Why do people hate Oblivion so much?

[JamesDixon]

The funny thing is that Todd worked in Daggerfall as an additional designer.

Additional design means he was a gopher. Christopher Weaver, Julian Lefay, Bruce Nesmith, Ted Petersen, Hal Bouman, Mark K. Jones, Hoang Nguyen, Louise Sandoval, and Eric Heberling were the brains and brawn behind the game. Funny that Todd Howard doesn't appear in the credits on Wikipedia.

By the way, Julian, Bruce, and Ted are creating a spiritual successor to Daggerfall. It's going to be bigger and more non-linear then ever.

 

[JamesDixon]

For comparison on world size between Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim here they are.

Daggerfall: 209,331 square kilometers (80,823 square miles)
Morrowind: 15.54 square kilometers (6 square miles)
Oblivion: 41.44 square kilometers (16 square miles)
Skyrim: 38.33 square kilometers (14.8 square miles)

Todd Howard is the decline and puts out theme park rides over what he thinks you should enjoy. His betters from Daggerfall and Arena thought that you knew what you would enjoy.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

By the way, Julian, Bruce, and Ted are creating a spiritual successor to Daggerfall. It's going to be bigger and more non-linear then ever.

https://rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=11544
This is the last I heard of that piece of shit.

 

[JamesDixon]

By the way, Julian, Bruce, and Ted are creating a spiritual successor to Daggerfall. It's going to be bigger and more non-linear then ever.

https://rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=11544
This is the last I heard of that piece of shit.

Well that bites. Thank you for the information.

 

[BruceVC]

By the way, Julian, Bruce, and Ted are creating a spiritual successor to Daggerfall. It's going to be bigger and more non-linear then ever.

https://rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=11544
This is the last I heard of that piece of shit.

Its a pity, I was hoping it was real....that would be a game I would definitely support

 

[Funposter]

By the way, Julian, Bruce, and Ted are creating a spiritual successor to Daggerfall. It's going to be bigger and more non-linear then ever.

Ted spends most of his time posting furry erotica in the discord, by all accounts.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

• 

The old faggots who made all the old games are now retarded and produce nothing but filth. Maybe they were always retarded and their games were good solely because of the time period in which they were made. In either case, the only way to get incline is to create it with our own hands. Don't ever be fooled by senile cocksmokers like Ted Peterson or Warren Spector.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

For comparison on world size between Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim here they are.

Daggerfall: 209,331 square kilometers (80,823 square miles)
Morrowind: 15.54 square kilometers (6 square miles)
Oblivion: 41.44 square kilometers (16 square miles)
Skyrim: 38.33 square kilometers (14.8 square miles)

Todd Howard is the decline and puts out theme park rides over what he thinks you should enjoy. His betters from Daggerfall and Arena thought that you knew what you would enjoy.

Except the extremely vast daggerfall content is all completely proc gen and pointless.

Plus, you didn't account for all the area in oblivion.

You can close 60 gates in one playthrough. So since's daggerfall's identical procgen areas all count, so do oblivions. So you've got to add at least another 60 square miles to oblivion's world size. Sure, most of that is lava and pointless nonsense, but so is daggerfall's.

 

[JamesDixon]

For comparison on world size between Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim here they are.

Daggerfall: 209,331 square kilometers (80,823 square miles)
Morrowind: 15.54 square kilometers (6 square miles)
Oblivion: 41.44 square kilometers (16 square miles)
Skyrim: 38.33 square kilometers (14.8 square miles)

Todd Howard is the decline and puts out theme park rides over what he thinks you should enjoy. His betters from Daggerfall and Arena thought that you knew what you would enjoy.

Except the extremely vast daggerfall content is all completely proc gen and pointless.

Plus, you didn't account for all the area in oblivion.

You can close 60 gates in one playthrough. So since's daggerfall's identical procgen areas all count, so do oblivions. So you've got to add at least another 60 square miles to oblivion's world size. Sure, most of that is lava and pointless nonsense, but so is daggerfall's.

It looks like we have someone that is ignorant on how they used procedural generation in Daggerfall. They laid out the cities, dungeons, and terrain features using procedural generation during the programming phase. The storyline dungeons are all hand designed. The random dungeons and wilderness are all done at runtime using procedural generation.

It's not pointless since you don't have to do the main quest. You can own a house in any of the provinces and a ship. There are a total of 44 regions in the game. Houses can be apartments to mansions.

The stats are from the TES wiki which I believe only counts the external landmass. Oblivion and all of its gates are never going to come close to what Daggerfall's size actually is.

Here's the full stats of Daggerfall.

Daggerfall contains a total of 15,254 cities, inns, homes, temples, graveyards and dungeons. Contrary to the randomly-generated wilderness separating them, these locations are all pre-determined. They are spread over the 44 different regions of the Iliac Bay; density varies depending on the size or importance of the region, ranging from the Wrothgarian Mountains, with 1,833 locations, to the tiny island of Cybiades, with only one. It is possible to sort these places of note into four main categories, following the in-game map labels: Dungeons, Homes, Temples and Towns. This article only lists some of the most relevant locations. A complete list of locations is included in each specific region article.

