So I got Oblivion for PC and I have played for roughly 4-5 hours. So far I am not understanding why this game is getting such high marks! In my opinion this game is like Ultima plus one minus two.
For one I am not at all impressed with the graphics which everyone is raving about. Sure the textures are high res and the game has nice bumpmapping, but graphics are about more than what your graphics engine can do for you. The graphics remind me of how I feel about the Unreal Tournament games, it's like really machine-intensive high-res graphics pasted on a bunch of ugly models with bad animations. I'm not really all about graphics, but I was surprised to see what the game looked like on high settings, considering how good I've heard the game looks.
Next, out of the 4-5 hours I've been playing so far, maybe two of those were solely the time it took for me to create a character that I was even a quarter of the way satisfied with. Er...actually I wasn't at all satisfied, it's just that after two hours I concluded that it was impossible to make a character that didn't look like either the ugliest, most deformed woman I have ever set my eyes upon, or a messed up 3d mesh that looks like some amateur 3d modeler went through and edited point by point.
I finally started the game, and as soon as I was given the opportunity to test the controls in that cell I could already tell how clunky they were. Something about the way it controls just feels so...unfinished? buggy? I couldn't even see my pony tail because it was going through the mesh on my tunic. I was trying to be forgiving until I found the punch button and heard my 3d disaster-mesh-faced woman cry out and swing her arms in the single worst attack animation I have ever seen in my life (and I've played Ehrgeiz).
The clunkiness and general bugginess didn't get any better as i explored the first area killing giant rats with my Darth Vader/Frankenstein "I've got no points of articulation"-esque punches. It got a bit better when I got my first sword, but unfortunately that was around the same time that I discovered that there was certain angles that I could point my camera at my character that would make her hair simply disappear altogether! Being bald actually didn't make her look any worse, though.
I didn't find out about the jump button until I had gotten out to the outside world map area. Before that I thought that you were incapable of jumping since the "set controls" option doesn't have jump listed. Now, I don't know if I was more upset when I thought you couldn't jump or when I performed my first jump, probably the former. I think I'd rather just stick with not having the option than having to look at my ugly woman spontaneously become airborne and make a static pose in the air as if she were sitting on a high toilet seat every time I need to jump over something. Needless to say, I have done a lot of walking around obstacles.
I was excited to encounter some people having a campfire not far from the sewers in which I had just emerged (By the look of my character, that was actually a suitable entrance into the world of Oblivion). Before I can even get within a reasonable proximity of them I hear one yell "If it's a fight you want, it's a fight you'll get!" followed by shooting arrows at me and encouraging his friend to rush me with a battle axe. I killed them and took their shoes, but I just wondered "Why?" I was attacked by a summoner(?) in a similar fashion soonafter. I guess they were evil to the core, or something.
Finally I met a knight who surprisingly didn't want to kill me and I was introduced to the interpersonal communication interface and the disposition minigame thing which is basically fun for about 2 minutes until you figure out how to win over anyone in about 3-4 tries. But uh...actually I stopped doing that when I realized that the fact that they liked me didn't really do anything since they didn't tell me anything new regardless. I guess they greeted me in a nicer tone?
Eventually I was caught stealing a cabbage from some guy's house and forced to pay my bounty of 7 gold pieces (ouch) and I was then forcefully escorted to the castle to be searched. Actually it worked out quite well since I couldn't find the castle and this was a quick way to get there. I talked a couple more guards into liking me and bought some stuff from some orc woman. I even picked a hard lock in the warrior's guild for some crappy dagger replica and gems. I would have been impressed by the amount of things you could pick up and all that if I hadn't already got a lifetime's worth of that kind of gameplay from the early Ultima series. In fact, maybe we should just stick to sprites and 2d worlds for western RPGs until someone can make one that doesn't play like some clunky reject first person shooter (The first person mode is like Thief 3 revisited, and that is NOT a good thing).
I really want to explore more of the game but I'm having trouble tricking myself into thinking it could get any better. I quit just before typing this up, and that was mainly because I couldn't move and I was getting frustrated. I picked up a tunic and I found that my legs had been magically bound to the floor. This is apparently the effect of being over-encumbered. No problem right? ...Wrong. There is no easy or quick way to drop anything, apparently. I learned this after clicking and dragging multiple times on apples and daggers in my inventory before they went bouncing all over the floor in no particular direction. After about a minute I was still over-encumbered, and considering I just stole a tunic from some guy's house I was trying to be quick and sneaking about it, but apparently the game's programming doesn't allow for that. "You can not drop the battle axe, there is no where to drop it." Oh? I can't drop it on this big open space on the ground right in front of me? Really? Okay, I'm done!
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by fantasyjunkie
:grr: :sad:
