Why does nearly everyone hate oblivion?

The game world is awesome, but the mechanics are flawed. Dumbed down for consolites, the levelling system sucks, the characters are unmemorable and the story is poor.
 
Only thing I hated about it was the fact it was so demanding on my PC and I could'nt run it in its full glory.

I've not fully completed it and will go back to it once I have a right capable of playing it in full detail with a lot of the graphics mods in palce to just to show off to my self abit more hehe.
 
For some reason it never gave me the same level of enjoyment as Morrowind. Morrowind had an eerie quality to it and outposts and towns were obviously the figment of a slightly bizarre imagination. Oblivion felt largely like medievil Britain with very little variation between towns and landscape.

Morrowind also felt like a much larger area to explore which I think was largely due to the fact that you could see the main city from almost everywhere on the map in Oblivion, this meant that after exploring for a few hours you could turn around and not really feel like you had gone anywhere.

In Morrowind you had a sense of wandering around a tainted almost alien landscape full of foreboding and evil, Oblivion felt quite literally like a walk in the park with the odd cave/ruin thrown in.

I know the levelling could be "fixed" with mods but it was a bit annoying that Bethesda broke it in the first place.

Your hero just didn't seem as customisable as it was in Morrowind and I never once felt that empathy or attachment to my character that I wanted to feel.

It's not a bad game it just should have been so much more absorbing, when all the landscape looks like a pretty forest, why bother exploring it?

It's obviously all down to individual preference but I think a lot of those "Oblivion haters" are Morrowind fans who expected more.
 
tomanders91 said:
Everyone on here seems to hate oblivion, i for one think its the greatest game of 2006, but some quotes from the last few weeks ive seen.

"Oblivion Was Dire"

"Awful Game, So overated"

"A letdown for the TES series"


Seriously though, the game is huge, loads to do, fun quests, fantastic graphics, and best of all the modding community is huge, loads more life into the game from mods.

So why does everyone on here hate it so much?

Yet i havent played Morrowind, most people say its better.
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Morrowind is a lot better for a number of reasons, since I've played both games to death, I'll explain.

A lot of people feel Oblivion was Bethseda's (the devs) attempt to make TES appeal to a more mainstream audience, therefore they cut a lot of features from Oblivion which were enjoyed in Morrowind, examples include:

No Minor Skills, in Oblivion, you only select Major skills, in Morrowind, you also select Minor skills which are more powerful than base skills but not as powerful as Major skills.

No Pauldrons (shoulders), this made characters less unique as the chest plate in oblivion gave you shoulders, on Morrowind, you could have different shoulders to your chest piece and even a different Left shoulder to the right shoulder (and visa versa)

Level Scaling, this was a big blow to Morrowind fans, the idea of a game constantly challenging was great but there are some big problems to this.

- At high levels, rats were just as difficult at level 20 as they were at level 1, same with all creatures, this meant that getting new gear didn't feel like much of an upgrade.

- At high levels, every single bandit you saw had the best armour on and the best weapons, yet was just as hard now as he was at level 1.

- Item scaling meant that you could not find good loot by solving puzzles like you could in Morrowind, the game lost a lot of immersion by having a game world where a stupid number (your level) was tied to the possibilities of loot you could find. (This was a killer for me, I really enjoyed cruising Vvardenfell working out ways to get some nice items.)

- If you had all your combat skills as Non-major skills, you could become godly powerful by levelling them up as you wouldn't increase your base level.

- Willowisps (...)

Those are the main points, they sound quite insignificant but TES is all about Immersion into the game and a lot of these problems made the TES community feel cheated that Bethseda completely ignored what made Morrowind GotY and instead opted for a more mainstream game.

With mods, the game is playable to a degree but nobody really fixed the item scaling properly, not being able to fight some decent items really killed it for me (and a lot of others).

That's why people say Oblivion is inferior to Morrowind.
 
Sweetloaf said:
For some reason it never gave me the same level of enjoyment as Morrowind. Morrowind had an eerie quality to it and outposts and towns were obviously the figment of a slightly bizarre imagination. Oblivion felt largely like medievil Britain with very little variation between towns and landscape.

