The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Comments by Kristan Reed

>" you NEED to play in first person to really enjoy it."

:-(

ooooh very well.
/drags himself to his 360 like a spoilt brat.

I really dont care how the game looks it will look good on my PC and the graphics will get better every year. havent played it yet but if the gameplay is solid i will have no problems with the game. What you 2 are saying is the game looks good so it most be good. i care about gameplay not how it looks. you 2 care more about the graphics and not the gameplay
i dont think that there is no big difference between the PC and x360

EGBartonFink
"admir will get it for the PC, no need to buy a x360 if you own a PC"
There is if you want to play it and don't have a PC that is capable of playing the damn"Statix care to post your rig? Just out of interest... "

Statix101
P4 3Ghz
2.0GB Ram
Radeon X850XT PE

"The 360 has 4xAA. Try that and see what your framerate is. Then compare the price of your PC with the 360 "

I wasnt having a dig at the 360, i was simply saying that it was unessacary to spend £300 on a new console when my current PC is capable enough...

By the way 4xAA has minimal effect on the frame rate, 5-10% fps reduction, if anything my CPU is a weak spot.

Also, theres no way of knowing what settings the 360 is using for all the options i can tweak on the PC version, as there are lots of options for draw distance, details tc,etc,etc.....

ed thing. What a silly thing to say.

That would be true had Bethseda not said that the 360 version uses the same settings as the PC version does on high.

Also the PC version, regardless of graphics card cannot support both HDR lighting and AA. The 360 version does.

Its swings and roundabouts of course - the PC version has mods for instance, but if you want out and out visual quality, I've seen nothing so far in any comparison shots to suggest the PC version looks any better than the 360 version.

Especially when faced with the choice of a 32" HDTV or a 19/21" monitor :)

You miss the point of graphics on PC can be scaled.

For ever little gadget a console does, the PC will come with a similar effect 1-2 years down the line and HD-TV still does not beat a monitor.

I am curious about the 10/10 since Eurogamer scores tend to be less inflated that the likes across the Atlantic but still this is on the Xbox 360 version so I am not sure if this is the Xbox 360 review or a general game review.

Ummm...the games are identical? So its a review of both?

Why doesnt an HDTV beat a monitor btw? Unless you are refering to the black levels on a CRT, I cant really think of anything beyond the cost element.

Personally give a more immersive experience via a bigger screen than better levels any day.

Maybe you should upgrade your graphics card? :)

Interested enough to post though right? :P

Mmmm good game and it certainly does grow on you as you see more of the world and get into the quests that are surprisingly involving. Best part about it, well that and the combat which really does handle well for a first person game.

Heh.
Just read the spoiler thread over the next few weeks, beats the hassle of playing \o/

Oh it is, but I've been denied my TV all night :(

Not on my system it doesnt.

I got this today from play.com and...

...this is one of the worst games I have ever played. Seriously.

10/10? LOL! 1/10 more like!

Take it from me, try before you buy ffs! Im floggin' this piece of sh1t ASAP...

Oh, and this is the last time I get taken by the stupid hype!

OK then! Thanks!

first time ever.?

hyped games
halo, DoA, BF2, FF7, Far Cry,

I'm a big TES fan. Bought the PC version but wasn't happy that I couldn't run it at at decent detail. That went to ebay after I was in the shop today and saw a 360 sitting there with my name on it. The controller takes a bit getting used to but I kinda like the analog sticks, Oblivion not being a twitch FPS I think I can get used to them. I've read the 360 version runs with 4AA + HDR and almost full detail which my PC couldn't do. Nevermind that it couldn't do 4AA+HDR at the same time. The game is beautiful. Looks better than it did on my PC so I'm happy plus I get to play it on our 34" HDTV. If your're not seeing this game near it's full glory just get a 360. I took the plunge and I'm happy for it.

It arrived on my doorstep 13 hours ago. WHERE DID THAT TIME GO??

It crashes. Quite a bit. Most notably when you're killing wolves out in the world. But I don't care. I just sigh, load up and try again.

/looks at the readers scores
ONE? FUCKING ONE??? Why do these trolls exist?

You know what the killer is? In 11 hours I leave for New York, for 6 weeks, without my PC. Talk about bad timing...

