Starfield

Are you going to be a Bethesdafag?

  • Yes.

    Votes: 4 6.9%

  • No.

    Votes: 35 60.3%

  • I am a hypocrite.

    Votes: 12 20.7%

  • I like to whine a lot about things I am the reason for sucking.

    Votes: 7 12.1%
  • Total voters
    58
Gonna play a bit of Oblivion to refresh my memory of it.

So far A big criticism is still valid is that the NPC's look like shit. Everyone's face looks swollen and blurry and there's such an excess of NPC's that they become indistinguishable from one another. Then there's the problem of the limited range of voice actors as well as their vocal delivery and facial expressions changing on a dime.
 
Ok, so I've replayed a fair bit of Oblivion and I haven't really wrapped up any guild questlines or the main quest nor Shivering Isles but so far I don't think that the game is necessarily badly written. There are an absolute avalanche of problems I have with the game but the writing isn't necessarily the problem because the game is so simplistic in its setting and design that it is hard to hold it accountable really. It's not like Megaton being created by dragging massive hunks of metal pieces from planes from an airfield miles away and then living with cultists around a nuclear bomb in the town square. Nah it's like, here's a town, it's been here a while, it does its thing as medieval fantasy towns do. Like, I can't really criticize that too much.

But the problem instead is in its design. Every location feels like a bubble, where things are so selfcontained that the outside world might as well not even be considered. I'm thinking of the major towns and the counts that exist. Who elected them? Why do they hold power? Who are their vassals? Are there any political intrigue behind the scenes? Some Game Of Thrones esque stuff. The vast majority of the time the nice cozy Oblivion music plays and everyone just walks around like :)

There's no teeth to it. No grit. The towns start to feel disengenuine the more you explore them. They mention that the towns of Anvil is full of drunks but I never saw any drunk sailors puke on the streets or sing shanties or try to grab a fistful of titty from a barmaid. I never see any real class disparity. In Skingrad there are two competing wine orchards and neither of them really have a bad word to say about the other.

Oblivion's problem isn't in that the writing is bad, it's that the world design and setting is bad which in turn makes the writing feel boring and hollow. Each town is designed to basically fit the same mold of what a town should be and then anything unique or interesting is tacked on as an afterthought without the town being designed for it and it shows when you play through it.

It's hard to describe a "feel" but the "feel" of Oblivion is cozy to a fault.
 
Here is something I noticed a few days ago...

Both Oblivion and Death Gate each have an assassin's guild called the Brotherhood, whose lair has no obvious way inside, and the PC must discover how to infiltrate it by becoming a member.

Both Oblivion and Death Gate each have a prisoner trapped inside of an oil painting, where the PC must learn the magic to enter the painting and speak with the person inside. Deathgate has more than one of these; one mission is to steal an amulet (from the owner posed in the portrait) to use as false proof of a murder to be admitted to the Brotherhood guild.

Both Oblivion and Death Gate each have a simplified lockpick minigame that uses audio tones.

Death Gate released in 1994.
 
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Why yes... I remember his rousing rendition of "Where Is Tallman", by Fred Rogers. :smug:

*No slight intended. it's just funny as hell to imagine it.
 
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Gizmojunk said:
Here is something I noticed a few days ago...

Both Oblivion and Death Gate each have an assassin's guild called the Brotherhood, whose lair has no obvious way inside, and the PC must discover how to infiltrate it by becoming a member.

Both Oblivion and Death Gate each have a prisoner trapped inside of an oil painting, where the PC must learn the magic to enter the painting and speak with the person inside. Deathgate has more than one of these; one mission is to steal an amulet (from the owner posed in the portrait) to use as false proof of a murder to be admitted to the Brotherhood guild.

Both Oblivion and Death Gate each have a simplified lockpick minigame that uses audio tones.

Death Gate released in 1994.
Click to expand...
Think they might have been "inspired" by Death Gate?
 
Mr Fish said:
Think they might have been "inspired" by Death Gate?
Click to expand...
"Inspired?" At most they would have been "inspired" by the Murder Inc. group having Brotherhood in their name and the lockpick minigame. Magical paintings and assassin guilds not showing the world their front door are nothing particularly novel to 1990.

As for the lockpick minigame, it definitely wasn't the first lockpick minigame and Oblivion uses sound cues to assist you but it is about setting the tumbler/pin in the correct position. Some people found it easier to use the audio some found it easier to visually confirm when the pin was in the right spot. I just said fuck that minigame and pressed auto attempt. Stupid ass minigame.

