The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006)

I started this for the first time two nights ago and of course they shadow drop the remaster the day after, so I'll take credit for summoning that, lol.

Having only played Skyrim (and a teeny bit of Morrowind) beforehand, this is pretty refreshing! I had to install a different audio codec on my desktop to fix a stutter every time combat music started or ended but otherwise it's running well. I think I might prefer the creature designs in this game to Skyrim's, though it could just be that they feel different and fresh after dozens to hundreds of hours in the latter game.

Someone found some images from the upcoming Oblivion remake. It looks pretty good:

It will be interesting to see how they've dealt with the many, many issues it has. Also, what about mods? This is UE5, not even a newer version of the same engine. Mods have always been the strength of Bethesda RPGs. And i just realised this might mean new or even no console commands. Oof.

I had no idea what hit me when I started Oblivion. I vaguely remember my friend suggesting it and I picked up it on his word alone. No prior knowledge of Elder Scrolls, and no real RPG knowledge other than playing isometrics like Diablo and Gauntlet.

I didn't get it at first. It was hard. Enemies were ridiculously tanky and I couldn't open any doors because I ran out of lockpicks and didn't know how to get anymore. Of course, all of this is a result of me playing the game incorrectly. Once I started figuring things out, it was a pretty transformative experience. I obsessed over this game. I obsess over most games I'm in to, but this is a special case where I genuinely did. I'd never experienced a game world like this before. The lore, the characters, the quest lines, the guilds/factions, the little secrets, the time spent robbing every NPC blind, it was all so majestic. There are a lot of moments and parts of that game that some of my core memories are comprised of. Zooming on skooma; the Thieves Guild quest that saw me stealing boots from a vampire, going through the basement of thean Imperial City building and finding gigantic furniture, to end up stealing an actual fucking Elder Scroll. The Black Hand and Lucien Lachance. The Akaviri quest, that quest with the frozen tears, the suicidal troll under the bridge...man, I could go on and on. There are just so many cool moments, set pieces, places, and characters in this game.

At least, they were cool to a high schooler back in 2006. It hasn't aged well. I played my fair share of Skyrim but nevertheless, it never appealed to me as much as Oblivion did. I have a feeling my time with Oblivion is a lot like Elden Ring first-timers. As a diehard FromSoft fan, Elden Ring is not very special to me. That's because while it's the brilliant flourish that is the culmination of everything FromSoft has learned since Demon's Souls, it's a game that I've played several times. But to those who've never gone through the triumph that is a FromSoft game, it's a transformative experience for them much in the same way. Skyrim, as a result, wasn't too special to me either, because again, it was an iteration on Oblivion, however much better or improved.

Sometimes I wonder if I would enjoy an Oblivion remake but I think my memories of it are better than the game could be now. Maybe the Elder Scrolls 6 will supplant those memories when it comes out in 27 years.

Such a joy to play. So many interesting quest lines, and the world itself is great to explore. I agree with most I think in saying that some of the best missions come through the guild quests. Some had really interesting plot twists, and others just allowed for cool exploration throughout the world.

The game isn't perfect of course, but I just had such a good time that I could overlook some of its dated aspects. This includes the number of very similar dungeons with a lot of the same enemies, the number of NPC's with the same voices, and the animations and look. Tbh, though none of this isn't bad, just can be jarring if going from new games to old. Still 100% worth a play.

4.5/5.0 rounded up to a 5.0

Excited, jumped into Oblivion straight after finishing Morrowind. And oh boy was I in for a surprise.

Gave the game 10 hours before putting difficulty to 0%, and lasted around 2 hours after that. The game is absolutely dreadful. Awful combat, dialogue, voice "acting", environments, art direction, graphics (for the time), characters, sound design, UI, UX, all other mechanics (leveling, level scaling, mounts, lockpicking), story (at least the initial stages). Can't say much about side quest or guilds, unfortunately couldn't make myself last long enough to experience those. Only good thing in the game is music.

It's hard to believe how a game developer can go from Morrowind to this affront to game design.

100 hours so far and I am not even 30% done with the game. The combat is divisive in players opinions: love it or hate it. But there is one consensus: it is hard, the hardest in any TES.

I noticed that, aside from me liking the combat, it is very repetitive and you get sick of it quickly. You can say that you need strategy, but I think it is pretty much smashing buttons and poisoning your weapon with damage health potions.

I noticed too that if you are using a close-combat weapon and after swinging it and trying to immediately block the enemy's attack, you can't, your char is to slow for that (even at a high level); but the opposite rarely happens, the foes are able to hit you and block instantly.

