I only played Morrowind for the first time fairly recently, and I just replayed Skyrim for its tenth anniversary, so I decided to complete the set with the Elder Scrolls game I love the most. Well, I remember loving it at least, but this replay made me realize some things.
Oblivion is… wrong. It’s just wrong. Wrong in ways I find it shocking an RPG could ever be. The genre is at its best when hitting the perfect mix between progression and expression, letting players slowly become a part of the world through finding new places and getting stronger, but Oblivion carelessly throws both these aspects out the window. Players won’t find getting stronger to be satisfying when increasing major skills, on the whole, actually makes you weaker. Since the enemies scale so quickly, if you aren’t heavily focusing on your damage-dealing abilities, you’ll be left in the dust. Gaining a level also grants attribute bonuses based on which types of skills you leveled, so you have to play a horrid game of tracking every single skill point to ensure you get the optimal attributes to keep up with the enemy scaling. The most common scenario is to start the game on the baseline difficulty, and slowly move the slider farther and farther to the left so the game isn’t a damage-sponge safari.
The exploration seems like it would be exempt from this, but strangely enough, it’s just as poorly considered as the leveling. Your very first moment of exploring the sandbox puts you right next to the biggest, most impressive city in the game, which has everything you could ever need. There’s a reason why Morrowind starts you in the backwater outpost of Seyda Neen and not the towering metropolis of Vivec, and there’s a reason Skyrim starts you in the cozy little town of Riverwood instead of Solitude. The best example of why this normally isn’t done comes from New Vegas, where the context you gain from starting in a dusty, forgotten town makes the moment you reach the shining lights of The Strip feel that much more impactful. All of Oblivion’s cities have a unique feel to them, but there’s never a reason to get attached or fall in love with any of these places when you know they're objectively lesser places to be than the Imperial City. To further lessen their uniqueness, fast travel is available even before visiting them for the first time. You don’t get a sense of their surroundings or how each region of Cyrodiil is unique, just that they’re jumping off points to reach the nearest cave where your quest objective is. It becomes an adventure without an actual sense of adventure, where there’s little discovery for players to take joy in, either in the places they find or in the questing process where new places are found.
As you might imagine, discovering those things about the game I said was the best in the series for years was a little heartbreaking. My first few hours of wrangling with these issues made me start to think that my love had been misplaced, and that this was the worst of the bunch, but little by little, it made a comeback. In most RPG’s, jumping into someone’s dream to save them might be a huge highlight, but in Oblivion, it’s just one of many. You might find yourself visiting a town of invisible people like you got caught in a fairy tale, busting ghosts, solving a murder mystery, or even causing a murder mystery. I hope that the way I tore into its core systems wards off accusations of rose-tinted glasses when I say it easily has the best spread of quests of any RPG I’ve ever played. While they lack the sort of choice and expressiveness that make the genre unique, their quality is still enough to save the experience for me. While there’s no good reason to get attached to a glorified shanty town like Bravil compared to the glittering Imperial City, who knows what kind of weird quest I might find there? I may have no reason to hang around a little hamlet on the way to the next quest, but I’ll always poke my head in and see if anything weird is going on. The level scaling may be terrible, but since the majority of side-quests don’t rely on combat, you still get to enjoy them without much interruption. If you can let go of the drive to constantly increase your stats and hoard the best gear, and instead let yourself be a leaf on the wind, uncovering hidden little locations and quests, it might end up being amazing, even in spite of its myriad issues. Taking on this sort of playstyle, my love for the game was rekindled, albeit more as a torch than the bonfire it was before.
Addendum on the DLC (here we go again, you saints who have read my Skyrim/New Vegas reviews):
Oblivion was a pioneer in coercing payments with the same gentleness used to shake a bag of chips from a broken vending machine, and had a total of ten DLC packs. However, the two major expansions were Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles, so the rest will just be grouped as “the other DLC”.
