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| A whole new world... |
I feel like I should first mention that I played the third game in the series, Morrowind, beforehand. Morrowind was not a perfect game by any means. But I did enjoy my time with it and found it to be a deep and engaging role-playing experience once you got past its various quirks (and the fact that you had to wander across the map slaying cliff racers for at least half of the game). But enough about that. When I first dove into Oblivion, I had a lot of fun with it. I really did. It started off strong, gave me some exciting objectives, and thrust me out into the world to do whatever my heart desired.
Initially I found Oblivion's UI to be a huge step up from Morrowind. Everything just seemed a bit cleaner and more intuitive. Not to mention that there was a competent quest tracker and an optional fast-travel, features that I thought were sorely missing from Morrowind. Because of these improvements, the game was much easier to jump into right away and just start pounding away at quests. And for awhile, I had a lot of fun doing just that.
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| One of the many fun things you can do in Oblivion. |
The thing about this game is that it looks great on paper. If I were reviewing this the same way I would review a vehicle or a refrigerator or some other piece of hardware, it would score very high marks. There is a TON of content and it has all the right technical features that I would imagine a great RPG should have. However, I'm not reviewing this game as an appliance or a piece of hardware. I'm reviewing it as a video game, which is supposed to be a form of entertainment. And to be perfectly honest, for the majority of the time I put into this game, I was not entertained.
So what was missing from this game, you ask? The game simply does not have an ounce of soul. It may actually be the most generic thing I've ever played. The Shivering Isles expansion definitely improved upon this, bringing in Sheogorath, AKA the only NPC in the entire game with an ounce of originality or character. Aside from that, there were literally a handful of character models and voice actors which they haphazardly recycled throughout the world map. Not to mention the fact that every dungeon felt exactly the same (probably because all those assets were heavily recycled as well). Very few of the quests were memorable at all, as I sit here and try to remember specific details from them. In general, I just found it extremely difficult to stay engaged when the game was so blatantly repetitive and unoriginal. This is one area where Morrowind DESTROYED Oblivion. Morrowind had a fairly unique swampy setting whereas Oblivion is just straight-up generic fantasy forest through and through.
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| Don't worry. You'll be seeing this character model many times. |
So now that I've gotten my biggest beef out of the way, I have a few other grievances I feel I need to address as well. First off, the enemy level scaling is probably more obnoxious in this game than in any other game I've ever played. That is not an exaggeration. You will fight THE SAME enemies almost endlessly in huge chunks as you level, because the game is too afraid to spawn anything but enemies that are at your exact combat level. It would be nice to have a little bit of enemy variety as I journeyed through the quests, but I had no such luck with this game. The combat is also extremely boring and repetitive: swing at an enemy and back up so it doesn't hit you. That was about the extent of my strategy throughout the game.
In general, I did not have fun with this game. All the pieces were in place for it to be a rewarding experience. But due to an extreme lack of creativity and variety, I found myself just chugging along mindlessly through the quests, constantly wishing I was playing something else. Simply put, this game is generic and has no soul. I felt zero emotional connection to anything that happened throughout the entire adventure. And for me, that does not equate to a good game.
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