Why do people hate Oblivion so much?

[Lemming42]

Playing more of Oblivion, I've turned into a stealth character armed with Detect Life, Invisibility, and a special custom Paralyze-on-touch spell for emergencies (that also has healing so I can protect enemies from dying of fall damage when paralyzed - ULTIMATE moral high ground).

I think doing ghost runs of these games can be a lot of fun, it helps avoid the shit combat and occasionally gives you a new perspective on certain places. It was the best way to play Fallout 3, too - dungeons that in normal gameplay are boring as fuck suddenly become rather tense areas full of heart-stopping moments (Germantown Police HQ goes from a slog in regular gameplay to something pretty engaging when you play this way).

I am wound up to no end though because I was doing this stupid Mage's Guild recommendation quest where some guy with fetal alcohol syndrome stole an amulet from a demented lady. Go retrieve it from some burial chamber, okay, fine. Genuinely fun ghost run through the burial chamber, narrowly dodging groups of bandits, slinking through the shadows, and a particularly exciting bit right at the end where I had to pickpocket a key from a "marauder" leader who was watched at all times by two of his soldiers.

Then I get into the treasure room and retrieve the amulet, when fetal alcohol syndrome guy appears out of nowhere and attacks!!! Wow what a twist!! I make a run for the door but it's locked. For no fucking reason the door is magically locked to force me into a lethal confrontation with this shitty idiot. Okay, not giving up, I'll paralyze him and take the key from him that way. Oh look, the key magically isn't on his body. You literally have to kill him to proceed. Why? The devs clearly discovered that you could retrieve the key in other ways, but deliberately made it so that the key would inexplicably not appear in those circumstances. You should reward the player for finding innovative solutions, not punish them by having impossible reality-bending shit befall them. It would have taken exactly 15 minutes of work to add an alternate ending to this quest, where if the player successfully evades the assassination attempt then fetal alcohol syndrome man is, like, teleported to a jail cell or whatever where he a special line of dialogue or something. I think even I could make this a reality with my limited knowledge of Construction Set. Why couldn't Todd do it. He's a prick.

Same thing happened again a little later with the Mage's Staff quest - I go to the dungeon and find out that oh no, what a shocker, Necromancers have taken the place over and killed my friends. Okay, I ghost my way through the cave (which is fun) and emerge at a Necromancer ritual. Annoyingly, one NPC auto-detects me and approaches me to tell me she's going to kill me. Okay, no matter, I paralyze my assailants, grab the Mage's Staff from their ritual altar (or whatever it was), and heroically fling myself from the cliff edge into the ocean and swim to safety. Exciting!! Except the quest is now stuck until I go back and kill the necromancers, even though the fucking objective was explicitly to retrieve this shitty staff which I am now holding. The dimwit quest giver says "WEREN'T YOU SUPPOSED TO BE FINDING THE MAGE'S STAFF???" while I brandish that very fucking staff in his stupid uncomprehending inbred face. What a waste of time. At least Morrowind laid the cards out on the table by just telling you outright that each quest was going to be go-here-kill-everyone boring shit rather than tricking you into thinking there might be some kind of interesting alternate solution.

Just did the "Sirens" gang quest as well, same thing. They invite me to join their gang, which I actually want to do, but then for some reason when I go to join them I literally have one dialogue option which is "I will kill you" and then combat starts. I paralyze them all and leave, the quest is now eternally stuck. Great stuff. I don't think I'm playing in a particularly obtuse way that the developers couldn't have predicted or anything, I'm doing things that are absolutely logical and intuitive in-game and using core mechanics like Paralysis that the game happily provides to you.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

That is pretty shit, but do be fair Morrowind isn't innocent in that regard either when it comes to scripted crap.
If you do the Marsus Hides quest and kill off those hide thieves as part of the main quest (they are part of the warring faction) the quest gets stuck because what you're supposed to do is talk to them and make an agreement that Marsus won't come near the camp again.
For whatever reason, the game doesn't simply check to see if you have the hides in your inventory. If you kill them without talking to them about it first, you cannot return the hides to Marsus, even when you have the bloody things on you.

Its almost as if Bethesda can't script for shit.

 

[grimace]

Is there a mod to force combat into turn based fun?

 

[octavius]

It's almost as if the TES games are Adventure games with only one solution to the quests.

