Originally Posted by Joram
In Oblivion the enemies level up with your hero! This I find boring and not so interesting thing. But I read on other forums there're gamers who really love Oblivion's gameplay system !!

The voice-acting and the variation in dungeons and other things in the world of Oblivion I find not so strong/good! For example: in many dungeons I have the 'feeling' they're almost the same ... frown

The levelling system didn't bother me so much at the beginning, but after a while (well, quite a long while: several hundred hours of gameplay!) I began to get rather bored of it since in essence it just meant that the appearance of one's adversaries changed but very little else did, eventually leading to a bit of a feeling of "what's the point?" To born2beagator (or any other prospective players), fortunately there's a plethora of mods to change that, from the relatively simple to the very complex: the latter I found to be more rewarding, but even experienced players can have trouble with some of the hairier installations.

It should be noted that, although a common complaint, it's still subjective and many if not most players are perfectly content with it. But I wouldn't gamble on it and being able to add in endless user-made mods is probably Oblivion's biggest strength, especially considering the enormous wealth of stuff that's available - so either way, get the PC version! This is really important.

Voice acting is another bugbear for many: not because it's poor quality (even though Lynda Carter's not-exactly-subtle voice in a mediaeval setting is an acquired taste for some grin ) but because of the somewhat dubious decision to make all of the dialogue voiced: which means they'd quickly run out of space if they used a lot of voice actors, which means you only get 11 regular voices: the effect of this is for example that the dunmer, altmer and bosmer races all share exactly two voice actors, one male, one female, and however good one thinks they may or may not be, that's pushing it a bit. Though again mods can help, and someone's raised and lowered the pitches between races where actors are shared; not a comprehensive solution, but it makes a difference.

Oblivion's what one makes of it, really. Some people see what it isn't, give up too fast and hate it forever; others see just what they always wanted and love it; sometimes it's easy to see a lot of people pointing out its shortcomings, but actually a lot of people (not all of them new to RPGs, I should add) like it perfectly well out of the box. My personal feeling is that with a little work it has the potential to be one of the best games going: anyone who doesn't like levelling, wants better graphics, new towns, a few extra quests, new NPCs hanging round, an entirely different approach to their character's attributes, guars and so on can find the answer to their questions and more other stuff than they could possibly imagine at modders' sites such as TES Nexus.

I was going to post a few modding essentials but I guess I shouldn't get ahead of myself!


J'aime le fromage.