Overrated games are nothing new in this industry. It is an industry that sells a product before the buyer has a chance to figure out if he will like it, so you have to convince him that your game is the best thing since sliced bread. Hence why today marketing (including under the table bribes, shills commenting on articles, forums and videos, and "influencers") has a far bigger budget than the actual development of the game for AAA companies.
Thus, in my full 3 decades of hard core gaming, i have witnessed a ton of overrated games that when i got to play them on release i was like "meh, how much the reviewers got bribed this time?"
Now, overrated does not mean "bad". A game can be good and still get "masterpiece" rates that it simply does not deserve. Games like GTA IV for instance. Was a fun game, i completed it, but look at its metascore: 98. Does anyone who isn't on drugs believe that GTA IV deserved a freaking 98 metascore? A more accurate and perfectly valid metascore would have been 85ish... Thus, GTA IV was overrated. And that is a simple example.
Do i hate GTA IV? Nope. I hate the marketing and i hate the shills masquerading as users that hype such games to such lengths online, but the game was fine if shallow.
Oblivion was also an obviously overrated game. It has a 94 metascore... But the thing with Oblivion in contrast with most overrated games, was that it was not a good game at all. It was garbage even by 2006 standards. The true metascore should have been around 65-70ish, and that is pushing it.
It is the only so called "GOTY" game i have ever played in almost 30 years that didn't have any redeeming quality whatsoever. I am not judging it purely as an RPG, because i play all genres, not just RPGs. I am judging it as a video game. And it fails spectacularly on all fronts.
Its graphics were pure garbage. Someone gave them a cool bloom shader to use and like toddlers they spilled it all over the place. Faces were absolutely disgusting. The textures were an abomination. Animation is the laughing stock of the industry.
Voice acting was so trash that it would have been less immersion breaking to just use Morrowind's system of wikipedia dialogues... Sound effects were bland and music was meh.
Gameplay, the meat of the game, was total shit. It was pure shit if you judged it as an Action game, with terrible controls and stupid hitsponge enemies, and it was pure shit if you judged it as an RPG game... It failed at all fronts. The level scaling serves as an example on how NOT to make an RPG, since it literally makes no sense to level up, you get an easier game by NOT leveling up...
There was no immersion in this game, between the terrible voice acting, the poor dialogue, the bland graphics, the terrible animations, the bugs, the copy-pasted locations, the boring Oblivion gates, the uninspiring story, you had no reason to want to complete this game.
There have been much better games than Oblivion that have gotten far worse metascores and far less sales.
Oblivion is the only TES game i have ever played that i never managed to continue after escorting Martin to the Blades Headquarters. I did some early guild quests but i lost interest every single time. I have tried to enter this game at least 10 times, and every single time i just cannot force myself to continue, it is that bad. I have played and completed every Bethesda game ever, Oblivion is the ONLY game that i refuse to complete because i'd rather go kill myself for better entertainment...
It is not that Oblivion marked the turning point of consolization for Bethesda. It did not. Morrowind did. Morrowind was an XBOX game. It is not even that it dumbed down the RPG aspects. A game can be good even if it is not a pure stats driven turn based RPG. I enjoyed Skyrim thoroughly and have wasted hundrends of hours making different classes of heroes and fooling around as a Werewolf or Vampire Lord because i found it fun. Skyrim was an RPG-lite, an Action-RPG if you prefer, but still was a good, solid game. Oblivion was SHIIIIIIIIIIIIT. Ok?
The only people who defend Oblivion are those who were too young when they first played it. I know a few people like that. They will defend it to the death because it was the first game their daddy bought them for Christmas when they were 10, because Lord of the Rings had gotten the Oscar and Bethesda decided to retkon the Roman-inspired Empire to make them look like Gondor and the magazines were saying GOTY everywhere and dads all over the world wanted to get it as a present for their kids to fool around in fairytale land. I even encountered such a person when i did my military duty and he told me "Oblivion was best game ever made" because he played it at 12... I wanted to punch him in the face but i would get a military trial for that. Still, Oblivion was such garbage that the thought that a military trial was worth it crossed my mind...