 

[Lemming42]

Well, I don't mind there being one solution in some cases - the "clear the cave of goblins" starter mission in the Fighter's Guild, for example, Oblivion's equivalent of the equally-boring Egg Poachers mission from Morrowind. Dull as hell but it serves its purpose - it's a beginner combat challenge for players starting their journey into the Fighter's Guild. Obviously in an actual good Fallout-esque RPG you could obviously have all kinds of ways around this, but I can accept that this is The Elder Scrolls and therefore a giant murder sandbox where virtually all problems are solved by spamming attacks. No problem. I'm not expecting Goblin diplomacy or the ability to talk the Egg Poachers down or anything.

But the problem is, with these Mage's Guild ones, I'm actually using magic. If it was called the "Get Locked Into Combat Constantly Guild" then that'd be one thing, but instead I'm actively punished for using my magic to try and move forward in the game, in the Mage's Guild. It's not like I'm trying to do something completely out of left field - the game tells me to get an amulet, I get the amulet, I'm magically locked into a room with a maniac for no reason who the devs actually ensured would not have the key to escape unless he died. The game tells me to retrieve a mage's staff, I retrieve the staff and abscond (which is not an illogical or obtuse step to take, given that the staff is right there, the enemies are easily dodged, and we're on an island which invites the player to make a quick escape by diving from the cliff), then game secretly decides that I actually had to kill three people even though the quest journal says nothing of the sort and I've actually brought the staff back to the questgiver only to have him spazz out and refuse to recognise the object that is directly in front of him.

It's also annoying because they not only suggest stealth as a viable option to you - telling you how to sneak during the tutorial, having the skills description say you can "move unseen", various upgrades and spells to help you with this, etc - but they also actually created a half-decent sandbox stealth game (albeit with the worst AI in the world). Morrowind's stealth was utterly abysmal and never a remotely viable gameplay option, unless you want to spam Invisibility, but Oblivion's got things like guard patrols and dynamic sneak/detection mechanics that actually work logically. Yet if you try to play it like this, the game simultaneously rewards you (with dungeons designed in part around moving unseen, with guard patrols and occasionally unique enemy conversations for players who have not been detected) while also punishing you (by suddenly forcing you into combat which it would be trivial to sneak past if you hadn't been forced into it via awful scripted shit).

They don't even have to offer any kind of actual concrete alternate solution - look at the Bleak Falls Barrow quest in Skyrim, for example. You can sneak into the barrow undetected, redeem the claw after the guy holding it inevitably dies, then sneak past the boss at the end or just back out the way you came and turn in the quest for your reward. Because the game told you to retrieve the claw, and you have done so in a manner befitting your character's skills, so you win. Oblivion would like, have the shopkeeper stare dumbly at the claw you're holding right in front of him while saying "DID YOU GET MY CLAW BACK YET?", and refuse to move the quest on until you'd killed every draugr in the barrow. Terrible.

 

[Caim]

Female Nords and Orcs were voiced by Lynda Carter...

Cute in the 70s, but I hope she didn't quit her day job.

She was 55 back in 2006, and unless she's bad at money she could combine her own wealth and that of her then-husband (he died in 2021) she'd have been fine.

 

[Lemming42]

After about half a trillion attempts to play this game, including the aborted one I wrote about at the top of this page, it's finally clicked for me. Enjoying the core gameplay loop of just walking across the map and fucking people's shit up.

Minimal modlist with Ascension, Unique Landscapes, and UOP, one or two mods to reduce level-scaling, plus a couple other minor mostly-cosmetic tweaks.

The Bethesda-ness is strong though, because, no joke, about two minutes after I said out loud "fuck me, I'm actually enjoying this!" the game crashed to desktop for no reason, and then failed to load both my quicksave and autosave. Averted disaster by restoring the autosave backup and relying on manual saves from then on.

I still wish the game was something much, much, much more than it actually is, but that's true of every Elder Scrolls game, especially post-Daggerfall, so whatever. Oblivion's always been a sticking point for me, it's the one entry in the TES series that I just couldn't fully get into because it was too shit, but it seems to be working for me at long last. Looking forward to uncovering the whole map, meeting lots of potato-faced fools, and entering at least fifty identical caves.