Mr Fish said:
Ok, so I've replayed a fair bit of Oblivion and I haven't really wrapped up any guild questlines or the main quest nor Shivering Isles but so far I don't think that the game is necessarily badly written. There are an absolute avalanche of problems I have with the game but the writing isn't necessarily the problem because the game is so simplistic in its setting and design that it is hard to hold it accountable really. It's not like Megaton being created by dragging massive hunks of metal pieces from planes from an airfield miles away and then living with cultists around a nuclear bomb in the town square. Nah it's like, here's a town, it's been here a while, it does its thing as medieval fantasy towns do. Like, I can't really criticize that too much.

But the problem instead is in its design. Every location feels like a bubble, where things are so selfcontained that the outside world might as well not even be considered. I'm thinking of the major towns and the counts that exist. Who elected them? Why do they hold power? Who are their vassals? Are there any political intrigue behind the scenes? Some Game Of Thrones esque stuff. The vast majority of the time the nice cozy Oblivion music plays and everyone just walks around like :)

There's no teeth to it. No grit. The towns start to feel disengenuine the more you explore them. They mention that the towns of Anvil is full of drunks but I never saw any drunk sailors puke on the streets or sing shanties or try to grab a fistful of titty from a barmaid. I never see any real class disparity. In Skingrad there are two competing wine orchards and neither of them really have a bad word to say about the other.

Oblivion's problem isn't in that the writing is bad, it's that the world design and setting is bad which in turn makes the writing feel boring and hollow. Each town is designed to basically fit the same mold of what a town should be and then anything unique or interesting is tacked on as an afterthought without the town being designed for it and it shows when you play through it.

It's hard to describe a "feel" but the "feel" of Oblivion is cozy to a fault.
Click to expand...
I think this is a good assessment of the game. It's too bland, cozy, toothless, etc. like you said as well. And the bubble issue is definitely something I noticed the last time I tried to play it.
 
All right, here's my Steam Review of Oblivion.

First off, I understand that the game was very bla bla bla for its time and those arguments can work when you speak about something "for its time", but there is the question of whether things hold up over time. There's other old games I love that do hold up, so does Oblivion?

I don't even know where to start off with this... How about this. having a 1000 and 1 named NPC's all with their own schedules and roles in the world sounds good on paper when it comes to creating a living and breathing world but the problem with this approach is that you cannot reasonably make all of those NPC's interesting.

Which brings us immediately to the next criticism, the game looks awful. I'm not talking about the "graphics". I love System Shock 2 and its graphics are way worse. Graphics isn't the problem, it's the art direction. NPC's look like swollen charicatures of people who share the same voice actors that deliver the lines with the same cadence, intonation and accent that it cheapens the unique feel of NPC's. Which means finding the correct NPC's that give quests is confusing.

Doesn't help that it is a topic dialogue system where their emotion can flip in an instant. There's practically no memorable characters at all. Fantasy names that all bleed together. Same voice actors with the same intonation to their speech pattern and vocabulary, same smudged textured swollen faces.Oblivion is hailed for its quests but honestly, even the best of quests is only good for "Bethesda standards". The vast majority of them are simplistic, underdeveloped and has too fast of a pacing.

The world is a copy paste of trees, rocks, bushes and grass. To the north it is replaced with snowy ground textures. To the south-east it is replaced by swampy trees. To the west the trees are sparser. That's the world. You won't come across any interesting vista's or nice looking setpieces. Just the same generated gameworld that they oversprinkled with dungeons. Dungeons are largely meaningless drivel. It's dungeons for the sake of having dungeons. Quantity over quality. Stick to quests and do not explore randomly and you'll squeeze more juicy out of this rock.

A problem with the dungeons and the world in general is that it scales to your level. So you won't find juicy loot at lower levels and at higher levels you will find juicy loot but the enemies have turned into gigantic damage sponges that are a complete chore to deal with. And I don't understand what I've been doing wrong but the enemies are too dangerous for me to be able to deal with a lot of the time and my mana runs out before a lot of enemies are dead and I have to cheese them to survive.

Learn by doing system is trash, it's never been a good system as some skills will be used far moreso than others, leaving you to grind skills in an unintended way of playing the game just so you'll level up the skills proper.On that note, when you level you you will get to increase your Attributes, 3 of them. And the amount you get in each is dependent on which skills you've been using and which you haven't. So you can end up getting +4 in an attribute you don't really want for your role simply because of you just flooping around with something and leveling up a skill a bunch.

Magic is 3 types. You can cast a bolt, you can 'touch' an NPC or you can cast it on yourself like a buff. Instant or DOT, Singular or AOE. That's it. It's boring and underdeveloped. When you get access to spell crafting it is too stingy with its parameters to allow for fun spells to be crafted.

Melee is basically just heavy hit an enemy repeatedly to minimize the loss of enchant charges and getting stunlocked a lot. Boring.

