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A step backwards fo TES and RPGs

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 18 / 28
Date: September 18, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is terrible. It's impossibly easy and not really fun so much as you just want to beat it to see what happens. The not fun factor stems from four important problems with this game.

1. Leveled Items / Leveled Monsters - This is the worst idea ever. How they ever decided to include this and not alienate true fans of ES is beyond me. Hey lets make all the creatures in game be relatively the same level as the player. Let's negate any incentive to level up to have to beat anything. The funnest part of Morrowind was realizing you stumbled into an area that was too tough to handle and then either dieing or realizing you should come back. THIS CANT HAPPEN IN OBLIVION. The only things you cant do in oblivion at lvl 1 are the Daedra quests. Also, you cant get any items that are too powerful for you. Again lets point to Morrowind. The first time you discovered that you could break into the Redoran bank vault and get awesome stuff at a low level was like hitting the jackpot. Guess what, little treasures like that, that you may or may not ever find depending on if you read spoilers, don't appear in Oblivion, anywhere.

2. Fast Travel - Oh hey if ive been somewhere and I get the marker on my map I can instantly go back there again! Thats total crap. You basically never ever have to wander through the world and get to somewhere because youve almost always been somewhere close before. And almost everything is pretty close to a town (which you can go to from wherever without having been there). Way to eliminate the whole fun of exploration! The travel system should have been exactly like Morrowind. Why they changed it is beyond me. You should only be able to travel between towns instantly, and if you were so inclined use the bind/recall spells. You should not be able to go anwywhere youve been before from anywhere else.

3. Dungeons - All the dungeons in this game (except those related to a quest) are almost exactly the same. They have zero personality. Oh hey lets go into a random old fort that has 1 of 4 sets of different bad guys in it (animals, undead, or mages/necros, goblins) with a basically randomly generated layout. HOW FUN! NOT! None of these non-quest dungeons has anything interesting about them. Again, Morrowind, was 10 times better in this category.

4. Factions - In Oblivion, any player can join any faction. So if you are a mage character and all you do is cast spells, for some reason you can still join the fighters guild and advance all the way up to Guildmaster. You can even join all the factions you want to! In Morrowind, you had to get the right skills up and have the right skills to even get in to the faction, let alone progress through the ranks. I spent alot of time planning my characters skills at creation so I would get into the factions I wanted. Even then, once you picked one of the houses, you could not join the other 2. Also, in Morrowind, there were more factions to join so this lead to people to play the game over and over just so they could experience all the factions with different play styles. Oblivion is just so not fun in the regard. There is no reason why my player should be allowed to be head of the fighters/mages/thieves/and dark brotherhood without having extremely high skill levels in skills that are important to each!

This game is a step backwards for the Elder Scrolls and RPG's in general. That all being said, the game has spectacular sound and graphics, and the day/night cycles for the NPC's are a good addition but has been done before.

No action... nothing but a bunch of running and empty space

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 19
Date: October 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Man, did this game not deliver or what?!?!?

I was extremely excited to get this game and after a good hour, was out of the first dungeon and off to explore...well... nothing but endless landscape of bore. It takes 30 minutes to find anything to do, mind you, 29 of those minutes is checking doors, buildings, and rooms with nothing of interest what so ever. I understand "finding the action" is part of the experience of being in a fantasy world but this game takes it way too far. I played the game for a good 4 hours, encountering a total of 27 monsters (18 of which are annoying rats) but more importantly, only 16 minutes of that was action, 19 minutes was searching for loot (the fun kind of searching), and the other 3 hours and 25 minutes was RUNNING AROUND DOING NOTHING!!!!

Geez. What a stupid game.

Tech support

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 20
Date: September 25, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is great, reinstalling video card drivers over and over, talking to tech support over and over, searching the net for clues to what's wrong with the game - like why is the world completely white? or why is it completely black? or why does my computer crash every time I get to Weynon Priory?

They tried to make the most graphically intensive game of all time and what they made was one of the most unstable.

You can't return it after you buy it, so don't buy it.

Severely Overhyped

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 10, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I really wouldn't call TES 4 Obivion an RPG. Hardly. It's more like an FPS that caters to the desires of 1337 n00b pwned hax0rs. This is a massive slash at the rep of Bethesda for me.

