You know what really grinds my gears?

[WeissYohji]

You know what really grinds my gears?

 

1. The bows. I can understand how metal bows would work, but glass bows? How does a glass bow work? It can't, Bethesda. IT CAN'T. (There's no evidence that Tamriel has nanofiber technology.) A glass bow should break, not bend.

2. The part of the main story where you have to get the blood of a Daedric Prince. If you do the main quest in the Shivering Isles expansion before doing this one, why not just have your character prick their finger, put their blood in a vial, and give it to Martin? You ARE the new Sheogorath, after all.

3. If Tamriel is supposed to be the size of Europe, it sure doesn't feel like it. It feels a lot more like you could fit all of Cyrodiil alone inside Delaware or Rhode Island.

4. Weye. Just Weye. One house and an inn? That's not even a village!

 

Your thoughts?

[Trandoshan]

You know what really grinds my gears?

 

1. The bows. I can understand how metal bows would work, but glass bows? How does a glass bow work? It can't, Bethesda. IT CAN'T. (There's no evidence that Tamriel has nanofiber technology.) A glass bow should break, not bend.

2. The part of the main story where you have to get the blood of a Daedric Prince. If you do the main quest in the Shivering Isles expansion before doing this one, why not just have your character prick their finger, put their blood in a vial, and give it to Martin? You ARE the new Sheogorath, after all.

3. If Tamriel is supposed to be the size of Europe, it sure doesn't feel like it. It feels a lot more like you could fit all of Cyrodiil alone inside Delaware or Rhode Island.

4. Weye. Just Weye. One house and an inn? That's not even a village!

 

Your thoughts?

 

My thoughts?

 

...I use my

 

... and all of the inconsistencies just blow in the wind...

[BFG99]

Kudos to Trandoshan for making me laugh. :)

 

Seriously though, on #2 -- you may be Sheogorath, a Daedric Prince title, but you're not Daedric. (You're still whatever race you started out as.)

[WeissYohji]

Kudos to Trandoshan for making me laugh. :)

 

Seriously though, on #2 -- you may be Sheogorath, a Daedric Prince title, but you're not Daedric. (You're still whatever race you started out as.)

 

But there's the Mythic Dawn's theory that

Mundus is just Akhulakan's sphere and mortals are the equivalent of Dremora. Either you don't think of it, or the Mythic Dawn is wrong about this

.

[The_Vyper]

One thing that's always bugged me about Oblivion is Jauffre. Seriously, this guy is the Grandmaster of the freakin' Blades. He should be at least marginally intelligent, but what does he do? He sends an escaped prisoner on mission after mission with the fate of the world itself in the balance and he doesn't send so much as one Blade along as backup. The problems I have with that are:

 

1. Why would he put so much trust in an escaped prisoner that he's never even heard of before, much less met? Wouldn't he be more likely to send someone who's actually earned that level of trust, like one of the Blades that he's known for years? All the ex prisoner did was bring him the Emperor's bling and tell him a wild story that anybody would have trouble believing.

 

2. Why would Jauffre send anyone on such vital missions alone? Wouldn't it greatly increase the chances of success to send two, three or even four people on these missions? At the very least, he should send one Blade to make sure the ex prisoner doesn't try anything...funny.

 

It seems to me like Jauffre has gotten a little carried away with the skooma.

[Megatarius]

Thanks for the spoiler about Sheogorath. :confused:

 

That grinds my gears.

[WeissYohji]

Here's another thing that really grinds my gears: The Khajiit and Argonians. You'd think there'd be some with digitigrade feet instead of human-looking feet, seeing as how a Khajiit's form is determined by the phases of the moons when they're born and Argonians' forms by how many times they lick the sap of the Hist tree. Now, I've seen some clips from Morrowind that had Argonian and Khajiit characters with digitigrade feet, but they looked pretty funky. Maybe Bethesda should hire some furry artists to design and animate their character models--someone on FurAffinity might know what they're doing. (Given the Khajiits' lunar lattice and Argonians' Hist tree sap kink, that must make for some odd breeding cycles.)