Just in case, I'm taking the game with, and my saves on a usb stick. Fat chance I'll get to play it though - my family over there are almost computer illiterate :(

Ummm...the games are identical? So its a review of both?

The PC is not a console, if the contols and GUI are same as the console it suffers, also PC are not the same "harware" as consoles are so what might run "fine" on a console might CTD on a PC every 5 minutes.

I am hearing many reports of CTD at cell loading (not I am suprised, Bethsoft games are known from being PoS in terms of performance and yes I can say that after playing most TES games and even the more unknown Terminator games) so I like a review of the PC version so I get a grip on how well it actually runs and how the GUI works.

OK, I gave this game a chance and played it for a few hours last night...
My opinion is this... slow boring buggy ugly crappy combat buggy, oh did I mention it was buggy?? I mean seriously, why haven't the reviews mentioned to truckload of sloppy bugs to be found in this game? The animation is sooooo bad and textures poor, if this is erm 'Next-gen' then you can stick it up yer arse!
The AI is pretty suspect too... don't believe the hype!

PS - Oh look, see that mountain in the distance? You can actually walk there! ...YES, but why would you want to?

PPS - A quick note on the 'Beautiful Open Vistas', I'd give it a 8/10 for foliage. But, what the f*ck is this? Gardeners World? A decent shrubbery doesn't necessarily mean its a good game now does it?

Reading your personal views is much more enlightening than the review itself, thank you guys. Not that I am a Sony or on Xbox fanboy, but I personally think that with 10/10, EG have screwed a bit. I believe they might review the rating in the future.

^^ so we condlude that this is not your type of game? Havent your played any other daggerfall/morrowind games? Then you would have known. They are all pretty identical in gameplay.

Crap! With this out and Test Drive on the way I *have* to buy a 360 now. :(

Reading your personal views is much more enlightening than the review itself, thank you guys. Not that I am a Sony or on Xbox fanboy, but I personally think that with 10/10, EG have screwed a bit. I believe they might review the rating in the future.

The words, "No they bloody won't cos this is one of the best games they and I have ever played" spring immediately to mind.

it's hard to read the user ratings graph, but it seems like multiple people have given it a 1/10. how strange.

for those still complaining about the score, EG are hardly off the curve on this one:

http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages4/927345.asp

10/10 is absolutely spot on. In fact Oblivion is so damn excellent it should get the first ever 11/10 score!!! I'm 15 hours into the Xbox 360 game and bar some forgiveable framerate stutter/popup outdoors and some very minor bugs this game is near perfect and the best RPG I've played to date on any platform. It just so damn addictive in the same way that World of Warcraft was except this game is more so!!!

And I didn't like Morrowind (PC) either...

If you were to take the EG XBOX 360 score modifier into account that some people will have you believe to exist this game is really 12/10.

Cracking game, well worth your money.

it's hard to read the user ratings graph, but it seems like multiple people have given it a 1/10. how strange.

It happens on every high profile game. The idiots.

The system needs fixing. So we can see exactly who has voted for what and in what volume.

Having played the game fairly extensively now and disliking it in almost every way I have voted but I am not one of those idiots giving it 1/10.

I gave it a 6/10 which is what I think it deserves.

Personally I'd have given it a 6 or 7 too, but hey it is all just opinions right?

As far as I can see, it's still just Morrowind really - every bit as clunky, ugly, awkward, badly-written and impenetrable as ever. I am enjoying it so far, but I'd have been happy with a game a quarter of the size, with a quarter of the amount of features, depth and choices, but with a lot more polish on the UI, controls, combat system, and a better-realised third person mode. What I mean to say is - the staple diet of play in Oblivion is pretty rough around the edges - just like Morrowind. If you can buy into the world and really get into it, you'll make your own fun and get a lot of value from it anyway no doubt. I'm just sore because I haven't managed to make a character I like yet :-)

Also, having played both versions, I find the PC version much easier to get along with. The menu navigation on the 360 was doing my head in.

