Best Oblivion review ever:

The story in Oblivion was a cliched heap of crap, and they didn't even try to put an interesting spin on it. "Guy with mysterious birthright needs to save world from great evil ." Wasn't that the plot of Star Wars? The presentation was terrible, there wasn't even a boss fight to speak of - you can sit there and watch someone ELSE kill the 'bad evil' guy for you. Were that not enough, the story itself had zero impact whatsoever on the gameworld. In the Witcher, the influences of Salamandra's power are everywhere. In Oblviion, if you're NOT doing the main quest, there's absolutely no indication that APPARENTLY there's demons from HELL running around a quarter of a mile away. There can be Oblivion gates open all over the place, and yet nothing ever happens, they all just wait patiently for you to kill them one at a time. Nobody even gives a damn, and it doesn't matter how many you close on your own time, the story actually FORCES you to slog through a minimum of about 15-20, and Oblivion gates are probably slightly less amusing and exciting than a colonoscopy.

- Story: Terrible - (Apparently the developers' experience with novels was limited to R.L. Stein's Goosebumps)
- Story Presentation: Abysmal - (The world is being invaded! But we'll all just patiently wait for you. So you're level 2 with some rusty iron armor? Well so are these hell-spawned demons! Scary, huh!)

How about the front-end? Graphically the game sucked. The art direction was terrible, if there even was any. The ONLY thing that was 'pretty' about the game was the ability to process large vistas - but it was terrible at that. Far Cry did the same thing about 3 years PRIOR to Oblivion and it didn't bring the most powerful computers of the time to their knees to do it, and still look barely acceptable. Every other texture or model in the game was a 50/50 shot of being halfway-decent looking, or being an amateur Photoshop abortion. If you can go look at the textures for faces, and tell me that that is acceptable, then I know you're lying to me straight up. Everyone knows the interface was completely consolized because Bethesda sold out for monetary quantity over game quality. How about sounds? The voice acting? The voice acting for THOUSANDS of characters that was obviously done by a team, minus Viggo and Stewart, about 3 or 4 people? Look at how many races even SHARED the same voice. In Morrowind, nearly every race sounded unique. Dunmer males are raspy, Orcs are gruff, Altmer are snooty, etc. In Oblivion? Half the races sound exactly alike. And look at the world they chose to set Oblivion in? No, we don't learn anything in the years past - gone are fantastic places like Telvanni mushroom villages, atmospheric and dreadfully dismal little villages nestled in a swamp, or even hearing the call and seeing a Silt Strider tower out of the mists of Seyda Neen. Sure, those were Vvardenfall creatures and places, I didn't expect those to be in Tamriel - But no! We don't get anything like that! We get to regress to a generic Everquestian high-fantasy world of "BIG_STONE_CASTLE_12" and "GENERIC_FANTASY_MONSTER_853"!

- Graphics: Appalling - (There were two art teams, a team of forty whose only goal was to put poly-syllabic high-tech-sounding rendering technologies on every surface, and three interns who had to model and texture everything else)
- Art Design: Laughable - (There was not a single original thought in this entire game. Honestly, Oblivion makes WW2 games look like the height of creative design)
- Sound: Loathsome - (Fun Fact: Hiring Viggo Mortensen and Patrick Stewart - 90% of the budget. The other 10% went to cocaine for the game design team, and developers just got their wives to record some s**t overnight)

What about BESIDES the story? What else was there to do? Well how about the massive completely-computer-generated-utterly-soulless-world? That was full of level-scaled monsters? Where would you like to go exploring? The "FOREST OF TREES"? Or how about the "EASTERN FOREST OF TREES"? I hear if you go to the "SOUTHERN FOREST OF TREES" there's the same damn crap that there is everywhere else. Scattered amongst the endless miles of boring, randomly-generated deciduous forest are semi-handcrafted dungeons. Dungeons that consist of caves, mines, ruins, and Ayleid ruins. 99% of these dungeons contain absolutely NOTHING of interest, except more level-scaled monsters. These dungeons are also 'assembled' together like lego bricks. "BIG_CAVE_1" prefab goes here, attach to "CAVE_HALL_2" which loops to "SMALL_CAVE_ROOM_45". Apply glue, wait 30 minutes, fill with level-scaled monsters and chests of 'loot' containing 12 gold, a lockpick, and tongs.

