ES4: Oblivion - Retrospective @ The Koalition

Didn't we post something from these guys recently? Anyway, The Koalition has a breathless retrospective on Oblivion. Have at it:

Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is damn near unbeatable. Sure the main storyline quest is beatable within a couple hours, but the main quest is nothing. There are literally hundreds of quests in this game, and given the world which Bethesda has created for you, you will definitely attempt to complete as many as you can. The fact that there are two huge expansion packs doesn’t make it any easier either. I have had the game for three years now, and I still have quests to finish. What’s incredible is that these quests aren’t just pitiful side quests you see in your average RPG’s or Sandbox titles. In every quest you accept in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion you will face great challenges, and once finished you obtain a great sense of accomplishment.

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More information.

lol. The sad part is that he may be right about it being the best RPG in a generation. I'll stipulate that a "generation" of gamers is 10 years - anyone under 15 is too young to matter and anyone over 25 is too old to matter.

I give Oblivion about a C, or maybe a B on my own personal scale. But there hasn't been any other RPG I liked better in the last 10 years. It doesn't make me very happy to say that, but there it is.

Dragon Age could have been a contender but I didn't even get past the mid-game. I got tired of being beaten over the head with mandatory storyline and (trivial)scripted combat. And DA like all recent Bioware games was severely lacking in meaningful exploration, freedom of choice on the part of the player, meaningful decision making, and so many other things I associate with the kinds of games I think of as "RPG". The Total War series is as much RPG as Bioware games these days.

And besides Bioware and Bethesda, what else is there really? Action RPGs? The Gothic games? Divine Divinity 2? Drakhensang? Which of those was better than Oblivion? Most of them wee trying to BE Oblivion.

PS-Forgot to mention The Witcher! Good game and they did a pretty good job of patching over the flaws of Bioware's game engine, but they still stuck too close to the Bioware recipe.

A retrospective for a game only 4 years old? Geez, let it age a bit more.

I don't recall this: "Many quests will result in something in the world changing, making you feel like you have actually made a difference in the world.

But this is true: "How about becoming the most powerful being in Cyrodiil before you even start the main quest? Yes it is actually possible."

After all, I was Grand Champion of the Arena at level 3!

Ahem... I'm well over 25. Old enough to have watched RPGs go from the Colassal Cave to present day. Too old to matter!?!?

Oblivion was, IMHO, one of the best RPGs of all time. As the quoted paragraph states, there are quests by the truckload. GOOD quests, too, often with funny twists to them ("oh my poor rats!"). The graphics were incredible for the time and still look mighty good today. The degree of choice was fantastic, too. The mods for the game were great and plentiful. The music was fantastic.

The big downer for everyone was the level scaling. It didn't actually bug me all that much. On the story side of things, the gates had opened and nasties were running around everywhere - it makes sense that people would break out the old magic items and start paying big bucks for high quality armor to get made. On the playability side, it meant that you could do what you want WHEN you wanted. Giving you a choice of where to go doesn't mean dink of the monsters are too high level for you in most of those places. (Though I admit that having one or two high level areas would have been nice.)

I dont really get how the level scaling could bug anyone since it was patched away by a mod like after 3-4 days - like many other things that were poorly implemented (playing a TES game on Xbox is blasphemy btw).

The biggest disapointment was the incredible boring Oblivion levels and too much copy/paste work in the dungeons as well + that the game world felt very small compared to Morrowind (which is much more varied). But it was a good game, the AI is really cool too (again - after some mods )

Zloth said:

Ahem… I'm well over 25. Old enough to have watched RPGs go from the Colassal Cave to present day. Too old to matter!?!?

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Yes, too old to matter. When PC gaming was a niche market the average age of gamers (all gamers since there were no other viable platforms in the early 1990s) was mid 30s. Now? Isn't it blatantly obvious what age group game companies are targeting with their games? And sorry, if you aren't in that age group (I'm not either) then you DON'T matter.

EDIT:

bemushroomed,

I dont really get how the level scaling could bug anyone since it was patched away by a mod like after 3-4 days...

I never found a mod for the auto-leveling that didn't change the gameplay into something I didn't like. Bethesda just didn't design the game to work that way, and there's really no getting around it. I have to admit that messing around with the editer to see what I could do with it probably tripled the amount of time I spent with Oblivion.

The biggest disapointment was the incredible boring Oblivion levels and too much copy/paste work in the dungeons as well


Agreed... it really felt like doing the same 3 or 4 dungeons, over and over again. Even if you made a point of never returning to a place you'd already been. They did much better on that with Fallout 3.

BG2: SoA and BG2: ToB are both less than 10 years old, so I'd eat a shoe before calling Oblivion "RPG of the decade". Besides, Morrowind was a much better game, where your actions actually mattered.

As far as the world changing consequences.. there are none. Oblivion gates pop up at one point during the main quest, but that's about it.

I think people mostly comment on how much better it could be not on how bad it was .
Beth only cared about money paying little attention to their game ; in KoN expansion you receive a map with locations of 9 shrines that you have to visit in order to start the quest , if you chose to visit a specific one last there is always an oblivion gate spawned on the top of it …. to me this shows a lack of interest .


On the other hand OB brought us the innovation of "the more you level the weaker you become" , 2 arrows to kill the average beast in level 5 - 10 arrows to kill the same average beast in level 40 .

