Do not get me wrong I liked Oblivion but here I want to list some things it lacked and Bethesda hopefully changed in Skyrim.

First nearly nothing felt unique in Oblivion. The Creatures dungeons and locations all felt computer generated and generally they were.

Second the landscape was lame just green hills with trees it was too open. I don't know how to describe it but it was too easy to go straightforward to every spot you want. There were no natural barriers that force you to skirt around and therefore exploring never felt like "wow I've never been here" but like "hey I walked half an hour but everything looks the same and I saw this spot from my starting point anyway". I never felt like an adventure it always felt the same Cyrodill was just too plain.

Third it often lacked the right flair it was a bit too bright and clean and the NPC's felt not very individual in their habit.

With all this Oblivion never felt very unique compared to Morrowind or my favorite RPG Gothic (the old series). There you walked through a valley and encountered a broken cart plundered by bandits the owner nailed with arrows to a tree some loot laying around left by the marauders. You couldn't walk straight ahead because there were lots of plateaus and so everything felt bigger.
Or you entered a cave near some orcish camp and found a diary of someone who described his last days surrounded by orcs. That's what I call an adventure. And when you come to town behind a house you see the smith working on his anvil telling you he's busy at he moment some others are talking in a very vulgar voice about the situation an so on.

Some of this seems to be fixed by Bethesda. I really liked the scene with the windmill and the men chopping wood or so it really looked alive. Also the few insights into the game gave me a good feeling about the landscape it looked more handcrafted and interesting to explore.
I hope you understand what I mean. I bet there will be some replies like " then go play Gothic" or the like but I really liked Oblivion the gameplay was the best I've ever had in a RPG. Now I wanna know how you feel about this issues.

In regards to uniqueness, Oblivion had two big problems:
1. It was very generic. Not only was the environment very clean, green and plain, the quests were also predictable.
2. There was a strong sense of morality in the game (morality: principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior). All of the characters were either good (knight in shinning armor) or evil (sterotypical cartoon villain), especially the main quest. The characters were either white, or black; there were no gray areas. (The Dark Brotherhood quests were a breath of fresh air because the characters and their quests in it had gray areas, and were believable as a result.)

These two problems go hand in hand. The real world is not white and black, but full of gray areas. So in order to make characters more believable and unique, give them gray areas thus making them believable.

"The fish in the pond can only truly survive if the water is slightly murky. Clear water will be the death of them."

Wow, I've never read this before

Indeed, there are possibly hundreds of threads just like this one. :shrug:

Can't say I had the same experience, but I'm not really that concerned either way, they say they have volcanic tundra, and icy glacier areas.

I get what your saying, but that was 5 years, only just after the release of the next gen consoles, and then it was a pretty awesome effort on the landscape, im sure Skyrim will be 10x better.

Yep, back in 2006 Cyrodiil was beautiful.

I didn't say it wasn't beautiful, i said it was generic, as in plain.

Im sure they will fix the "plainness" of Much of Cyrodil. Remember they didnt have as much time with OB as they do with Skyrim. OB came out as a release title or damn near release with the 360 they didnt have as much experience with the hardware.

The quests in Oblivion (some of them, anyway) were pretty standard. Otherwise I liked the world in Oblivion. When it first came out it looked amazing, and I actually think it still does when I'm replaying it (waiting for Skyrim). :dance:

What do you mean oblivion was replay able? It was not like there was much to miss on the first play through. Oblivion gave us that rather lame quest system where people did not even need to read anything. Had no role play what so ever. Talk to random npc hit 1 alot then go to the nice shiny waypoint marker on your compase. Kill mob or grab item. Return to quest giver and repeat. I hope they bring back the actual quest system from morrowind and daggerfall. I do not want another baby's first rpg like Oblivion/fallout. 1 was bad enough let alone 3 games that was a cake walk. It was less of a game and more like a long interactive movie. There was no exploring. There was no roleplay. It was just this badly made game that people who can not read loved to death. I want to be exploring the world. Finding dungeons. Spending countless hours tring to complete said quest. Not spend 60 dollars on a game I will beat in a few hours.

Nice spot of Oblivion bashing time.

Carry on folks, its only been done 600001 times.

Wow harsh. I loved oblivion and I can even read.

Completely agree with the OP, although this thread has been made about 500 times per year since mid 2007. We know.

Well at least it's not a "Oblivon is unimaginative, generic fantasy, we want Morrowind again..." type of complaining...

A few simple things..

1 ob took place in the heart of the empire... filled with imperials. Thats about as unwild as you can get.

2 Imperials are by thier nature BORING.

3 Everything realy interesting that may have ever crawled around the lands there was hunted by the legions LONG ago. What was left was what crawled back...

4 Ob did have different landscapes.. mountains wetlands grasslands and such.. but it was..... as if they set it to 3 and not 11;/ Everything was a bit too tame a but too normal. Way too average. The mountains werent mountainy enough the wetlands werent wet enough... graslands were grassy enough tho.... forests were... not very foresty.. and so on.

Now its ok to have a game with epic open vistas.. but they have to be epic.. as in freaking HUGE to make that work... ob is small far too small to pull that off. I think thats something bethesda did learn.. the more open the map the FAR FAR larger it has to be.

Interestingly, forum polls prior to the announcement of Oblivion showed Cyrodiil as the favored location for the next game. Go figure!