- Game World: Insipid (Nobody realized that 12 square miles of New England deciduous forest without a single interesting, picturesque locale wasn't the greatest of ideas)
- Dungeons: Plebian (EVERYONE LOVES LEGOS, RIGHT?)

Of course you have loads of quests to do, right? Quests like "KILL THIS OGRE AND GET MY POTATOES", and quests like "KILL THE MONSTER ON MY FARM" and quests like "KILL THE MONSTERS IN MY BASEMENT" and quests like "KILL THIS AT THERE". Oh sure you have the occasional "TAKE THIS TO THERE" quest, but fundamentally, that's all the quests were. You get a quest to go 'spy' on a guy's wife to see if she's cheating? I can tell you right away how it's going to end - He'll see you, he attacks you, you kill him. There's no other outcome. There's no conversation trees, there's no choices to be made, nothing. The vast majority of quests in this game were nothing but "KILL KILL KILL LOLOLOL" quests, designed to appeal to the unsophisticated philistine whose idea of a 'role playing game' is anything where you kill stuff to get XP, because that's clearly what an RPG means. I can probably count on... maybe both my hands, and a couple of toes, the number of quests in the game that actually gave me choices to make. Meaning any choice, whatsoever. Honestly, the Betehesda developers must've thought a 'dialog tree' was way too complicated for 2006. Nearly every conversation you can have with anyone in the entire game, important or not, consists of a linear single-reply train track of conversation choices. You HAVE no conversation choices. Just because I'm offered the ability to say " goodBYE" doesn't make it a choice. I *CAN* count on one hand the number of quests that gave me different ways to resolve the quest that didn't involve killing everyone ANYway, because nothing you do in this disgusting abortion of a game matters to anyone. For all the unwashed primates out there, "DONT KILL THE GUY" and "KILL THE GUY" isn't a choice either. The game doesn't even work as a sandbox game, because the only thing there is to do sandbox-wise is to steal apples and murder people. Yeah! People! Remember how Bethesda promised that they'd have dynamic lives, released a neat video featuring the 'Radiant AI' where the woman reacts to her dog and everything around her, with dynamic conversation? Now do you remember how in the actual game, people would just shuffle out of their homes at 6AM, pray at the church for 12 hours, shuffle back, eat an apple, and go to bed? Wow! That was groundbreaking! I've never seen that before! Unscripted you say! Holy crow! The combat AI was phenomenal too, with the guards running to kill me from across town because I picked up a hobo's bowl of change, or how an errant swing of the fist would turn the entire town into a hilarious deathmatch ending with bodies everywhere, and nobody left in town! Now THAT'S game design progress!

- Quest design: Atrocious - (World of Warcraft has better quests than this. I'd like to say I'm joking, but I'm not. Seriously, the Onyxia thing that kills all the noobs you lure into the room was infinitely more amusing and unexpected than anything in this game. The Chancellor is Mehrunes Dagon? WHODATHUNK!?)
- Choices: Sublime - JUST KIDDING - THERE ARE NONE!
- Depth: Superficial (I know evaporated lakes in the Nevada desert with more depth than the entire contents of this game)
- AI: STOP! YOU VIOLATED THE LAW!

