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Why does Codex hate Oblivion so much?

BruceVC

Magister
Joined
Jul 25, 2011
Messages
7,697
Location
South Africa, Cape Town
I would strongly recommend certain Mods that include Maskars Overhaul, Ultimate levelling and Alchemy Advanced. These mods make exploring exciting and really rewarding

But Oblivion modded is a very worthwhile RPG and definitely shouldn't be a target of vitriol :salute:
Some things can be fixed by mods - but Codex hive mind will still despise Oblivion because story, characters, choices & consequences and dialogues are on PG-13, morning cartoon level - both in original game and in most adventure / quest mods.

At the same time it completely misses the point why some people still play it in 2022.

Maskar and Oscuro do not try to turn Oblivion into Obsidian / Troika game - but into modern version of Amulets and Armor or Arena - unlearning the lessons of modern, focused game design - and they succeed.

Have you, or anyone else, ever used Martigens Monster Mod in Oblivion? I wanted to use it but it seems very problematic and difficult to get working properly ?
 

Azdul

Magister
Joined
Nov 3, 2011
Messages
3,328
Location
Langley, Virginia
I would strongly recommend certain Mods that include Maskars Overhaul, Ultimate levelling and Alchemy Advanced. These mods make exploring exciting and really rewarding

But Oblivion modded is a very worthwhile RPG and definitely shouldn't be a target of vitriol :salute:
Some things can be fixed by mods - but Codex hive mind will still despise Oblivion because story, characters, choices & consequences and dialogues are on PG-13, morning cartoon level - both in original game and in most adventure / quest mods.

At the same time it completely misses the point why some people still play it in 2022.

Maskar and Oscuro do not try to turn Oblivion into Obsidian / Troika game - but into modern version of Amulets and Armor or Arena - unlearning the lessons of modern, focused game design - and they succeed.

Have you, or anyone else, ever used Martigens Monster Mod in Oblivion? I wanted to use it but it seems very problematic and difficult to get working properly ?
I've used it ages ago as a part of FCOM compilation (Oscuro + Francesco + Martigen + WarCry):

However, FCOM installation manual is 10 pages long.

Installing Martigens mod alone - at least version 3.8 - is straightforward. You just need to download 'Mart's Monster Mod.bsa' and activate 'Mart's Monster Mod.esp' and 'Mart's Monster Mod.esm'. Just remember that Oblivion will load BSA file only if ESP file of the same name is activated.

If you want to create modern megamod compilation - not using 10 years old mod versions required by FCOM - you can do that using MOO. Install BSA file, ESM file - and empty ESP matching BSA name to load resources. That way mod will be loaded - but not active.

Then MOO will inject creatures and items from supported mods into leveled lists where appropriate. Martigens crafting can be activated through one of MOO ini files.
 
Joined
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Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
Some things can be fixed by mods - but Codex hive mind will still despise Oblivion because story, characters, choices & consequences and dialogues are on PG-13, morning cartoon level - both in original game and in most adventure / quest mods.
It's actually kinda unique in that Oblivion is one of the few RPGs where you aren't the hero of the story, you're the hero's sidekick :M
 

BruceVC

Magister
Joined
Jul 25, 2011
Messages
7,697
Location
South Africa, Cape Town
Some things can be fixed by mods - but Codex hive mind will still despise Oblivion because story, characters, choices & consequences and dialogues are on PG-13, morning cartoon level - both in original game and in most adventure / quest mods.
It's actually kinda unique in that Oblivion is one of the few RPGs where you aren't the hero of the story, you're the hero's sidekick :M

Thats an interesting perspective, who is the hero then....Martin ?
 

Lemming42

Arcane
Joined
Nov 4, 2012
Messages
6,038
Location
The Satellite Of Love
Just installed Oblivion as part of my ongoing TES replay. Spent a bit of time installing mods, just a few bugfixes, the seemingly highly-recommended MOO, and a few graphics mods.

Boot up the game to be greeted with the Bethesda logo. The rousing "Reign of the Septims" theme kicks in, THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION fills the screen... then I have no input. No keyboard or mouse input. Trying to alt-tab out freezes everything. The music reaches its heroic crescendo as I'm forced to open Task Manager on a new desktop to terminate Oblivion.exe.

Turns out you've got to go into the config file and disable the inexplicably-included joystick option. Keyboard works fine after changing that one value in the Oblivion.ini file. Fantastic. Sets the tone for the whole game.
 

Lemming42

Arcane
Joined
Nov 4, 2012
Messages
6,038
Location
The Satellite Of Love
Your computer did its best to spare you the agony. :M

Honestly I'm looking forward to it. Back in the day I hated Fo3 and Oblivion for their hideous writing and their abuse of their respective settings, but these days it's all just a bit of fun and the atrocious dialogue is part of the joke. I played (modded) Fo3 a few months ago and really enjoyed just wandering around the loosely Fallout-themed amusement park that the game presents and getting into shootouts every three steps. Liam Neeson mumbling his way through the comically shit lore-busting main quest just made me laugh, rather than rage or wilt with disappointment as I have in the past.

