One thing none of the posters in this thread have noticed is that Oblivion is NOT a traditional CRPG, unlike TES I, II, and III.
In the earlier games, what was doable in game was limited by and to your character's capabilities. In Oblivion, your character's capabilities are mere weak modifiers to what you, the player, can do TO the game.

As for another thing discarded by Oblivion, Lore consistency. One of the most easily visible ways that the lore in game is screwed around is wearable ancient armor styles.
example images of Dweemer (dwarven) armor from Morrowind and Oblivion on UESP:
Morrowind - http://images.uesp.net//4/49/MW_DwemerArmor.jpg
Oblivion - http://images.uesp.net//3/3a/OB-item-Dwarven_Armor.jpg
Ancient armor should not change in style over games. Current manufactured armor, however, should. But even here, there are limits as to what should be allowed to be done.
example images of Orcish armor from Morrowind and Oblivion on UESP:
Morrowind - heavy oriental influence - http://images.uesp.net//f/fa/MW_OrcishArmor.jpg
Oblivion - where's the oriental look gone - http://images.uesp.net//d/da/OB-item-Orcish_Armor.jpg

The force to close focus when a player-NPC conversation happens. I HATE that. :flame:
Also on the subject of conversations, kill the gods damned guards being able to do a force to close focus challenge on the PC when the PC is already in combat with other NPCs/creatures. :banghead: :swear:


The lack of there being any flying creatures in Oblivion, to me, felt like a big mistake.
As for the Cliffracers themselves, in Morrowind, I liked them, except when the freshly killed corpse of one fell through the landscape before I was able to harvest it. :shakehead: Such holes in the maps should be found and fixed BEFORE a game is released.
That was something also defective in Morrowind, the sheer tiny number of non-hostile creatures when compared to the armies of hostile ones. And the way that you are swarmed upon by the hostiles as soon as you set foot out of a town, even when you are on the road, and not trekking cross country through the forest.
Another thing that is broken in both Morrowind and Oblivion is Alchemy. In both, once you know all the effects levels for ingredients, there is no way to craft potions masking out unwanted effects and/or using only selected effects from the ingredients. Also wrong with Alchemy and weapons is not being able to apply ANY potion to a weapon.


OK, something seems wrong here, first you say leave Enchantment out, then you say you want to be able to Enchant stuff in a certain way.

Make it possible to kick an NPC/creature.
Make on-strike enchantments available on ALL weapons, and boots and gauntlets.


edit: insert correct image URL

Thanks for the info on what I'd glitched, Count Lauriel.
Fixed.

Jenifur Charne

I guess when the topic was started the OP did not imagine this swarm of improvements desired, many of which very necessary...

This. This. This. This.

Oh, and Jeniskunk, the links you gave for Orcish armour are both to the same picture. Just letting you know

What would make this game better? Hmm.... Maybe the device from Men In Black that erases minds so I could erase my knowledge of Oblivion's storyline so that I can play it over again and be excited again. The real thing that would make this better is if there was some more DLC coming out that adds new provinces to the game and a new storyline.

No.

More voice actors!
seriously, at some point, even the most inattentive gamer starts to suspect that the whole city is made of cloned dopplegangers.

a party system - the people around me should compliment my skills. for example, to build off the mages guild specialty, have mage followers from different schools. a fighters guild follower with a different major weapon than you. a thief follower that will unlock locks for you or assassinate people you target with say a lesser power called 'kill that guy'.

more weapon types. not just animations or styles, but differences in reach and speeds. different enchantable quantities. maybe nunchucks, for example, would have very low damage, and low speed, but have larger quantities of enchantment possibilities. or functional differences. for example, equipping sais will disarm sword/staff users at 50% and ignore 50% armor; hammers do more damage to heavy armor and can not be poisoned.

I'd like to see stage-by-stage boss fighting mechanics
Where it is allmost impossible to kill it on your first try - You have to memorize what the boss does and how you have to respond to it

yeah, poisoning war hammers, that took the cake. I mean, you cannot poison your fists, right, coz its illogical, BUT WARHAMMERS OK!

