What I hate about Oblivion

[foxhunting]

To begin, I love this game. It's easy to get lost within it and simply want to do all that you can. But there are many things that I simply don't make sense or are lacking in many ways when it should be much more. Here are a couple examples.

 

Thieves guild - It begins all fine but as you end it you can't help but feel that you were nothing more then an a simple errand boy for some masked a-hole. In the end you help some rich man who felt a need to get into petty theft even so he was as high up in life as one could be prior to. He loses it all and is trying to repent but is far too lazy to get up and do this himself. Not just this but the Grey Fox himself tells me that he used to think I was a hero blah blah blah, and this is after I steal the stone for HIM!!! His own wants bring me to the level of gutter trash and he has the balls to lower me somehow. Of course he then goes on to cry about his curse after I call him out on the grey cowl by using the note from the blind moths.

 

In addition you are given a guild hall that is no better then your skingrad basement. You would think there would be more to this guild but no, it is literally in someones basement with a table or two and a couple people walking around serving no use at all. In the end you wonder what is the point of it all other then to help a self satisfying rich boy who can't clean his own messes.

 

Knights of the Nine - All in all this is a good quest and the reward is decent enough. But once completed you may need to do things that can bring up questions of morality and in turn make you out to be an absolute villain. After completing this I began the thieves guild quest, two missions into it and I am branded as evil with people somehow knowing this and calling me out as an unworthy bastard who is hardly worth the time to speak to. Forget that I did good in the quest itself for the divines, forget that I rid Cyrodiil of Necromancers and forget that I was instrumental in saving the entire world from Oblivion to this point, not to mention the countless individuals I helped solve the most trivial of matters with. Stealing a couple objects while not being caught has made me out to be no better then the dog crap being scrapped from a boot to everyone. Seems like I made the cover of the black horse courier.

 

In the end it seems there is no point to these two factions. All in all I can honestly say that there is only one person in all of Cyrodiil that accepts you as you truly are with absolute devotion. In turn he has been given a place in my castle, Hoarfrost, as a permanent guest of honour. This ones for you adoring fan!

 

So whats your beef with Oblivion?

Edited September 7, 2011 by foxhunting

[Deleted472477User]

Good question! I personally dislike too much hand-holding. I know why they did it--people complaining Morrowind and Daggerfall were too haaaaaa-aaaard!--but they made it too easy.

[RatcatcherOfKvatch]

A few too many compass marks pointing to the precise location of "hidden" artifacts it seemed.

Fallout doesn't give you nearly so many specific locations -- the compass in Fallout would guide you maybe to the right building or town, but once you get there you have to find what you're looking for on your own.

I think maybe Bethesda had to update their game engine to make the quest arrows smarter like that.

[jordanLoL]

A few too many compass marks pointing to the precise location of "hidden" artifacts it seemed.

Fallout doesn't give you nearly so many specific locations -- the compass in Fallout would guide you maybe to the right building or town, but once you get there you have to find what you're looking for on your own.

I think maybe Bethesda had to update their game engine to make the quest arrows smarter like that.

 

Actually there's plenty of cases in Fallout when the quest marker leads you to the exact location of whatever your objective is.

[RatcatcherOfKvatch]

Actually there's plenty of cases in Fallout when the quest marker leads you to the exact location of whatever your objective is.

Well, sure, but only when the quest designer wants you to.

If an NPC gives precise directions then you really should get an arrow leading directly to your objective.

In Fallout there seemed to be many situations where you'd get a quest arrow to a zone then you'd have to dig around on your own from there. "I think it's somewhere in Vault 93" really shouldn't give you a precise location, and usually when you're given limited information like that it doesn't.

In Oblivion you almost always got an arrow to precisely what you were looking for, regardless of whether it made sense in the context of the knowledge you acquired from NPC's regarding its whereabouts or not. I don't know if it was a limitation of the game engine or a design choice, honestly. It was easy enough to give us an arrow to Shadeleaf Copse without pinpointing the Nirnroots.

In Skyrim they're giving us a spell that lights up a pathway to our current quest object, so it looks like Bethesda is going the other direction with quest arrows. (In Oblivion quest arrows could still get a little confusing if your objective were above or below you. Not if you have the exact pathway to the correct stairway lit up in front of your eyes ...)

I'm not particularly entertained by running mazes, so I don't guess it bothers me much. It definitely counts as "hand-holding" though.

 

If quest arrows aren't my pet peeve ... yeah, I know what my pet peeve is! Not being able to sort spells by spell effect! When it comes time to renew the "feather" effects I should be able to click on the "Spell Category Icon" column heading ("Feather" is a picture of a red feather) and sort that way. The stock "Feather" spells are better than what I can make myself, so I can't use custom names for alphabetical sorting. Having to dig for the stock feather spells with their idiotically bad name placement ("Beast of Burden" and "Pack Mule"? Seriously, "B" and "P" in the same series? Could they be any more stupid?) is a PitA.