The only Bethesda game I really haven't been able to come around on is Fallout 4, which is just so drab and soulless. Oblivion's the TES game I've played the least, but my main memories of it are that when it's not being absurdist comedy (ie any time an NPC is on screen), it's a fairly boring dungeon crawler, but hopefully the vaunted MOO lifts the whole experience up a little. As long as the level scaling's fixed, that's one of the major concerns out of the way.
 

BruceVC

Magister
Joined
Jul 25, 2011
Messages
7,697
Location
South Africa, Cape Town
Just installed Oblivion as part of my ongoing TES replay. Spent a bit of time installing mods, just a few bugfixes, the seemingly highly-recommended MOO, and a few graphics mods.

Boot up the game to be greeted with the Bethesda logo. The rousing "Reign of the Septims" theme kicks in, THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION fills the screen... then I have no input. No keyboard or mouse input. Trying to alt-tab out freezes everything. The music reaches its heroic crescendo as I'm forced to open Task Manager on a new desktop to terminate Oblivion.exe.

Turns out you've got to go into the config file and disable the inexplicably-included joystick option. Keyboard works fine after changing that one value in the Oblivion.ini file. Fantastic. Sets the tone for the whole game.

I absolutely encourage all Codex members to play Oblivion so what I am about to say is not me being sarcastic or being negative about your decision to play Oblivion

But if you one of those gamers who expects your gaming experience to not have CTD or any technical issues rather dont play Oblivion. Basically every person who uses multiple mods will have problems sometimes in the game and thats to be expected

You learn to troubleshoot certain issues and your choice of mod manager is important, I use Wyre Bash and OBMM, within Wyre Bash, and I also have identified which mods are the culprits that cause most CTD in certain areas of the game. In my game its certain adult Romance mods like my Viconia companion, from BG series, but I am not going to drop these mods so I have learnt how to address any CTD

If I get a CTD when I go to a new area on the map all I do is unsummon Viconia, go to the new area, save the game and summon Viconia again and its all good

Anyway Funposter knows a lot about the technical flaws in Oblivion that causes CTD

I hope you have great time in Oblivion but please dont get upset every time their is a technical problem because its going to happen and all you need to do is be patient and fix the issue as it occurs :cool:
 
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KeighnMcDeath

RPG Codex Boomer
Joined
Nov 23, 2016
Messages
12,859
Yeah, Future shock had a mess of issues. I recall getting stuck more than a few times where it wouldn't advance me to the next stage. That driving & shooting was a pain. I beat it a few times and tried skynet from myabandonware. I believe it has some issues as well. It was alright. Later I enjoyed some of the cheats like super SMG. The first Terminator was kind of meh. 2029 was a pain in the arse. I liked Rampage but it was a slog. Resetting items was something I found out mid game.
 

Commissar Draco

Codexia Comrade Colonel Commissar
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Привислинский край
Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
Oblivion is not as bad with right mods installed I got deadly reflexes for more challenging combat, Oscurio to get rid of deadric weapons wielding bandits + Better cities to see the Imperial city looking like city not town hardly bigger than provincial towns like Balmora, some story mods like Rebuilding of Sancre Tor and the one in which you travel in time and aid Sait Alessia fighting the godless Ayelids and its pleasant romp although modded Morrowind is still superior game over Moroblivion the Todd just hacked too many weapons, classes, skills and spells. Not half as angry now when game was released to be sure.
 

Bad Sector

Arcane
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Messages
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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
The open world aspect is not an issue. Here you can see open world and terrain generation slapped on top of Ogre3D engine to create rudimentary prototype of Daggerfall style game. OpenMW implemented world paging first on top of Ogre3D - and then on top of OpenSceneGraph - and each time it was never the biggest source of problems.

Bethesda version of NetImmerse / Gamebryo / Creation Engine is unique in allowing to inject mods during the playthrough. Skyrim even supports removing mods - although it is not 100% reliable. Half of the changes to DF Unity code in recent months is just 'allow mods to inject changes to X'.

It makes performance of Bethesda games (and DF Unity) much worse than competitors - as some optimizations (like pre-baked lightning) are impossible. At the same time - you just don't see equally impressive mods for non-Bethesda games.

Yeah, that is why i wrote the part you quoted. Bethesda's engine isn't just Unreal + "big world" (or UE5 since it seems to have add cell-based big world support), there is way more to it.

It's not even an innate feature of NI/Gamebryo AFAIK.

