TES: Oblivion.

[zpanzer]

Thx for the quick replies and opinions about the game, now i really cant wait until it arrives, to bad school is to 15:00 :\ but then, i wont do anything then eat and play

[slicky]

The last few days have been quite a journey for me. I haven't left my university residency room for anything except going to the bathroom, showering, occasional cigarettes and joints, and picking up my food deliveries ever since i got this game the morning of the store release.

I can probably say ive played the game more than anyone else on these forums by this point.

I beat the main storyline of course as well as a great deal of the lateral content.

Its quite frustrating because it seems like other people are having a much better experience than me, even though desperately trying to really get into it, and I truely want to like it.

Think I just need to play it some more :G

This game is very complex to review because of the strange balance of severe game flaws and truly inspired content.

Before i start my long-winded pessimistic-minded review let me first say this was not a game for me, it was an experience (excuse how corny that sounds) the only other game that has done this for me has been half-life. Oblivion is one of the best games ive ever played.

Having said that, the game is very short on late-development content. The basic mechanics of the game are impeccable however.

The best analogy i can use to describe oblivion is that traditional games are like a well, they are very narrow but have a great deal of content within the thin limitations of its scope (IE medal of honour series, anything linear) oblivion by contrast is like a vast shallow lake. At the outset it seems massive beyond comprehension, but if you delve deep enough into any particular area you hit dirt very quickly.

The late development content i mentioned as lacking would be simple things like extra items, spells, quests, special enemies, etc... I'll get into this more in a moment.

The inpired content is basically everything thats not listed below as a flaw, the terrible thing is that the flaws ive listed would require SO LITTLE additional effort on the part of bethesda to restore meaning to oblivion for me.

some flaws-

There is a total lack of ORIGINAL enemies in the game, so frequently you get to the end of the dungeon and realize you have to turn back, and youre left scratching your head as to where the big dungeon boss was supposed to be. Instead you have to satiate your killing needs on the same enemies repetitively over different level ranges. This also means there is very few enemy-linked special item drops.

The game has been lobotomized quite a bit to suit the console user.

There is VERY little item content, pathetically little really. There is only a few armor classes in each range, and once you get the best one (which wasnt even hard) there is essentially no more upgrading to do. As for weapons, i found the umbra sword around level 10 and i have been using it for the past 15 levels, kinda pathetic as far as item content goes.

Ironically the game has massive item content in areas where its totally useless, things like calipers, a bucket, millions of varieties of pants and shirts youll never wear because its somehow more practical to wear armour if youre in combat.

There is no more spears, crossbows, throwing weapons, etc.. etc...

In a game like this, the players material motivations should be dangled in front of him - that one staff/sword/axe youre just dieing to buy but you cant afford - that armor set youre desperately trying to collect by looting and stealing. Oblivion fails at this rather badly. I found i reached a threshold after which upgrading was almost irrelevant, what was worrisome was how quickly it happened. Now i have like 200,000 septims from loot-sales and nothing to spend it on - at all -

The most serious flaw in my game experience:

I dont want this to sound like an elaborate boast, but the particulars of my character are such that he is utterly unbeatable, he is such a tank i can just stand and take blows for hours. I happened to find a few EXTREMELY overpowered items early in the game (with the aid of a few billion quickloads) and it made the game almost broken. So much so i beat the end of the game as though it was little more than an annoyance. Pushing the difficulty slider up extra-extra high is an option i realise, but i just cant handicap myself that much, that would be like tossing your best items away just to restore the challenge.

When i play oblivion now, its an exercise in going into extremely remote areas TRYING and continuously failing to find enemies that can challenge me. This is essentially because of how bad the level-scaling system is (to those not in the know, the game scales the difficulty of nearly every enemy you encounter and every item you find to the level of your character) If your character's actual strength exceeds his or her level as was the case with me, you will find the game pretty boring.

Attach that to the lack of upgrades in equipment, and it now feels like its pointless to play anymore.

[TomWithTheWeather]

For you PC players, 12 slot inventory mod.

http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?id=11859854

[Mazy]

Yeah, thats one thing thats really annoying on the 360, scrolling up and down the inventory. The actually switching between menus is quite cool though.

Currently going around doing guild stuff in the towns atm, good fun

[RD]

The last few days have been quite a journey for me. I haven't left my university residency room for anything except going to the bathroom, showering, occasional cigarettes and joints, and picking up my food deliveries ever since i got this game the morning of the store release.

I can probably say ive played the game more than anyone else on these forums by this point.

I beat the main storyline of course as well as a great deal of the lateral content.