However, it doesn't really matter if the game just isn't any fun, does it? You know, the real meat-and-potatoes of the game (of course at this point it's more like rotting, jellied, maggoty meat and blackened, decaying potatoes). I don't even know where to start! How about the ridiculous, s**tty mini-games you play! Who needs to develop a CHARACTER when you can pick a very hard lock with a single lockpick with a skill of 5! Why have a Charisma score, when it doesn't matter WHAT your speechcraft is, you just play a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ little pie game and get everyone to love you? What about the magic and combat system? God forbid they EVER improve the crappy magic systems in any of these games. "CHOSE EFFECT. CHOSE PROJECTILE. PROFIT." Remember games like Baldur's Gate where your spells had interesting effects instead of "HEAL, HURT, DEBUFF"? Honestly, I don't even think the Oblivion developers PLAYED video games before. Combat was a matter of click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click, just like the glory days of Diablo. The game even fails at being a stereotypical ROLE PLAYING game. There is no 'mage' **** there is no 'Thief' or 'Warrior'. If you've ever played the game up until about level 15, you realized 10 levels ago that every character is THE EXACT SAME. Your warrior can cast spells, your mage can pickpocket from the king of thieves himself, and your thief is carrying a battleaxe. I'll be polite and spare you all the vitriol I'd spew all over the 'significant' character building options (SWORDS OR AXES? HUR HUR HUR I LOVE RPGS LOL HALO RULZ)

In fact, you want to know what the extent of 'role playing' in Oblivion is? PLAYING PRETEND. No really, how many of you simpletons 'played' a '**** in Oblivion and did so by artificially restricting your options? Like, you chose from the whole of *THREE* weapon catagories, and you suddenly realize that 'BLADE' lets you use a two-handed claymore as adeptly as a small stabbing dagger? So you come across a claymore, and don't use it, because you're playing a Thief and it's against your idiom? That's not a role-playing game, thats PLAYING PRETEND. You may as well just quit the game and 'pretend' you're playing the whole stupid waste of time in your MIND.

An RPG isn't "PLAYING A ROLE", because you know what? That means that HL2 is an RPG, Thief is an RPG, even a game as mind-numbingly stupid as Counter-Strike is an RPG. It's not about having stats either. Diablo was not an RPG. It was an adventure game.

Fundamentally, a ROLE PLAYING GAME is about making choices. That is the only divisive thing that sets a true RPG like Deus Ex away from wannabee mainstreamed plebian *HORSE s**t* like Oblivion. But the masses just LICK this crap up, they can't get enough of it, because all the hype they read told them it was good, so they FORCE THEMSELVES to believe it's good. And yeah - Deus Ex was TEN TIMES the RPG that Oblivion was. If you've never played it, that's downright depressing.

Short Version: In Oblivion, you run around in a world with zero personality or creativity embarking on an extremely shallow, easy, cliched quest to save the world from a completely non-threatening foe. You explore a wilderness full of the same trees while bravely running into worthless holes in the ground that have nothing interesting in them. You fight monsters by simply clicking on them with the same tired generic 'swing' animations and sometimes shoot a 'fireball' at them. You're doing this so that you can gain levels, which in turn simply makes everything else you fight a level harder, until you reach a magic point where suddenly all this equipment you've never seen before sprouts from the ground and everyone is selling and wearing it like it's no big deal. You earn XP by doing extremely tedious, repetitive tasks that are about as fun as a penile piercing or by killing generic fantasy monsters that are lurking around for no god damn reason. Along the way you 'develop your character' by making some stats bigger, but that doesn't matter, because your character is still as shallow as a dried-up driveway oil-stain, because there's not a single meaningful, significant choice in the game to be made, and you end up either playing a character that can do everything, or you play pretend and create stupid rules that the game was too s**tty to implement on its own and make a "****" based on arbitrary, stupid, worthless restrictions. Repeat until you suicide.

Final Score: If I knew where a Bethesda developer was, I'd burn their house down. And their dog, if it escaped the inferno.the_one34

say what? word

maybe a new zone of the enders?tktosc666

^^ i sure hope so!!

Wow all the lemmings in here are sad, really really sad. If you are the still in here claiming that he CAN'T retract a wrong translation or clearify what he really meant from what he said because other cultures take it another way, or if you are in here saying he is stereotyping the West or being racist then you are just sad.

This is truly truly an all time low for all lemmings trying to claim ownage.

CajunShooter

i honestly cant see whats the big deal with Halos story, or Halo as a whole, but w/e.RazMaTaz-1

i totally agree. ive played all 3. nothing special to me. it was way overhype. and fps are overated too.