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RPGDot Game Rating Machine |
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Magus77
has rated the following games:
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Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion: 4/10 points |
Hallo,
The good side:
- Visually very beautiful. I have a high end computer, so it runs well. There is potential for improvments, true. But it looked great out of the box
- Sound - good, but a bit repetetive in dungeons.
- Some issues which were criticised in Morrowind were adressed:
++ Combat - much better
++ Sneaking - much better
++ Casting and fighting at the same time
++ Mana regeneration
- Havok physics are nice, but badly implemented IMHO - see below.
- Scheduled NPCs, RAI, nice touch, but not really thought through
The bad side:
While playing Morrowind I did not think about mods. The first mods out were mostly houses for the player. I did not download any mods, not even all the Bethesda mods. I played. With Oblivion I thought of mods from the first hour of play on, because some things are really bad. There are that many Bad Ideas in the game.
- User interface. Will not say anything about this awful thing. There was a mod out in the first days. Beth should be ashamed.
- German translation: I got to see some examples on the Web. I always buy the english version of games - and Oblivion gave me one reason more to do so.
- Level scaling. It was always in ES games, but never this bad. But with this one could live - see below. But one side effect of level scaling is, that the main quest can be solved very fast, and the character could be a very low level. This does not fit, and it does not really fit if a level 3 character is arena champion.
- Level scaling during the Kvatch quest: Everywhere they level the NPCs, but your team of helpers in Kvatch is not leveled. I entered Kvatch at level 16, they were whiped out in seconds. The only essential NPC (the captain) is more unconcious than on his feet. His armor degrades in minutes, so he is standing in his clothes, which does not exactly help him. But he is unconcious and probably more comfortable in clothes anyway
- Item scaling. This is the most awful, sloppy and lazy solution they could find. It absolutly kills a large part of ES games. They were too lazy to think about dungeon design (or they did not have the time - see below), and with the automatic marking of dungeons there are no secret dungeons, where you could hide something. So what you will find is always the same. Awful. And I do use a mod which mods the equipment of NPCs, or I would have bandits with daedric gaer around every corner. Awful.
- Some of the parameters: Armor is degrading _much_ too fast. After Kvatch I changed this in the CS. It is neither fun nor role playing if you have to hammer your armor and weapon after every enemy. I had 30 hammers with me an was journeyman armorer, and still run out of hammers half the way through.
- The idiotic enchanting/reloading is really bad. Enchanting was badly dumbed down. Soul gems come now mostly filled. But htis is rather bad, you find grand soul gems with petty souls in it, so they are unusable for better things. I think they should be modded out and the reload cycles should be longer instead. (Enchanting was unbalancing in Morrowind, but no one was forced to ruin his game this way. Oblivion is unbalanced in other ways). And constant effect has lost all of its mystery if it can be done with even a petty soul gem.
- The spellmaker is dumbed down and 'balanced', even as a master I cannot make spells lasting more than 120 seconds, but I can buy journeyman level spells which last 240 seconds.
- There are things which are taken from FPS games: Torches around every corner, millions of heal and mana potions (of a quality the character cannot make himself) and so on. Reminds me of Farcry with its ammunition and heal packets.
- The main quest, and some other quests: The main quest starts with a console 'tutorial' game, and is rather boring. Worse, it is unbelievable from the start. Emperor flees through dungeon, well I can believe this. Emperor sees a prisoner and connects him to his visions. Ok. Emperor has only three guards with him. Hmm. Emperor and guards do not mind prisoner following them and breaking out. Well. Emperor dies - a catastrophe! And then, they let the prisoner disappear with the most important artefact of the empire? Please. This is awful, the person who wrote this should be whipped. Normally the Blades would have killed the prisoner out of sheer frustration. And it goes on. The silly gates, where nothing happens but some assorted (leveled) daedras coming out. A town destroyed, and then nothing. The entire main quest does not fit the ES games style. It is much too urgent. They wanted to build up pressure fast, so new gamers would not become bored and would know always what to do next. The sacrificed the freedom, because role playing the character cannot ignore the events. In Morrowind there were no urgent events at the start, and the pressure built slowly. So you could do other things.
- The choices in quests - non existant.
- The quest arrows - ugh. No exploring, no descriptions where to go. No subquests to find a location. Run along the quest arrow. Thanks to Todd Howard. He knows how to make fun games.