 

[ind33d]

After about half a trillion attempts to play this game, including the aborted one I wrote about at the top of this page, it's finally clicked for me. Enjoying the core gameplay loop of just walking across the map and fucking people's shit up.

Minimal modlist with Ascension, Unique Landscapes, and UOP, one or two mods to reduce level-scaling, plus a couple other minor mostly-cosmetic tweaks.

The Bethesda-ness is strong though, because, no joke, about two minutes after I said out loud "fuck me, I'm actually enjoying this!" the game crashed to desktop for no reason, and then failed to load both my quicksave and autosave. Averted disaster by restoring the autosave backup and relying on manual saves from then on.

I still wish the game was something much, much, much more than it actually is, but that's true of every Elder Scrolls game, especially post-Daggerfall, so whatever. Oblivion's always been a sticking point for me, it's the one entry in the TES series that I just couldn't fully get into because it was too shit, but it seems to be working for me at long last. Looking forward to uncovering the whole map, meeting lots of potato-faced fools, and entering at least fifty identical caves.

oblivion really isn't that hard to fix, FCOM makes it almost the best game of all time

 

[InD_ImaginE]

FCOM

These days its just MOO and OOO

 

[Lemming42]

The big overhauls seemed too content-heavy for me, I think a few past attempts at playing the game were sabotaged by me being quickly annoyed with the stuff they added.

Ascension is not bad, it's a noticeable upgrade over vanilla combat but doesn't mess around with too much. It retains most of the problems of vanilla but scales them down a bit, which I think is better than some modder just going crazy apeshit and messing around with everything in the game in a way that it's just not suited for. The game is also reasonably challenging now without relying as much on enemy health bloat. Still pretty poor combat overall but it's just about working.

Anyway, still playing this. Just did a stupid quest where I went to sleep in a boat hotel and the boat was put to sea with my dumb sleeping self aboard, by a group of thieves. Cue some gay Die Hard thing where you have to face down the gang and make your way to their leader who is locked in the captain's quarters.

I managed to slip by all the goons using my chameleon spell, stealing their keys, and confront their leader. Then you can actually talk the leader down rather than engaging her in HP-bloat combat, wow! I was going to praise Bethesda for this but apparently UESP says that it's only thanks to Unofficial Oblivion Patch that you can slip past the guards; in vanilla you have to fight them or the quest breaks. Good stuff Todd. Fun quest anyway, funny concept and a cool little thing at the end where you can make the leader surrender if you gathered enough info.

 

[Butter]

^ This is Oblivion in a nutshell. Neat quest idea that breaks if you try to do anything besides dumbfuck through it like a 30 INT Redguard.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Pickings must be slim, my friends. People are talking themselves into playing Oblivion in "unusual ways".

"If you don't engage in combat, and ignore the character development, and mod in the loot, and read Dostoyevsky on the side during dialogue, or hell, if you don't launch the game at all, it ain't so bad, chums..."

 

[Leinhart]

Not every RPG needs to to have 100 options for every quest. I think Oblivion does great what it needs to do. Exploration

 

[Lemming42]

It doesn't need to have Fallout-style quest branching obviously, but the problem is that it doesn't let you use the game's own mechanics. It encourages you to pick things like Stealth and Security as major skills, even offering pre-made builds to suit that, then throws it back in your face if you ever actually try to use them in a logical way.

The quest with the boat thieves is a great example because you literally can complete it as a thief - the keys you require are in the inventories of the thugs and are pickpocketable. The game's own systems have, apparently without the devs even realising, naturally created a cool situation where you're free to get the keys in a way that suits your skill set - a warrior or destruction mage will kill the thugs, a thief will steal the keys, a non-destruction mage might paralyse the thieves and take their keys.

But then, without the patch, the quest just fucking breaks. You got the keys and proceeded through the door to the goal, you have completed the quest, but the game locks up because Todd thought everyone would pick Blunt and Axe and didn't design quests around using the game's own systems. It's annoying and shows a huge lack of the most basic effort on Bethesda's part. And it's every single quest, every single time.

If they don't want you to use these skills, why are they in the game? If they don't want you to use systems like pickpocketing and sneaking, why do those systems not only exist, but also have such a core presence in the game? If they wanted to manufacture a situation where you're forced to simply fight your way through the ship, why have this concept of there being three keys, and why make them pickpocketable at all? Why create all these systems, skills and spell effects that the player isn't allowed to actually use, and yet which are constantly present in the game?

