Well, I finally finished the last quest in the thieves guild and picked up the last achievement for Oblivion, and I gotta say, I like the game, but I honestly don't ever want to play it again. Ever.
Honestly, after a year or so of playing games like WoW, (and I use the word game loosely) I'd almost forgotten what a real quest in an rpg was, one that didn't require you to just kill 25 bugbears or whatever nearby and kill the same monster a thousand times over to level.
That said, there are a great many things that mar Oblivion painfully and ultimately leave it vastly inferior to its predecessor Morrowind.
Level scaling has got to be the most terrible idea Belthesda has ever dreamed up and refused to let go of even though it's widely regarded as the worst aspect of their games. Rather than scaling your character to his environment by leveling him up through your actions, the game scales the environment to you as you level, the end result is that under ideal circumstances the game stays the same difficulty from start to finish.
But in reality, since you level by using your skills, you'll quickly find yourself vastly outclassed by your enemies, if your leveling skills are the abilities you use most frequently. Level scaling was in morrowind, but your stats rose a lot faster between levels, so it wasn't a burden if you played however you felt like.
The whole idea is fucking moot anyways, because it's one of the only games I know of that actually features a difficulty slider ranging between +100 (impossible) and -100 (piss easy).
The magic system is much less interesting and varied, as well as much more difficult to acess fully without gimping your character in all other regards.
The stealth system is horribly broken, as for instance, killing a person in a sealed room after stealthing up behind him, alerts the guards immediately if you fail to kill him/her in one hit.
The AI is horribly stupid. Granted the AI wasn't great in Morrowind either, but Morrowind didn't make a huge stink about how great the AI was. No AI that routinely runs between you and your target mid axe swing is great.
Also, the graphics, while fantastically bueatiful, are flavorless and bland, as well as incredibly laggy. I mean seriously, this brings me to an old gripe I've had for awhile now, what ever happened to the days where it mattered more that the game ran smoothly than it looked pretty? Comparing morrowind to oblivion is sort of like comparing world of warcraft to everquest, sure the graphics in wow are terrible, but they have character, and flavor, while the graphics in everquest are better, they look like they were drawn by some high school kid during lunch break, and are horribly unoptimized.
Take for instance fast travel, yeah I think being able to go anywhere you've been before is sweet, but I think they just threw it in because they couldn't think of anything as origional as the silt strider transport system from morrowind, or the mark and recall spells, now those were handy, I miss those.
The saving grace of the entire game was the shivering isles expansion, because it reminded me more of morrowind in art and style.
Also, the game fucking crashes occassionaly (constantly on the PC). On a console? Goddamn, I remember back in the day you'd get laughed into the fucking dark ages if you made a game for a console that crashed at all.
Bottomline? It's a good game, but Morrowind is still better. I knew this the moment I watched two guards spout the same conversation at eachother. "I'm looking for heronymous lex" they both say to eachother, and then turn to me and say "can you help me find heronymous lex?"
The story is pretty good though I must admit, if you can stick with it.
Also, Patrick Stewart dies like 15 minutes into the game.
Y'know how cell phones have all sorts of cameras and games and gps systems and internet browsers on them now but the actual phone part of them is somehow inferior to a phone that is just a phone? Yeah Oblivion is sorta like that. All this extra stuff is cool, but I think somewhere they forgot why the elder scrolls games were so good to begin with.
Hal
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