Well, to an an extent it is, as Oblivion has no choices, no consequences, no classes, no restrictions, and a fundamentally broken level system that makes any review >80% pandering. Oblivion is a console action game with RPG-lite elements, NOT a hardcore RPG.
Well, I'd rephrase your post to say Oblivion has no limitations vs choices-you can be a mage-healer-two handed sword fighter because the game is so long that you can master all of the above. If it was Gothic and you wanted to start out as a mage; the game limits you because you can't become a mage until later in the "story". Oblivion isn't as concerned with whether or not you become to powerful for the story. Story isn't as important as letting folks be all that they want to be.
I'll agree with consequences-again Oblivion isn't worried about the story. It's like the older crpgs, where the story only supports the action. Almost all of the older crpgs are story-lite. Oblivion follows this.
You must think restrictions are a good thing. I'd agree with that if you had a party, but this is a single-character game. I want to be able to do everything in a gigantic game world. If it was a tiny world, like Gothic, then you might want restrictions to encourage replayability. If you do everything that there is to do in Oblivion, one playthrough will last several hundred hours.
Your last point is completely valid. It was too easy to level up in Oblivion. It should have been made harder and level scaling was completely out of whack. For me, it didn't matter so much.
Oblivion is not a "hardcore" crpg. I don't think it ever was marketed as such, though I may be wrong. It is still one of the best crpgs I've ever played. Another great thing about Oblivion is that they made it moddable so that folks who wanted to change how the game played-could. Where is Gothic/Risen's toolset? I'd give +10% to the final score just on that alone.
Turning this back to Dragon Age-I'm really looking forward to seeing what the community will do with the game. I'm hoping someone can filter out most of the blood, if we can't just change that in the settings. If someone could mod out a lot of the chit-chat, that'd be good too.
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