RPG Codex - RPG of the Decade: Developers' Choice

I didn't usually mind the repetative dungeon design. What bugged me most however were oblivion planes. Basicly each time you had to find the door to the big black tower and fight through traps and monsters to close it.

Prior release they hyped so much the whole oblvion realm thing that I really got my hopes up. Do you remember the opening speech the Emperor gave: "…I've never been the ruler of my own dreams. I have seen the gates of Oblivion, beyond which no waking eye may see. Behold, in darkness, a doom sweeps the land. This is the 27th of Last Seed, the year of Akatosh, 433. These are the closing days of the third era, and the final hours of my life."

What do you expect after such a grand speech? Heck I thought that I was walking into Mordor first time, but it didn't feel like it. There was no sense of real danger or fear. Planes should have felt nightmarish, intimidating and unreal…something similar to silent hill games. More focus on psychological fears instead of visual tricks like lava, gore and spikes that only 6 year old finds disturbing.

Aside lack of danger, every tower felt identical. Exactly similar textures, exactly similar traps, exactly similar foes. Once you had seen one, you had seen them all. There were couple of expectations but typically oblivion planes felt more work than adventure.

Yep. The only way I kept it entertaining was using illusion spells to get the daedra to fight each other and fall off the balconies to their deaths... 2 spider daedra duking it out was pretty funny...

After the first couple of oblivion planes I sprinted past all the enemies and jumped my way up the cliffs and over the lava, you can skip most of the areas that way. After I realised they were all going to be near-identical it didn't seem worth bothering exploring them, especially when the only worthwhile items (sigil stones) were found right at the end of each plane.

There was a high powered hidden goodie in a cave where you had to fall through a hole into lava, then waterwalk over it. And another hidden cave where you could find the best bow in the game and something else. But the rest wasn't worth it…

I enjoyed oblivion, though not enough for it to be RPG of the decade.
My biggest problem with it was the way it hold your hand through the game. I hate when an RPG starts communicating with the player instead of your character.
In this case the constant quest updates and the arrow pointing.
It takes some immersion away from me and alot of achievement of being able to solve rather logical things yourself without having the game tell you what to do.

I had the same problem with Dragon Age, and their quest icons above NPCs heads.
Takes away alot of achievement of finding quests aswell as the feeling that they won't hide anything from you, so no need to bother searching.

Its bad design imo. If the game wants me to know something while playing, it should communicate it through my character instead of skipping my character and going straight to me.

Foss said:

My biggest problem with it was the way it hold your hand through the game. I hate when an RPG starts communicating with the player instead of your character.
In this case the constant quest updates and the arrow pointing.
It takes some immersion away from me and alot of achievement of being able to solve rather logical things yourself without having the game tell you what to do.

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That, along with the level scaling, was what annoyed me the most about Oblivion. A mod to nerf the level scaling, and another mod to remove the compass, are mandatory for me to play it.

Looks like OB will be bashed till the end of days lol
Removing the compass isn't wise since you don't get much of info from NPCs for locations , game would have been better if it was adult only , gorish / nightmare style with a sick touch of "the thing that gets you 500d fine" even with level scaling and retarded levelling on .

I like the guy who voted for MW, this is my RPG of the 00's anyway .

Foss said:

My biggest problem with it was the way it hold your hand through the game. I hate when an RPG starts communicating with the player instead of your character. In this case the constant quest updates and the arrow pointing. It takes some immersion away from me and alot of achievement of being able to solve rather logical things yourself without having the game tell you what to do.

Click to expand...

JDR13 said:

That, along with the level scaling, was what annoyed me the most about Oblivion. A mod to nerf the level scaling, and another mod to remove the compass, are mandatory for me to play it.

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Ditto.

I can see why Tim Cain chose it though. I think it's main strength is also it's weakness: it's easily accessible.

Really, you don't need to read the manual to get right into it, the quests are simple and straightforward, as are the game mechanics/combat. You have the quest pop-ups and NPC/Quest GPS to help you along. And you do get a whole lot of gaming for your buck, I mean the game IS huge. That the content is of questionable and varying quality is a whole other thing.

As a consoley action/adventure/lite-RPG game it's actually designed well. I think of it as Fantasy Grand Theft Auto.

My pick is Baldur's Gate 2 for pretty much doing everything well enough for me to be glued to my PC for the 100 hours or so it took me to finish. It was just so epic. And memorable.

Runners up: Wizardry 8, Divine Divinity, Morrowind (superior to Oblivion).

They said RPG of the decade.... Oblivion is an FPS so it doesn't qualify.

raaaaoor. Oblivion is Fallout 3 without guns.