Its quite frustrating because it seems like other people are having a much better experience than me, even though desperately trying to really get into it, and I truely want to like it.

Think I just need to play it some more :G

This game is very complex to review because of the strange balance of severe game flaws and truly inspired content.

Before i start my long-winded pessimistic-minded review let me first say this was not a game for me, it was an experience (excuse how corny that sounds) the only other game that has done this for me has been half-life. Oblivion is one of the best games ive ever played.

Having said that, the game is very short on late-development content. The basic mechanics of the game are impeccable however.

The best analogy i can use to describe oblivion is that traditional games are like a well, they are very narrow but have a great deal of content within the thin limitations of its scope (IE medal of honour series, anything linear) oblivion by contrast is like a vast shallow lake. At the outset it seems massive beyond comprehension, but if you delve deep enough into any particular area you hit dirt very quickly.

The late development content i mentioned as lacking would be simple things like extra items, spells, quests, special enemies, etc... I'll get into this more in a moment.

The inpired content is basically everything thats not listed below as a flaw, the terrible thing is that the flaws ive listed would require SO LITTLE additional effort on the part of bethesda to restore meaning to oblivion for me.

some flaws-

There is a total lack of ORIGINAL enemies in the game, so frequently you get to the end of the dungeon and realize you have to turn back, and youre left scratching your head as to where the big dungeon boss was supposed to be. Instead you have to satiate your killing needs on the same enemies repetitively over different level ranges. This also means there is very few enemy-linked special item drops.

The game has been lobotomized quite a bit to suit the console user.

There is VERY little item content, pathetically little really. There is only a few armor classes in each range, and once you get the best one (which wasnt even hard) there is essentially no more upgrading to do. As for weapons, i found the umbra sword around level 10 and i have been using it for the past 15 levels, kinda pathetic as far as item content goes.

Ironically the game has massive item content in areas where its totally useless, things like calipers, a bucket, millions of varieties of pants and shirts youll never wear because its somehow more practical to wear armour if youre in combat.

There is no more spears, crossbows, throwing weapons, etc.. etc...

In a game like this, the players material motivations should be dangled in front of him - that one staff/sword/axe youre just dieing to buy but you cant afford - that armor set youre desperately trying to collect by looting and stealing. Oblivion fails at this rather badly. I found i reached a threshold after which upgrading was almost irrelevant, what was worrisome was how quickly it happened. Now i have like 200,000 septims from loot-sales and nothing to spend it on - at all -

The most serious flaw in my game experience:

I dont want this to sound like an elaborate boast, but the particulars of my character are such that he is utterly unbeatable, he is such a tank i can just stand and take blows for hours. I happened to find a few EXTREMELY overpowered items early in the game (with the aid of a few billion quickloads) and it made the game almost broken. So much so i beat the end of the game as though it was little more than an annoyance. Pushing the difficulty slider up extra-extra high is an option i realise, but i just cant handicap myself that much, that would be like tossing your best items away just to restore the challenge.

When i play oblivion now, its an exercise in going into extremely remote areas TRYING and continuously failing to find enemies that can challenge me. This is essentially because of how bad the level-scaling system is (to those not in the know, the game scales the difficulty of nearly every enemy you encounter and every item you find to the level of your character) If your character's actual strength exceeds his or her level as was the case with me, you will find the game pretty boring.

Attach that to the lack of upgrades in equipment, and it now feels like its pointless to play anymore.

I guess i will set the difficulty extra high then. And hope for some patches

[Tequila]

To be fair, play as something else slicky.

You've become the best warrior/tank/whatever. Try being a mage, or an assassin, or a vampire. There's still some variety left.

I do agree with you about the lack of items and monsters though.

[Marcos]

Yeah Tequila, is right. I remember completing MW with about 4 diffrent chars. Joined guilds I didnt complete in past games ect, and it was suprisingly fun every time

One good thing about the PC ver. is the mod's. Morrowind had plenty of them, making the game soo much better

[Grinwhrl]

man this game is fun. There is so much to do and the quests are great. The thing I love the most is how realistic things are, People accually, eat, drink, sleep, change, talk to each other, snoop, go to bars, etc.

Im level 6 now been doing a bunch of stuff, main story, guilds, side quests, makes it more fun.

[JamesL]

Had the game 48 hours, racked up 30 hours gameplay so far

It does suffer for being developed for console primarily, but beyond that I think the game is awesome. Conversly to what has been said above, I have been finding the game more challenging to play than Morrowind. I have yet to find any really decent items and have gotten my ass kicked more times than I care to mention.

