Hi everyone this is my first time posting on the forums , iv'e been lurking on the forums for the past few days and i cant help but notice that no one regards oblivion as good as the rest in any respect, i just want to know why people dislike the game so much because i think its the best of the series.

Oblivion has a small core of very devoted fans and some would say it strikes a nice balance between the complexity of Morrowind and the smooth combat and improved AI of Skyrim. But Morrowind fans will say Oblivion is still too simplistic because it lacks a chance to fail and and attributes were watered down and they complain that the atmosphere is too "generic" and Skyrim fans complain that Oblivion's combat is not nearly as good as Skyrim. And nobody really likes Oblivion's over the top level scaling.

I don't hate Oblivion as much as I did when it first was released. But I've always hated the art style, especially the way npc's look. It's because of this why Oblivion is my least played tes game. Morrowind being first followed by Skyrim. Just my 2 cents.

This pretty much.

I still play MW and Skyrim but although Oblivion had its good points but the things I disliked about it outweigh them for me and I haven't played it for about 5 years.

I think I'm responsible for 80% of the comments, so your view on the public reception to Oblivion might be a little skewed.

For me, it comes down, to art style, aesthetic, dialogue, and interesting representation of previously mentioned ideas. For me, Oblivion fails on all counts, as it did not bother to represent the Niben as it should be, the art style took heavy cues from the LotR's craze that was going on, its voice acting was rather...hammy, to say the least, and everyone had pudding faces. The Altmer seriously looked like a nice, banana smoothie with that wacky hair of theirs. The one thing I feel Oblivion has going for is that its side quests are fun and well executed. That's about it though.

Of course, if I'm being fair, I feel Skyrim dropped the ball in a few courts as well, but it at least looks and has the feel of a TES game.

Personally, Oblivion was my first Elder Scrolls game, and I always quite enjoyed it. But I can't help but find that from a world building perspective, it is quite inferior to Morrowind and Skyrim. For example, in Morrowind and Skyrim, you can find several commercially operating mines, but in Oblivion, all the mines are 'forsakened' or 'haunted' or 'doomed. And theres the fact that the Imperial Legion doesn't have a single fort, and even forts that are right next to major towns are abandoned and filled with bandits. Its just little things like that that make it seem less like Cyrodiil is the center of a great Empire, and more like a far-flung backwater, and this is especially apparent after the last game took place in Vvardenfell, a place that was supposed to be a far-flung backwater. Its like going to colonial Africa in the 1880s, and everyone is talking about what a dangerous, uncivilized and underdeveloped place it is, only to then go to Great Britain just to find that its an even less developed, more dangerous place than Africa supposedly was.

I also believe that Oblivion's loot system is just awful. For example, at level twenty, you will just be constantly running into bandits wearing full set of Daedric armor and wielding Daedric weapons, despite the fact that previous games made it abundantly clear just how rare and difficult it was to obtain Daedric equipment, not to mention the fact that if Daedric armor is so easy to get, then why doesn't the Legion and the town guards use it? But ignoring all lore concerns, I still think that the decision to make high-level loot so easy to obtain by giving it to bandits was a terrible idea. In Skyrim and especially Morrowind, if you managed to get a piece of Daedric equipment, then you felt like you earned it, because you had to seek out and find it, or gain a high level of skill to craft it. In either case, you felt like you deserved to have it after what you had to do to get it. But in Oblivion it is just like, 'Hey, your level twenty! Have all the Daedric equipment in the world!', and I just can't see how that is superior to Skyrim and Morrowinds loot systems.

But that being said, I still think that Oblivion has some of the best side-quests in the series, not to mention that Mankar Camoran and the Mythic Dawn are my favorite Elder Scrolls villains, even if I thought they were woefully underdeveloped. But then again, I also thought that House Dagoth and Alduin were woefully underdeveloped too, so maybe I just can't be pleased

I had a similar reaction. I loathed the game at first. An hour or two after installing it I had to turn the game off and go for a walk so that I could cool down. My partner, Brash, a Morrowind modder and someone who had been looking forward to Oblivion as much as I was, played for only two weeks before losing interest and moving on.

We tried to play again in 2007. Many mods were out by then that partially fixed some of our problems with the game. Nevertheless, she stopped playing a weeks later, never to play again.

It wasn't until 2013 that I finally made my peace with Oblivion. I managed, finally, to let go of my expectations and enjoy the game for what it it was. In its vanilla state Oblivion is still my least favorite of the last three games. But in its modded state Oblivion has become my favorite game of the series.

Abysmal Art Direction

Some people like it, they really get into the numbers side of the game, and they don't mind the way the world begins to change heavily as we get into the teens with leveling. Not me though. This was my least favorite part of the game.

Everything else people usually rant and complain about (NPC faces, "generic" landscape, cut / paste dungeons) never bothered at all. Even now that I"m on PC, and have the full power of mods, there's a list of things I'd feel weird changing.

OP, take it form me; just ignore the hate. Truthfully, it's rare that you'll encounter any hate nowadays, unless you specifically go looking for it here in these Elder Scrolls Discussion forums. If you come visit the Oblivion forums, you'll be amongst good company, friend.

and have a http://www.uesp.net/wiki/General:Fishy_Stick, by the way.

its my least favorite of the tes games (i don't even count daggerfall or arena, they're so much different its not fair). Its still a fantastic game. After playing the other two (morrowind and skyrim) i realized its flaws. Its too generic imo. Morrowind was delightfully strange, and while skyrim was pretty grounded, it also had its weirdness (mumified nords, the elderscroll business, snow elves, ect). I think oblivion had the best quests, and i even enjoyed the main quest (which gets a lot of hate.)

I also think oblivion had the best magic system of all the games. However the stagger-iffic combat is annoying coming back from skyrim. The levelscaling ruined any sense of accomplishment, as you never found anything you couldn't handle, and you never got that awesome feeling of beating a boss and getting some overpowered loot. Mods fixed that problem, and if the vanilla game was closer to ooo i think nobody would have had a problem with oblivion gameplay wise.

http://www.imperial-library.info/content/pocket-guide-empire-first-edition-cyrodiil

Many people who started with Morrowind read the Pocket Guide while Oblivion was being developed. Just read that. That sounds like the effing coolest place. Dozens of cults, heavy Akaviri influence, tattoos, jungle, rice paddies, back-stabbing politicians, mystical shrubbery (!), small dragons, and spurning it all are the Colovians in the west, with their simple, soldierly lifestyle and their honest piety, picking up the pieces whenever the effete Nibeneans inevitably screw things up.

Morrowind was weird (and wonderful), but Cyrodiil was supposed to be the weirdest. Gameplay can be modded, aesthetics can be modded and city sizes can be modded, but the lore and overall setting is hard to change without too much effort.

I didn't play more than a few hours of Oblivion until the mod Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul came out, and then I grew to like it.