Since this “other” stuff was released first though, it’s first on the block. The elephant in the room is, of course, the horse armor. The obvious point people make is how a $2.50 DLC would hardly raise an eyebrow today, but even after all this time, there’s still something that feels tasteless about this DLC and the other similar ones. They include just enough stuff that you wish they were included in the base game, like an unlimited version of the game’s famously silly poisoned apples, but actually paying for these features is another matter entirely. Remember, these DLC’s came out in the era of Microsoft points, where you couldn’t just pay directly, you had to buy points in increments of 400 at a baseline cost of $5. If you wanted the Vile Lair DLC with the fun poison and vampirism features, you couldn’t just pay $1.89, you had to spend $5 for the points. The DLC would cost 150 of your 400, leaving you with 250 to either spend on one of the other little DLC’s, or just let it rot in your account. If you wanted to then buy Knights of the Nine for 800 points, one more increment of 400 wouldn’t be enough, you had to spend $10 anyway and still be left with that annoying remainder. I’m not just cherry picking one oddly-priced DLC here either, the only three DLC’s that cost a number of points cleanly divisible by 400 were Horse Armor, Knights of the Nine, and Shivering Isles. The other seven cost 80, 150, or 250, in an attempt to force you into spending the remainder of one purchase on others you might not really want. The content itself may be nice on its own, but the blatant money grubbing makes me resent the black mark it represents on a game I enjoy.
Knights of the Nine meanwhile ended up surprising me. It’s the DLC no one really talks about, since it didn’t enrage anyone nor blow anyone’s socks off like Shivering Isles did. It was just a quick, cheap little adventure using existing locations, and I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I expected to. The first objective was the exact point where I discovered the advice I gave in the main review, that Oblivion is best enjoyed when you play as a leaf on the wind, since I decided to visit all nine of the shrines dotted across Cyrodiil in one journey without using fast travel. Since the DLC is meant to invoke Arthurian legends of questing knights, I helped every NPC who required assistance along my circuit around the entire map. Just having a reason to enjoy the world and take pride in the tiniest victories was a nice experience, and I highly recommend doing it that way instead of simply fast traveling from spot to spot to get it done in one tenth of the time. The dungeons and subsequent quests were also surprisingly nice, with a clear Indiana Jones influence shining through the clever puzzles and traps along the way to the holy relics. It’s a thoroughly pleasant little adventure, and fits nicely with a game that already has some legendarily nice quests to discover.
Shivering Isles is considered one of the best expansion packs ever, but the passage of time has been unkind to it. Just as the humor in New Vegas’ Old World Blues DLC resonated with people in 2011, but not in 2021, the same could be said of the humor in Shivering Isles. That would usually be pretty easy to forgive, but the way that the DLC is centered around the real-world issue of mental illness makes the whole thing a little dicey. You’ll get one quest that actually discusses the topic of addiction fairly competently, then you get one where you have to coordinate sleeping spaces between mentally ill homeless people, which someone in 2007 apparently thought should be played for laughs. You get occasional commentary on how obsessive behaviors really work, then you get a character who wants you to bring him 100 useless sets of tongs because isn’t that just hilarious. Just as the Isles themselves are split into the lands of Mania and Dementia, the expansion is split between great content and borderline (if not outright) offensive content. For me, the rest of the game’s fairy-tale atmosphere and general lack of cynicism prevent the feeling of ire I directed at its DLC pricing scheme, but I can easily see this expansion becoming recognized as an uncomfortable time capsule as the years go by. Again, the good parts are worth checking out, but the low points create a stain that’s impossible to talk your way around.
That’s the Oblivion experience in a nutshell, really. This part is great, it has some great quests, but please ignore this gigantic flaw that could understandably wreck the experience for you. I enjoy the game overall, and I think it’s still worth playing for those quality moments, but… I can’t blame people who think it’s the worst of the modern Elder Scrolls games. I guess I’ll reevaluate when TES6 comes out, and I hope to see you all then!