[Ferryt]

WeissYohji, there are a LOT of things about Oblivion that grind my gears -- but it's still my favorite game. First I'm going to "meta-address" a great number of issues before I talk about yours, and mine. The entire game is contrived. It has a contrived premise, it's full of contrived plots ... examined carefully and objectively there's very little in it that could actually happen the way the developers designed it if Tamriel were a real world setting with real people that reacted to things in a realistic way, even given the fantasy elements which are present.

 

Your issues

 

1. Bows: This is actually a more far-reaching issue than just with bows. I very much dislike the whole "level" progression of weapons and armor from iron on up through various other materials. That's not the way real weapons and armor work. I think it was just an excuse to rationalize the cooler textures you get with better armament. Like I said, above -- "contrived".
    
   
2. Sheogorath's blood: What BFG99 said -- it's a title and that's all. I'm not even sure you could actually use the original Sheogorath's blood for that quest, either. Don't count on the Mythic Dawn having the last word regarding "Truth", either. Remember that they have an axe to grind and The Nine happen to disagree with this theory, for obvious reasons -- AND, Akatosh ]did defeat the (arguably) toughest of the Daedric Princes in the main quest, thereby putting the Daedra in their "proper place" in the overall scheme of things.
    
   
3. Size of Tamriel: Yep. One of my pet peeves is that Cyrodiil, in its entirety, is no larger than some cities in the U.S., and that its cities are hardly even respectable neighborhoods. It should take weeks, if not months, of hard travel to traverse Cyrodiil, but how long does it take in-game? A couple of days, and that's stopping at frequent intervals to browse for alchemical ingredients.
    
   
4. Weye: And most other "settlements", too. Yeah ... Bethesda dropped the ball on "finishing" almost everything in this game (there are even some blatantly unfinished quests and even places that were never completed), but the lack of attention to "reality" in constructing various settlements is very immersion-breaking for me. So, you aren't the only one to have noticed this. It's why we have several mods that directly address the issue of Weye.
    
   
5. Digitigrade feet: Definitely agreed, at least in the case of Khajitti. Biologically, though, a good argument could be made for Argonians being plantigrade, since, to my knowledge, all modern reptiles are. On the other hand, the hip structure and orientation of bones in the pelvis and legs or Argonians means that they have some distinctive mammalian characteristis, as well, so they could quite easily be interpreted as being digitigrade. I really wonder why Bethesda didn't make at least the Khajiiti digitigrade? I suspect it was just laziness. It wouldn't have required that much of change to the standard skeleton -- just the lengthening of certain bones and re-angulation of the foot bones to force toe-walking. It might have required a different animation, but I'd think that could have been easily worked into the game during the development process.
   

 

The_Vyper, Jauffre is only one of many NPCs that don't act rationally. Bethesda developed Oblivion for gamers who want everything handed to them on a platter. The entire main quest in this game is horribly contrived. How someone just out of prison and with only a few skills above novice level could possibly accomplish the main quest in a short time, rather than drawing it out for years, if not decades, to train to be good enough, escapes me completely. The same could be said, of course, for all the guild quests. Play your cards right and you can be the Arch Mage, Gray Fox, Master of the Fighter's Guild, the Dark Brotherhood Listener, and the grand champion of the Arena in less than a month's time, right out of the sewers? What rational kind of sense does this make? Answer: None.

 

Megatarius, that was hardly a "spoiler". If you've played Oblivion for any length of time you already know you're going to become the head honcho for every single main objective in the game (one of my own pet peeves). This was hardly an eye-opening tid-bit when I first discovered it thorough reading. I had already expected that the PC would gain control of Sheogorath's Realm, which would, logically, require him to actually become Sheogorath in the same sense he becomes the Gray Fox at the end of the Thieves Guild quest line. I really don't count such knowledge as "spoilers" for this game. It's simply par for the course for a game aimed at aggrandizement of the PC for players with megalomanic tendencies.

 

Now, for a few of my own

 

1. Levels: I hate them. We can thank Gary Gygax for ruining game systems forever by his introduction of the fundamentally-flawed concept of character level into gaming. Later games, at least a few of them, threw out the idea completely, and went with a purely skill-based method of determining how good a character was at anything. It's much more realistic and much less conducive to the fixation that gamers have on milking game systems for rapid level advancement.
    