Dungeons
There is a total of 4,232 dungeons in Daggerfall, which contain various enemies and block types. Depending on the location, they can include haunts, dens, laboratories, caves or graveyards, among others.

Homes
These include farms, isolated houses, manors, palaces and urbanized dead ends. There is a total of 4,400.

Temples
Temples can include isolated altars, monuments or shrines, friendly covens, or "temple compounds" (temples with several buildings surrounding it). There are 1,532 separate religious sites.

Towns
Daggerfall towns include cities, towns, villages and independent inn/pub complexes. The total amount of Towns in Daggerfall is 5,090.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Places

So the question is do you want to live a life anywhere within Daggerfall without following the main quest or do you want to follow the main quest. See the thing about Daggerfall that you miss is that the development team that made it wanted the player to decide how to play the game not be lead around by the nose on a theme park ride. You say it's pointless and you fail to understand the why the world is set up like it is.

I've played all but Arena and only Daggerfall gives you the complete flexibility to play the game you want as you want to. The ones done by Todd are on rail theme park rides where you have no choices in the matter. Keep in mind that Daggerfall also had random quests that linked to random dungeons, so the radiant quest system of Oblivion/Morrowind/Skyrim isn't new.

One last thing, the random dungeon runtime generation can generate massive dungeons that take hours to explore. They were so massive that Daggerfall Unity has an option to produce smaller dungeons. That's completely different from the postage stamp sized dungeons in Todd's games.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Yeah man more power to you if you enjoy living a pretend life in identical procgen town #523 near procgen cave #1053, but those stats are as meaningless as borderlands having 100 quadrillion possible guns. Daggerfall's combat and dungeons sucked. The manual was a goddamn work of art, I'll give you that.

 

[Cael]

If you are going to play pretend farmer or something, there is this game called Second Life that you might want to look at...

 

[JamesDixon]

Yeah man more power to you if you enjoy living a pretend life in identical procgen town #523 near procgen cave #1053, but those stats are as meaningless as borderlands having 100 quadrillion possible guns. Daggerfall's combat and dungeons sucked. The manual was a goddamn work of art, I'll give you that.

It's hilarious that you make fun of Daggerfall when Oblivion had the exact same thing, except for in a postage stamp sized theme park. At least Daggerfall had different terrain like deserts and mountains.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Yeah man more power to you if you enjoy living a pretend life in identical procgen town #523 near procgen cave #1053, but those stats are as meaningless as borderlands having 100 quadrillion possible guns. Daggerfall's combat and dungeons sucked. The manual was a goddamn work of art, I'll give you that.

It's hilarious that you make fun of Daggerfall when Oblivion had the exact same thing, except for in a postage stamp sized theme park. At least Daggerfall had different terrain like deserts and mountains.

I'm not shitting on daggerfall I'm just saying that claiming it has 50 kazillion square hectares of space an oblivion only has 0.1 hectares isn't really a real comparison. I hated the oblivion gates, the procgen caves were terrible as well. I'll happily take 1% of the content if it's handmade instead of procgen.

 

[Squid]

Oblivion should have been better than Skyrim but Skyrim went simple which is what Oblivion should have done from the start. The middle ground of it made it even more janky. Oblivion NPCs still have the funniest conversations out of TES games.

 

[Azdul]

The old faggots who made all the old games are now retarded and produce nothing but filth. Maybe they were always retarded and their games were good solely because of the time period in which they were made. In either case, the only way to get incline is to create it with our own hands. Don't ever be fooled by senile cocksmokers like Ted Peterson or Warren Spector.

Media tend to present a blockbuster game as a work of single genius with creative spark, because it makes an interesting story. Daggerfall and Deus Ex were major efforts with real teams, budgets and companies behind them. It wasn't just 3 guys toying with ideas in their free time.

Making PC lead (or only) platform was sensible business choice at the time, not some sentimental, nostalgia-driven decision - the same goes for appealing to tabletop RPG players.

The same goes for choosing Xbox 360 as a lead platform for Oblivion. There was a huge market opportunity in selling western RPG-lite to people who just bought shiny, new and pretty powerful console. For every guy who played Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind and was disappointed with Oblivion - there were ten console kids who were completely fascinated with their first RPG and somewhat overwhelmed with all the possibilities that Oblivion offered.

 

[Sykar]

This should answer all questions as to why Oblivion was such a steep decline from Morrowind.
https://sites.google.com/site/damicat/whyoblivionsucks

 

[Jack Of Owls]

That Wayward Realms momento mori was quite an enjoyable read. I remember how when they all got together, one guy wanted to work around the clock (the author of the article?), while the senior programmer/designer wanted to only work a few hours a day then just chill until the next day with the other dudes that got together, like husband and wife mismatched sex drives.

 

[prengle]

The funny thing is that Todd worked in Daggerfall as an additional designer.

