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Why do people hate Oblivion so much?

Joined
Oct 18, 2022
Messages
277
(a) Boring. Annoying. Battle music starts. A small rat runs out of the forest. It bites the level 100 hero's shoe. The level 100 hero kicks the rat. It dies. The battle music cuts to the woods exploration melody. Edit. Basically cliff racers again.
For more intelligent mobs you can mitigate this by having them spawn and then flee when overmatched. A bandit who sees you coming and craps his pants at the thought of picking a fight with you feels like the world reacting to your character progression.

That doesn't work so well with animals that shouldn't have any awareness of how outmatched they are, though.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

Dungeon Master
Patron
Joined
Oct 3, 2015
Messages
11,759
Skyrim didn't improve any of the things a typical Codexer would care about but it's inarguably better than oblivion at action-RPG fundamentals: character controls/actions, level scaling, world and dungeon design, itemization and many other important building blocks. Really the only thing that continued to get worse from oblivion to skyrim was the writing, but it's hard to taste a difference between cat shit and dog shit.
Skyrim continued the casualization and dumbing-down, even relative to Oblivion, though it did manage to improve certain aspects so that the overall quality is about the same regardless. Among other things:
  • Attributes were removed entirely from the game, and the player doesn't even select skills to specialize in for a new character; Skyrim did add a perk system inspired by Fallout, but almost all of the perks are either boring (+20% to attack/defense/whatever) or useless
  • The user interface is a joke, far beyond the console-directed UI of Oblivion, almost as though Bethesda were attempting to see how horrible a UI could be while still being lapped up by console players, while computer gamers simply downloaded a mod to replace the UI
  • Dungeons were incredibly large in volume yet in design were almost all linear corridors through which the player runs from encounter to encounter, with an occasional optional side-path swiftly deadending in treasure
  • The game throws as many quests as possible at the player, who has quest entries added to the journal simply by happening to walk near NPCs related to quests, who immediately launch into introductory dialogue monologue, even including most Daedric quests
  • The game was rushed to release and in consequence a large amount of content was removed, which involved inter alia severe truncation and simplification of the Civil War questline, reduced to little more than a series of boring battles, nearly identical for either side
Skyrim did manage to greatly improve the environment and other aspects of the setting from Oblivion, since even a generic Vikingland is much superior to a generic pseudo-medieval fantasy grab-bag, and also improved NPC interaction (much larger budget for voice-acting), while the level scaling was far less obnoxious than in Oblivion.
 

perfectslumbers

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 24, 2021
Messages
1,198
The way animals act in RPGs always kills my immersion. Seriously a pack of four wolves or a single bear are going to attack me and die over and over again? It made me appreciate BG1 where bears were passive 99% of the time, although wolves still had the usual problem.
 

Atlet

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Nov 11, 2017
Messages
1,569
When I played Oblivion long time ago, I didn't have much rpg experience (basically jrpgs from snes and ps1). But I enjoyed the mood and the vampirism we suddenly got from fighting those pale abominations. Absurdly cool for my then easily impressed eyes.

The game started to become odd with all the hell gates and scaling, even for a noobie, but till those final acts, I enjoyed my experience. Will def check this game out again with loads of mods and see if I still like it.
 

Cael

Arcane
Joined
Nov 1, 2017
Messages
20,287
The way animals act in RPGs always kills my immersion. Seriously a pack of four wolves or a single bear are going to attack me and die over and over again? It made me appreciate BG1 where bears were passive 99% of the time, although wolves still had the usual problem.
Cave. Racers... >.<
 

NecroLord

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck
Joined
Sep 6, 2022
Messages
7,927
Location
Southeastern Yurop
I love a good VikingLand.
1020ba4f55b3a88175e3e5d3235ee650.jpg


f1c6ed077eb7d7056b7d4ab034d6ed0b.jpg
 

KeighnMcDeath

RPG Codex Boomer
Joined
Nov 23, 2016
Messages
12,867
(a) Boring. Annoying. Battle music starts. A small rat runs out of the forest. It bites the level 100 hero's shoe. The level 100 hero kicks the rat. It dies. The battle music cuts to the woods exploration melody. Edit. Basically cliff racers again.
For more intelligent mobs you can mitigate this by having them spawn and then flee when overmatched. A bandit who sees you coming and craps his pants at the thought of picking a fight with you feels like the world reacting to your character progression.