Oblivion is… wrong. It’s just wrong. Wrong in ways I find it shocking an RPG could ever be. The genre is at its best when hitting the perfect mix between progression and expression, letting players slowly become a part of the world through finding new places and getting stronger, but Oblivion carelessly throws both these aspects out the window. Players won’t find getting stronger to be satisfying when increasing major skills, on the whole, actually makes you weaker. Since the enemies scale so quickly, if you aren’t heavily focusing on your damage-dealing abilities, you’ll be left in the dust. Gaining a level also grants attribute bonuses based on which types of skills you leveled, so you have to play a horrid game of tracking every single skill point to ensure you get the optimal attributes to keep up with the enemy scaling. The most common scenario is to start the game on the baseline difficulty, and slowly move the slider farther and farther to the left so the game isn’t a damage-sponge safari.
The exploration seems like it would be exempt from this, but strangely enough, it’s just as poorly considered as the leveling. Your very first moment of exploring the sandbox puts you right next to the biggest, most impressive city in the game, which has everything you could ever need. There’s a reason why Morrowind starts you in the backwater outpost of Seyda Neen and not the towering metropolis of Vivec, and there’s a reason Skyrim starts you in the cozy little town of Riverwood instead of Solitude. The best example of why this normally isn’t done comes from New Vegas, where the context you gain from starting in a dusty, forgotten town makes the moment you reach the shining lights of The Strip feel that much more impactful. All of Oblivion’s cities have a unique feel to them, but there’s never a reason to get attached or fall in love with any of these places when you know they're objectively lesser places to be than the Imperial City. To further lessen their uniqueness, fast travel is available even before visiting them for the first time. You don’t get a sense of their surroundings or how each region of Cyrodiil is unique, just that they’re jumping off points to reach the nearest cave where your quest objective is. It becomes an adventure without an actual sense of adventure, where there’s little discovery for players to take joy in, either in the places they find or in the questing process where new places are found.
As you might imagine, discovering those things about the game I said was the best in the series for years was a little heartbreaking. My first few hours of wrangling with these issues made me start to think that my love had been misplaced, and that this was the worst of the bunch, but little by little, it made a comeback. In most RPG’s, jumping into someone’s dream to save them might be a huge highlight, but in Oblivion, it’s just one of many. You might find yourself visiting a town of invisible people like you got caught in a fairy tale, busting ghosts, solving a murder mystery, or even causing a murder mystery. I hope that the way I tore into its core systems wards off accusations of rose-tinted glasses when I say it easily has the best spread of quests of any RPG I’ve ever played. While they lack the sort of choice and expressiveness that make the genre unique, their quality is still enough to save the experience for me. While there’s no good reason to get attached to a glorified shanty town like Bravil compared to the glittering Imperial City, who knows what kind of weird quest I might find there? I may have no reason to hang around a little hamlet on the way to the next quest, but I’ll always poke my head in and see if anything weird is going on. The level scaling may be terrible, but since the majority of side-quests don’t rely on combat, you still get to enjoy them without much interruption. If you can let go of the drive to constantly increase your stats and hoard the best gear, and instead let yourself be a leaf on the wind, uncovering hidden little locations and quests, it might end up being amazing, even in spite of its myriad issues. Taking on this sort of playstyle, my love for the game was rekindled, albeit more as a torch than the bonfire it was before.
Addendum on the DLC (here we go again, you saints who have read my Skyrim/New Vegas reviews):
Oblivion was a pioneer in coercing payments with the same gentleness used to shake a bag of chips from a broken vending machine, and had a total of ten DLC packs. However, the two major expansions were Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles, so the rest will just be grouped as “the other DLC”.
