So when Oblivion came out in 2006, the three of us were of course super hyped. I think the other two enjoyed it, but to me it really wasn’t the same. Gone were the explorations of winding roads, landmarks, and numerous caves, replaced by mostly random forest and fast travel. You end up fast traveling a lot because there’s not much to see in between. Gone were the cities like Balmora, which almost fit like a puzzle in its almost real life design. Or the maddening complexity of Vivec, featuring stacks and stacks of levels, including a room that was locked behind a master door only the highest of thieves could lockpick and housing one of the game’s most mysterious living gods. Or one of my favorites, Sadrith Mora, made on the outskirts of living mushroom houses and shops like some kind of LSD paradise, complete with secluded mages’ dens you had to levitate to to even access.
Best town.
Instead we get a circular capital city divided into sectors, only one of which you’ll ever visit which is the market place because there’s nothing of real interest in the others unless you’re part of the Thieves Guild, or at the very end of the game. The horribly clunky leveling stat leveling system was still present from Morrowind where you only get attributes from leveling in certain categories, for example leveling hand to hand would give you a point in strength while leveling something like speechcraft would give a point in personality, making you go out of the way on how you would naturally play the game to not be stat gimped with a bunch of +1’s by the time you level up. The whole “Oblivion Hell” levels got old very quickly with most of them being a pain just to navigate and looking mostly the same. Going through 7 of those fuckers in a row for a quest only to find out later it was optional took all the patience I had in me not to hulkslam this game right into the uninstall bin.
TL,DR; I had really never gotten into it and just put it behind me as a bad fluke. Maybe they had different designers this time around. Maybe they were just having a bad day that day, 400 times in a row. Elder Scrolls V will surely be better. It has to be better. And then Skyrim finally did come out a few years later. Procedurally generated forest had been kicked into maximum overdrive mode, this time with hundreds of giant mountains scattered out the ass across the map, the worst UI I have ever seen in a vidya game, joke hobo villages passed off as towns, and an unskippable scripted event that ended up somehow being worse than Oblivion’s. Arrow to the knee memes coming out almost instantly, seeing how the NPCs just parrot the same tired dialog at you over and over. I guess it could have been worse. At least it wasn’t HORSE ARMOR DLC.
“Let me gueeess…someone stole your sweet roll.”
“But you never run out of quests, ever!” Yeah, right. Seeing how the sprawling labyrinths of older Elder Scroll games turned into linear hallways and reused assets, that’s not much of an incentive. Everyone else on the internet seemed to love it though, and I tried to like it, I really did. But after starting three new games over the next year of 2012, I keep starting and dropping it shortly after getting a few quests into the main story line. Sad times.
So why exactly am I complaining about an almost 5 year game, in the year 2016? Mostly because it has bothered me not beating either of these games after coming out of Elder Scrolls III with so much love, and also because I have had some extra free time this month to see if I could finally slog through these games to see if the games were really just bad, or it was me just not giving them a fair chance. If I could give Morrowind a second chance and love it, could it be the same for the other two? Oh yeah, and Enderal just came out and it’s supposed to be the Greatest Thing so I’d like to give that a shot soon.
captainadmirals 