Morrowind also felt like a much larger area to explore which I think was largely due to the fact that you could see the main city from almost everywhere on the map in Oblivion, this meant that after exploring for a few hours you could turn around and not really feel like you had gone anywhere.

In Morrowind you had a sense of wandering around a tainted almost alien landscape full of foreboding and evil, Oblivion felt quite literally like a walk in the park with the odd cave/ruin thrown in.

I know the levelling could be "fixed" with mods but it was a bit annoying that Bethesda broke it in the first place.

Your hero just didn't seem as customisable as it was in Morrowind and I never once felt that empathy or attachment to my character that I wanted to feel.

It's not a bad game it just should have been so much more absorbing, when all the landscape looks like a pretty forest, why bother exploring it?

It's obviously all down to individual preference but I think a lot of those "Oblivion haters" are Morrowind fans who expected more.
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Sums up most of my feelings on Oblivion really.

Pretty graphics, but the gameplay is rather dull. Things I don't like about Oblivion:
  • World feels much, much smaller.
  • You feel like the world is revolving around yourself (probably due to being thrust into the game as a hero in the middle of a crisis).
  • The environment seems much more generic and predictable than Morrowind; Morrowind's game world had a slightly grand, yet alien feel about it that made it that much more intriguing.
  • The levelling system is game-breaking. Yes, there are mods, but mods are not ideal, and shouldn't be needed to fix something that should never have been broken so badly. Admittedly, the levelling in Morrowind wasn't perfect either, but Oblivion took it too far.
  • As someone said earlier, you get that feeling that you're going to stumble on something really special and unexpected, but it just never happens.
  • Too little variation in environment across the game world; the Morrowind world, by contrast, was very rich and dynamic.
  • Too few settlements. Oblivion has 8 towns; Morrowind has countless cities, towns, and sporadically placed settlements all over Vvardenfell, bordering on a hundred if you include minor settlements.
  • It's too easy to get from one place to another. You can usually just fast-travel from wherever you are to the place you want to be. Failing that, you can just run in a straight line to get there (usually).

I certainly don't hate Oblivion, but I do feel that it could have been far more than it is.
 
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what ^^^ they said.

Morrowind certainly did feel unique. Each town felt very different in design and atmosphere. For example theres one city which was mazy and very large business city-type with different layers so you could go out on the edge and drop down to a lower level.

Then there was the city which was always in a raging duststorm. Absolutely awesome! And the siltriders giant ant things very cool :)
 
I love Oblivion. The graphics are top notch, and the community of mod makers keeps this game alive even after completing it for the 1st time.

The only downside is the lvl system. Really is a little annoying how you don't really need to lvl in the game but wont see half the good battles without doing so.
 
Phalanx said:
Morrowind is a lot better for a number of reasons, since I've played both games to death, I'll explain.

A lot of people feel Oblivion was Bethseda's (the devs) attempt to make TES appeal to a more mainstream audience, therefore they cut a lot of features from Oblivion which were enjoyed in Morrowind, examples include:

No Minor Skills, in Oblivion, you only select Major skills, in Morrowind, you also select Minor skills which are more powerful than base skills but not as powerful as Major skills.

No Pauldrons (shoulders), this made characters less unique as the chest plate in oblivion gave you shoulders, on Morrowind, you could have different shoulders to your chest piece and even a different Left shoulder to the right shoulder (and visa versa)

Level Scaling, this was a big blow to Morrowind fans, the idea of a game constantly challenging was great but there are some big problems to this.

- At high levels, rats were just as difficult at level 20 as they were at level 1, same with all creatures, this meant that getting new gear didn't feel like much of an upgrade.

- At high levels, every single bandit you saw had the best armour on and the best weapons, yet was just as hard now as he was at level 1.

- Item scaling meant that you could not find good loot by solving puzzles like you could in Morrowind, the game lost a lot of immersion by having a game world where a stupid number (your level) was tied to the possibilities of loot you could find. (This was a killer for me, I really enjoyed cruising Vvardenfell working out ways to get some nice items.)