Since this “other” stuff was released first though, it’s first on the block. The elephant in the room is, of course, the horse armor. The obvious point people make is how a $2.50 DLC would hardly raise an eyebrow today, but even after all this time, there’s still something that feels tasteless about this DLC and the other similar ones. They include just enough stuff that you wish they were included in the base game, like an unlimited version of the game’s famously silly poisoned apples, but actually paying for these features is another matter entirely. Remember, these DLC’s came out in the era of Microsoft points, where you couldn’t just pay directly, you had to buy points in increments of 400 at a baseline cost of $5. If you wanted the Vile Lair DLC with the fun poison and vampirism features, you couldn’t just pay $1.89, you had to spend $5 for the points. The DLC would cost 150 of your 400, leaving you with 250 to either spend on one of the other little DLC’s, or just let it rot in your account. If you wanted to then buy Knights of the Nine for 800 points, one more increment of 400 wouldn’t be enough, you had to spend $10 anyway and still be left with that annoying remainder. I’m not just cherry picking one oddly-priced DLC here either, the only three DLC’s that cost a number of points cleanly divisible by 400 were Horse Armor, Knights of the Nine, and Shivering Isles. The other seven cost 80, 150, or 250, in an attempt to force you into spending the remainder of one purchase on others you might not really want. The content itself may be nice on its own, but the blatant money grubbing makes me resent the black mark it represents on a game I enjoy.
Knights of the Nine meanwhile ended up surprising me. It’s the DLC no one really talks about, since it didn’t enrage anyone nor blow anyone’s socks off like Shivering Isles did. It was just a quick, cheap little adventure using existing locations, and I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I expected to. The first objective was the exact point where I discovered the advice I gave in the main review, that Oblivion is best enjoyed when you play as a leaf on the wind, since I decided to visit all nine of the shrines dotted across Cyrodiil in one journey without using fast travel. Since the DLC is meant to invoke Arthurian legends of questing knights, I helped every NPC who required assistance along my circuit around the entire map. Just having a reason to enjoy the world and take pride in the tiniest victories was a nice experience, and I highly recommend doing it that way instead of simply fast traveling from spot to spot to get it done in one tenth of the time. The dungeons and subsequent quests were also surprisingly nice, with a clear Indiana Jones influence shining through the clever puzzles and traps along the way to the holy relics. It’s a thoroughly pleasant little adventure, and fits nicely with a game that already has some legendarily nice quests to discover.
Shivering Isles is considered one of the best expansion packs ever, but the passage of time has been unkind to it. Just as the humor in New Vegas’ Old World Blues DLC resonated with people in 2011, but not in 2021, the same could be said of the humor in Shivering Isles. That would usually be pretty easy to forgive, but the way that the DLC is centered around the real-world issue of mental illness makes the whole thing a little dicey. You’ll get one quest that actually discusses the topic of addiction fairly competently, then you get one where you have to coordinate sleeping spaces between mentally ill homeless people, which someone in 2007 apparently thought should be played for laughs. You get occasional commentary on how obsessive behaviors really work, then you get a character who wants you to bring him 100 useless sets of tongs because isn’t that just hilarious. Just as the Isles themselves are split into the lands of Mania and Dementia, the expansion is split between great content and borderline (if not outright) offensive content. For me, the rest of the game’s fairy-tale atmosphere and general lack of cynicism prevent the feeling of ire I directed at its DLC pricing scheme, but I can easily see this expansion becoming recognized as an uncomfortable time capsule as the years go by. Again, the good parts are worth checking out, but the low points create a stain that’s impossible to talk your way around.
That’s the Oblivion experience in a nutshell, really. This part is great, it has some great quests, but please ignore this gigantic flaw that could understandably wreck the experience for you. I enjoy the game overall, and I think it’s still worth playing for those quality moments, but… I can’t blame people who think it’s the worst of the modern Elder Scrolls games. I guess I’ll reevaluate when TES6 comes out, and I hope to see you all then!
2 Comments
I was sorta split on that idea, but since you mentioned it: I do have a Morrowind review up, but it's only a short note written in early 2019 when all I was doing was sharing brief year-end summaries on my Twitter (https://www.backloggd.com/u/Uni/review/68801/). Since my Skyrim, New Vegas, and Oblivion reviews were complete analyses based on multiple playthroughs, I was sorta tossing around the idea of doing a Morrowind replay in a month or two so I can do a full breakdown and have a uniform set. I'm just not sure if people have the patience for any more textbook-long reviews of games everyone's already talked about! I guess I'll commit to replaying it, then see if I have anything new to say, and go from there.
Mur96
2 years ago