad]

 

[octavius]

Which mod is that from?

 

[whydoibother]

If only oblivion didn't have the potato faces it would be instantly better than morrowind, because comparing both in their vanilla state oblivion is much more palatable.

Melee combat is bad in both.
World and stories is good in both.
There's more magic in Morrowind.
There's fewer loading screens in Oblivion.
There's nicer colors in Oblivion. Morrowind is brown&rust.
Hard to judge if cliff racers or oblivion gates are more annoying as a gimmick.
There's fewer bugs in Oblivion? Question mark? Feels like it, but nobody plays it raw anyways.
Level scaling and item scaling on random bandits is WAY WORSE in Oblivion. Without mods, the game soft locks you from continuing certain characters, because you simply can't get over random enemies you run into after X levels put into non-combat skills.

Both games are about as good (bad).

 

[ind33d]

because of the great graphics and HDR, people at the time mostly played Oblivion like a life sim, decorating their houses and going on pilgrimages from one shrine to another to take in the sights, autistic stuff like that

if you just installed it today it would probably appear unexceptional

 

[Elttharion]

I always remember the battle of Bruma were instead of an army defending a city we get a dozen hobos awkwardly standing around in the snow

 

[Fargus]

I always remember the battle of Bruma were instead of an army defending a city we get a dozen hobos awkwardly standing around in the snow

Back in early youtube days when it was filled with Oblivion videos, some 360 retards claimed this was epic moment lol. I was messing with console spawning 6 times more creatures to fight at once on pc.

Bethesda made towns that looked like villages recovering from plague and epic battles that looked like tavern brawls.

 

[whydoibother]

Back in early youtube days when it was filled with Oblivion videos, some 360 retards claimed this was epic moment lol.

Half Life 2 was a couple of years old when Oblivion released, and it had set pieces with more characters doing more things, faster, while looking better.
A lot of people thinking Oblivion was graphically/technologically impressive for its day should check out what else came out that year, or even in the previous years.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

The perty pink platoon?

 

[Fargus]

Looks like detect life spell

 

[Caim]

Farmgirl gets plowed by a hoe.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Farmgirl gets plowed by a hoe.

Hoe on hoe action. Hot.

 

[anvi]

Ban reddit

 

[Berengar]

It seems like part of the Codex culture to hate

48 pages and the answer was staring us in the face the whole time

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Codex are sith worshipping mephisto?

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Dumbass taking sowing the oats too literally.

 

[Fargus]

 

[Losus4]

I love how a minor transgression in Oblivion is enough to make a close-knit village community fight to the death with nothing in the way of trial or jury.

 

[Dark Souls II]

Oblivion is to RPGs what murrican "renaissance fairs" are to medieval history.

 

[Gandalf]

This game has so many mods, but none of them can really fix the base game and make it the king of rpg. It's saddening.