I figured out how to add them, going to be releasing a mod over thanksgiving break, and it won't have that crappy staff animation

well I think everybody has covered just about all I can think of, except for,
Capes, making vampires not look old and anorexic, making more unique attacks other than the typical slash, slash, slash the other way, slash with grunt.

If you sneak up behind someone being able to cover their mouth and stab them. It would only be useful if the person/creature is by themselves.

Maybe have acrobatics let you climb things?

Better voiceacting

Ability to have more realism (as a setting or something). Where if you get hit where you aren't wearing armor, you will die or be fatally wounded, dismemberment, breaking through doors and windows, multiple kinds of strikes and slashes...
Of course I realize this is kind of ridiculous from a technology standpoint.

Better animations, so there's a difference between slashing a person and a wall.

Climbing was in Daggerfall, it was nuked for MW, and it stayed nuked in Oblivion. It should not have been nuked.

Not just better voiceacting, but MORE voice actors, and some CONSISTENCY as to which voices are used for which NPC.

Breakable doors/windows, that depends on the game engine.

Jenifur Charne

Oh, I think many of us have noticed. But you're right: with each game in the series Bethesda has further abandoned roleplaying mechanics for first-person shooter mechanics. Sadly, I don't expect they'll be reversing this process for TES V.




Oh gods, me too! I got rid of it the day the game was released. I also hated it in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.




That's one of the most disorienting things that happens in the entire game, for me. If it only happened with guards I suppose a player could find ways to avoid it, but there are also scripted encounters with non-guard NPCs that force a sudden zoom. The first time through the game it's impossible to know when these will happen. It's enough to give a person a headache. And nausea. And vertigo. And, probably, nosebleeds.




I thought so too. As much as I disliked Cliffracers (it was the sound: that sound was everywhere - I couldn't relax, I was constantly peering around me to see if I was about to be attacked) I have to admit that Cliffracers did add a vertical dimension to the game that I felt was lacking in Oblivion. It just felt less interesting to me when every moving thing was on the ground.




There's nothing to fix, really, as there aren't any "holes" in the sense you're using the term. You may have seen Oblivion in http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ZELMncgtnWT8lM:http://donut-tech.com/terrain/terrain3.jpg&t=1. Those triangles are what actors and objects fall through. It can potentially happen in any 3-D game. The only thing a gaming company could do to prevent it would be to make those triangles smaller, but doing so would result in a significant hit on framerates.




I'm slightly surprised by how many of the suggestions in this thread I dislike. If Bethesda were to implement some of the suggestions made here I would not buy the game.




I agree. I actually thought the voice acting in Oblivion was very good. It's just that next time they need to hire more than 14 actors to voice every single NPC in the game.

A player should choose where they live via home or a cave that they clear out, and have the option to live in it and perhaps even buy their own furniture so the can CUSTOMIZE it how they want. That is, if the cave isn't part of a quest.

I hate how water looks almost as much as I hate the leveled weapons, whenever I start a new character I don't even wanna do quests to get the stuff if it's going to be junk in a few levels. Leveling up can be boring with a small map and limited quests. The map isn't that small but it's just feels very compact and overly detailed for the space it sprawls in certain areas.
One of the things I really liked about TESIII was exploring and finding artifacts or other unique stuff. Oblivion feels so small and everything is level dependent just feels less rewarding. At least though in oblivion I didn't get a game over message please reload for killing the wrong person.

Since spears were mentioned I missed those, a sharp stick is the most classic weapon there is.
I guess arrows count as sharp sticks. One thing I really liked about this game is after a big fight sometimes I'll zoom out of first person view, I tend to think I'm good at dodging most arrows but once in a while it's funny seeing a ton of arrows I got hit with sticking out of my character.

The leveling system, it can be a bit of a pain. Losing the bonus points if you got a +10 to a skill group all the extra points are lost. Adds up it can take ages to level up skills after a point.