I blame the scaling for this as well. The game's direction is nonsensible. There is no progressive difficulty curve where you are supposed to go here then there and work your way up, instead you're allowed to go wherever you want to and the game scales with you, which means that the world is almost exclusively populated by high level enemies and max tier weapons and armor on bandits. All overpowered damage sponges.

(this is an edit to the review I made after a while)
Right so after I did the Mezhrunes Dagger dungeon (a DLC dungeon) I came across some very needed upgrades and I got some survivability + damage that allows me to actually stand a chance against enemies. So it was weird how suddenly the game went from being insanely tedious to just being tedious. I played many more hours after that point and at this point after lowering the difficulty maybe 4 more ticks about half the enemies die at a reasonable pace and the other half are still sponges.

Now you might be thinking that that fixes the problem right? Well... Not really. The awful enemy AI, animations and pathing means that nearly all fights turn into the same whacking fest for melee and the same run around and wait for mana to recharge for magic. And the game has A LOT of combat in it so you get to suffer through the same barely passable combat system for hours on hours on hours on end. I am so incredibly bored with this that whenever I come across an especially annoying enemy that always managed to stun my character I just use console command and "kill" them.

People actually enjoy doing this for hundreds of hours? Baffling.

Also, the PC version of this game has horrendous controls. For example, you're gonna sell various arrows you picked up from enemies to a trader right? Well if you click a stack with 3+ in it you get a slider option, it is automatically at max. All right, so you hit the Enter key... Nothing happens. You hit the Space key.... Nothing Happens. All right what about E or F? Nope. Oh so I have to manually move the mouse cursor over to the "OK" button on the slider every single time I'm gonna sell something? Wow, 10/10 game design right there. And you'll encounter this absolute dogexcrement clunk EVERYWHERE.

Ok, so I've replayed a fair bit of Oblivion and I haven't really wrapped up any guild questlines or the main quest nor Shivering Isles but so far I don't think that the game is necessarily badly written. There are an absolute avalanche of problems I have with the game but the writing isn't necessarily the problem because the game is so simplistic in its setting and design that it is hard to hold it accountable really. It's not like Megaton being created by dragging massive hunks of metal pieces from planes from an airfield miles away and then living with cultists around a nuclear bomb in the town square. Nah it's like, here's a town, it's been here a while, it does its thing as medieval fantasy towns do. Like, I can't really criticize that too much.

But the problem instead is in its design. Every location feels like a bubble, where things are so selfcontained that the outside world might as well not even be considered. I'm thinking of the major towns and the counts that exist. Who elected them? Why do they hold power? Who are their vassals? Are there any political intrigue behind the scenes? Some Game Of Thrones esque stuff. The vast majority of the time the nice cozy Oblivion music plays and everyone just walks around like

There's no teeth to it. No grit. The towns start to feel disengenuine the more you explore them. They mention that the towns of Anvil is full of drunks but I never saw any drunk sailors puke on the streets or sing shanties or try to grab a fistful of titty from a barmaid. I never see any real class disparity. In Skingrad there are two competing wine orchards and neither of them really have a bad word to say about the other.Oblivion's problem isn't in that the writing is bad, it's that the world design and setting is bad which in turn makes the writing feel boring and hollow. Each town is designed to basically fit the same mold of what a town should be and then anything unique or interesting is tacked on as an afterthought without the town being designed for it and it shows when you play through it.

It's hard to describe a "feel" but the feel of Oblivion is cozy to a fault.

I've decided not to finish any main game questlines as I am just getting angry at how boring the game is so I'm going to try out Shivering Isles instead.

This review just feels like a giant rant but I have no idea where to start off with criticizing the game as I have a problem with nearly everything in the game. And it's not necessarily any individual component of the game but rather the combination of the package.

[edit]

lol no
not playing shivering isles
won't elaborate, try it yourself.
kthnxbyeeee
 
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If you are playing Oblivion, here is something you can try for amusement:
(No mods, this is totally doable in the vanilla game, due to physics colliders.)

 
Have Bethesda publicly said where the aircraft parts of Megaton comes from or is that a community guess that they come from some far away airfield? Sounds a bit like Stonehenge and the mysterious origins of its stones.... Or how were the Pyramids built?

Nice review!

e: That gate is stupid! They have a functional jet engine that is used to raise and lower aircraft wings. Yeah sure.
 
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The_Proletarian said:
Have Bethesda publicly said where the aircraft parts of Megaton comes from or is that a community guess that they come from some far away airfield? Sounds a bit like Stonehenge and the mysterious origins of its stones.... Or how were the Pyramids built?

