Was Oblivion soulless slop?

[Nessa]

!	Message from: loregamer
	Split from Wabbajack Unlocked.

Just play oblivion or morrowind instead.

I get Morrowind, but Oblivion is just as soulless without mods.

[Wretch]

Just play oblivion or morrowind instead.

I get Morrowind, but Oblivion is just as soulless without mods.

Completely untrue. Skyrim is soulless girlboss “forever game” slop. Oblivion is a traditional handcrafted game with a beautiful timeless story and fun whimsical world. It’s also one of the only “open world rpgs” that hard leans into imsim mechanics/ depth. The ai in the game alone is beyond any game released in the last 15+ years.

It has it’s problems (leveling system/ scaling and dumbing down of previous mechanics) but the game is genuinely full of soul. I hear It’s even the inspiration for Lord of the Rings.

[Nessa]

Completely untrue. Skyrim is soulless girlboss “forever game” slop. Oblivion is a traditional handcrafted game with a beautiful timeless story and fun whimsical world. It’s also one of the only “open world rpgs” that hard leans into imsim mechanics/ depth. The ai in the game alone is beyond any game released in the last 15+ years.

It has it’s problems (leveling system/ scaling and dumbing down of previous mechanics) but the game is genuinely full of soul. I hear It’s even the inspiration for Lord of the Rings.

I agree on Skyrim completely.

However Oblivion's main plot was infantile (only eclipsedm in awful by the garbage that was FO3 perhaps), calling the dialog asinine is an understatement, voice acting was even worse than Skyrim (hard to achieve!), there were no choices at all and it was the beginning of Bethsoft calling stupid fetch missions "quests". There wasn't a single decent quest in the main game that didn't need an overhaul to be playable. And I'm STILL mad over gathering all those **** Ayleid statues and not finding out what the hell the bloody things even were.

Just consider...

• Dark Brotherhood questline. Total trash, needed that overhaul mod. I actually just found out it was written by that abject moron Emil Pagliarulo. Imagine my shock.
• Mage's Guild. Dear heaven kill me now. Busy work to even get membership, and when you finally do you're instantly Archmage. Ridiculous and pointless without the overhaul mod.
• Kvatch: first part was the only good quest in vanilla, and they managed to screw that up. Fixed by the mod.
• Main quest: infantile and insulting to the intelligence. Generic Oblivion gates that get more boring each visit. Not even a single choice about anything. And even the end was pointless.

I can continue with the ......

And we're in the wabbajack thread aren't we?

I'm going to blame Lore for this.

[jebacdrkac]

Just play oblivion or morrowind instead.

I get Morrowind, but Oblivion is just as soulless without mods.

Completely untrue. Skyrim is soulless girlboss “forever game” slop. Oblivion is a traditional handcrafted game with a beautiful timeless story and fun whimsical world. It’s also one of the only “open world rpgs” that hard leans into imsim mechanics/ depth. The ai in the game alone is beyond any game released in the last 15+ years.

It has it’s problems (leveling system/ scaling and dumbing down of previous mechanics) but the game is genuinely full of soul. I hear It’s even the inspiration for Lord of the Rings.

"rose-tinted nostalgia— is when you remember something from the past as being much better than it actually was because you’ve forgotten the flaws and only recall the good parts.

In gaming, this happens a lot. You might remember an old game as amazing because of the fun you had playing it as a kid, the excitement of discovering it, or the emotional connection you had with it. But if you go back and play it now, you might realize the controls are clunky, the mechanics are outdated, and the story isn’t as deep as you thought.

This kind of nostalgia can be misleading because your brain tends to filter out the frustrations and only keep the highlights. That’s why some games feel "magical" in memory but don’t hold up when revisited."

Thank you ChatGPT...

Oblivion is what Dragon Age 4 would have been if it had been made before the woke era—ugly trash with terrible voice acting, dialogues that make Tumblr fanfiction romance slop seem realistic, and boring, repetitive quests.

oblivion-gate-inside.jpg

1200px-OB-quest-Defense_of_Bruma.jpg

remember-when-mannimarco-was-so.jpg

Rmtq8KDLagPDutJTp5ZViE.jpg

[Wretch]

I get Morrowind, but Oblivion is just as soulless without mods.

