MLB's review on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Oblivion is a game I truly and honestly hate. One of the only games in existence I hate, in fact. Be warned before you begin reading this. This is not an unbiased review, nor is it baby's first review, nor am I someone who is paid money to like games that are objectively bad. I'm proud of my strong bias on this, actually. Any bias against one of the worst games ever made is good bias in my opinion. Not having a bias against Oblivion is like not having a bias against Adolf Hitler. Straight up.

Oblivion.
Oh Oblivion.
Where do I begin?
There are so many things wrong with this game I legitimately don't even know how to begin. There's so much bullѕhit in this game it'd make Penn and Teller jealous.
Let's start with a basic description on what this game is.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is an open-world fantasy RPG ("RPG"), much as would be expected from an Elder Scrolls game. Here begins the first of Oblivion many failures. Despite the fact that Oblivion is meant to be an open-world, non-linear game where the player is encouraged to explore, the game features a "fast travel" system that the player can use to essentially teleport to any place they've visited in the past. While that's not especially despicable in and of itself, the problem rests in the fact that every main city in the game world is available to fast travel to from the beginning of the game. This basically amounts to making exploration/travel useless and obsolete, as the player can instantly travel to any area in the province at no cost or risk. That's obviously the best fucҝing choice for a travel system they could have used, even though TES games before Oblivion, like Morrowind and Daggerfall, had well-developed and senseful systems of travelling that worked well and could have easily fit into Oblivion's world. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/File:FullMap_TravelRoutes.png
Now, this review isn't about making Morrowind or other TES games seem better by comparison (they do a good enough job of that by themselves), but we need to recognize that Oblivion isn't a standalone game; it's a sequel. And as a sequel, certain things are expected of it that otherwise wouldn't be, were it a standalone game. The only real "improvement" I can think that Oblivion has over Morrowind is the combat system. Morrowind's combat system was indeed one of the game's shortcomings, but it's been covered well enough before that I don't feel the need to describe it in this review. Oblivion attempts to rectify problems players had with the combat in Morrowind by removing all RNG from it, and making it into more of an action game system where the player simply needs to hit the enemy with their weapon in order to do damage. While the concept is fine, the actual result in Oblivion is laughable. Oblivion combat has absolutely, positively no depth or required skill. It is literally "click until they die" with occasional menu digging to swallow potions. On top of being horrible from an action game standpoint, Oblivion's combat is also bad from an RPG point of view, as actual skill points put into weapons do nothing besides unlocking a "special move" every 25 points and making the player do a negligible amount of extra damage every skill point.
Magic in Oblivion is more user friendly than in Morrowind and easier to get into, as spells can no longer fail and the player can now equip both a spell and a weapon at the same time. However, the magic system has been absolutely butchered in depth, with a lot of magical effects from Morrowind being removed, and there being vastly fewer vanilla spells built into Oblivion http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Spells vs http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Spells . The ability to create custom spells is retained, however, it is arbitrarily locked behind the player having membership in the Mages Guild, which requires a fairly lengthy quest line to unlock. Furthermore, the Enchanting skill was removed from Oblivion, meaning that the player is now required to go to a specific location in order to be able to enchant their gear. At least you can't fucҝ up while enchanting and destroy your ѕhit anymore.
Well, let's move onto the core gameplay of this game. As we have already established, Oblivion is not a serious, hardcore roleplaying game experience. Nor is it remarkable (or even slightly noticeable) as an action game. Oblivion has about as much depth as a half-filled bathtub. A bathtub that someone pissed in for a good period of time and then didn't drain. With that being said, Oblivion is still an active attempt by a group of people (probably unfrozen neanderthals) to create an RPG. Now, Oblivion does employ a good amount of traditional RPG mechanics one would expect from an RPG. Unfortunately, they are almost all badly implemented and a problem of some sort can be uncovered within each of them. The attribute system is fairly simple. There are eight main attributes. Two are chosen by the player character to correspond to their class and gain a starting bonus to them, and every attribute is tied to a skill and gives a benefit to that skill as it rises. The attributes kind of overlap, though, and the same benefits are give by several of them. For example, fatigue is increased by agility, endurance, strength, AND willpower. Hilarious enough, despite being increased by so many attributes, fatigue is almost completely useless, and regenerates so fast anyway that it never has any presence in gameplay. Similarly, the player's starting max encumbrance is so high that the player would never have to invest any points in strength while playing, regardless of class. Well, the weight of equipment increases linearly depending on what it's made of, leading to scenarios such as elven swords perplexingly being heavier than iron swords, for example. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Weapons The game's more or less entirely linear, computer-generated equipment statistics lend to making Oblivion feel even more like a soulless, uninspired blob of a game.
