At some point during the earlier months of the pandemic, a good amount of the videos I watched on YouTube were those seconds-long videos of NPCs in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion doing something weird or funny. I was always interested in checking this game out, but the ridiculousness of those videos (along with how disappointed I was with Skyrim) was what really made me want to give Oblivion a go, so I was really excited to find the Game of the Year edition of the game at York's CeX. After sinking roughly 50 hours into the game for the past month or so, I have developed a lot of thoughts on it, as I really enjoyed my time with Oblivion, but it also had some glaring issues and questionable choices that held my experience back a bit.
What's so interesting about Oblivion to me is that it succeeds really well in ways that Skyrim failed really badly, despite how it came out five years earlier than that game. Not only is the main quest compelling, but the game's varied cities are all full of creative, engaging sidequests and memorable characters, with the questlines being especially rewarding and satisfying. Rather than having you clear out a handful of Draugr ruins and then suddenly giving you an important title like in Skyrim, Oblivion makes you work up the ranks in both the guilds and the Arena, and I really felt like I had earned my titles when I had finished those questlines. Speaking of which, Oblivion puts a lot of emphasis on having you put in the time and effort to earn useful perks and items, with the most obvious example being its weird leveling system. A lot of people have cited this as one of the game's worst aspects, but I honestly kind of liked it, as it allowed me to really carve out my build while also making my perks feel more significant. The melee combat is also much, much better here, as the emphasis on blocking added a layer of strategy to every one-on-one swordfight, even if actually swinging my sword felt weightless.
On its own, Oblivion is definitely fun in terms of gameplay and engaging in terms of story, but what made me really love my time with it was just how charmingly unpolished it was by today's standards. Watching the people of Cyrodiil have stilted, nonsensical conversations about recent events while being voiced by the same five or six people never got old for me, and I especially loved just how ruthless and determined the Imperial City's guards were. My copy of Oblivion wasn't nearly as janky as what I'd seen on YouTube, but people's food and utensils still flew up into the air every time someone sat down, so it still had a bit of that lovable clunkiness to it. Although the graphics of Oblivion don't really look that great in terms of textures and detail, I'd still take the game's vibrant colors over the drab lifelessness of Skyrim any day, even if both games had the same generic, vaguely medieval fantasy overlay.
I had a lot of fun with Oblivion, but the issues that I had noticed with the game at first got bigger as I kept playing the game, and a lot of that has to do with its use of procedural generation. Now, I don't know the exact amount of procedural generation that was used in the game, but a lot of the caves felt really similar in terms of their layouts and enemies, and that also extends to a slew of Oblivion Gate quests that pretty much all felt identical. The choice to use level scaling was one that I really wasn't a fan of, as I didn't feel like my character was getting stronger due to how my enemies were leveling up alongside me. Although the melee combat works really well when you have just one target, I can't say the same when you have to fight multiple enemies at once, as having some other enemy interrupt your attack or take in a hit that you meant for someone else disrupted the flow of combat. This overlaps with the outright horrible staggering mechanic, as being able to get staggered by any enemy made no sense when my Block skill and Endurance level were both at 100. These are all pretty big issues, but Oblivion was so entertaining to play and experience that my gripes with the game pale in comparison to my praises for it, and not only am I excited to eventually play through the game's DLC, but I also want to eventually find a way to play Morrowind as well.
What's so interesting about Oblivion to me is that it succeeds really well in ways that Skyrim failed really badly, despite how it came out five years earlier than that game. Not only is the main quest compelling, but the game's varied cities are all full of creative, engaging sidequests and memorable characters, with the questlines being especially rewarding and satisfying. Rather than having you clear out a handful of Draugr ruins and then suddenly giving you an important title like in Skyrim, Oblivion makes you work up the ranks in both the guilds and the Arena, and I really felt like I had earned my titles when I had finished those questlines. Speaking of which, Oblivion puts a lot of emphasis on having you put in the time and effort to earn useful perks and items, with the most obvious example being its weird leveling system. A lot of people have cited this as one of the game's worst aspects, but I honestly kind of liked it, as it allowed me to really carve out my build while also making my perks feel more significant. The melee combat is also much, much better here, as the emphasis on blocking added a layer of strategy to every one-on-one swordfight, even if actually swinging my sword felt weightless.
On its own, Oblivion is definitely fun in terms of gameplay and engaging in terms of story, but what made me really love my time with it was just how charmingly unpolished it was by today's standards. Watching the people of Cyrodiil have stilted, nonsensical conversations about recent events while being voiced by the same five or six people never got old for me, and I especially loved just how ruthless and determined the Imperial City's guards were. My copy of Oblivion wasn't nearly as janky as what I'd seen on YouTube, but people's food and utensils still flew up into the air every time someone sat down, so it still had a bit of that lovable clunkiness to it. Although the graphics of Oblivion don't really look that great in terms of textures and detail, I'd still take the game's vibrant colors over the drab lifelessness of Skyrim any day, even if both games had the same generic, vaguely medieval fantasy overlay.
I had a lot of fun with Oblivion, but the issues that I had noticed with the game at first got bigger as I kept playing the game, and a lot of that has to do with its use of procedural generation. Now, I don't know the exact amount of procedural generation that was used in the game, but a lot of the caves felt really similar in terms of their layouts and enemies, and that also extends to a slew of Oblivion Gate quests that pretty much all felt identical. The choice to use level scaling was one that I really wasn't a fan of, as I didn't feel like my character was getting stronger due to how my enemies were leveling up alongside me. Although the melee combat works really well when you have just one target, I can't say the same when you have to fight multiple enemies at once, as having some other enemy interrupt your attack or take in a hit that you meant for someone else disrupted the flow of combat. This overlaps with the outright horrible staggering mechanic, as being able to get staggered by any enemy made no sense when my Block skill and Endurance level were both at 100. These are all pretty big issues, but Oblivion was so entertaining to play and experience that my gripes with the game pale in comparison to my praises for it, and not only am I excited to eventually play through the game's DLC, but I also want to eventually find a way to play Morrowind as well.