Every single time I watch a minute of footage from this game I can’t believe it was ever treated as god’s gift to humanity, even eleven years ago. It was silly and clunky then. Today it’s like a bizarre sub-tech-demo curiosity.
I guess people were excited about it because Morrowind was interesting and this one had tree-swaying tech? I just don’t know how that excitement was sustained after it was actually released. Must be the compelling magic of Big Game with Lots of Checklists.
A huge audience’s first encounter with a western rpg
That might be it
This was like two (maybe even less???) years after World of Warcraft, right
It was also an early 360 game without much competition (on the 360).
That one video (that I watched on Gamespot or something, not YouTube, and pre-release) that had the gold dude charging at you and then you entering a dungeon to shoot falling logs and stuff made it seem like there would be “duels” and “dungeons full of traps” instead of combat as it was (not worse than morrowind but not pleasant) and that there would be more than ONE person on the team designing dungeons which is true iirc and extremely pathetic and that’s why there’s only like 4 different templates for the whole game.
They did a decent job of curating the audience’s expectation to be more morrowind but with obvious enhancements to your character’s physical presence. Considering that was the only video I saw, straight from E3, and that publisher-created advertising and footage were not 100% avoidable like they are today I think it was reasonable for me to “get hyped”
When I installed some mods trying to get my character lesbian-pregnant, it had the side effect that two soldiers caught me in the Imperial City and then marched me in irons, naked, across the continent to be placed in an old noblewoman’s basement.
That, I felt, warranted a Game of the Year Edition.
when it came out a friend without means to have a 360 was telling things like “dude, you have to spend like twelve hours to cross the whole map!”
now that he can play anything he wants he’ll never touch it, but those tidbits of info were pretty impressive for the youth
Can I link this again
Thanks
nobody ever expected or needed a video game to be good until breath of the wild came out
I was excited because combat felt less like rolling dice. Big improvement.
when this came out my friend had just got a 360 and was excited to show me that you could knock an apple off a tree, then down a hill into some water, and then it floated on the water.
but i guess when i got a dreamcast i though it was really cool that you could stand on that cliff overlooking the jungle in mystic ruins, with the pyramid in the distance, then actually jump down and go to the pyramid in the distance.
people still do it with skyrim too! admitedly, i’ve only played 5 of these big open world rpg things, but skyrim is by far the worst of them, in just about every respect
That’s why I liked it
Not sure that’s entirely it though, IIRC one of the reasons Oblivion made it to the 360 was the success of Xbox Morrowind. I know that’s why the one dude I knew who was super hyped for it was super hyped for it at least. He seemed no less hyped after having got it and played for a little while, though I dunno about long term since this wasn’t too long before I left.
Same. I’m surprised people could put over a hundred hours into it pursuing the main storyline or dungeons or w/e. I bonked people on the heads, ran away from cursing guards, and admire the occasional rainstorm and was good and ready to move on after about five hours
Installing oblivion mods to make it as jank and stupid as possible was way more fun than morrowind’s restrained mod offerings and also base morrowind is actually compelling in a way that oblivion never was
Jeremy Soule goes a long way. Skyrim is occasionally arresting because of the music.
I like the weird sloppy rubbery physics and jumping around a lot is more fun than in other TES games but yeah it’s pretty bad.
I made a solid go at the main storyline but the first oblivion gate turned me off entirely, so i made a beeline for Shivering Isles and considered that to be the main game instead.
Because I became so obsessed with Morrowind this was my most-anticipated game since Ocarina of Time.
The promise of endless forests
seemed to culminate a vidcon quixotic dream: real-deal woods, dense and dim
I can still look at those shots and see the game I thought we’d get and I’d still like to play that rather than a zorked mess in which the strongest enemy is a goblin mage who’s double-stacked monster levels and human levels
I think it was obvious within the first twenty minutes that the writing and art were a major nosedive from Oblivion, but I stayed in for thirty hours because I like running through terrain.
Of course here’s where they also make fast travel convenient and eliminate all designed instructions to a place, replaced with map markers. (Of course if you’re like me and walk everywhere the lack of the Morrowind’s maze of non-overlapping mass transit systems makes the world strictly less convenient…)
I bought a GeForce 3 Ti 200 to play Morrowind on a 1GHz PC with 256MB RAM (my first ever PC). I bought a Radeon 9500 Pro to play Oblivion on a 2GHz PC with 512MB RAM. My personal personal computer history is inextricably linked with the TES series. Well okay, I played Skyrim on the PS3 and haven’t touched any of the Fallouts yet, but you get the idea.
Oblivion will always have a cozy place in my cold heart. I have such fond memories of spending my first couple hours venturing through the moody catacombs of the Imperial City. Fighting thugs and finding treasure, it seemed so incredibly vast to me at the time, I fantasized about an entire action dungeon crawler taking place like this. (I later discovered through HOTU that there is in fact an old DOS game that kind of fits this criteria and plays out inside a city and the catacombs beneath, whose name escapes me right now.)
I almost wished there wasn’t more beyond the city walls. I dreaded them. Huge city gates imprisoning even huger landscapes. My meager hardware could barely handle the murky walls, I feared that more scenery would upset the rambling innards of the machine even more. I was having so much fun, what do I need to go outside for?
Eventually I did and my PC indeed suffered greatly, BSoDs abound. I sealed an Oblivion Gate or two, thought the environments looked kinda stupid, and lost interest quickly. But I always wanted to revisit this dumb old game and see how my memories of those beginning hours would hold up. I fear it’s a lot less impressive now. I don’t want to ruin my illusion. Maybe it really was that great.
On the contrary, if I crack and start using fast travel it starts to expose everything poor that’s not outdoor environment design. Granted I don’t enjoy Bethesda games but I enjoy them much less when I do that
