Why do a lot of hardcoe TES gamers hate oblivion? Sure, it doesn't have werewolves, but I don't see what's wrong with TES: IV

It's not that it lacks Werewolves, it's that it's been... dumbified, so to speak.

Let's check off the results of this dumbification, shall we?

1. Quest Markers- You're basically having your hand held throughout the game. Some take this as Bethesda saying that gamers are stupid and can't figure out things on their own.
2. Fast Travel- Makes it easier to "skip" areas of the game. Combined with the lack of more conventional pay-for-travel, many players feel they are "forced" to use it, or that it breaks Immersion.
3. Spears, or lack thereof- NO SPEARS!
4. Crossbows, or lack thereof- NO CROSSBOWS!
5. Story- Compared to Morrowind, the story of Oblivion is far more straightforward. Oblivion, belive it or not, is actually the outlier for this. Daggerfall's MQ had more twists and options than you can shake a stick at.
6. NPC Interaction- NPCs tend to have a lot less to say about quests, and they tend to blur together unless they have a Quest Marker or you follow their daily schedule.
7. Stores- Tell me again why stores have an infinite amount of barter gold, but will only pay, say, up to 800-1000 gold per item?
8. Setting- Allright, Cyrodiil is mostly jungle, according to in-game lore! *plays TES:IV* Wait a minute...

Basically, Oblivion was tweaked for mass audiences, not the Core TES fans. Of course, if Bethesda catered only to the Core TES fans, there wouldn't be a Bethesda to make games.

Hmmmmm... I see where you are coming from but TES: IV was my first and last game. I would get the other games but I don't think they do them for mac.

Not many games can run on a Mac... it might be because Windows users makes up roughly 95% of the computer market. Have you tried getting a Windows emulator for your Mac? That should trick games into playing on your Mac, though there may be more bug issues...

You don't need an emulator. Macs can be set up to dual-boot - either Windows or Mac OSX.

Someone stole the thoughts out of my head!

But yes, precisely. I wouldn't call myself "hardcoe", but to me Oblivion isn't interesting or immersive unmodded. It's just so boring that I wouldn't be playing it almost five years after it's release without mods. Hell, I probably wouldn't have been playing it half a year after release. Modded it's a good game, but still not a "great" game, unless someone went and replaced all the NPCs and their dialog, all the essential characters, all the terrain and got rid of quest markers and fast travel, then rewrote parts of the MQ and made it available for download.

I know I can just not fast travel or I can roleplay so heavily that's it not even Cyrodiil anymore or something, but that doesn't mean the quest markers and fast travel aren't there. The base of Oblivion is good, but it could be so much more. And that's what bothers me. But with mods, it ranks in my favorite 10 games of all time.

So it's all good!

I love both Oblivion and Morrowind. Oblivion has a great combat system (block, magic, bow, drawing and sheathing the weapon etc) but a really horrible faction base.
The Guild quests have a lot to answer for.....

OB changed a lot of stuff, so really it's not about hardcoe gamers, it's about fans. You wont notice much of the complaints if OB is the first TES game you play, precisely because it's mostly in relation to the past games that the faults occur. But really it happens between every game, Daggerfall fans complained a lot about morrowind, and so it continues.

Then there's the fact that to some people it's important that other people can't play it, or they want to feel special, or base their intelligence on the games they play, so when a developer does something thinking it would be convenient, some people will feel like it was a personal attack on their intelligence.

Most so called 'hardcoe' TES players are simply people who played Morrowind first and can't get over the fact that the sequel to 'their' game is different and not the same game. Unreflected nostalgia, that is all.

You will see this for just about any other game (or movie, or book, or...) out there with sequels. Before Fallout 3 came out there were a lot of Fallout fans who knew right from the start (before they even played the game) that FO3 would be a bad action game for kiddies. Same goes for other games that were not made by Bethesda. I play Unreal Tournament for example. A lot of people hated (yes, I know that hate is a very strong emotion for something as unimportant as a computer game) UT2k4 because it was not the original UT from '99. Now UT2k4 players hate UT3 because it is not UT2k4. People get used to things and if these things change they hate the change. Whether it's justified or not. It's psychology.

Basically it's like grumpy old men who curse computers because they're used to typewriters.

Wouldn't we all be better served to just go bash some Necromancers, in the TES game of our choice? :wink_smile:

There are many approaches to RPG. For those who are into RL rivalries it is all about bragging rights. For others, it may be about puzzle solving and intellectual exercise; developing creative imagination and problem solving skills; and for a few, nothing more than bubble-gum for the brain during idle time. No doubt someone else could add to this list.

There is no consensus about the quality of any aspect of the game although I think the majority of people would agree that there was a great effort put into making a graphically rich environment. Great beauty can be found at many locales as well as epic evil settings.

For myself; I played Daggerfall when it came out, I played Morrowind when it came out and I've played Oblivion Since it came out although my game time has tapered down till it's just about nil. What worked for me is to accept what's there and consider the game world valid without needing it to conform to real life. If the game supports fast travel and my character is impatient to get somewhere they will fast travel with no apologies and no regrets. If they wish to travel on foot or on horseback it is for a reason and as long as that reason is consistent with my character, it's all good.

It;s true that there are no spears in the game. There are also no wands, overcoats and capes, or cheese graters. SO?