NetImmerse (and Gamebryo for the majority of its existence) was just a rendering engine with some utility libraries. AFAIK they added some support for big worlds after it became popular with MMORPG designers but that was years after Bethesda had implemented their cell-based approach in Morrowind.
 

Maxie

Wholesome Chungus
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Glory to Ukraine
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Grantham, UK
Oblivion's boring irrelevant mess which has got fully eclipsed by Skyrim, and whose odious legacy continues to ruin the industry to this day (horse armour lol)
whoever likes Oblivion today has mental issues
 

Just Locus

Educated
Joined
Mar 11, 2022
Messages
275
I do not utterly despise Oblivion, i actually appreciate it for what it is, but i have a few problems with OP's comments.

A main story with an intro that is very long and doesn't establish more story-important plotlines without any more elaboration beyond "the player needs to save the world" with very few nuances at all that are few and far between. It makes for an experience that is very boring and is most likely being completed for those who want to 100% the game, or for those who are genuinely interested in the story and end up being disappointed. Morrowind did a lot more with a lot little when it came to its plot, and Skyrim at least had the decency as to not present events they're not capable of showing in their buggy engine that'll end up falling flat.
And I do not think the main story is to be excused as a "small issue" because it's on you from the end of the tutorial since Uriel Septim gives you his amulet before dying, despite the fact that the player could've easily saved him and it robs the scene of any intensity when the player is purposely forced to not save nor accelerate the death of Uriel, like what if the player was allowed to kill Uriel from the beginning and then be able to join the mythic dawn the same way as Skyrim's civil questlines did. as that would make the choices you make in an RPG much more impactful, and the amount of urgency in an OPEN-WORLD game that strongly encourages you to ignore the main story and wander-off is also very off-putting, and i would say the Intro even discourages mage players since you are only given a basic flame spell, and a basic healing spell, and a bunch of scrolls (which are a one-time use only, so it's useless). and further pushes the players to get a melee class since they are given a variety of swords and shields.

About the gameplay, it had the same problems as the rest of the other games. The melee combat is strongly lacking and floaty, and given how Weapon classes (Maces, Swords etc) are purely cosmetic and aren't given any strong and weighty animations, especially to the enemies who seem to just not react accordingly to heavy/light attacks which removes the intensity of an actual fight. Granted, this was worse in Skyrim, because they added regenerated HP which further decreased the fun in combat and made it more dull and bland, since you're never really likely to die as long as you aren't stupid and aren't standing still and making the enemies pick-away at your health, but even in Oblivion, casting and swinging aren't fun as it is could be and no amount of mods could save it, which makes me want to talk about the Mods you mentioned and mentioned a couple times in this thread already.

as much as i enjoy mods, I REALLY don't like the impression it left on the community, since the community seems to enjoy and care more for the games than Bethesda does (at least on the part of polish).
it has made it so that anything that is mildly flawed in bethesda's games that is met with criticism, is responded with the sentiment "Mods will fix it!" or "Oh, yeah [insert mod name] fixes that." etc, and I really feel like people use that as an excuse that these games are less of an RPG and are more modding platforms. and thus praise their modded experience over the actual vanilla experience. All i have to say is, If you're gonna put in that effort in making a game better, why don't you put in that effort into making a new game?
 
Last edited:

BruceVC

Magister
Joined
Jul 25, 2011
Messages
7,697
Location
South Africa, Cape Town
I do not utterly despise Oblivion, i actually appreciate it for what it is, but i have a few problems with OP's comments.

A main story with an intro that is very long and doesn't establish more story-important plotlines without any more elaboration beyond "the player needs to save the world" with very few nuances at all that are few and far between. It makes for an experience that is very boring and is most likely being completed for those who want to 100% the game, or for those who are genuinely interested in the story and end up being disappointed. Morrowind did a lot more with a lot little when it came to its plot, and Skyrim at least had the decency as to not present events they're not capable of showing in their buggy engine that'll end up falling flat.
And I do not think the main story is to be excused as a "small issue" because it's on you from the end of the tutorial since Uriel Septim gives you his amulet before dying, despite the fact that the player could've easily saved him and it robs the scene of any intensity when the player is purposely forced to not save nor accelerate the death of Uriel, like what if the player was allowed to kill Uriel from the beginning and then be able to join the mythic dawn the same way as Skyrim's civil questlines did. as that would make the choices you make in an RPG much more impactful, and the amount of urgency in an OPEN-WORLD game that strongly encourages you to ignore the main story and wander-off is also very off-putting, and i would say the Intro even discourages mage players since you are only given a basic flame spell, and a basic healing spell, and a bunch of scrolls (which are a one-time use only, so it's useless). and further pushes the players to get a melee class since they are given a variety of swords and shields.