 

[Ravielsk]

It's annoying and shows a huge lack of the most basic effort on Bethesda's part. And it's every single quest, every single time.

That's because Bethesda designs everything in complete isolation. They have an idea for a quest or a feature so they make a system for that one idea but then never really use it for anything else. That is how you get dragon shouts for quick sprinting that are used a total of once in one dungeon or crafting that snaps the economy and level scaling in half. They had their one idea, they made it work and then never looked back.

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

Level scaling was ultra bloated at high levels ennemies had so much hp that the gameplay reduced to be spamming the strongest spells or swinging the stronger enchanted weapons on repeat to be able to kill ennemies that were mundane but had HP sponges.

 

[Ravielsk]

Level scaling was ultra bloated at high levels ennemies had so much hp that the gameplay reduced to be spamming the strongest spells or swinging the stronger enchanted weapons on repeat to be able to kill ennemies that were mundane but had HP sponges.

You know that is actually the better example for my point about how Bethesda designs everything in isolation than my examples. Level scaling on its own sounds like a neat idea and in isolation works great to keep the challenge at a constant level. Problem is that Bethesda obviously never crunched the numbers or really tested the feature beyond it initial implementation which resulted in glass clad bandits and wolves that have more HP than golems.

 

[Arbiter]

I believe that expectations of RPG players after Morrowind were huge. Bethesda instead decided to design Oblivion for 12 year old console players - hence streamlining and horrible UI utilizing huge fonts. In addition to that, Oblivion was marketed as "an RPG for gamers that do not like RPGs". All of this created outrage among hardcore RPG players.

Oblivion is also associated with censorship on developer forums, which gave rise to independent websites like Codex.

 

[Caim]

I believe that expectations of RPG players after Morrowing were huge. Bethesda instead decided to design Oblivion for 12 year old console players - hence streamlining and horrible UI utilizing huge fonts. In addition to that, Oblivion was marketed as "an RPG for gamers that do not like RPGs". All of this created outrage among hardcore RPG players.

Oblivion is also associated with censorship on developer forums, which gave rise to independent websites like Codex.

So basically the Codex existing is Todd's fault.

 

[Arbiter]

So basically the Codex existing is Todd's fault.

It just works.

 

[Caim]

So basically the Codex existing is Todd's fault.

It just works.

Barely.

Just like a Bethesda game.

 

[Arbiter]

So basically the Codex existing is Todd's fault.

It just works.

Barely.

Just like a Bethesda game.

Indeed, Codex is as buggy as AAA releases, for example I never received achievements for 250 and 500 brofists.

 

[anvi]

I am surprised someone hasn't made a generic RPG called Morrowing.

 

[Lemming42]

I believe that expectations of RPG players after Morrowing were huge. Bethesda instead decided to design Oblivion for 12 year old console players - hence streamlining and horrible UI utilizing huge fonts. In addition to that, Oblivion was marketed as "an RPG for gamers that do not like RPGs". All of this created outrage among hardcore RPG players.

I've said this kind of thing before in these threads but Morrowind was already a huge step down from Daggerfall, and the differences between Morrowind and Oblivion are nowhere near as vast as people tend to make out. They're both games where nothing you do matters, with half-baked poorly-balanced systems, where most of the game consists of engaging in crap combat in copy/pasted dungeons and talking to NPCs who have one unique line of dialogue, they both have level scaling (Oblivion's being far, far worse of course), they both offer no challenge after about level 10, they both typically have ultra-linear quests that are mechanically boring and have to be solved through combat, etc.

Morrowind's obvious major advantage is that the world is extremely interesting and detailed, unlike Oblivion which is deeply boring and generic, but most of the actual experience of playing them is not really a whole lot different. And they both offer the same massive letdowns and total lack of reactivity when you try to do things in a remotely novel way.

 

[Arbiter]

I've said this kind of thing before in these threads but Morrowind was already a huge step down from Daggerfall, and the differences between Morrowind and Oblivion are nowhere near as vast as people tend to make out.

This has already been discussed and most people here disagree with that thesis: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...line-and-should-be-considered-as-such.132932/