Bismarck36

I'll lead off by saying that I really do enjoy Oblivion and think its an awesome game, well worth the couple hundred hours I've sunk into it, but it fell short of my post-Morrowind expectations. Morrowind was my first ES experience, and impressed me so much that I played it continuously for three years (with occassional breaks for Rome: Total War) and did just about everything there was to do in it. Oblivion has bettered Morrowind in three respects I think: the beautiful graphics, the improved AI, and the awesome combat system. That being said, it fell short in a lot of ways. I hate to sound like a broken record and repeat the things everyone else has said so far, but I think its important to reinforce them and send a clear message. First, the decrease in weapon classes, which continues to drive me nuts (i love spears, though I don't know why). Second, the lack of my preferred medium armor class, as well as the decrease in clothing/armor slots (poor forgotten pauldrons...), and what seemed a general thinning out of armor choices. Also the fact that in vanilla oblivion you're either going to end up with glass or daedric armor, both of which I think are hideous. Then there's the beautiful environment- with almost no real variation. In MW you had a wide variety of landscapes to wander, whereas Oblivion is pretty much all trees, grass, or barren mountains. And amongst this homogenous landscape: tons of pointless dungeons, with map markers and quest markers to lead you to everything without having to look for yourself. Then there's the quests and factions: not enough of either. And almost every quest there is seems hack-n-slash oriented - great for showing off the combat system, but boring after awhile. MW's fetch, escort, and deliver quests could be tedious, but they provided some variety. And I have to say that I especially miss the legion missions, which were my favorite in MW and provided your new character with some weapons, armor, money, experience, and fame, and rewarded an awesome cuirass AND sword for completing all its missions. Now I'll get to the stuff I don't think anyone else said yet. First and foremost is the leveled everything system: baddies, weapons, armor; everything is tied to your level. This is annoying for several reasons: at low levels you'll never see any of the interesting things, but when you get to those high levels, even the common bandit runs around in glass armor. Then the type of daedra you run into are tied to your level, so after awhile those stupid spider ones get real tiresome. To talk about armor again, I'd have to say that it seems to me your AC never goes beyond 85, which you'll reach with either light or heavy, thus there is no real difference between them at the end. And sort of associated, the leap from Roman-style legionaries in MW to the crappy iron-clad legionaries of Oblivion.....why? I'll admit I like the Roman stuff better in general, and I could be content with the change if it weren't quite so sudden and thorough. Can't there at least be a few pieces of MW-style legionary armor around to be had? Then there's the world itself, which I already touched on, but will elaborate. The land area is smaller than MW's, which is bad enough in itself. On top of that, it all looks more or less the same. Add in the fact that there is a vast overabundance of dungeons (mostly pointless) and the whole thing begins to feel too crowded, especially to those of us who would like some empty space to build on. What makes it even worse though, is the fast travel, which makes everything that much quicker to get to. Because I can fast travel from almost anywhere to just about anywhere, I find that I do, like most everyone else I bet, at the expense of the immersion factor of running through the wilds. I think I really prefer MW's system of transport: your feet, with some help from silt striders, boats, and mages guild teleporters that all charge you some fee and often require you to make stops along the way for "connecting flights." Also, I think the cities themselves are too small, with too few people in them. They all feel like villages except for the IC, which feels more like a town, but not the grand capitol of the Empire. Also, it feels like there isn't any depth to conversations in the game. By switching from text to voice the developers really hemmed themselves in. In MW almost everyone had more to discuss than just "rumors" and quest-related topics. They usually had things to say about whatever factions or towns they were in, plus stuff about their professions and backgrounds (these were mostly generic and repetetive, but again, they added variety). And just to add on to the voice complaints, it makes modding more complicated, and I know I certainly don't want to hear a poor recording of my own voice coming out the speakers at me. Poor voice acting (both in vanilla Oblivion and modding) as well as a character that lacks any speach at all really detract from the immersion. And my last complaint is about horses. Aside from being useless (i never even bother with them anymore) you can't fight from one. I know there are mods out there that try to address this, but the developers really should have done something about it before they released the game. Personally my vote is for lances, but ANYTHING is better than NOTHING. Sorry for writing so much, but I wanted to cover everything I could think of.