One thing other thing that always gets me is fall damage. No matter how much I train acrobatics I get way to fast in the game and take tons of fall damage for a simple jump (I tend to travel on foot most the time and it is usually faster when you jump) in TESIII I had to use a constant effect +1 health per second enchantment on something I was wearing to counteract it (There was no master armor trainer either on that one so I had some spiffy constant effect weightless bound armor cuirrass added on my shirt which would repair itself whenever I took it off and put it back on ). In Oblivion it's like gotta rest every couple minutes or restoration gets kind of annoying to activate manually all the time. One of the few reasons I don't like the antronach birthsign often not a big fan of using lots of potions either should be some kind of delay on the things wouldn't a character have to at least pee at some point after drinking a bunch of those?

Absolutely, and the choice of the 3 English luvvies to do the Emporer, Martin and Camoran were exemplarary (although I maintain to the day I die it would have been sooooo much better had Sean Bean used his normal Yorkshire accent (think the miners in Lost Spires))

When they were making Oblivion, Bethesda should have raided the cartoon studios for a decent assortment of voice actors.

Jenifur Charne

Mods, And done.

Mods can (and do) add, remove or otherwise fix SO much that's needing to be so with Oblivion, it's ridiculous. So much goodness, and all for free! :twirl:

Well, I really don't think the character's need more voice variation like how some of you guys think so. I'm perfectly fine with it, and at LEAST all the NPCs can talk rather us having to read every single dialog, right?
The only change I would like to see in the characters would be that if there were more emotions, movements, styles and clothing. In the SI pack they achieved a little bit of that by creating more clothing and adding more actions that they can do like juggle and slouch.
I also hate how the characters are like robots... doing the same thing.... everyday.

While I agree the voice thing is somewhat limited / repetitive in O, I have always been much more into reading things in the game - so you're passing by some area and you 'read' some info about that area, or detailing how the environment feels heavy / creepy, etc...

I could perfectly live without voice-overs, while not objecting to it (just seems to be that kind of nice to have kind of thing).

I actually think they broadly got the voice-acting right in Oblivion. Key characters like Martin Septim, Uriel Septim, Mankar Camoran, and Sheogorath and Haskill are rightly voiced uniquely, but I see no problem with having stock voiceovers for the general population. I also definitely think it's a good thing that all dialogue is spoken. Nothing kills immersion quite like having some lines spoken and others simply as text.

What I would change is some of the content of the dialogue. Just make it more relevant to the NPCs and their status/situations, and more varied, as well as giving more lines at certain points in the game. For example, the Blades don't get any new dialogue at all after the Main Quest is finished. That's pretty disappointing given that they are centrally involved in the plot.

Stock voices, for background pvssyr, by the generic populace, to a point, is tolerable.

This is the point where tolerance, for having one voice actor do the voices for all gender NPCs from an entire race; irrespective of age or social status, becomes a matter that is unacceptable, and the problem of lack of voice actors becomes a defect worthy of ridicule for the game.


I honestly cannot see why the Blades deserve any more lines after they failed thrice in their job (failing to protect Emperor Picard, and failing to save the Last Heir of the Septims, and incidentally also failing to save the Third Empire) and their Order is for all intents and purposes rendered useless.

Jenifur Charne

Yes, but as I said before, they need more than 10 actors doing all of the non-unique voices. Paying the same actress to do all of the Khajiit and Argonian voices is just lame. And cheap. And cheesy.

In general, they could make some kind of minor, token effort to distinguish one race's voice from another race's voice. In Oblivion female Orcs sound exactly like female Nords (probably because - guess what? - they hired the same actress to do both races...again).

I honestly do think the dialog they did record is very good. They just need to hire more actors next time.

::EDIT:: I just did a count of the number of actors in Dragon Age. Bioware hired 147 actors for that game.

And how many actors did the voice work for Oblivion?
From what I have heard and the complaints I've read, I'd not think that Oblivion can even count 20 voice actors in total.

Jenifur Charne