I’ve mentioned in my last few posts how close I was getting to yet another 1000 points added to my gamerscore, referring to Oblivion in this case. Tonight (technically this morning) I’ve made it. I have completed the main quest along with all the main guilds and here’s what I think of the game.
Oblivion can be summed up pretty easy. It does a lot of things, and it doesn’t do any of them exceedingly well. The story leaves much to be desired, the battle system is terrible, the currency is basically pointless because you’ll find everything you need, the items and magic are basically pointless (aside from the heal spell) and everything is basically just ok. But, let it be known, that there is a ton of content so if you are just looking for things to do, this is your place.
You can enter into Oblivion and play through about 2 hours of the main storyline and then never touch it again for 100, maybe even 200 hours if you choose because there are just that many things to do. If you choose to go just through the necessary, you won’t be there long. The game really encourages you to just enjoy the world.
However, there is a problem with the world. It’s huge and has to load itself very often. You can be in the middle of fighting or wandering the countless similar looking areas and it’ll just stop you for 3-5 seconds and load. It’s not normally to long, but it reminds you everytime that the world is bigger than the game can handle. And for no reason to because most of it looks the same. The edges don’t wrap around, they just tell you that you “cannot go any further in that direction” and you can fast travel (aka click where you want to go and it will automatically take you there) instead of actually walking through the world to get to where you need to be.
Last thing I want to go into more detail on is the battle system. The game feels like it wants to have depth to it’s battles, but it doesn’t give you any more than the ability to hack ‘n slash. The big problem I ran in to was that I leveled up my characters strength immediately to get real strong, but as a result the game leveled up all the characters strength and then I was left with a medium defense but taking strong hits. This hurt me real bad in trying to play the game.
But really the fights are just lame. There is the option to block, but it doesn’t really help you any aside from upping your block skill. You might as well just head straight towards an enemy and go to town. You also may notice that the enemies A.I. tends to do what you do. If I block most of the time the enemies just stare at me. When I attack they start attacking and when I do a charged attacking they just do one right back. Which defeats the purpose of trying to do any of these things.
All in all this game really depends on what you’re looking for. If you want a bajillion things to do that are all similarly repetitive then this game will provide you a lot of entertainment. But if you’re looking for some other sort of RPG or Adventure fulfillment, I suggest looking elsewhere. Lastly though, if you played and enjoyed Morrowind, you’re not going to care what I say because you already have your opinions. Thanks for reading!
