» Thu May 26, 2011 9:21 pm
What's wrong with it, you ask? Very well. From a previous thread:
Goodness... Where to begin?
Sigh. I suppose I should have a disclaimer beforehand... [Disclaimer]I did and do enjoy Oblivion for the game it is, and despite the list of complaints soon to follow, it was fully worth the money I paid and is still a Bethesda game, which means it is far above most games out on the market.[/Disclaimer]
OK.
1. A freaking stereotypical "Holy crap the entire world is threatened save it right now!!!" main quest that forced or severely guilt-tripped the player to shoot out of those sewers like a bullet to quickly preserve the empire from its terrible calamitous fate. As well as ending up segregating the whole universe into good guys versus evil Daedra, or morally ambiguous guys versus evil Daedra, or evil guys versus evil Daedra by proxy because the end of the world is bad for business. There was no real slow approach to the world if roleplaying was involved, as there were few excuses one could come up with to simply abandon the clamorous beginning of the game and pursue their character's own interests for a while.
2. Faction quest-lines that operated in their own little worlds, had little-to-no bearing on each other, had little to no acknowledgment of the Empire crumbling around them as the Deadlands slowly began encroaching on Nirn, and emulated the main quest by trying to have somewhat overarching plot-lines for each guild, as opposed to simply representing the tasks required to advance within the guild (often mundane, disjointed, and anti-plot-driven) and using those tasks and the strings attached to them to provide massive characterization to the guilds/factions.
3. The overall neutering of factions. Granted, it's been a trend the past two games, but seriously. Five? None of which have any form of relationship with one another? So joining one will not affect your standing with another? Ugh. Oh, and neutering skill and attribute requirements for those factions? Awesome. Now my level 1 pure combat Warrior can theoretically become the Archmage of the Mages Guild. Or the Gray Fox. Without any real investment into improving skills as well as factional reputation.
4. Level scaling and leveled lists, both applied to hostile NPCs and creatures, and applied to loot. If the game simply raises the challenge bar with you continuously, then what exactly is the benefit in leveling? Where's the real sense of accomplishment from going from level 1 to level 30? The world should not develop with me. The world should be a fairly static playing field in terms of differing skills, and the player should start out weak and floundering, struggle to hone their skills to become on par with the world, and then work hard to surpass the world and prepare themselves for above-average otherworldly challenges. AKA the basic D&D model of progression:
Early levels: Struggle to survive.
Mid levels: Moderate difficulty.
Late levels: Struggle to actually die.
When it comes to leveled lists for loot, there are serious flaws. I reach level 15 or so, and the leveled loot lists start churning out expensive enchanted items. I find a valuable constant-effect necklace and celebrate because I have found something exquisite and rare. Within the next dozen dungeon crawls, and as I level more, my loot container at my house suddenly will get completely overwhelmed with supposedly mythic and rare and uber-valuable enchanted crap. Answer me: If all this loot I'm suddenly finding because my level is getting higher is honestly so "valuable," then why am I suddenly finding so much of it? Why does my game lag when I access my loot chest at level 25 or so, because I have so much excess "rare" crap that I haven't even bothered to sell due to the sheer amount of it all?
5. On a related note: randomization of loot. Now, I'm not against the usage of loot lists, and using percentages to determine what's found there. But Oblivion sorely needed a hand-touched feel to its dungeons, and there just wasn't enough hand-placed loot to give it that feeling. There were no hand-placed artifacts a la Morrowind, everything that was hand-placed in almost all dungeons were of low quality at best and largely suffered from copy-paste syndrome. Dungeons in Morrowind could tell stories with their hand-placement of items and loot. Oblivion's dungeons lacked that.
6. Fast Travel. Don't bother telling me it's optional. There's no decent alternative, AKA sensible travel networks between some cities. And don't bother telling me it's the same as Morrowind's limited cost-inducing system of travel, because the only way I can simulate Oblivion-style FT in Morrowind is through using the console and typing COC. Fast travel removed the immersion of having someone in the world whose job was to move people around. It removed the whole possibility of escort quests, because they would be, by and large, stupidly easy. It removed the absolutism of distance, meaning that no region in the game required the player to pause and think how they needed to prepare for entering it, because heading back to town was as simple as a hop, skip, and left-click away. It removed the severity of all in-game diseases, because the nearest cure altar was, again, a hop, skip, and left-click away. True, the player can resist the urge to use such things, but absolutism is a worthy quality in games, and an absolutist understanding of distance fits that as well. Should it be optional whether that difficult enemy I'm facing with a half-broken longsword has the standard 90 health or an optional 10 health? Should I have the option between a regular iron dagger at the game's start, and another iron dagger scripted with an infinite kill command?
7. The removal of skills, namely, axe, short and long blade, medium armor, unarmored, enchant, spear, etc, etc. The removal of spells, namely Blind, Jump, Sound, Levitate, Poison (as in Poison of the school of Destruction), etc, etc.
8. The creation of a minigame for both lockpick and speechcraft, both of which rendered character skill completely null and void. I could pick any lock in the game with a security skill of 5.
9. The removal of major lore tidbits. Cyrodiil not being jungle. No mention of the old theories and theorists who claimed that the Emperor's sons were dopplegangers placed there by Jagar Tharn. No multiple sub-sects of worship for each divine, scattered all throughout the province.
10. No political warmongering. Cyrodiil, the heart of bureaucracy and deadly political maneuvering, was sans politicos. There was no Elder Council. And hardly a mention of the Elder Council. The player, in the whole main quest and side-quests, dealt with no political factions and problems at all. Completely unforgivable.
11. Magical green-arrowed GPS. Never get lost again! Never have to receive and coherently follow directions and use landmarks like an intelligent person. Never have to learn the lay of the land. Right up there with Magical Points-of-Interest navigational system. A beacon to every possible thing within 500 yards of you! Even such notable tourist attractions as Necromancer dens that would probably like to stay hidden, or Shrines to Daedra like the King of [censored], Molag Bal.
12. The inclusion of a Fame/Infamy system that acted as a word-of-god game-prejudging-a-universally-represented-standard-of-morality system. Instead of letting factions and sub-factions of people judge your actions according to their own personal standards of morality, as done in previous titles, the game simply tabulated every "good" and "evil" act you committed and uniformly and universally raised and lowered dispositions accordingly.