You will not hear many complains about Oblivion from people who played lots of Daggerfall either, older and wiser might do something, if you played Daggerfall at release you are not a teen really devoted fan Had lots of discussions about this, obviously Oblivion is far closer to Daggerfall than Morrowind.

In my opinion Morrowind has far better factions and lore, I prefer the dialogue system in Morrowind, Morrowind also has spears, crossbows and throwing weapons who was dropped.

Oblivion is far more balanced and playable has better combat system and quests, yes Morrowind had some great quest and the main quest was better than Oblivion but the huge majority of quests could just be random like in Daggerfall (one of my pet ideas is a return of random quests as a filler)

My great fear is that Bethesda will listen to the Morrowind crowd and make Skyrim to like fallout 3, yes the enemy balance was good, but again to easy at high levels, unless you have broken steel but this bring back level scaling as a pack of albino radscorpions
yes I want to be able to get the best weapon in my class at level 3 because I found it on internet. (moder challenge: make an ingame version of www.uesp.net )

Add role-playing, here Morrowind was better than Oblivion (unmoded), I played a Dumner nationalist and Hlaalu member, and a power crazy Bosmer (potions are good for you, more potions are better ...) they played totally different.

Oblivion needs mods for serious role-play just and Morrowind needed mods to be balanced
Lots of people complains about levelling problems in Oblivion, I had them in my first Morrowind game, same reasons, focused on none combat skills and was basically a city thief, then the mage guild sent me close to Ghostgate at level 8, had only killed a few enemies. I learned a lot about sneak and reload

I was actually pretty flabbergasted when I booted up Daggerfall, and found myself in what could have low graphics Oblivion Everything just screamed Oblivion.



valid points, don't know about lore though, I'd say it had more lore, not necessarily better.



Again I'd say that's a pretty fair anolysis, I also wish for a return of randomly generated quests, for like low-mid level stuff.



Well I hope they've been listening over the 5 years that we've been discussing the games, because all the OB vs MO kind of died out in the end, and there was some constructive criticism and good anolysis of the games. People on both sides was able to talk level headed and such, but now that Skyrim has been announced, it's ripping up old wounds, and people who left the forum back in the day because of anger/disagreement, they're coming back with all their anger and hurt still retained from when they left so long ago, which is now being poured all over the forum.

Well, I don't see a lot of "hate" literally, but it's definitely true that there are specific elements that can be evaluated objectively because of the genre of game that TES IV: Oblivion is supposed to be (as well as not supposed to be, of course).

Fundamentally, a role playing game requires that the player be allowed to role play a character (either a character that is provided by the game or a character the player creates). Unlike what some people here claim, Oblivion's combat system is terrible for a role playing game. Why? Because it relies on player abilities, not character abilities. Anyone can argue back and forth about this element, but a role playing game requires role playing a character, and outcomes must be based on the character, not the player (aside from the player instructing the character to do certain things, of course). In fact, this is true of ALL role playing of any kind: acting a part in a play or movie, taking part in a professional or academic training exercise, etc. For example, if you are playing a character in a film who is supposed to be clumsy, it doesn't matter that you actually have abilities that garnered you a medal in various gymanstics competitions. If you portray the character with those abilities, you are not playing the character (and if you do it during an audition for the role, you will certainly not get a call back).

Unfortunately, Oblivion went the route of so many RPGs post 2000 or so. How many so-called RPGs on the market during the past 5-10 years actually rely on character skills rather than player skills for doing various activities within the game world? Very few... and pretty much none in the American market, certainly none that I can think of that were developed by an American developer. This trend destroys gthe entire basic concept of role playing.

Now, before anyone flies off the handle, I am not suggesting that real time, player skill based action products should not be offered. In fact, I am not even implying that action-RPG hybrids should not be offered. The problem is that such products (i.e., action-based, player skill focused not character skill focused) are ALL that is offered in the English market today. In addition, other markets have moved towards that approach due to global economic pressures.

This is the fundamental problem. Other problems are related to this one, of course. Mind you, it really doesn't matter that there are more people who want action-based, real time, player-centric rather than character-centric game mechanics (and that is certainly arguable because the markets are always changing, anyway). There are certainly segments of the markets who want actual role playing games (i.e., the ability to role play a character based on the character's skills and abilities, not the player's). Likewise, there are consumers who want cute, aesthetically pleasing characters, not realistric-looking characters (even for TES games, the aesthetic mods, especially by Asian artists such as Ren, are extremely popular). If these players are ignored, they become excluded and cannot be part of the community. There is no choice, and that's the main problem.

A problem many games faces, and for two reasons. Reaching out to mainstream "casual" gamers and porting to consoles

I don't see how porting to consoles has anything to do with that.

I can understand why someone that was introduced into TES with Morrowind can have mixed feeling about Oblivion. It's not unreflected nostalgia or grumpy reaction.

I love both games. I really do. But, for example, I can't stand seeing all those bandits and marauders running in Glass/deadric armor. In Morrowind, It was hard to gather a complete set of Daedric armor. It was something special. Now it's just an armor. It's annoying for me.

There are other aspects too.


But I still love them both and I mod what I don't like. Bless the PC version for this.

Actually, I was thinking more about how interfaces work, rather than the gameplay. Sorry bout the confusion