I agree that the OP is late to the party, but I've actually been thinking a lot lately about just how dark I like games to be. I loved the moral ambiguities of Morrowind, but really don't enjoy constantly being backed into corners where all the options are bad. Having to make occasional tough choices makes for memorable moments. Being constantly surrounded by unpleasant people and challenged to choose the least negative solution is more wearing than stimulating, at least for me.

Sure Oblivion had some down sides, but what game doesn't. I enjoyed it. I liked the landscape and the way it looked. Perfect for what it was meant to be. Why do so many people like darker, grittier tones anyway? I had fun. And screw those dark brotherhood fools. Bunch of idiots really. Thought they were so good, until I took them out.

I have to agree with some of the other people in this thread. I understand what you're saying about the scenery being "generic", but did you feel that way when the game first released back in 2006? Well, I didn't. At the time, I thought that the world of Oblivion was the most beautiful, wonderfully crafted scenery I have seen in a video-game. Sure, looking back at it now, it does look "generic".

On to the second half though. I have no doubt that the world of Skyrim will be exquisite, especially in comparison to Oblivion.

Post like this really annoy me. The reason Morrowind felt more unique then Oblivion was the setting. BGS didn't try and make Oblivion more polished and less unique they made the game to fit the province in which it was set. Morrowind was set in Morrowind; a province dominated by dark elves. Thus the culture, people and architecture had elvish influence which gave it a more unique feel. Oblivion was set in Cyrodill, a province of Imperials. It made perfect sense that it was polished and the culture and architecture be human influenced. It made sense that there wasnt a town built into the trees like in Morrowind. It made sense that the races were more refined because the culture is refined. By doing this it felt less unique because it looked and felt like our own human culture in europe in the dark/middle ages, and like other games set in this time period. Im not saying that you should like one over the other, thats all about personal taste. Im just saying that there is nothing to "fix". For Skyrim they will do the same thing, make the game fit the province in which it is set. It will be heavily nodic influenced, alot grittier then Cyrodill, with alot of elven history.

I understand, being a huge Gothic fan myself. I felt this too, that Oblivion sacrificed a lot of adventuring features and Todd recently admitted this too. I think this was the downside of trying to bring more action into Tes. From what we know so far about Skyrim, I think Tes is leaning towards the old sense of culture and exploration we had in Morrowind. Better topography, handmade landscapes and dungeons, a story that implies studying the dragons and their language, civil war, professions, all make me think Skyrim will have more depth than Oblivion.

Because of the lack of unique dungeons and lack of hand placed items, because humanoid NPC's respawned and were generic (nameless) Oblivion sorely lacked not only replayabliity but also playability.
There was no point in doing most quests until level 30 because of the horrible levelling system and then by lvl 32 you had done all the quests and it was basically game over.
On Morrowind you could still clear dungeons and look for hand placed unique goodies then.
I sure hope this is gone in Skyrim.

I also utterly disliked the speechcraft and security minigames as they are not RPG. They should depend on character skills, not how well I push a button.
I hope this is changed.

Oblivion lacked decent graphics. Every suit of armour looked like a fat suit. Glass, daedric and ebony looked better in Morrowind.
Morrowind also had more unique models for things like soul gems. Not only torches for light, but also lamps and candles. Etc. Like in Daggerfall, Oblivion used one dimensional models for things like shrubbery.
I hope the graphic quality in Skyrim is more like Morrowind.

Spellmaking was utterly stunted compared to previous games, and rumours say spellmaking is out completely in Skyrim and this is a very bad thing.

Quests lacked engagement, lacked moral ambiguity and lacked choices on how to finish them.
I hope this is changed and that the quest marker is out. Id like to see more decent puzzles too, like in Vathacen's secret.

Immortal NPC's. Apart from being a total immersion killer you instantly knew wich NPC was important for future quests, wich made the game.. smaller, less interesting.
This needs to go.

Another major irritant were the 'manuals or armour and manuals of weapons' that were utterly ubiquitous.
Put this in the manual. Total immersion killer, and very badly written. (orcish is not a metal.)
They need to go.

Yeah your right if you mean it fits the lore, but then the lore should fit the game. What I mean is I wouldn't create a game that's based on a story which is like "and then there were 1000 years of piece and friendship between all people". It would just be boring so the argument doesn't count for me the game.
I'm exaggerating here to clarify my position. I'm not saying that Cyrodill was a lame country or so but if there's a place were all people are nice to each other in Tamriel it would not make sense to set the plot there.
And I think Cyrodill had much potential just because it's the most civilized region doesn't mean that everything is polished. The nobles could intrigue against each other like they did in the dark/middle ages. for me it never looked like the "dark/middle ages" anyway. Then it should be dark not bright and clean it should be full of dirty streets and narrow lanes leading from the main street to the shady quarters of the cities.
Just my opinion on a great game that could be even greater for me:D

You totally got what I was talking about and I also think that the landscape and the dungeons are much better now. But I'm scared about the NPC's and hope they gonna be believable interesting characters.

But Oblivion is not a medieval game. Not even close.
I do not understand why people see a sword or a bow and then instantly go: medieval. Or why they always ignore the fantasy elements in these arguments.
First of all, Its fantasy and fantasy and medieval are not the same by a long shot.

Furthermore, the level of technology that Oblivion did have was much closer to our renessaince than our medieval times.
They have advanced glassmaking, advanced architecture and a myriad of other things that our medieval times simply lacked.