They traded in Morrowind's excellent main quest for extremely fun and surprising side adventures instead. It's taken 16 years for me to finally finish this and it was quite the slog thanks to some truly tedious combat deriving largely from inflated health pools that only get worse as you level up. I have no idea how anyone is supposed to do any significant damage without relying almost exclusively on enchanted weapons past a certain point. I also had a conjured imp to hand that I would constantly place down to distract everyone, allowing me to beeline towards my main objective. The crap speech system is easily sidestepped using a custom spell for 1 second of instant persuasion level 100, thankfully, but there's only so much you can do about some of the least satisfying combat and spell animations I've ever seen. Fireballs look like puffs of red mist, where are the particles??
A huge mess of many clashing ideas and systems in an engine suffering from the growing pains of moving between console generations. Still a very special experience despite all of it's problems. We will never see something like this again, a huge big-budget WRPG that stays strangely alluring because of the unique circumstances in which it was made. No current-day development cycle would even think of allowing faces quite as horrific as these into any of their products now but Oblivion made a lot of these mistakes before any other games of this immense size. Pure ambition.
Farewell. May this game rest in piece.