Completely untrue. Skyrim is soulless girlboss “forever game” slop. Oblivion is a traditional handcrafted game with a beautiful timeless story and fun whimsical world. It’s also one of the only “open world rpgs” that hard leans into imsim mechanics/ depth. The ai in the game alone is beyond any game released in the last 15+ years.

It has it’s problems (leveling system/ scaling and dumbing down of previous mechanics) but the game is genuinely full of soul. I hear It’s even the inspiration for Lord of the Rings.

"rose-tinted nostalgia— is when you remember something from the past as being much better than it actually was because you’ve forgotten the flaws and only recall the good parts.

In gaming, this happens a lot. You might remember an old game as amazing because of the fun you had playing it as a kid, the excitement of discovering it, or the emotional connection you had with it. But if you go back and play it now, you might realize the controls are clunky, the mechanics are outdated, and the story isn’t as deep as you thought.

This kind of nostalgia can be misleading because your brain tends to filter out the frustrations and only keep the highlights. That’s why some games feel "magical" in memory but don’t hold up when revisited."

Thank you ChatGPT...

Oblivion is what Dragon Age 4 would have been if it had been made before the woke era—ugly trash with terrible voice acting, dialogues that make Tumblr fanfiction romance slop seem realistic, and boring, repetitive quests.

Chill Ulfric, you’re letting your empire hate get out of control!

[Finarfin]

Completely untrue. Skyrim is soulless girlboss “forever game” slop. Oblivion is a traditional handcrafted game with a beautiful timeless story and fun whimsical world. It’s also one of the only “open world rpgs” that hard leans into imsim mechanics/ depth. The ai in the game alone is beyond any game released in the last 15+ years.

It has it’s problems (leveling system/ scaling and dumbing down of previous mechanics) but the game is genuinely full of soul. I hear It’s even the inspiration for Lord of the Rings.

I agree on Skyrim completely.

However Oblivion's main plot was infantile (only eclipsedm in awful by the garbage that was FO3 perhaps), calling the dialog asinine is an understatement, voice acting was even worse than Skyrim (hard to achieve!), there were no choices at all and it was the beginning of Bethsoft calling stupid fetch missions "quests". There wasn't a single decent quest in the main game that didn't need an overhaul to be playable. And I'm STILL mad over gathering all those **** Ayleid statues and not finding out what the hell the bloody things even were.

Just consider...

• Dark Brotherhood questline. Total trash, needed that overhaul mod. I actually just found out it was written by that abject moron Emil Pagliarulo. Imagine my shock.
• Mage's Guild. Dear heaven kill me now. Busy work to even get membership, and when you finally do you're instantly Archmage. Ridiculous and pointless without the overhaul mod.
• Kvatch: first part was the only good quest in vanilla, and they managed to screw that up. Fixed by the mod.
• Main quest: infantile and insulting to the intelligence. Generic Oblivion gates that get more boring each visit. Not even a single choice about anything. And even the end was pointless.

I can continue with the ......

And we're in the wabbajack thread aren't we?

I'm going to blame Lore for this.

Only good thing about Oblivions Story was Sean Beans monologe at the end of the game.

[loregamer]

I loved playing Oblivion on the Xbox 360 with my dad

[A Chinese opium den]

Oblivion is very soulful, are you gay?

[rusty_shackleford]

Points in favor of Oblivion:

• Actually tried something with its AI. It might be goofy as **** at times, but that's better than not existing at all. Skooma addicts traveling to a drug den to get their fix, NPCs going on trips to stay with their extended family for days, NPCs with low integrity resorting to stealing if hungry enough, etc.,. These are all cool ideas that should have been iterated upon instead of being thrown out the window.
• One of the few RPGs where you aren't the primary protagonist/hero.
• Better combat system than Morrowind and IMO the best of the series. Being able to use magic while using a weapon/shield is, as the younger people say, kino.