I have to agree I would have to give it 6 or 7 too.
Is just an OK..RPG game,nothing special.
But Im sure its a perfect 10 when you playing this game high on something,now that I think about it I have to admit it must be an adventure.
I played this game for about 7 hours last night,not cuz I was having that much fun but because I didnt have much else to do.I was excited at first tho, just because I thoght it was really that good,but it isnt.
The fighting in the game is kinder boring all you do is the same thing over and over again,just a basic sword atack.You can use other weapons like a bow but I didnt find it that effective at all,I had a goblin run at me with arrows all over him still very alive,so I just sticked to the sword.
It is very weird to me that all the human lookin characters look alike,even the woman do,due to the fact that everybody is based on one model,so no matter how hard you try to make your imperial look different you wont succeed without making him look abnormal.
Pretty much all that I was fighting was the annoying goblins and wolfs,I kinder find it weird that you get atacked by everything for no reason at all,even by the human looking characters.I always end up waiting for them to see how they going to react hoping they wont atack me but they always do.
Graphics is good but I wish it was better,the best thing about the game is the world size ,it is huge,so you do need a horse to get around if you like to travel.The walking speed is to slow tho, for the human as well the horse,you just cant walk for longer than 5 sec and not get bored,I wish there was a speed in between walking and running.
Anyway Im not a big RPG fan,never was, so that must be one of the reason I dont like it so much,I just cant make myself go and check out every house,dungon,talk to everybody and so on.I dont see a point really.
I'll check the game once more but Im not sure Im going to finish it.
Well I guess is a great game if you like RPG games,and you like leveling up.I dont think I leveld up to much,only visited like 2 dungons..

Kiigan wrote "Also, having played both versions, I find the PC version much easier to get along with. The menu navigation on the 360 was doing my head in"

Bloody hell mate its not that difficult- I cant honestly see how they could have mapped the controls any better!

To the people giving it "6 or 7", this is fine, it's your opinion. Said that, you don't understand the game and it's depth and have little appreciation for it. TES games take time to appreciate. You really need play for a while before understanding the massive depth of role playing that the game presents. TES fans of which I am one understand this and are very accomodating. Not a problem. The game is not for everyone but unlike Morrowind, Oblivion is much more accessible.

"you don't understand the game"

Euhm, you said it yourself; everyone is still entitled to an opinion, that implies you can't really be the judge of that opinion either or always assume that they didn't get 'it'. The player imagining things himself is a TES trademark indeed but I wouldn't exactly call that 'deep roleplaying' or even a standard to which all other Western rpg's should be judged by. It's just different, not really better.

I have no problem with people giving it 6, it probably means they don't like RPGs, or have particular issues with this one.

1 is just ludicrous, and clear fanboyism.

I have only only played it for a hour and it is simply beautiful and has got to be one of this years must have titles.

Gosh, if it's really that good I may have to pick this up for PS3. ;p

Hehe dont tease em. It's just as playable with a 2 year old computer.

I'm way up in the northen mountains fighting skeltons in a deserted castle, damn near soiled myself a dozen times, this is possibly the best game i've ever played >.

Hehe dont tease em. It's just as playable with a 2 year old computer.
But not a Mac ;)

Copy/pasted from a forum I frequent, there are many other posts like this, but this I think eloquates it best(at least, far better than I ever could).
'Cause I'm too lazy to figure out where else to put it. Some of this is obvious repeatery, but my commentary is always invaluable. Laughing

Seriously, I haven't posted here in for, like, EVAR, but I figured it would be diverting to drop by and see what everyone's thinking of BethSoft's latest masterpiece. I picked it up the other day, and I was particularly relishing the thought of coming here in full fanboi regalia and telling you all that you missed the second coming of the RPG Christ - that you're all 100% wrong about Oblivion, and that history will not judge kindly your shallow oldsk00l prejudices.

Only problem is, I'd be full of field-ripe feces.

Before my mini-review, an apologia: I got a promotion, just cashed a new paycheck, and after finishing Avernum 4 I was itching to try any non-FPS with some extended play time. Besides, I was already in EB buying Metroid Prime: Hunters. So really, if I hadn't purchased Oblivion, the terrorists would have won.

Also, a caveat: I liked Morrowind. It was a terrible RPG - but even as a combat-heavy adventure game with piss-poor social interaction, it suited part of my gaming style pretty well. I tend to explore every nook and cranny in the game world, and I love finding out-of-the-way caves or dungeons or canyons or mountains or whatever, and Morrowind was actually rewarding for that kind of approach. I hated the walking Wikis, I was bored by the combat, I was irritated by the idiotically-scaled monsters and the insipid quest design . . . but I got a kick out of exploring every square inch of the game world. In Tribunal, in fact, the dungeon crawling was among the best I've ever seen (outside of the ludicrously bad final dungeon).