"Uninspired" really does define Oblivion very well. Absolutely nothing about this game will challenge you, change you in anyway, or push the norms or expectations put upon video games by any means. TES games were known among the video game industry for being impressive and innovative in many ways, being one of the first series of RPGs to actually do an open-world successfully. Oblivion inherits none of these traits, and even manages to baѕtardize the open-world gameplay that the Elder Scrolls series capitalized on beforehand.
TESIV is unimpressive in aspects of both gameplay and design, with this game's art being comparably dull and lacklustre as the gameplay. If I showed you a screenshot of Oblivion http://images.uesp.net/e/ef/OB-creature-Minotaur.jpg would you be able to pick it out from any of the games you see here? http://goo.gl/UrxYVL
No, you fucҝing wouldn't, since Oblivion is pretty much the very definition of "generic medieval RPG", down to every comparable aspect, be it enemy design, set design, or setting. As I said before, Oblivion pushes absolutely no boundaries, and is derivative to the very last drop. The question is: why? Why would the designers and devs at Bethesda go as low as to fill their game with completely uninspired fantasy tropes when they already had a very well-established, very deep and very imaginative fantasy universe built for them? For example, http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Pocket_Guide_to_the_Empire,_1st_Edition/Cyrodiil, http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:The_Heartland_of_Cyrodiil, http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Brief_History_of_the_Empire Remember, Oblivion is the fourth game in the main series (ignoring spinoffs such as Battlespire). Why does it have so little in common with other TES games, then? Indeed, Oblivion goes one step further than to ignore established TES lore in its setting, and actually retcons or arbitrarily changes series fiction at several points, going as far as to completely change the climate of Cyrodiil (the Imperial province that the game takes place in) from what it had been written/described as in official Imperial books in earlier games.
However, not everything in Oblivion is uninspired and awful. Some things are just plain awful. The face modeling in Oblivion is certainly special and unique, but in a very, very bad way. Here's a good example of Oblivion faces: http://goo.gl/CERcdZ The faces (and models in general) are infamous in the video game industry for being so bad that they're treated as a full-out joke. Humans all look the same, elves are made of dough, Khajiit are pillows and Orsimer are potatoes.
Speaking of awful (and of speaking), Oblivion features a well-touted "NPC interaction" system, where NPCs in the game will do a variety of things, based on factors such as time of day, day of week, and the effects of other NPC actions. This system doesn't really add much to gameplay or immersion, and actually serves mostly to make the game less immersive and believable, as NPCs generally act like robotic contraptions, always and shamelessly doing their programmed actions without pause or fail. The only notable effect this has on gameplay is that it makes specific NPCs slightly harder to find than they would be otherwise. Great use of AI. GOTY material right there. Anyway, on top of performing daily actions, NPCs also have a chance to engage in conversations with each other, their responses based on a number of factors, including hidden NPC attributes such as aggressiveness, and the disposition of NPCs between each other. As I'm sure you could guess, given how clearly proficient Bethesda is at implementing complicated or difficult-to-do aspects in games (I'm being fucҝing sarcastic) a concept like that would clearly thrive in a game like this, which has thousands of unremarkable, similar-looking characters of various similar-looking races, all ready to tell everyone their life stories and saddle mundane tasks onto them (such as "Get me my wine" and "Take this letter to my son"). Well, given Oblivion's affinity for generic unremarkable characters, and Bethesda's affinity for hiring less than ten voice actors among them, this leads to scenarios such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lMiu4j9xvQ . NPCs constantly and consistently speaking to other NPCs that look the same and are voiced by the same person about the same topics that they've already spoken about dozens of times before. Among the "dynamism" present in Oblivion's NPCs and their amazing conversation system, you get frequent scenarios such as: Voice actors speaking to themselves; characters gossiping about other characters in front of even TO that specific character; guards killing criminals and then immediately questioning that character's "murder" and mourning over their corpse, and more!
