BlameThePixel!

I've noticed that a lot of BTP users been playing Oblivion for some time now, yet noone commented about the game that was hyped over so much during the past year. What do you think of it, now that you've seen and played it for yourself? Are the reviewers giving the game 110/100 and saying it's sure to get GOTY right, in your opinion? What do you like, and what annoys the hell out of you in the game others call "perfect with a few minor issues"?

Also, the game is pretty much all about mods. Mods patch up the countless bugs, holes and imbalances in the game, add content and generally improve the game alot. However, it's somewhat hard to find good mods amongst hundreds of ones that just add imbalance to the game, cause problems, or are generally useless. What mods do you use and could suggest to others?

You can hide the whatpule icons in the systray. Right click and empty space on the windows toolbar>>properties>>customize button>>select whatpulse to hide.

so far I'm really enjoying the game. the character customization has always been a favorite thing of mine and they added to it in this installation. granted, the changing of looks doesn't add anything to the game, really, but it IS nice not to have to deal with an ugly character at least.

the gameplay is about the same as morrowind, which is fine by me because I loved that game too, so having a new story line with an equally good gaming experience is pretty good IMO.

I bought a new X1600 video card for this game and I've recently upgraded quite a few other components on my computer, so I'm enjoying the game on High ! the graphics are REALLY nice and just add to the greatness of the gameplay.

overall, I'd say this game lives up to the hype and is an equally good game as morrowind just with an improvement in graphics.


....I do miss my levitation spell, though....

Personally, Oblivion dissapointed me somewhat. Initially, the game overwhelmed me and i throughoutly enjoyed every moment of it, spent literally hours doing pointless things and just messing around (like, breaking into houses and stealing things, exploring the world, doing dungeons, etc). Then i started doing the quests, and the ones i bumped into turned out to be, by pure chance, the most interesting and best worked out questlines in the game...


Then, the game's charm started to fade. The quests left (main quest, Fighters'/Mages' guild quests, etc) were almost all boring (they all fit into generic formulas, such as "go to x/kill y/get z and return to me"), and as such got horribly repetitive. The game's countless amounts of bugs, even though mostly small ones, harmed the overall feeling of being a character in the game world somewhat.


The "revolutionary" Radiant AI turned out to be incredibly stupid - in big battles, at least half of the enemies always focus on you, ignoring your companions, and those soldiers that are supposed to act like tanks and keep them off you, just keep bouncing from target to target, not covering you from the mobs' retaliation at all; the boasts about "every NPC leading his own independent life" turned out to be bs - an NPC exits it's house, walks around a small area of land having conversations with every other NPC it meets that make no sense whatsoever (they exchange sentences unrelated to each other and leave), goes into another house, sits there for up to 8 (!) ingame hours, then just goes into his home and often, instead of sleeping, just freezes in the middle of a room until dawn...


Another thing i didn't like was the level scaling system. It's like communism - perfect on paper, yet horrible in implementation. When you level up, everything around you changes to match your character's stats. While this allows you clear out any area at any level with ease(you can even defeat the last boss while level 10!), it means nothing ever changes - fights don't become stronger or weaker, you'll have as much trouble beating a skeleton at level 50 as at level 5 - the fights don't change a bit over the whole course of the game, there's no strategy involved - you attack, block/dodge the enemy attack, attack again, drink potion, block, attack, and so on. Repeat until game completed. While that's not considered hack-n-slash, it gets horribly boring doing the same thing with the 1000th monster you fight as with all 999 before him.

The fact that you can't shape your class into another one during the game also adds to it. Once you've chosen to be melee in the beginning of the game, no matter how much you improve your magic-related stats (Intelligence/Willpower), you will never become a proper mage - spells that actually damage the enemy a lot, heal a lot of health or provide any other feelable benefits, will consume your whole mana bar at one cast, and it's back to the fighting formula i mentioned higher.


The loot tables kill any point there might be in clearing dungeons or doing tough and time consuming quests - you may take an hour to get to the end of a big dungeon, only to find pitifully weak/outdated gear at the end that you won't have use for anymore, but the randomly spawned bandit outside in the forest will have the latest enchanted gear with wildly powerful bonuses.


The game world aside from towns and unique quest locations deserves a separate mention - when Bethesda said most of the outside world is randomly generated, you thought it was a good thing, right? While the randomized forests do look absolutely spectacular even on medium graphics settings, they get boring really fast, since there's no objects of interest in them that would make them worth exploring - enourmously huge areas, randomly filled with a dozen different models of trees and randomly spawned bandits and forest animals occupy most of the game world, and aside from an occasional village, manor or dungeon placed in the wilderness, that's all - just trees...

Dungeons themselves show off the designers' lazyness - once you've seen one ruined fort, you've seen them all; once you've been in one set of elven ruins, you know how others will look like - the same assortmend of doodads, textures and objects are used for all dungeons of a type, only their placement and structure of the dungeons differ.

This also partially applies to planes of Oblivion - while each plane is different by the positioning of towers and what's required to reach the final chamber, the same set of models of ruins and doodads is placed randomly around the landscape, shaping your way to the tower. Which means, in the end, all planes of Oblivion are the same - nothing aside from the main tower's final chamber is worth your attention, and you can pretty much even run to it without entering any other buildings or attacking anything, since there's nothing else to explore anyway.

And finally, there's the weird interface.
Long time ago, Bethesda promised that it's game will be developed separatevely for the consoles and the PC, with the interface in each version being optimized for the platform it will be released on.
They ended up just porting the XBOX version to the PC, which resulted in the horrible interface you see in the game - awfully small inventory window, where you need to scroll for a few minutes to find something you need; a custom hotkey system which is well optimized for consoles(there's no other way to add hotkeys on consoles, simply enough), but looks like something from the stone age to people who played RPGs on the PC - only 8 slots to ease your digging thru the inventories, which are uncomfortable to bind and use, esspecially for spells.
In fact, a fitting name for the interface would be "A Mage's Nightmare" - instead of the usual hotkey bar on the screen that allows you to, say, quickly cast some buffs on yourself and your allies in mid-combat and cast an offensive spell by clicking the apropportiate spell icons from the bar, you must select each spell first, then cast it with the "Cast" key.
All other single player RPG games(like Gothic, Fable, etc) had simple and easy to use interfaces, why did Bethesda insisted to be original and make something barely usable instead of just using time-proven ideas?...




Edit: Woah, i wanted it to be a small rant, and it turned out to be more like a huge complaint letter. Sorry for that, i just wanted to "let the steam out"

yes, Bethesda Softworks tend to do that a lot.