Tragos said:

…
Beth only cared about money paying little attention to their game ;…

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I think this is unreasonable. Oblivion is a huge game, much larger than the average crpg. Of course quantity does not equal quality, but it does indicate that they put a lot of work into it. Much more than necessary if all they cared about was the money.

This doesn't say anything about whether they did a good job or not. But I think they did care.

pibbur said:

I think this is unreasonable. Oblivion is a huge game, much larger than the average crpg. Of course quantity does not equal quality, but it does indicate that they put a lot of work into it. Much more than necessary if all they cared about was the money.

This doesn't say anything about whether they did a good job or not. But I think they did care.

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The average cRPG maybe but it is not bigger than the previous TES games in any aspect , i bet the developers spent more time lieing on the media rather than developing .

Tragos said:

The average cRPG maybe but it is not bigger than the previous TES games in any aspect , i bet the developers spent more time lieing on the media rather than developing .

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I spent more time with Oblivion than Morrowind, so in my experience it's longer. I cannot however guarantee that I played the two games the same way.

I've no way of knowing how the developers spent their time, so I can't speculate on that.

Oblivion is for morons. The end

CraigCWB said:

And DA like all recent Bioware games was severely lacking in meaningful exploration, freedom of choice on the part of the player, meaningful decision making, and so many other things I associate with the kinds of games I think of as "RPG".

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True. They started to abandon the exploration part as early as BG 2, and meaningful choices were always an extremely distant second to their "story-driven" design philosophy. It was a extremely steep, short slope from the well-rounded BG games to the current batch of group therapy/dating simulators. If only they put half as much energy into game design as they do into multiple paths to "getting it on" with various NPCs.

Tragos said:

i bet the [Oblivion] developers spent more time lieing on the media rather than developing .

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Nah, they had Pete Hines and Todd Howard for that. I'm sure the actual developers were way too busy trying to constraint the awesome Skynet level intelligence of Radiant AI lest it escape and initiate Armageddon.

This reminds me of the people giving it review scores of 100 when it was released. This guy must be a console gamer, to think it's one of the best looking games and best quests, it's the only explanation, only with mods did Oblivion become a decent game.

Hmmm, I love Oblivion and work in a very demanding environment where a mistake can cost lives. They wouldn't allow a moron to handle the pc systems in a refinery where an oops could cause a boom. I'm wondering how our pay and responsibilities would match up, Watchman? It's quite silly and childish to make such a generalization. Troll somewhere else, ok? How about discussing intelligently why you believe the writer of the article was incorrect? Remember, it was just his opinion.

While I love Oblivion, I would never say that the writing in most of the quests or even the goal of most of the quests are particularily noteworthy.

To me, Oblivion shines in providing a huge world, that is modestly populated, and then giving the community the ability to play in this world and make changes as each talented person sees fit. Bethesda's game is perfectly fine, standing on its own merits, but it shines above all the rest when it comes to being modifiable on such a huge level. Vanilla Oblivion was worth the $60 I paid for it. Modded Oblivion has then given me another 1000 hours of gaming pleasure for free.

People whine incessantly about the level scaling, but there are dozens of ways to play the game without scaling. Bethesda made it one way, but allowed others to make it a different way. Download one of the mods, and whale away in unscaled bliss. A relatively recent mod allows you to play Oblivion with an experience point system vs the practice skills method of vanilla. There are ini tweaks to many of these mods so that you can set it up to be as easy or difficult as you like.

I love mages, so I've added mods that give my mage more weapons (Supreme Magicka, LAME, Spell Tomes, Harvest Flora, etc.). Glenvar Castle creates a nice quest to become the owner of a castle just south of the imperial city. Ayleid steps gives you a teleport system to replace the fast travel mechanic, and this system can be very dangerous until you learn the routes that are safe. It also adds a little mystery in discovering why the steps were created. These are a couple of mods I've added for my current playthrough. I've solved all the vanilla quests, so I generally skip it, though I may play partway through just to get sigil stones from the gates. There's a mod that turns off all random Oblivion gates, or greatly reduces how many pop up. That's a great mod for folks who find the random Oblivion levels to be dull.

Wonderful game!

Morrowind was 'da bomb', ES4 was a "shit bomb"

Guy seems like an rpg noob, one of those 15 - 25 year old's who didn't actually play the good ones in the 90's !!!!!

Oblibion is awesome guys it really lets the world be yours. Only because it's an oldschool game you don't have to be all haters. It's almost as good as Fable 2, 10/10 material.

I thought it was a good game. It wasn't great for me, because I really like the sense that my character is gaining power in the world, and I didn't feel like that in this game (in part because of the level-scaling.) Nothing got more interesting and exciting as I played, it just felt like variations on a theme. It had a pretty good story, though, with good atmosphere and some interesting twists on gameplay and mechanics that were fairly well thought-out. The artwork was pretty nice for the most part, though I thought the demonic world was drab and pixel-noisy, which hampered my enjoyment for a good part of the game.
I finished it, but had no desire to replay it or play any user mods.

CraigCWB said:

The Gothic games? Divine Divinity 2? Drakhensang? Which of those was better than Oblivion? Most of them wee trying to BE Oblivion.

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At least the gothics (yes, even the mostly loathed third) and DivDiv 2 are much better games than oblibion. Also, how could a game that was released in 2001, be trying to be oblibion?

And a strong vote in Oblivion's corner. The complaints are silly