- Worse, the idiot hint windows. 'I have found the cave X, I should now go in'. Wahhh. Cannot be disabled and absolutely ruins the fun for me. As an old computer hand I heard a saying years before: "Build an interface every idiot can use, and only an idiot will want to use it". This could be rewritten to Oblivions quest structure and the quest helpers, including fast travel: "Make a game every idiot can play, and only an idiot will want to play it". No offense - I did play it myself
- The minigames: They defeat RP, because RP is about the abilites and disablilites of the character, not the player. It is possible to open very hard locks with low skill, if one takes the time to learn the mini game. I could not be bothered, I hate such things. So I used the automatic option - and this thing is sloppy implemented, because despite skill around 50 it still breaks some lockpicks even with very easy locks. The other minigame is just silly, I do not use it, I bribe the NPCs.
- All the things left out: Enchanting, skills, medium armor, weapon skills, and so on. It seems they always used the easy way out: Somebody complained, so we leave it out. The game is badly dumbed down. Fast travel in itself is not that bad, but they left out _all_ the typical ES travel methods, and this sucks. Not being able to levitate in a world that beautiful also is a dumb decsion
Bugs:
Some of the bugs are really annoying. The game is unstable. Havok seems to have to do with this, and other processes with the AI. If one sleeps for 4-5 days (4-5 times 24 hours game time), the stability of the game is much better. If I leave a room with havok sims still running, crash probability is higher, I think. Sometimes havok runs wild, one time I had a dead goblin cought in a door, it rattled around, could be heard in the entire cell, and never came to a standstill. No damping. Some creatures, when killed, continue to twitch indefinitely. No damping. Not only is this unnatural, it also costs CPU time and slows down the game. I have a dual core AMD 4800 X2, I do not notice much, but there are complaints about sudden unexplained slow downs of the game. If I drop an item, it is not put down. No, this would have been uncool, it is thrown about, so it upsets other things. If I log in in my house, things one floor below (in the same cell) are disturbed. If I pick something from a table, the entire table surface is disturbed. This should work better.
Quest bugs, which show that the game was either tested sloppily or not tested at all.
RAI bugs, I saw two Imperial forresters fighting each other to the dead. Something happend to the horse of the countess of Leyawiin, and now she walks, while her escort rides. Really funny, because she is much faster on foot and miles before her escort. So she is unconsicous most of the time, when the bad critters appear in hgiher levels. This could easily solved in the program. There are no corrections built in if a NPC falls under the floor, which happens sometimes.
Summary and conclusions:
The game is obviously not ready. It seems to be more ready for the console, but there are still bugs, which is worse on XBox because people can do nothing - no console.
I can only speculate, but besides bad design decisions they seem to have been under an enormous pressure. Many of the bad things, from the PC user interface to bugs galore could have been ironed out, if they had more time. I suspect, that M$ had to do with it: The XBox needs games, and Oblivion was one of the main applications which would push the XBox 360. So they needed it and they needed it now. I think Beth had no choice in this matter. The game should have been released 3 months later, then many things would have been corrected in QA.
The project manager (Todd Howard) is surely to blame for many of the things. He defended some of the more awful design decisions on the boards before release. I will not buy another game when this guy is in charge. He always selected the easy way out, either leave something out, or dumb it down. He set out to 'balance' the game, always saying Morrowind was unbalanced. Yes it was unbalanced, but who cares? It also was fun because of this, and nobody forced the player to make an uberhero. Some items I had, but never used, because they were too strong. Now they rebalanced the game, took much of the fun out of it and failed badly, because you can cheat in other ways (chameleon adds up, with 90% you are unbeatable) now.
I am quite sure that the game does not look like the dev team imagined it. There are very beautiful desinged dungeons - with nothing in it. It looks as if they had to finish the game in a hurry, so in go the automated leveld monsters, in go the leveld chests, and ready. There are bugs which show this. In a quest you are asked to retrieve a family weapon from a man who left home and his wife with it. If you revist the dungeon after this quest, it is filled again with bandits. And the dead body of the bandit with the weapon stills lies there. And he has the weapon with him. If you take it, you cen never drop or sell it again, since it is a quest item. A shop keeper in Anvil asks you for help (Fighters Guild quest) against thieves. The bodies of the thieves still lie in his shop, months in game time have passed. It does not seem to disturb the shop keeper.
There are a lot of unfinished things in the game. With the CS you see a lot of testing areas in the game, some of them are deleted, some are not. There are items, with no purpose. It looks, as if somebody said at some point: "Code freeze, we have to go gold, so we test now for a week and thats it".
Pete Hines (the person responsible for many overhyped statements and half truths) told in an interview, the patch would be ready around mid April. It still is not ready. I can only hope the use the time to correct the game, otherwise I will not buy from Bethesda.
The game still is playable, even if badly dumbed down. I have a long list of small things (stamina while running, etc) which should be corrected. The game is optimized for the players on console (and I think this was unneccesary, console players do not like dumb games, why should they).
With mods the game will be quite nice, I think. But I fear it never will be a great game like Morrowind.
Magus
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