Meh:

• Dialogue system is arguably worse, but the wikipedia-style dialogue from Morrowind wasn't great either. Morrowind actually allowed a hybrid system but it makes use of it …two or three…? times in the entire game.
• Leveling system is still broken, but it was broken in Morrowind too.

Strict downgrades:

• Excessive level scaling
• Spell creator was worse and more limited.
• Less armor slots.
• Dungeons are worse than Morrowind, still better than Skyrim's copy-paste.
• Quests are overall worse than Morrowind.

False claims continuously repeated:

• Despite many claims to the contrary, it actually expanded upon the complexity of various systems from Morrowind instead of taking away. See ¹
• Anyone who complains about Oblivion having less weapon types fails to understand how little the weapon types in Morrowind differ from each other, as Oblivion actually models this unlike Morrowind. See ¹
• Cyrodiil was never a jungle. Morrowind retconned it into being one against the established lore(along with other terrible retcons like turning Bretons into elf-mutts). See ²

¹

"Not as many armor slots "

This is a good critique imo. I don't consider "no medium armor " to be a good critique if the same number(or more) armors still exist and there's no functional difference.

Similarly, spears add nothing that Oblivion doesn't already have other than spear visuals. Oblivion does have the concept of weapon reach — and unlike in Morrowind, claymores have significantly more reach than a shortsword(nearly double). All long blades in Morrowind have a reach of 1.0, from the lowly saber to the Daedric Claymore. All shortblades also have a reach of 1.0, yet another inferiority to Oblivion which does a much better job of modeling various weapon ranges.
In reality, nothing was lost. Oblivion gained true two-handed swords which functionally perform the same task. Oblivion also models various weapons having different ranges, rather than spears just having higher range and near everything else having the same.

Just mentioning that Oblivion has one less skill is pointless, Daggerfall had plenty of useless skills that were removed in Morrowind, I guess Morrowind is ultra bad by this logic.

²

Strangely, in the lore books prior to Oblivion it describes Cyrodill as being an "endless" jungle with only the centre being largely inhabited, yet in Oblivion we see none of that.

Wrong, only Morrowind did. Morrowind actually contradicted the existing lore.

From the King Edward book in Daggerfall describing Cyrodiil:

The journey through Valenwood was pleasant. The weather held fair for the most part, with sunny days and cool nights. Bright leaves of scarlet, crimson, gold and green drifted down to form a carpet beneath their horses' feet. Valenwood was very different from the somber, steep forests of High Rock. When they reached the northern border[that is, the border with Cyrodiil], Edward, looking back, saw that the trees were mostly bare, shorn of their glory. Before them lay a wide green land of rolling hills with only a few stands of trees. It seemed to spread on forever.

I challenge anyone to nail Cyrodiil better than Bethesda actually did using that description.

And, Daggerfall again, describing a climate not suitable for what someone would think of when using the word 'jungle':

The late winter weather held fair but cold for their journey, so that they travelled quickly over firm roads. On the last day, spring seemed to come at last for there was a thaw, and the road grew sloppy underfoot, and everywhere one could faintly hear the sound of water trickling and dripping. They came to the great bridge that crossed into Imperial City at sunset.

Conclusion:
Oblivion is a game that can be fixed with mods because the core issues are mechanical in nature, rather than narrative or design.
All an Oblivion "remaster" would require is putting in the work to release a 64bit build.

[Tweed]

Yes, it was always garbage and far worse than Morrowind and anyone who says otherwise is huffing nostalgic copium.

[Xenich]

Points in favor of Oblivion:

• Actually tried something with its AI. It might be goofy as **** at times, but that's better than not existing at all. Skooma addicts traveling to a drug den to get their fix, NPCs going on trips to stay with their extended family for days, NPCs with low integrity resorting to stealing if hungry enough, etc.,. These are all cool ideas that should have been iterated upon instead of being thrown out the window.
• One of the few RPGs where you aren't the primary protagonist/hero.
• Better combat system than Morrowind and IMO the best of the series. Being able to use magic while using a weapon/shield is, as the younger people say, kino.