- If you had all your combat skills as Non-major skills, you could become godly powerful by levelling them up as you wouldn't increase your base level.

- Willowisps (...)

Those are the main points, they sound quite insignificant but TES is all about Immersion into the game and a lot of these problems made the TES community feel cheated that Bethseda completely ignored what made Morrowind GotY and instead opted for a more mainstream game.

With mods, the game is playable to a degree but nobody really fixed the item scaling properly, not being able to fight some decent items really killed it for me (and a lot of others).

That's why people say Oblivion is inferior to Morrowind.
Click to expand...


nearly all those things are fixed by using OOO
 
pretty graphics....thats about it

I love RPGs, I played the whole BG series and currently play WoW but Oblivion sucks

The combat is dreaful, so reptative, like someone else said, if it had a combat system like dark messiah then it would have been amazing

Also, like others have said, everything levels with you so theres nothing which is big and amazing and scary to aim for so you cant think "wow look at the size of that guy, i bet hes like level 9999999, i cant wait to get that high so I can take him down and get his amazing loot

Its just a game for graphics, I played it for about 24 hours then the fact that the world was huge and looked nice wore off on me and I saw that the game was just really dull
 
weringo said:
I am convinced this quest is impossible at this stage, I just do too little damage and take way too much damage. And you're saying it will only get harder if I level up? I really don't know what to do now...
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Stand in a field somewhere and level baby, level. Because that is all this game is about. It's a repetition simulator.
 
weringo said:
I am convinced this quest is impossible at this stage, I just do too little damage and take way too much damage. And you're saying it will only get harder if I level up? I really don't know what to do now...
Click to expand...


Not sure quite how the levelling works but it seemed to me that the enemies got a bit harder every 5 or six levels, I don't think they match you level for level more the bracket you are in so to speak.

i.e

Character Lvl 1-5 -> Enemies Lvl 3

Character Lvl 6-10 -> Enemies Lvl 8

and so on.

I could be wrong and that's just a rough example, it's how it felt to me, just as you were getting a sense of power vs the enemies they would step up in difficulty. Certain enemies must have been capped because I was taking trolls out in 1/2 hits in the end. And closed an Oblivion gate in just a pair of underpants :)
 
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Whilst the graphics were of a high quality, I felt the world was drab and depressing.

Gameplay was boring as hell.

Enemies were uninteresting.

Effort required to fix these via mods was too much.
 
You've got as much chance as everyone supporting the same football team as everyone liking the same game. As long as you like it who cares? :) I personally think it's a very good game.
 
I actualy like this game.....But!!!
Besides being buggy as hell This game has the potential to be great. Although you can get a mod now for any problem or badly designed part of the game (leveling system, psycic guards and especially the npc lvling) I also feel that the combat system & npc ui is not what it was hyped up to be.

Needed more focus on the game and less on the pretty gfx.

Did that multiplayer ob mod ever get finished?
 
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Its so easy to write similar list about Morrowind though:

Lack of good combat i.e attack a rat 4 times to hit it once.
Database style conversations.
No Horses.
You became to powerful too early on, no challenge after say 20/30 hours.
Those cliff racers everyone hated.
Poor journal system, can be unclear where to go / what to do.
Really, really slow player at the start.
 
I didnt bother with the main quest to begin with so i had a good fun time role playing as i started with nothing so i had to steal, which brought me to the attention of the thieves guild. Rapid progression through the ranks lead me to the leadership with a great reward. Then on one trip i fell into the Dark brotherhood, followed by redemption through the Fighters guild, then i turned my back on fighting and learn the skills of the mage.

The level problems made it a bit of a grind really as you had to make sure that you got your full stat bonuses, and had to set-up your skill in the reverse in order not to gimp your character.
The loot leveling was a pain for a thief as no matter what house you broke into you could never get anything that good at a low level character.
I was very dissapointed with the voices as there only seemed to be 3 or 4 voices for all the characters.

There wasnt any danger in the land, as the whole world scaled with you.
 
I think it is a poor game out of the box. I would say that is because it is a console game but once you mod it on the PC it's a good game.
 
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