Additional design means he was a gopher.

i can't be assed to find the interview where he says this, but todd has more or less admitted that he was a huge bethesda fanboy in the 90s and he kept begging them to hire him until they capitulated and let him on as a latrine cleaner. redguard was the first project he actually led:

Ted spends most of his time posting furry erotica in the discord, by all accounts.

but he wasn't the one who wrote the real barenziah...

 

[Azdul]

That Wayward Realms momento mori was quite an enjoyable read. I remember how when they all got together, one guy wanted to work around the clock (the author of the article?), while the senior programmer/designer wanted to only work a few hours a day then just chill until the next day with the other dudes that got together, like husband and wife mismatched sex drives.

I'm not sure if hyping the game in early pre-production was a great idea. The same goes for choosing programming language and engine just because junior programmer knows it.

Dreaming about new Daggerfall, talking shit on Discord, writing lore and doing some programming experiments - can be done for free when you're having fun. If you expect veterans like Ted, Julian and Vijay to deal with schedule, budget, pressure, expectations and insufferable younglings and drama queens - someone needs to pay them for that.

As I see it, the only 'missed opportunity' is that instead of disappointing just one 'marketing director' / 'Youtube personality' - they could have burned through few millions of $$$ of publisher / Kickstarter money and disappoint tens of thousands of people ...

 

[LarryTyphoid]

Any project organized on fucking Discord is cursed anyway.

 

[Gaznak]

I always wondered why people adore the whole TES thing, not only Oblivion...

Yes, Bethesda did some (not so) new and (maybe) cool things, like huge open world or skills increasing while using, but for me these games look and feel empty, tedious and boring. For example, M&M6 (what I still cope with and critiсize) is much better IMO.

Oblivion is the worst TES I played (and I played 1-4 and Battlespire). Why worst? Despite the shiny graphics it feels even more empty and tedious than previous parts. Don't know why and never wanted to see into it.

 

[Tihskael]

Because people hate the fact that Todd has kept Bethesda relevant after all this time. The companies the man-childs that scour these forums liked are long gone, their favorite devs are involved in wondrous activities such as putting their family on their company's payroll, developing a fetish for cars suitable for Lilliputians and making out with women that later MeToo their sorry asses. Some of them are even putting out games, which make Todd's recent misfire look like a fucking masterpiece. Only the Todd remains now, motivated as ever, setting his brilliant blue eyes on his next challenge - which is to make the best hard sci fi game possible brimming with 16 times the detail. Criticism will always be a part of his game, he has seen it all, done it all. Before it is too late, we need to realise that he is not the hero we deserve, but the hero we need.

 

[Lemming42]

I always wondered why people adore the whole TES thing, not only Oblivion...

Yes, Bethesda did some (not so) new and (maybe) cool things, like huge open world or skills increasing while using, but for me these games look and feel empty, tedious and boring. For example, M&M6 (what I still cope with and critiсize) is much better IMO.

Oblivion is the worst TES I played (and I played 1-4 and Battlespire). Why worst? Despite the shiny graphics it feels even more empty and tedious than previous parts. Don't know why and never wanted to see into it.

Arena - janky mess but it's got a lot of impressive tech and cool ideas for 1994. It's not a bad action-adventure game when you get into it.
Daggerfall - absolutely fucking wicked if you're interested in what it's trying to achieve. Never been anything else like it. Main plot is also genuinely pretty fascinating.
Redguard - this is actually fucking brilliant, but failed on the basis that the devs couldn't figure out how to do Tomb Raider controls properly, even though they were directly ripping Tomb Raider off.
Morrowind - has a lot of problems gameplay-wise, but it's an incredible glimpse into a totally alien world, only slightly hampered by the fact that NPCs never frigging move
Oblivion - absolute mess. Doesn't appear to even be set in the TES setting.
Skyrim - decent game, average action gameplay and it feels like it's back in the Elder Scrolls setting. Awful writing for most quests but they're background noise, just walk around on your own.

Other than Daggerfall, which is fascinating on its own merits, you have to really like the setting to enjoy the games.

 

[Gaznak]

what it's trying to achieve

And what's been achieved safe for 'big numbers of everything'? And what's good in these numbers if everything is empty, lifeless and copy-pasted? As soon as you realize the lack of meaning and coherence in all of these, indeed, spectacular numbers, Daggerfall loses its initial charm momentarily.

And yes, you are right about the setting. And yes, I don't like it just because I can't find anything I could like it for. It's deeply secondary and vapid. It's not Nosgoth, not Perihelion, not Arcanum, not Planescape, not Albion, not Dark Sun, not... I could go on forever. Mushroom houses? Duh. I pass.

 

[Funposter]

Morrowind is the closest video games have come to achieving a (fantasy) setting that feels realistic ala Tolkien. The mushroom towers are surface level. This is why NPC scheduling doesn't matter, either. NPCs going to sleep or eating at set times is realistic/believable on a micro level, but inconsequential at a macro level.