That doesn't work so well with animals that shouldn't have any awareness of how outmatched they are, though.
You should hear the music when rats appear near me. It is pretty epic.
 
Joined
May 25, 2021
Messages
1,347
Location
The western road to Erromon.
The way animals act in RPGs always kills my immersion. Seriously a pack of four wolves or a single bear are going to attack me and die over and over again? It made me appreciate BG1 where bears were passive 99% of the time, although wolves still had the usual problem.
Bears are more cowardly by nature, especially Blackbears, but it's still a dice roll. I had to put the run to a yearling that was into the garbage bins a few years ago and even though he was small, I could tell he was still weighing the odds in his head. Wolves should be hostile at all times, so long as the AI has them running in packs. If anything the AI should have them scatter/ avoid when directly attacked but continue pursuing and chipping away at your health/stamina as you try to escape or until you run out of steam. That would be pretty complex to program though.
 

HeroMarine

Irenaeus
Vatnik
Joined
Feb 3, 2019
Messages
16,306
Location
Rio de Janeiro, 1936
Among other things:

  • Attributes were removed entirely from the game, and the player doesn't even select skills to specialize in for a new character; Skyrim did add a perk system inspired by Fallout, but almost all of the perks are either boring (+20% to attack/defense/whatever) or useless
  • The user interface is a joke, far beyond the console-directed UI of Oblivion, almost as though Bethesda were attempting to see how horrible a UI could be while still being lapped up by console players, while computer gamers simply downloaded a mod to replace the UI
  • Dungeons were incredibly large in volume yet in design were almost all linear corridors through which the player runs from encounter to encounter, with an occasional optional side-path swiftly deadending in treasure
  • The game throws as many quests as possible at the player, who has quest entries added to the journal simply by happening to walk near NPCs related to quests, who immediately launch into introductory dialogue monologue, even including most Daedric quests
I knew there's another reason why I hated Skyrim other than the retardness of the PC killing a fucking dragon at level 1.
 

wishbonetail

Learned
Joined
Oct 18, 2021
Messages
671

MWaser

Arbiter
Joined
Nov 22, 2015
Messages
607
Location
Where you won't find me

MWaser

Arbiter
Joined
Nov 22, 2015
Messages
607
Location
Where you won't find me
Daedric quests
I knew there's another reason why I hated Skyrim other than the retardness of the PC killing a fucking dragon at level 1.

Makes me think of Might&Magic 7...
I'm just playing MM7 and it turns out for my Paladin to learn any skill to master level I need to kill a fucking dragon. My thief is already master in everything without stupid promotions. I mean WTF man.
That's the weakness of all "hybrid" classes in MM7. They require more promotions to get any skills to a decent level, and their max is heavily limited too. In general I'd say the hybrid classes are not worth using unless you want to make use of a specific "Grandmaster" ability that only a specific class has access to (but the only example of that which I can think of that has any value is Grandmaster Archery only available on Archer - all the other hybrid classes can only grandmaster worthless garbage skills and you miss out on all the genuinely powerful bonuses from what the Knight, Sorcerer and Cleric can master). For all intents and purposes, Clerics are just better Paladins in MM7. By far and large, even, since they have full access to grand-mastering even Dark and Light magic later.
 