About the gameplay, it had the same problems as the rest of the other games. The melee combat is strongly lacking and floaty, and given how Weapon classes (Maces, Swords etc) are purely cosmetic and aren't given any strong and weighty animations, especially to the enemies who seem to just not react accordingly to heavy/light attacks which removes the intensity of an actual fight. Granted, this was worse in Skyrim, because they added regenerated HP which further decreased the fun in combat and made it more dull and bland, since you're never really likely to die as long as you aren't stupid and aren't standing still and making the enemies pick-away at your health, but even in Oblivion, casting and swinging aren't fun as it is could be and no amount of mods could save it, which makes me want to talk about the Mods you mentioned and mentioned a couple times in this thread already.

as much as i enjoy mods, I REALLY don't like the impression it left on the community, since the community seems to enjoy and care more for the games than Bethesda does (at least on the part of polish).
it has made it so that anything that is mildly flawed in bethesda's games that is met with criticism, is responded with the sentiment "Mods will fix it!" or "Oh, yeah [insert mod name] fixes that." etc, and I really feel like people use that as an excuse that these games are less of an RPG and are more modding platforms. and thus praise their modded experience over the actual vanilla experience. All i have to say is, If you're gonna put in that effort in making a game better, why don't you put in that effort into making a new game?

You make some interesting points and some I agree with some but you couldnt have saved the Emperor in the beginning because your level is too low to defeat Mythic Dawn agents ?
 
Last edited:

Just Locus

Educated
Joined
Mar 11, 2022
Messages
275
I do not utterly despise Oblivion, i actually appreciate it for what it is, but i have a few problems with OP's comments.

A main story with an intro that is very long and doesn't establish more story-important plotlines without any more elaboration beyond "the player needs to save the world" with very few nuances at all that are few and far between. It makes for an experience that is very boring and is most likely being completed for those who want to 100% the game, or for those who are genuinely interested in the story and end up being disappointed. Morrowind did a lot more with a lot little when it came to its plot, and Skyrim at least had the decency as to not present events they're not capable of showing in their buggy engine that'll end up falling flat.
And I do not think the main story is to be excused as a "small issue" because it's on you from the end of the tutorial since Uriel Septim gives you his amulet before dying, despite the fact that the player could've easily saved him and it robs the scene of any intensity when the player is purposely forced to not save nor accelerate the death of Uriel, like what if the player was allowed to kill Uriel from the beginning and then be able to join the mythic dawn the same way as Skyrim's civil questlines did. as that would make the choices you make in an RPG much more impactful, and the amount of urgency in an OPEN-WORLD game that strongly encourages you to ignore the main story and wander-off is also very off-putting, and i would say the Intro even discourages mage players since you are only given a basic flame spell, and a basic healing spell, and a bunch of scrolls (which are a one-time use only, so it's useless). and further pushes the players to get a melee class since they are given a variety of swords and shields.

About the gameplay, it had the same problems as the rest of the other games. The melee combat is strongly lacking and floaty, and given how Weapon classes (Maces, Swords etc) are purely cosmetic and aren't given any strong and weighty animations, especially to the enemies who seem to just not react accordingly to heavy/light attacks which removes the intensity of an actual fight. Granted, this was worse in Skyrim, because they added regenerated HP which further decreased the fun in combat and made it more dull and bland, since you're never really likely to die as long as you aren't stupid and aren't standing still and making the enemies pick-away at your health, but even in Oblivion, casting and swinging aren't fun as it is could be and no amount of mods could save it, which makes me want to talk about the Mods you mentioned and mentioned a couple times in this thread already.

as much as i enjoy mods, I REALLY don't like the impression it left on the community, since the community seems to enjoy and care more for the games than Bethesda does (at least on the part of polish).
it has made it so that anything that is mildly flawed in bethesda's games that is met with criticism, is responded with the sentiment "Mods will fix it!" or "Oh, yeah [insert mod name] fixes that." etc, and I really feel like people use that as an excuse that these games are less of an RPG and are more modding platforms. and thus praise their modded experience over the actual vanilla experience. All i have to say is, If you're gonna put in that effort in making a game better, why don't you put in that effort into making a new game?

You make some interesting points and some I agree with some but you couldnt have saved the Emperor in the beginning because your level is too low to defeat Mythic Dawn agents ?
Not really, I'm pretty sure the game just disables controls from you and you watch the Emperor get killed.
 

Wayward Son

Fails to keep valuable team members alive
Joined
Aug 23, 2015
Messages
1,866,294
Location
Anytown, USA
I started a playthrough of Oblivion a couple months ago where I got a lot of mods (mostly graphical, notable exceptions are Better Dungeons, Better Open Cities, and Class Advantages). I also restrict myself from fast travel and try to explore things as I come across them. So far, it’s been pretty fun with a few exceptions.
 

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