Meh:

• Dialogue system is arguably worse, but the wikipedia-style dialogue from Morrowind wasn't great either. Morrowind actually allowed a hybrid system but it makes use of it …two or three…? times in the entire game.
• Leveling system is still broken, but it was broken in Morrowind too.

Strict downgrades:

• Excessive level scaling
• Spell creator was worse and more limited.
• Less armor slots.

False claims continuously repeated:

• Despite many claims to the contrary, it actually expanded upon the complexity of various systems from Morrowind instead of taking away. See ¹
• Anyone who complains about Oblivion having less weapon types fails to understand how little the weapon types in Morrowind differ from each other, as Oblivion actually models this unlike Morrowind. See ¹
• Cyrodiil was never a jungle. Morrowind retconned it into being one against the established lore(along with other terrible retcons like turning Bretons into elf-mutts). See ²

¹

"Not as many armor slots "

This is a good critique imo. I don't consider "no medium armor " to be a good critique if the same number(or more) armors still exist and there's no functional difference.

Similarly, spears add nothing that Oblivion doesn't already have other than spear visuals. Oblivion does have the concept of weapon reach — and unlike in Morrowind, claymores have significantly more reach than a shortsword(nearly double). All long blades in Morrowind have a reach of 1.0, from the lowly saber to the Daedric Claymore. All shortblades also have a reach of 1.0, yet another inferiority to Oblivion which does a much better job of modeling various weapon ranges.
In reality, nothing was lost. Oblivion gained true two-handed swords which functionally perform the same task. Oblivion also models various weapons having different ranges, rather than spears just having higher range and near everything else having the same.

Just mentioning that Oblivion has one less skill is pointless, Daggerfall had plenty of useless skills that were removed in Morrowind, I guess Morrowind is ultra bad by this logic.

²

Strangely, in the lore books prior to Oblivion it describes Cyrodill as being an "endless" jungle with only the centre being largely inhabited, yet in Oblivion we see none of that.

Wrong, only Morrowind did. Morrowind actually contradicted the existing lore.

From the King Edward book in Daggerfall describing Cyrodiil:

The journey through Valenwood was pleasant. The weather held fair for the most part, with sunny days and cool nights. Bright leaves of scarlet, crimson, gold and green drifted down to form a carpet beneath their horses' feet. Valenwood was very different from the somber, steep forests of High Rock. When they reached the northern border[that is, the border with Cyrodiil], Edward, looking back, saw that the trees were mostly bare, shorn of their glory. Before them lay a wide green land of rolling hills with only a few stands of trees. It seemed to spread on forever.

I challenge anyone to nail Cyrodiil better than Bethesda actually did using that description.

And, Daggerfall again, describing a climate not suitable for what someone would think of when using the word 'jungle':

The late winter weather held fair but cold for their journey, so that they travelled quickly over firm roads. On the last day, spring seemed to come at last for there was a thaw, and the road grew sloppy underfoot, and everywhere one could faintly hear the sound of water trickling and dripping. They came to the great bridge that crossed into Imperial City at sunset.

Conclusion:
Oblivion is a game that can be fixed with mods because the core issues are mechanical in nature, rather than narrative or design.
All an Oblivion "remaster" would require is putting in the work to release a 64bit build.

Some of the quest helping system in the game was rather absurd at times. That was a huge turn off for me and among many of the reasons I stopped playing it at release.

If you go back and patch the living hell out of it FCOM and tune it right (I still have the FCOM exe patch the community threw a tantrum over because someone made installing the thing easy) , I think the game is rather good.

[Tweed]

Look at all the nostalgic copers.

[maidenhaver]

Morrowind is to Arthurian Romance what Oblivion is to the Bible.

[rusty_shackleford]

Look at all the nostalgic copers.

Provide a coherent argument against the points I've raised. Morrowind feels overly sterile and lifeless with a lot of systems that work poorly. It's a good example of how much an RPG can succeed on quest design alone.

[Xenich]

Look at all the nostalgic copers.

Provide a coherent argument against the points I've raised. Morrowind feels overly sterile and lifeless with a lot of systems that work poorly. It's a good example of how much an RPG can succeed on quest design alone.