Noticed that the blades disarming attack rarely disarm the opponent, and when that happens, if you try to use a power attack, instead of regular hits, what takes several seconds, you will most likely miss it even if right in on your face and you see the blade swinging the foe. The knockdown attack almost never make the enemies to fall and even though it is almost impossible to use it because you need to walk backwards to unleash it, so you will hit nothing but the air.

One of the most frustrating things is not only that the adversaries are bullet sponges, but you can have a daedric 22 points sword, but if you go sneaking (3x damage) with bow and arrows (even the most basic ones), you are going to kill them easily, even if not sneaking actually! But if you use magic, you can use all the fire found in Hell or all the ice from the North and South pole but still they vile creatures will be standing glorious. Oh, and I think that the power, disarming and knockdown attacks are broken - they are supposed to damage 2.5x but some times they damage more, most time they damage 1x.

Something I don't really want to complain because I think it is regarding the technology limitation is the Wait feature, it allows you to fully recover waiting just 1-in-game hour; but the combat is so unfair and unbalanced that it end up not being a bad thing, but still, it is clearly bad idealization, but I suppose being able to pass the time was some sort of brand-new-pushing-forward-thing so I can accept the lack of realism in it.

The combat is far from perfection as many preach, and its flaws are starting to make me hate it. Not to mention level scaling. The lack of target lock just kills me...

Replaying Oblivion right now, it's as terrible as I remember it.

The world has such a super uninteresting vibe to it, it's hard to describe. The way the landscape is designed makes it seem like it was procedurally generated, even though it wasn't.

Oblivion is a vast open world that gives you all freedom to explore and do anything you like, but nothing you can do feels meaningful and that's due to such a radically low density of content that the world feels stale and deserted.

Often I would see a place from afar, an old cabin offside the road, I'd walk there, go in there, and there's an NPC with absolutely nothing to say and absolutely nothing of interest around.

There are way too many npcs, but none of it has any meaningful thing to say.

It's as vanille as a rpg can get. It hasn't such an interesting swamp world like Morrowind, it's just a bland standard fantasy world, but without atmospheric weather and music like Skyrim at least has.

As in Skyrim there were some sceneries that were quite beautiful but it doesn't really make up for the rest. The quest design is almost as bad as in WoW and the combat system, well, it's there, and it's not extraordinarily bad, but doesn't stand out either. Using magic can be fun, but it's not as creative and game breakingly inspiring as it was in Morrowind.

Every single conversation is boring and badly written, Bethesda has the worst writing in general, something that needs to be said.

The world building and writing is so bland and boring, it's very apparent that the writing staff at Bethesda consists of in this profession untrained programmers or game devs. I mean, compare the dialogue writing and world building to The Witcher series where you have a sophisticated fantasy novel series written by a professional author as base line. This difference shows.

As has been said, the level-scaling annihilites any feeling of progression and makes it absolutely unnecessary to explore the world to find something that can get you a step ahead.

Again, like in Skyrim, there's absolutely nothing you can find while looting that could be of interest. I haven't found a single interesting item to use anywhere. Oblivion is completly devoid of one of the most basic joys of rpg-gaming.

One of the few positive things to say is that all NPCs look and act goofy and make it way funny at times, but that was not really intended by the game devs. Interaction with NPCs can let interesting situations occur I admit.

I suppose what people praise about Oblivion is its historical value as it was one of the first open worlds with sort of independently living npcs.

All in all a very boring, vanille open world and one of the more overrated games that exist, sorry.

I only really review a game once I have, in my mind at least, completed it. I have done two 100% playthroughs of oblivion and I loved them both. There is a certain feel in oblivion that is unlike any other game I have played. This feeling both makes the game isolating and more engaging than any other game. The radiant AI is to blame here. While it is true that the AI can sap the realism right out of the game with the awkward, stilted conversations you will be witness to over the course of your playthrough, it also makes the game completely unique each time you play through. The quests may be the same but the random shit you will witness will be different each time. The main quest can get a little tedious.... especially allies for Bruma; but I do not see it as a quest that one is meant to do in one sitting. Do allies for Bruma as you explore the world. While doing allies for Bruma one should do the other excellent quests the game has to offer such as the dark brotherhood line or the thieves guild line. I know many players have been let down with the fighter's and mage's guild lines but I enjoyed them each time I did them. Both somewhat remind me of the guilds in Morrowind, where you must do quests a different guild halls instead of everything at the same place.

I am also not the biggest fan of the knights of the nine. I was the first time I played through Oblivion but every subsequent playthrough it was more of a chore; The Shivering Isles, however, never get old. In my mind the Shivering Isles DLC is one of the greatest addons in video game history, it is on the same level as the Witcher 3's expansions.

