[David-kyo]

Here's a page that has links to a few different websites all pertaining to Morrowind face mods. Check it out.

[Slade]

I agree that they muchly dumbed down Oblivion in terms of gameplay and items and size compared to Morrowind. No more uber fun spells, cool weapon varieties, making axes blunt (WTF?!). It was still a whole lot of fun for me, but it could have blown me away instead of getting obnoxious at times. I really want them to bring back hooded cloaks and wagons to store stuff in from Daggerfall. heck, I'd love it if they re-did Daggerfall in its entirety with the Oblivion engine (adding all of the Daggerfall content to the engine so it stops being wimpy, of course). If I could mod and wanted to re-make an enormous game in an age where you can't have an enjoyable experience travelling in cookie-cutter towns, I'd do that project... And I'd love to get Patrick Stewart to voice the ghost of Lysander. Back then, the Elder Scrolls games had I think literally seven different endings to choose from.

I'm done rambling. Morrowind > Oblivion. Oblivion is shiny and has much potential that was left untapped. The end.

Edit: I forgot. The only faction vs. faction in the Thieves' Guild quest line is that the watch captain is after the Grey Fox, and I suppose if they gave you a choice, you could infiltrate the Guild for the City Watch and unmask and arrest the Grey Fox if you sided with the guards.

[floppydisk]

You can actually join the Mystic Dawn at one point. I think you get an "Acolyte" rating in your book thing. Too bad they didn't go anywhere with that.

[SimeSublime]

Classing axe's with blunt weapons didn't annoy me overly much. Sure, it sounds silly at first. Axe's are most definatly not blunt. But if you stop and think about it, you'd use a handaxe in much the same way as you'd use a mace, and a battle axe in the same manner as a maul.

[David-kyo]

Classing axe's with blunt weapons didn't annoy me overly much. Sure, it sounds silly at first. Axe's are most definatly not blunt. But if you stop and think about it, you'd use a handaxe in much the same way as you'd use a mace, and a battle axe in the same manner as a maul.

Actually, this is all explained in an in-game book titled Manual of Arms.

(Then again, I'm a reader. )

[Gobbler]

Nerd.

[Slade]

Yeah, why don't you go cry to Akatosh, book-reading NERD!

It's still a cop-out for them to be lazy, and you certainly don't always use an axe at all like you use a mace. Sure, it looks that way in the game, but then you can say you use an axe like you use a sword, and pretty soon we just have a generic "weapons" class that everything falls under.

[David-kyo]

I never said I agreed with this change, I just pointed out how it's explained in the game (and that you guys don't read the books in it ). However, as a student of European martial arts, I have to say that this "you use an axe the same way you use a mace"-thing is total bullshit. Indeed, it's just an excuse for the programmers to be able to wrap 2 skills up into a single one. But I simply can't believe is that they were actually able to spare a significant amount of work with such a small, but radical change.

This post has been edited by David-kyo: 09 January 2007 - 04:19 AM

[SimeSublime]

I knew it was in the books, I just didn't mention that.

Knowing nothing about fighting, simply thinking about what I'd do, I would think a mace and an axe would be fairly similar. Apparantly not *shrugs* I didn't think it was that big a deal. I always hate having the weapons split off. You have to decide at the start of the game just what you want to use, having no idea what you'll randomly find in your adventure. You find a good axe? Well, you've focused on swords, it's useless. Yeah, that halberd you found is pretty neat, but you're specialisation is in glaives. Sorry.

[David-kyo]

Anyway, I think we've whined enough about the negative features of Oblivion, time to look at the good points. The beautiful graphics for which you need a power plant to get the game to run have been elaborately discussed, so I'd like to talk about something else.
I think it's an undisputed fact that the world is much more lifelike than that of Morrowind. I mean, the characters no longer stand rooted to one spot noon and night. When they're hungry, they eat; when they're sleepy, they go to bed; when they're bored, they grab a book and read or start beating some training dummies, or whatever they enjoy doing in their free time; they go to work; they talk to each other (and then you can even catch a few rumours you can investigate) amongst other things.
I also liked the skill-based minigames such as that of persuasion and lockpicking, made things a lot more interesting and a bit less skill-dependant. The characters no longer look like they'd been cloned from the same person, even though there weren't many voice actors (2 per race, if I remember correctly?).

This post has been edited by David-kyo: 10 January 2007 - 05:38 AM

[Slade]

Less than 2 per race. They re-used the voices for most of the races. All the male elves have the same voice, the Nords and the Kajhiit and Argonians are the same guy with different filters on his voice, (or maybe they're just really close-sounding), and there are only one or two different female actors minus main characters special enough to have their own voices.

It's a real shame they couldn't find people for the game that weren't already part of the lineup from Morrowind, though Sean Bean and Patrick Stewart were wonderful.

I think the mini-games added to working at the skill, and make the skills less of a click-fest. If only they hadn't done away with trapping chests and doors. I can envision a minigame where you have to navigate your probe around a maze inside the trap section, and if you bump the sides then the trap goes off or something.

I read almost all the books (I liked how they put the books in from the Morrowind expansions, so I could say "I did that!" a bunch of times.), but my brain didn't think it significant to remember their lame excuse for categorizing axes as blunt weapons.

Sime: I think the best way to fix the weapons tree thing would be to not rely so heavily on learning weapons skills, so that you won't mind knowing a bunch of them for the various weapons you get, so you can use that cool halbard even though you mostly use maces or something. Having a tree with synergy bonuses would be cool, so you'd have a base blade skill which goes up with your short/long/dagger/2h skills, and then those can work off one another so you won't have no skill at all in the similar skills you don't use as often. I dunno. This all takes a whole lot of discussion by a lot of people to figure out something really good.

[SimeSublime]

Was I the only person who found the radient AI a bit absent? The people walked around and talked to each other, mostly about the same things. I never got any quests from their gossip, no matter how long I stood around evesdropping. I never really noticed people doing that much eating or whatnot either. They just wandered randomly through the day and slept at night.

[David-kyo]

I'm pretty sure you were the only one to notice this, I was happy that they were at least doing SOMETHING. Dunno nothing about how repetitive their dialogues were, because I didn't hang around for very long.

[Helena]

I agree with pretty much everything Sime said about the levelled enemies and loot, as well as all the other problems people have mentioned. One irate player over on the main Oblivion forums commented that you can complete the main quest on level 2 - in fact, it's probably easier that way. There's just no incentive to level up, apart from getting better loot, and what's the point of that if everyone else you meet has it as well?

In addition, the levelling-up system really started to piss me off after a while. In theory it's a good idea to improve your skills by using them more often, but in practice, the 'level bonuses' meant that you had to actively avoid using your core skills and focus on others if you wanted to get the maximum bonus. It also caused big problems for magic-users, since the more powerful spells aren't available until your casting abilities increase, and you can only increase them by casting spells. This leaves low-level players trapped in a horrible catch-22 where they're forced to cast the same basic healing and light spells 4390000 times over in order to raise their skill by a few points.

To be honest, I much prefer the traditional system where you gain experience points in order to go up a level, then channel them into whatever skills you like. It may be less realistic but it gives you a lot more control over your character's development, and ultimately makes for a much more enjoyable game. Playing a video game is supposed to be fun, not an ultra-realistic experience.

[Slade]

There are a bunch of mods out for Oblivion that minimize the poor but laudible effort of Bethesda to break away from silly experience points, so that all the enemies don't level up with you, and you aren't forced to ignore your core skills to maximize your stats so you can stay formidable at high levels. I recommend checking some of them out for a much heightened experience.