Might just be because of the time it came out, but I was amazed by it and there were a lot of things I loved about the game play compared to Oblivion. I loved being completely ineffective at the start, having to really put effort to get my skills up, etc... /shrug

[Tweed]

Points in favor of Oblivion:
Actually tried something with its AI. It might be goofy as **** at times, but that's better than not existing at all. Skooma addicts traveling to a drug den to get their fix, NPCs going on trips to stay with their extended family for days, NPCs with low integrity resorting to stealing if hungry enough, etc.,. These are all cool ideas that should have been iterated upon instead of being thrown out the window.
One of the few RPGs where you aren't the primary protagonist/hero.
Better combat system than Morrowind and IMO the best of the series. Being able to use magic while using a weapon/shield is, as the younger people say, kino.

Broken AI system goes completely unnoticed by the player who's too busy running/swimming into a wall for five hours trying to level athletics. NPCs might as well stand around waiting for you to talk to them at that point.
Good thing they fixed that with Shivering Isles. Also Daggerfall says hi.
If that's all it took to fix Oblivion's combat it'd be no problem. Swinging like a ****** in Oblivion isn't much different than Morrowind except there's less dice rolls involved and every hit connects. If you level wrong it won't help against those highwaymen in glass armor thanks to level scaling from hell.

[rusty_shackleford]

Broken AI system goes completely unnoticed by the player who's too busy running/swimming into a wall for five hours trying to level athletics.

not my fault you played the game wrong

[Wretch]

Yes, it was always garbage and far worse than Morrowind and anyone who says otherwise is huffing nostalgic copium.

Oh you really hated that the beast races weren’t always naked anymore and less animalistic, huh?

[asf]

oblivion is the postcard game for when games turned into total ****

[gerey]

Oblivion feels like a product where Bethesda designed a game, but then forgot to make content for it.

There's so many useless or broken mechanics in the game, and the quests that are in the game fail to make much use of the mechanics that are functional.

[Oyster Sauce]

It's soulful slop

[Valter]

I like what it tried to be, even if it wasn't very successful at it.

[traxtan]

Every game sucks if you look hard enough, doesn't mean you can't enjoy the good parts.

[Irenaeus]

I don't like the overuse of the word "slop" but Oblivion was pretty bad.

[rusty_shackleford]

I like what it tried to be, even if it wasn't very successful at it.

Shooting for the moon, even if you miss, is underappreciated. I'm tired of "safe" small scope games(and projects in general.) Give me ambition!

[NotAI]

It was jank.

Not sure why jank is usually associated with eurojank.

But it had potential. Was trying, or so it seemed.

The writing, quests, story, where generic compared to competitors but the simulation aspects set it apart.

Agree with "I like what it tried to be, even if it wasn't very successful at it."

Spector or somebody had said that people like games based on what they could be, rather than what they are. Oblivion matches that description. Fun for a certain amount of hours when it came out for sure. Disappointing after one or two dozen.

[Vaako]

It started the quicktravel trend and magical markers on the map. Just so they could say our game is bigger (but more empty). Dungeons were **** especially oblivion gates, worst daedric and glass armor designs in the series. They got rid of levitation, seven mile boots, dumbed down spellmaking and armor slots. No fun without a mod which fixes level scaling. Terrible pc UI and character creation.

Few things it did improve, npc day/night shedules, combat casting with weapon out and active blocking. Vampirism wasnt completly ***.

Still had acrobatics/athletics/attributes/birthsigns at least.

Probably my least favourite in the series. But thanks to mods you could even get there 1k hours + out of it.

[traxtan]

Give me ambition!

Ambition nowadays just means filling a giant open world map with useless **** content.

[loregamer]

Is this rpghq's most divisive game?

[NotAI]

It started the quicktravel trend and magical markers on the map. Just so they could say our game is bigger (but more empty).

Actually yeah, it did start that trend. That's a big negative for it. Forgot about that.

Morrowind had stilt striders but that was it for fast travel. Meaning the map was the last designed to really be explored and navigated by walking and looking around.