First on the agenda is the main storyline. It is ungodly easy, and can be completed in under 30 hours if you want to. Remember Final Fantasy 7? Even so, the storyline isn't that good, and is so trite and predictable it's not even funny.

The side quests are just as bad,or even worse. These are definitely even more trite, being so unbelievably cliche. They're unoriginal, even sinking as low as to take the Lovecraftian story "Shadow over Insmouth," copy and paste it into the game.

The world in oblivion is minature, yet they have fast travel. Literally, I could travel from the southernmost city to the northernmost city in a few minutes. But who wants to do THAT? Nooooo. We can FAST TRAVEL! I just can't see it in the Oblivion world. it's way too small. But of course, people complained over and over about in Morrowind you had to run everywhere. I can see fast travel in Daggerfall, but the world in Daggerfall was mega-massive. MEGA-MASSIVE.

Periodically, over the small map, you'll see "Imperial Forts" and "Caves." For God's sake, every fort is the same as the next, and same with the caves. In Morrowind, you could enjoy yourself exploring caves, but they were different. In Oblivion,I've seen one cool cave. Thats it.

Everybody remember how there was one set of Daedric armor in Morrowind? NOT IN OBIVION!! Since theres LEVELED MONSTERS...you can get DAEDRIC ARMOR off of a MARAUDER! Come on. Seriously. Daedric weapons? Armor? That stuff should be rare, or at least mega expensive. And if you gant Glass armor(Alien Green UFO suit.) All you have to do is kill a few bandits. It really makes me sick.

I could ramble on and on about this.
It's way overrated.
So if you enjoy actual storyline instead of hack n' slash, avoid this.

Boring

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 13 / 37
Date: December 13, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Its a beautifully rendered world. I saved many screenshots. But the game gets very boring after a few days. This game has everything, horses, individual armors, unique weapons, etc. But what it doesn't have is sustainable fun. You can sneak around and steal the world blind, but 98% of the things to steal is cheese, apples and clay servingware. Ok yes, that is what makes up 98% of the items in a RL house, but if Real Life was exciting we wouldn't be playing RPGs. The little pocket hells that you have to enter are repetitive, and have very little good loot (what it has is heavy and undervalued considering the items come from demons).

ESIII has poorer graphics (cuz its older duh!), but a better story and better NPCs. The problem is, I don't have an alternative to suggest since Gothic 3 and NWN2 are also disappointing. At least this still has the unrestricted travel.

Good but has many flaws

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 21
Date: April 26, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I played the game for around 300 hours so the game is fun but......
Bethesda game support is not responding to my questions.
Right now I am having a video problem that certain moving things in the game are almost completely frozen the frame rate is near zero yet I can do all the normal stuff like fight. Examples of frozen things are: the fountain of blood, the wisps of fire from the lava, the smoke trail from spells and the elevators in the oblivion halls.
I have had many other problems the worst being saved games not saving and game crashing on exit and right now the game exits to the desktop for no reason with no errors. I just played Fear with no problems so it has to be a result of poor programmers.

Here is a list of the flaws that I have found so far.

1. The worst omission of the programmers in the game is that there is no damage meter enemy for the enemy so you do not know the effect your attack is having.
2. The close up maps in the caves are not very easy to read because you can't tell where one level starts and stops when they overlap.
3. The icons that show what damage is being done to you via spells etc. are not very intuitive.
4. In the menus the scroll line is too close to the items so is is easy to accidentally push in item and active it instead of scrolling.
5. The menus show all items in one place but would be nice tom see what is currently being worn grouped together because it is hard to find since the list can get so long.
6. No option to delete some of the saved games.
7. Sometimes maps are not filled in.
8. No magic bags to lighten load as in most other RPG games.
9. Can't shoot arrows through obviously big enough openings.
10. Almost impossible to find certain flowers that are needed in such a large world and not much fun to try.
11. Zoomed out map needs to zoom out a lot more.
12. Enemies attack seems predestined to hit even though you move or try to move you can't get out of the way.
13. Raising your shield seems to procrastinate.
14. Hard to tell how much magic a certain item has on self or weapon. Which magic effects can compound?
15. Bodies and weapons dropped vibrate and jump when you are near them.
16. The whole bribe thing is hard to figure out.
17. Lock picking is way too hard and lock picks are hard to come by.
18. Sometimes enemy can hit you through walls etc.
19. Enemy keeps talking even after dead.
20. What good does it do to level up when enemies just level up with you.
21. Dropped items can get stuff in mid air and when you try to get them you just walk right through them.
22. Wraiths get stuck in walls and can not be interacted with.
23. There are no directions on how to cure vampirism.
24. Sometimes if you jump you hit your head on something that is not there but close by.
25. Items shot or thrown can change directions when you do.