Joined
Sep 10, 2022
Messages
19
Several reasons. The world is empty and sterile and everything looks like plastic. Only the NPCs look worse then the environment. The leveling system ist awful and not fit for roleplaying. The fact that EVERY enemy levels at the same time as the player, and just gets better in combat, is insane. This leads to a scenario when the player gets weaker relatively as he progresses if he does not level up optimally (combat). The combat mechanics are atrocious and maybe fit for consoles. It ridicules everything morrowind built up. Also, the setting is a lotr cashgrab.
But maybe I got filtered. It has certain comfy qualities, though.
 

KeighnMcDeath

RPG Codex Boomer
Joined
Nov 23, 2016
Messages
12,867
I thought the same with Dungeon Siege II and the mod where you could play DS1 using DS2 engine. It was horrible.
 

Robotigan

Learned
Joined
Jan 18, 2022
Messages
397
  • Attributes were removed entirely from the game, and the player doesn't even select skills to specialize in for a new character; Skyrim did add a perk system inspired by Fallout, but almost all of the perks are either boring (+20% to attack/defense/whatever) or useless
  • The user interface is a joke, far beyond the console-directed UI of Oblivion, almost as though Bethesda were attempting to see how horrible a UI could be while still being lapped up by console players, while computer gamers simply downloaded a mod to replace the UI
  • Dungeons were incredibly large in volume yet in design were almost all linear corridors through which the player runs from encounter to encounter, with an occasional optional side-path swiftly deadending in treasure
  • The game throws as many quests as possible at the player, who has quest entries added to the journal simply by happening to walk near NPCs related to quests, who immediately launch into introductory dialogue monologue, even including most Daedric quests
  • The game was rushed to release and in consequence a large amount of content was removed, which involved inter alia severe truncation and simplification of the Civil War questline, reduced to little more than a series of boring battles, nearly identical for either side
Wow, I disagree with nearly all of this:

  • I get what attributes are going for, but in practice I just think perks are a better system. Attributes sort of wind up as leveling your skills twice. If you wanted a "Ring of Intelligence" in Skyrim, you'd just replace the intelligence stat buff with an alchemy+enchanting+magicka stat buff and it'd be mathematically equivalent. So what's the point of having attributes?
  • Okay, so I don't exactly disagree that the UI needed more information, but it's weird that you would want to play an Action RPG with a mouse and keyboard. Having two analog sticks is just kind of better for 3d spacial orientation than Cursor + WASD which is why every platformer ever is designed for a controller. It's also nice to layback on your couch and play games. I have my PC hooked up to an Nvidia Shield so I can do exactly that.
  • Morrowind and Oblivion were only slightly more plausible with their dungeon layouts and Daggerfall is Daggerfall. And they were all way more boring. Lemme ask you something, have you ever tried a corn maze without a map? It sucks. Isometric and 2d games can get away with mazes because you can see a lot more visual information at once. In a first-person game, you're just staring at walls the whole time.
  • I'd rather have pages of active quests than bumbling around for something to do.
  • Okay, fair. Some of the faction questlines are reduced to glorified side quests because of obvious cuts to make a date. The Mage's College was done so dirty, it should have gotten a DLC over Dawnguard.
 

dreughjiggers

Maidenhaver
Joined
Dec 26, 2022
Messages
261
Location
Vvardenfell
Several reasons. The world is empty and sterile and everything looks like plastic. Only the NPCs look worse then the environment. The leveling system ist awful and not fit for roleplaying. The fact that EVERY enemy levels at the same time as the player, and just gets better in combat, is insane. This leads to a scenario when the player gets weaker relatively as he progresses if he does not level up optimally (combat). The combat mechanics are atrocious and maybe fit for consoles. It ridicules everything morrowind built up. Also, the setting is a lotr cashgrab.
But maybe I got filtered. It has certain comfy qualities, though.
So its a anime.
 

Poseidon00

Arcane
Joined
Dec 11, 2018
Messages
2,039
Oblivion is the one Elder Scrolls game that targeted modding can actually save and make redeemable. Priority number 1 is remaking the way enemies are always hp sponges.
 

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