I say give it a shot.

TES IV: Oblivion has very likely aged poorly to anybody playing it for the first time. Even if you make use of mods and give the game a significant facelift you are likely to be able to name at least a few RPGs you have played in recent years that best Oblivion in several obvious ways. But it's the things that Oblivion does well that leave me feeling like it is one of the greatest games I have ever played, and what it does well is the role-playing.

You are free to make up any story you'd like for your character and live it out in the freest sense. You won't always be given full freedom of choice, but you will have tons of fun crafting up your own stories and engaging with the Radiant AI. This game is famous for its bizarre NPC interactions but these only add to my love of Oblivion. The experiences I have had watching the NPCs fight amongst one another, or steal from each other, leading a guard to kill them and rendering a quest incompletable to me are some of the fondest memories I have of this game.

The sidequests in Oblivion are some of the most iconic of all TES games and the guild quests in particular are so much fun, especially compared to the rather bland ones that replaced them in Skyrim.

At least once every two years or so without fail I will find myself returning to this game, to scratch a role-playing itch that Skyrim or Kingdom Come cannot deliver. I will tinker with a set of new mods, start a fresh playthrough and live out a new life in Cyrodiil. Oblivion is one of those games that feels like home to me, and a part of me really does wonder if Bethesda will ever be able to capture the magic they did with this game again. Here's hoping.

So I finally got around to playing this game, I've played Skyrim and Morrowind earlier. I couldn't finish Morrowind as it was so dated and I didn't like it. This however, might be even better than Skyrim. Í played the GOTY edition on gamepass PC.

The game looks alright, it has a very good atmosphere though. You feel very immersed in its setting. I think the combination of music, world building and NPCs randomly chatting is what makes it so immersive. I love how the NPCs are very polite and most of them have unique names and can be talked to. There's also that Bethesda magic that's prevalent in their games, it's a lovely sandbox to explore where many things are able to be interacted with.

I liked the sidequests a lot, the main quest leaves a little to be desired but overall its fine. Gameplay is great imo. I played with sword and shield so it was mostly about timing those blocks and slashing down enemies. The difficulty slider was a godsend, perfect for anyone that wants a lot of control over just how difficult the game should be at any point.

There are of course some bugs. I had one crash. I had a companion that would never leave me and reported all my crimes, so I had to console kill him. Several times I was in combat when there were no enemies around so I couldn't fast travel or anything. That was probably the most annoying, often occuring bug.

I liked this a lot and will miss being in this world, I might do another playthrough some time to try another build. It might be better than Skyrim, but it was a long time ago I played it. 9/10.

I actually managed to play this for about 60 hours without ever touching the main quest. It was quite a few years ago, but I kept the game installed out of fear of losing my mod configurations. That was until I got myself an SSD, which led to me deleting everything Oblivion-related.

So, I was feeling like going back to this in order to actually do the main quest and also play the Shivering Isles DLC. I spent last night trying to get my mods to work again, and failed miserably. I'm not even using that many of them, but the game does require some tweaking for me to bear it. I'm super in favour of mods existing and being supported, but I guess I don't have the patience to deal with it myself; there's just so many small variables and mod managers and compatibilities to consider. I'll give it another shot tonight, but if it doesn't work I think I'll give up.

The lesson, kids, is to never delete games.

Cavernas escuras, guardas debochados, aldeões malucos, os portões do inferno aparecendo em todo canto, Oblivion é uma salada de tudo isso, com a magia de Elder Scrolls e com muito mais que Morrowind pôde oferecer.

Certamente a melhor história dos cinco títulos principais da série, você deve ajudar o bastardo que assumirá o trono de Tamriel a fechar os portões de Oblivion e devolver Mehrunes Dagon para as profundezas das Deadlands. Até lá você pode rir muito com as mais esdrúxulas observações dos personagens, a começar pelos guardas imperiais, cavalgando por toda Cyrodill e as side quests mais absurdas possíveis.

Pode parecer datado, mas Oblivion ainda surpreende, considerando que é um jogo de 2006. As cidades são grandes (a capital, pra muitos, é melhor do que qualquer cidade em Skyrim), as aldeias também e as dungeons (com um bom mod) são sempre uma surpresa. A propósito, Cyrodill é muito mais colorida do que Skyrim ou Morrowind (considerando as diferenças gráficas entre os jogos que ambientaram essas regiões de Tamriel).