Edited September 16, 2011 by RatcatcherOfKvatch

[Balakirev]

Oblivion was designed to appeal to a younger age group than Morrowind: FPS (as opposed to die-based) combat model, insane physics model (to make bodies fly upon death), plenty of quest-based hand-holding, screen compass and "go here to find X," less involvement of society in the lore, regenerating dungeons, treasure, shop goods, and enemies linked almost entirely to character level, bland scenery, etc. This isn't because it's a bad game. It's simply because Bethsoft wanted a much bigger market. Between the redesign, the new playing media, and the gung-ho PR, they succeeded.

 

Spiced up with a bunch of mods such as Frans, MMM, Vampire Hunting, and the like, Oblivion becomes the kind of game many of us who enjoyed Morrowind would take a lot of pleasure in . But it wasn't really aimed as a product at us. They certainly hoped we'd buy it, given that every sale counts, but we weren't the gold ring on the merry-go-round.

[spiritshadowx]

I'm not sure if i have any beef against Oblivion. If anyone remembers me (I left the community unannounced a while ago, but I've returned fully now) they'll remember that i used to play Oblivion with 7-10 FPS. That's not because of the game, I generally have a lot of patience.

 

I know I wish that they had the ability to queue action keys or prioritize their processing power, because i was getting sick of trying to hit an ememy and either power hitting the air or not doing anything at all. People advised me to tone down my graphics (they were on pretty much minimum) but for me I used to think the game speeded up during play, which was partially true. While cache was being stored on my RAM, I was becoming delusional believing it was running at a higher FPS than it was. Well it's better to trick your mind than to lose your wallet.

 

My only problem was the keypresses. Other than that I simply fell in love with Oblivion. Hopefully skyrim can reach the same graphic level as Oblivion or I might have to increase my patience.

 

(oh and I'm going to remove and keep a select few of my mods, after that I will be on the modding scene again for Oblivion and Fallout)

Edited October 7, 2011 by spiritshadowx

[RatcatcherOfKvatch]

Welcome back!

I'm a newcomer to Oblivion, and for some reason I can't seem to stop playing it.

 

Whatever "pet peeves" I might've had got blown away by the "Extended Hotkeys" mod. It does everything I wanted it to, or pretty close to. I almost never break the game's pace for an inventory crawl.

 

The way I used to play I had to alphabetize buff spells so I could run them in sequence off of a single hotkey, running through the alphabetized list then circling back to the top. Of course that meant hitting Tab every 12 seconds or so and constantly pausing the game.

 

Not anymore. "Extended Hotkeys" keeps the game running and the action rolling. Not only can I put all 5 of my combat buffs on a single hotkey and have the next one in the series automatically come up, another hotkey, set to autocast, sets off all my weight-reduction spells at once (they're cheap so it's no big deal to cast them all). You wouldn't believe how much more convenient that is than searching through the spellbook.

 

I know that doesn't address your framerate problem, but Oblivion is old enough by now that even video hardware 2-3 generations out-of-date should hold up just fine. There are a lot of great places to get outdated computer hardware super-cheap, from Ebay to Goodwill, so unless you're starving there's no excuse for a low framerate on a game as old as Oblivion.

[diosoth]

I dislike the legal system. If you so much as pick up an object people call you a thief. Steal something far from anybody and the next guard you bump into will arrest you. The murder system seems a bit bugged and it's possible to "murder" people if their alignment isn't just right. The theft and "instant attack" system is also really buggy- my first time playing I would be constantly attacked and killed by Jauffre and Martin for trying to get on the wrong horse! And I'm supposed to be their friend! There is literally NO AI at work here in the theft system. "Steal" and disposition seems to all but drop to 0.

 

I also do not see the point in the doomstones or whatever giving a 2 minute buff. It wears off too fast to make use of it. The horse system really also needs an overhaul so you can park your horse permanently somewhere and not have it fast travel with you. I have to worry about my horse being killed now every time I fast travel.

 

And I do hate the vanilla leveling system. Every time you level, monsters level. I found by level 5 everything- even the scamps- could waste me better than when I was level 1. I found the game almost unplayable and if I'd been on a console would've given it up. I had to rely on OOO and other mods.

 

But in a way I'm also not totally fond of the legal cheating you can do just by finding or enchanting items. Right now, with items I either enchanted legit or found in the wild, I am now 100% immune to disease, paralysis and poison(Ring Of Vitality), 100% immune to fire, frost and shock(Hands Of The Atroach, Boots Of The Atronach, Charity Of Madness and Elemental Ring) and 100% immune to magic(5 enchantments- OOO unlocks this at the altars- but I do have some equips which have the effect too and the same can be obtained vanilla by sigil stones). Plus a legally made 100% chameleon suit. It's cheating without cheating.