   
2. Leveling: Not the same as "levels", above -- now I'm talking about the way the game "levels" with the character. Or doesn't level with the character. It's inconsistent. It doesn't make sense. I clear out a cave early in the game, meeting bandits clad in leather armor and wielding iron weapons. I go back later to find they've respawned and now they're decked out in their Glass finery. There are better ways of ensuring that the game remains challenging than just leveling up the opposition. And then, in the main quest you find that your NPC allies don't level up with you, but all the Bad Guys do, so you're friends get wiped out in the first few seconds of a battle, leaving you to do the job, yourself. The Oblivion leveling system is fundamentally flawed. I just don't see any other way to put it.
    
   
3. Bodies: Really bad bodies, in fact. Bethesda completely underwhelmed me with the system we were given to tweak our character's appearance. The head and face was nicely done -- kudos there. Then we have what amounts to a single male body being used for both male and female characters. OK, they were nice enough to put boobs on the female version, but it's still a dude's body! That's why we have body replacer mods, but there's no reason at all that we couldn't have had the ability, from the get-go, to modify the body structure as well. They could have learned something from playing in Second Life, where the body was almost as malleable as the head during character generation. And why does every single NPC have to have the same body? I install Robert's male and female bodies (my favorite body replacement mods) and everyone looks the same. There are no fat people. There are no skinny people. There are no tall people. There are no short people. There are no people with hunched backs (even though there are, ostensibly, old people). Seriously, how much extra trouble would it have been to be able to at least have a choice of body types, such as mods like HGEC gives us for females and Robert's male body gives us for males, even if we can't actually modify them beyond that? This game would be much more interesting if everyone wasn't exactly the same.
    
   
4. Psychic guards: How is it that every guard in all of Cyrodiil knows you've committed a crime virtually the instant you do it? I was once arrested even though the NPC into whose house I had broken in hadn't screamed for help and didn't leave the house when I did. There's no way at all that the guards could have known I was even in there. To make matters even more immersion-breaking, I had changed into a suit of full-coverage armor that I had never worn before, and I was still recognized. Sorry. I don't buy it. I didn't then, either. I cheated, since the game cheated, by reloading, killing the NPC in question before he could detect me, did my dirty work, and left. This time with no guards on my tail.
    
   
5. Horses: These creatures are totally borked, in almost every sense of the term. I'm an equine enthusiast in Real Life. I know a lot about horses. The game developers clearly knew diddly-squat about them.
    
   
   • Since when does a horse's coat color and pattern have anything to do with its physical capabilities?
      
     
   • How is it there are even horses in Cyrodiil when all of them are geldings (including Shadowmere, who is supposed to be a mare)?
      
     
   • Why don't they just stay PUT!? I don't want my horse wandering back to its home town when it wakes up after being knocked out (Shadowmere is especially bad about this). When I acquire another horse I want my current horse to remain stabled where I put it. I should be able to collect all my horses in one place. Yes? Other people do. Why can't I?
      
     
   • What is it with my horse reporting me to the authorities for assault if I accidentally hit it during combat? Horses are that intelligent that they can understand and use complex language? And they're on the same psychic hotline that the guards use? Give me a break!

[Megatarius]

Ferryt, I see your point, but it was totally a spoiler. I play a bunch of different characters, usually to test out mods. I have gotten jack-squat through most of the vanilla game. I've saved Kvatch. That's as far as I've been in the main quest. I've stolen the tax record. I've taken on the job that some drunk guy didn't do for the fighters's guild. I haven't even gotten all the Mages' recommendations. I don't know how this game progresses. I don't know the trends. Some spoiler tags would have been a courtesy. I'm only just starting Shivering Isles. I haven't even beaten the Gatekeeper yet. I didn't know what to expect, and I don't appreciate the ending just being thrown out there like every single person on this message board has beaten it already.

[chronosmagus]

The reason why you become Sheogorath is far more interesting Megatarius. I envy you, there's still so much left to explore for you.. take your time :)