Much like I did in Morrowind, I have totally ignored the main quest and at the first opportunity I just picked a compass direction and started wandering. I don't know whether or not this has given me a different impression of the game to other people, but I certainly disagree with the shallow lake analogy. I really don't know what kind of depth folks were expecting, it's certainly deeper than any other RPG of its type out there, though I do believe you need a chunk of imagination to play these kind of games in the first place, to fill in the blanks as it were. As with Morrowind, and Daggerfall before it, you kinda get out what you put in.

So anyways now it's monday morning and I am seriously thinking of doing some last minute holiday booking so I can get back to the game. I think that says it all

[Mazy]

Looking at the ingame timer it says Ive played for around 26 hours now !

Totally love it now, I admit that I've had somewhat deluded expectations and that it takes a while to get used to the way the game works. However when you're really into its an awesome game, been trying to get into the main quests again but I keep finding some Inn where some folks are having problems sending me in another way, quite awesome . Theres also a tremendous amount of variation in the different quests. Although you get those generic "go kill stuff in a cave" quests from time to time then Im quite impressed with the degree of variation in the quests, also by the number of them.

Something Ive been thinking about regarding getting into the game and my hard startup is that this really is a game that in general feels amazing. Problem is, like many say about their fears of photorealism in games, rather than making things more believable it outlines the limitations and the things that are wrong, where as games today generally leave alot to the imagination of the player. I think this somehow goes with Oblivion as well (Not that it looks photorealistic, obviously ) because it felt like a really cool place, but the constant strange actions of NPCs and that kind of stuff sort of breaks the illusion and in my case made the game less appealing. However once you realize whats messed up and live with it you can continue dwelving into the world.

Oh yeah, anybody else had the "bug" where pair of NPCs in Inns and such have the exactly same conversation at once? So you hear the exact same dialogue being spoken pretty much at once by 4 NPCs? . I've had around 6 of those so far

Oh and for those that complain of its obvious consoley feel, I've tried both the PC and 360 version and I honestly think the 360 plays better. Even though you sometimes have to point you view very carefully to pick up a small item then it works really well. The PC is obviously better in this, but I found the menus horrible to navigate, where as they're freaking fast when you're used to them on the 360.

Oh yeah I'm also getting pretty owned at the moment, lots of Minotaurs and Trolls are starting to appear and they just rip me to threads in no time. Good thing I got myself a über fast 5000 gold horsie so I can run away from them

Yikes I need to talk more and work less...or the other way around :G

[Hourences]

Im at 24 hours playing right now and its still awesome. I found my horse back and figured out how the locked doors bug works so I can get around

it

Beat the main quest and several other guild/other quests and now going to try and level up a lot before i go in the land and start exploring all the dungeons and stuff on my own

Wonderfull stuff

[Mazy]

Btw, maybe its just because I'm not playing a very stealthy character, but how the hell do you steal stuff without being confronted by guards right after? Even when you're in a totally remote and concealed place they figure out you stole something. Do you need to be in stealth mode/crotch or what?

[Marcos]

Mazy: I dont know if it has the same system of stealing like Morrowind did, but there you had to crouch, point at the item you wanted to steal, and wait for the "steal item" icon was shown to the buttom left of your hood. And yes, sneak skill will improve your ability to steal and aslo do critical damage

BTW, just bought a new PC (so I could play this game) Wonder if anyone got about the same speccs as me, and how the game runs?

AMD 64 X2 4200+

gForce 7600GT

1GB RAM 400hz

ESC Extreme MB

450W Power supply

Thanks

[ctswin]

Oh and for those that complain of its obvious consoley feel, I've tried both the PC and 360 version and I honestly think the 360 plays better. Even though you sometimes have to point you view very carefully to pick up a small item then it works really well. The PC is obviously better in this, but I found the menus horrible to navigate, where as they're freaking fast when you're used to them on the 360.

Console menus horrible to navigate on a PC but fine on a 360? Fancy that! Dunno why they couldn't give PC users the option to customise it without mods.

I think PC users have a right to complain, it is obviously imo an interface designed for console use and why they haven't given pc users an alternate mode or something that takes advantage of the pc is beyond me.

I hate to use the words dying etc when it comes to PCs but if we keep getting console stuff that isn't suited to the pc (some stuff works fine) there will be problems ahead, the pc just needs a little tlc, you're not limited to 10 or so buttons on a joypad, you've got a keyboard and mouse, lemme use it!

(thank god for the 12 item inventory)

so far, a fine game let down by some stuff, including menu and level scaling.

[InsaneSingingBlender]

man this game is awesome. the dark brotherhood/black hand quests are the most fun quests ever in any game. i love being a ninja.