As armaduras e armas podem se apresentar como um exemplo de design ruim, mas o sistema de progressão e builds compensa (eu prefiro ao sistema de Skyrim). É muito interessante, embora seja difícil você mudar o foco do seu personagem sem precisar começar um novo jogo.

De qualquer forma, Oblivion é um jogo obrigatório pra quem gosta de action-rpgs e, como disse no título, o melhor deles da década de 2000 (sorry Fallout New Vegas e Mass Effect 2).

It’s not a game I dislike, but it is a game that didn’t meet my expectations, unfortunately.

Let’s start with the combat, I like it. It’s very solid (or basic, depending on how you see it), and definitely an improvement over Morrowind’s. It is quite the experience to use a spell and actually have it work on the first try. That said, it does sacrifice the diversity of the previous game for a more streamlined experience, fewer armor types, weapon types, and spells, and it has a fatal flaw: Level-Scaling.

Your enemies grow stronger as you do, so you never really feel over-powered and farming becomes useless. That might be a positive in the eyes of some people, but it gets to a point where it just breaks. At higher levels it becomes a war of attrition, everyone is so armored that the damage dealt is minimal, and you will not die since you’ll have high-level healing potions or spells to use. Eventually, each fights becomes a chore, so I just turn invisible and run through the dungeons looking for loot.

In regards to the world, is bigger than Morrowind but it feels rather small and I think they’re two things to blame: Fast-travel & lack of things to discover. You can fast travel to any point in the map you already explored, which is very convenient and it goes along well with shorter quests but it means you’ll explore the bare minimum. If you do decide to explore you’ll find more dungeons, only dungeons really, caves, ruins, abandoned forts, they aren’t great, but that was also the case in Morrowind so nothing different there. What is different is the fact that a lot more quests force you into them which is a shame.

Okay, but credit where credit is due, while some of the individual quests are boring/disappointing, the questlines overall are fun with interesting stories.

There’s one more thing to find in Cyrodiil: Gates to Oblivion and are, ironically, the worst part of the game. You need to enter at least 10 of them during the main story, and they become very tedious very fast. Filled with high HP enemies, longer and more linear than a regular dungeon. All of that makes them harder to deal with at first, but as the game progresses they become more tedious. There is good loot inside them and they are a good way to make money, but again at higher levels that really isn’t an issue at higher levels. Every time I entered one of the gates I immediately started searching for the fastest route, taking advantage of the physics engine.

Then, there’s the stuff everyone already knows about. Weird mushy faces, overuse of bloom, broken shadows, “limited selection” of voice actors, bad dialogue, the speechcraft mini-game, all that stuff people mention when they say this game is very “charming”, but also try to fix with mods. Also, maybe this was a problem with my computer, but NPC’s voices fluctuate between very quiet and very loud, often.

Lastly, the two expansions:

• Knights of the Nine: I wouldn’t consider this an expansion, not in the Elder Scrolls sense at least. More like Mission Pack I’d say. Fun enough. I like the religious aspect of it.
• Shivering Isles: Kinda puts the main game to shame, beautiful scenery, and interesting quests. It is also more of the same at its core. The dialogue tires me, especially after the novelty of insane characters wears off.

Conclusion: If Morrowind is the super complex made-for-pc game, and Skyrim is the casual-fun accessible option, then Oblivion should be a nice middle ground between the two… or a very awkward middle child. I think is the latter.

I tried playing this game shortly after it first came out, but found that I'm not a big fan of first-person melee. Back on the shelf it went. When people online would rave about the game, I would sort of shrug and admit that I never gave the game much of a chance.

A couple of years later, one of my friends started obsessing over it. He put over 100 hours into it, then handed his copy to me and told me that I had been wrong, that I needed to get over the dodginess of the controls and enjoy this awesome thing. I dutifully put the game back on my list.

This time, some of the things that annoyed me before didn't annoy me quite as much. First person melee is still awful (which is why you'll never see any "Souls" games in my list...I don't need FPM and brutal difficulty), but the game is still beautiful almost a decade later, and this time around, I wanted to like it, so I was going to give it a chance.

I don't remember how far along I was, but I was on an escort mission, and the guy I was trying to protect was getting his butt handed to him on a platter, so I naturally went in to help him out. In the ensuing melee, I accidentally knicked him with my blade. He was furious, and began attacking me. I withstood his attacks and the enemies, but he kept it up. I was trying to be a decent person, so I decided to evade him and duck back to town, only to find that everyone hated me now. That was about when I cursed loudly and ejected the disc.

Nope.

I can't do it.

Look, I get it. I do.

I just can't find any joy at all in this game besides aesthetic beauty, and there are plenty of eye candy games that I actually enjoy playing.

It's not you. It's me.