Nice review!
Click to expand...
Very thank. :]

Anyway, if what Iprovidelittlepianos said is accurate then if we're gonna give them the benefit of the doubt then we'll simply have to ask where in the gameworld is there an area the size of the airport in Fo3 that is now just missing. Like, the runways would still be there. So where are long stretches of asphalt/concrete? And if none are within the area of the gameworld then we'll have to assume that they went outside of the playable area to fetch them.
 
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Gizmojunk said:
If you are playing Oblivion, here is something you can try for amusement:
(No mods, this is totally doable in the vanilla game, due to physics colliders.)

Click to expand...

I don't think it's the fastest non-glitch speedrun method now but early on, there was a method that used the physics of random useless objects and duping them to climb. This reminded me of that but I forgot how it worked. I remember hearing about it back around release time but someone told me it had to be a fork. This person from a forum in 2008 said to use a paint brush because it has no physics.

"10 minute mq completion

1. get a paint brush (no physics)
2. go to the temple of the one in the IC
3. dupe the paint brush
4. make a ladder with the paint brushes to the top of the temple
5. jump at the top round part
6. you should be in the temple
7. go to the door turn around you should see a half submerged door
8. enter the submerged door
9. after its loaded exit the temple
10. A pop up should happen + quest i think
11. enter the temple and wait for martin to come from kvatch (game wait not actual)"
 
It's possible to get on top of the walls in the Temple district by choosing the right location to start. The corner edge of one roof is accessible with sufficient acrobatics skill, then leaping to the wall from the roof, then repeatedly hopping like mad until managing to hop the last few inches onto the wall; then you can walk on it, and there is even a balcony area that could (should) have had a bedroll from a vagrant.

Once (just once) a city guard on the street was chasing my roof hopping PC, and somehow spawned on the roof to arrest him.

From the top of the Temple district walls, it is possible to drop down on the outside (while the game treats the PC as still inside), and wade into the sewers. IIRC the whole area/cell is flooded with four feet of water, the spire seen in the distance from inside, is floating above the water outside. There might not be a way back in. Doors work if you can reach them, but entering them behaves like exiting them.

It's possible to climb over the Arena wall at the gate, inside the model it looks like a movie set back-lot prop building. Using the door puts the PC on the interior downstairs Arena map, not the combat area.

The council area with the vaulted ceiling (that you can look down to from the hole in the top), my acrobat was able to survive the fall through the observation hole to get inside without the key; (a 70'~ish foot drop approx.).
 
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I'll say Oblivion has the least egregiously bad writing post-Morrowind (the writing in Morrowind wasn't fantastic, but it got the job more than done). It's just the combat, removal of mechanics and weapons from previous games, the level scaling, the dungeon design and so on, all of these have so many problems in Oblivion. And the fact it kept getting worse shows that Bethesda wasn't interested in actual improvement.

I get that Bethesda was more interested in making casual RPGs, but they had to knew eventually their games would be too simplistic even for the average normie.
 
Norzan said:
I get that Bethesda was more interested in making casual RPGs, but they had to knew eventually their games would be too simplistic even for the average normie.
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Honestly, I think there are more and more people who play video games regularly who have been familiar with them for a decade now that don't care for a lot of their games to be super casual. People seem to be more goal-oriented and the games in the late and post-Xbox 360/PS3 era seems to show an upward trend in the volume of and the reception of games that provide more depth and/or challenge.

There's still audiences that care for narratives, laid-back games, etc. and I'd imagine that a lot of people usually want some amount of both. But when people are familiar with a formula that isn't even challenging to begin with end up playing a game that also isn't narratively satisfying for the 6th time, I'd imagine they get kinda tired of it. How many skeletons posed in a zany fashion can you find before you start to want something more?

Bethesda will sell well for a little bit longer I'd imagine. If The Elder Scrolls 6 is a simplified Skyrim and/or just buggy and disappointing to the average person, I imagine they'll have to shift course.
 
Resardiv said:
Bethesda is just one dumbed-down mechanic away from creating another masterpiece game.
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Elder Scrolls 6 likely won’t revert to “fiddly character sheets” after Baldur’s Gate 3 success, explains Skyrim lead
I don’t think [Baldur’s Gate 3’s success] necessarily presages a complete change over back to more numbers and more fiddly character sheets and things like that,” Nesmith told us. “Whether or not the rest of the industry will follow suit, I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to say that, But I think that through Skyrim, Bethesda has wanted to have the game get out of its own way.“You see that everywhere in Skyrim. Todd [Howard] is a big proponent of the interface vanishing if you’re not doing something that needs it to be visible. So all you see is the world. That’s it. You just see the world.”
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Sometimes I wish I wasn't right.
 
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