PC Version: Made for screen shot marketing

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 17
Date: March 21, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Pretty graphics, no art. Looks nice but playability sucks. Terrible keyboard controls, requires multiple clicks from scrolling lists to do simple things like cast a spell. Quests confusing, sometimes screen pixel hunt and click required. Very limited, laughable, quick key assignment. Can't even bring up the area map with a single click/key!!! No personal journaling or marking maps on this huge game area. Wait for it on the $9.99 rack, or maybe user content will make something of it. Seems like a great graphics engine with little RPG behind it. Seems very much designed by committee with features removed when anyone didn't like it. Get NeverWinter Nights 1 instead.

Update after about 50 hours into it: The inside caves, it seems, are made of a very limited tile set. There is a narrow tunnel, an open cave, and open cave with upper shelves on each side, or a cave with an above cross-over. Textures are cut stone, some are rough stone, but the shapes are the same. Very boring, you now know where to look for the monsters. Guess console players are less demanding. Too much money went into the cut scenes, not enough into the RPG engine.

Just not my kind of game

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: January 05, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I tried hard to want to play this game. Like all RPGs, you have to endure some measure of tediousness. You have to fight a lot of battles to advance your character. This aspect of the game doesn't bother me. What I don't like is the transformation of the RPG from a 2D turn-based genre into a 3D first/third-person shooter genre, of which Oblivion is by far the best example. While the physics in Oblivion are much better than those in Morrowind, I still don't like the feel of 3D pseudo-medieval, melee combat. Range and sneak attacks are fun and tense, but melee combat is block-hack-and-slash. On the contrary, I like the 3D action of shooters like the Unreal and Quake series. I don't know what it is, but something is missing from Oblivion, and I simply don't believe the melee encounters.

My PC is no slouch. I can run Oblivion with decent textures and effects and at a good resolution. But it bothers me that with a system beyond the recommended requirements, I still have to sacrifice to play the game: I don't get all of the pretty details, can't see to the maximum distance, and no matter what settings I use, certain vistas and battles always lower the frame rate noticeably. It's just not very fun to play a game that suffocates itself from time to time. I imagine I would like Oblivion much better on a console rather than on the PC, where the frame rate is more consistent and the graphics are much, much higher and cleaner.

Oblivion really is quite an achievement in gaming--the graphics, sound, voice acting, writing, and especially the music are all fantastic--but consider that it does suck large blocks of time out of your life. That kind of gaming isn't for me anymore. When I was a kid, time was unlimited, but as I have aged, I've become much more selective about the games I play. Oblivion is a serious game, and I'm no longer a serious gamer. I play for stupid fun, not immersion. Before you buy Oblivion, ask yourself what kind of gamer you are. The answer will be a more significant factor in how much you will enjoy the game than the high quality of the game itself.

Good but shorter than expected

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 9
Date: August 13, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Before I got this game I was heavily addicted to Morrowind. Once I finally got this game and played for a while I was disapointed somewhat. After about 9 hours of gameplay I was already the Grey Fox(Grandmaster of the Thieves Guild) and there were very little missions to complete. In Morrowind after at least 20 hours of gameplay I am probably half done with thieves guild missions. I have noticed on walkthrough websites that the number of quests in the game for each section of it(including Main quest) is between 10-15 quests. The graphics are great but It is just not as long as Morrowind.

Fun, but gets a little boring after awhile.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: September 05, 2007
Author: Amazon User

A lot of fun, but I'm getting burned out on it, and I haven't finished it. And I also have the expansion which I haven't even started. I may take a break from the game before I do. Again, it's fun, I just don't think it has the lasting power that some other games do. I've been playing with some of the mod files that people post on the internet which has made it a little more interesting.
If you get it, hold off on the expansion to make sure you still want to play it by the time you finish the original. You may find yourself like me, burned out on it, and not sure you really want to start the expansion....

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