On the topic of dialogue, though, dialogue is yet another gameplay element present in Morrowind that was butchered in this game. Gone are branching conversations and being able to ask NPCs on a large variety of subjects. Each NPC now has only a specific amount of conversational options attached to them, with every line being completely voice acted. As I said before, this game has an enormous amount of characters and an opposite amount of voice actors spread across them. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Voice_Actors Oblivion literally has a grand total of ten voice actors for every character in the game, with an additional 3 that only voice a single character each. Truly pathetic by all standards, especially when the actual quality of the voice acting by every actor minus the ones that only voice a single character is dogѕhit. There's no inflection or vocal effort put into the acting by any voice actor. They all voice a single character, in a single way, regardless of situation or context.
The main "gimmick" of Oblivion (and also its namesake) is the ability for the player to visit one of the realms of Oblivion, the realm of the Daedric Prince of Destruction Mehrunes Dagon, known in lore as the Deadlands. The context of this trans-dimensional gameplay is that Mehrunes Dagon is invading Tamriel, and it's up to the player to push back his invasion and stop him. It's interesting to note here, that out of the dozen strong list of Oblivion realms they could have chosen from, the devs chose the one that is closest in style to traditional depictions of Christian hell. I'm sure I've already pressed this enough, but Oblivion (the game) is derivative as all fucҝ. Anyway, the mechanic of travelling to Dagon's realm through Oblivion gates is quickly exhausted, as behind every Oblivion gate is only a generic, cookie-cutter level like there is behind every other Oblivion level, where the player has no other objective than to acquire the Sigil stone and close the gate. "So they're like caves?" you ask? Yes. Except they're caves that you're forced to go through, several dozen times, in order to finish the game, contributing to TESIV's repetitive, tedious nature.
Speaking of caves though, Oblivion sure does have a lot of them. Hundreds of various caves, ruined forts, ancient elven ruins etc spread across the game world. Wait a second, though. What motivation is the player given to go through these dungeons?
Absolutely. Fucҝing. Nothing.
Because on top of Oblivion's entire map being unlocked from the start with no risk of going anywhere, the entire game, including every single enemy and piece of loot is levelled. That means that there's no chance of you ever stumbling across a rare and powerful enemy for the part of the world you're in, because the entire world levels with you, and you only ever encounter challenges/hazards that the devs deemed "appropriate" for the level you are. Same with all treasure and items that you can either find on enemies or in dungeons. You're only ever going to find things that are within your "level zone". You will never and I mean NEVER find an extremely powerful artifact in this game, nor will you ever stumble across a very expensive item you can sell or high amount of gold that will make you rich at a low level. If you're going to play Oblivion, motherfucҝer you're going to play it the way it wants you to. (unless you mod it, but that's a different story)
I'm sure it goes without saying that those attributes make Oblivion a very static and tedious experience for anyone playing it. The game lacks both depth in gameplay and dynamism in experience. In fact, Oblivion is infamous for it's appalling levelling and other negative aspects, namely that god damn face design and voice acting. How anyone in this day and age could consider this a good game is beyond me, at least without mods. Many people have argued that through the use of mods, Oblivion can be turned into an enjoyable experience. I consider those beliefs vapid and unjustifiable however. Why should a game's player-base be expected to improve or fix a ѕhitty product? It's the developers' responsibility to make sure that what they release in the box is a quality product, worthy of both the consumer's time and money.

And it just so falls upon us that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is none of those things. It isn't a quality product. It isn't worth the money you'd spend to buy it, or the time you'd spend playing or even installing it.
It's garbage. Among the great landfill of ѕhitty, utter garbage video games, TESIV: Oblivion is a gleaming pile of turds, rising well above the hellish legions of bad games and solidifying itself as one of the worst video games of all time. A true beacon of ѕhit. May God's hand protect you and all your kin from the despicable wrath of this game. Amen. ;_;7