Without further ado, my impressions based on the first hours of the game, with the negatives first (since I know that's the only reason you're reading it anyway).

THE BAD

1. Draw distance and texture LOD.
Yes, Virginia, it really and truly sucks. I was floored by the incredibly low texture quality past the LOD horizon, and some vistas which could have been magnificent end up looking laughable: they're low-quality and poorly tiled to boot, which can make that hillside across the river look about as snazzy as a preschooler's scribbles with dun-colored sidewalk chalk. On top of the execrably poor texture quality at a distance, geometry/object pop-in is a real issue. Buildings on the other side of the lake don't even draw in until you've dog-paddled halfway to their shore.

Keep in mind that my experience is based on playing the game at 1600x1200 with everything except shadows at max. I tried the .ini tweaks mentioned in the Elder Scrolls forum, and I found them to cause a significant framerate hit on my Athlon 64 3500+ and ATI Radeon X850XT (not a bleeding-edge rig anymore, but definitely not a slouch). And they didn't really solve the problem anyway; they only moved the LOD cutoff to about 50% of my view distance, rather than 30%. There's still a lot of ugliness out there before your eyes get to the horizon.

So, yeah - as bad as all that? Absolutely.

I'm undecided about whether I prefer Gothic's (or Morrowind's) serious world draw-in to this mess. That draw-in is ugly, but at least you know there's something out there you can't see; in Oblivion, there might be ruins in that clearing, or it might just be another peaceful forest clearing. And it's still just as ugly as Gothic's draw-in, maybe more so. In any case, Oblivion clearly doesn't get a pass here. Moronites at the ES forums seem to like pointing out that this problem is unavoidable for such a messianic game, but c'mon already - Far Cry handled this challenge with aplomb, all of two fucking years ago. Get some real programmers, Beth.


2. Texture quality
The textures are disappointing, basically low-res crap wallpapered with lots of normal mapping. It honestly doesn't bother me, but please - I'm supposed to believe this is next-gen?


3. Animation
I don't have any complaints about the NPC and monster animations. When viewed in 3rd-person perspective, tho, the PC animations are no better than Morrowind's. And that's really, really awful, placing Oblivion in the lowest tier of premiere titles being released today. I don't get it: with all the capital flowing into a game like Oblivion, can they really not afford better than this?


4. Automap
The automap is extremely disappointing. Maybe I just haven't figured it out in my first hours of play, but the default scale is too close to be useful and I haven't divined how to adjust the scale. And to make it even less useful, Beth seems to have decided the automap should only record data in about a 10-foot radius around your character.

With a scalable map and a larger mapping radius, this would have been perfect. As is, it's almost worthless.


5. Character interaction
The only significant improvement over Morrowind seems to be

Wait, there's absolutely no improvement over Morrowind.

Within the first hour of play, I'd already seen some glaring recurrences of the worst problems from Morrowind's character interaction mechanics. To whit:

- When you invade the privacy of someone's home, they yell at you to leave. Try engaging them in conversation, tho, and their facial disposition frequently becomes a smile. Their Wiki-style responses are exactly the same whether you've just picked the lock on their door in the middle of the night or are politely questioning them on the street in broad daylight.

- Different phrases from the same character sound as if they're voiced by different actors. This could also be a consequence of the fact that some Wiki responses sound angry while others sound exceedingly mellow, even when you've broken into an NPC's home and pocketed all of their cutlery right in front of their eyes.

- Different responses from the same character actually contradict each other. In one response, Character X will dismissively voice her belief that Gray Fox is simply a rumor; in the very next response, she'll tell you with total credulity that the Thieves Guild is led by Gray Fox, and she'll describe him with what actually sounds like fear.

Just as moronic are the random interactions between NPCs. Here's a pretty representative sample of the kind of stuff you'll overhear:

Man: "Good day to you, good citizen!"
Woman: "Hail to you!"
Man: "I hear the Fighter's Guild is recruiting."
Woman: "Oh!"
Man: "Farewell to you."
Woman: "Goodbye!"

I'm not exaggerating the extent of the insipidity; that's an actual paraphrase from the very first inter-NPC conversation I encountered after leaving the tutorial dungeon. In fact, it's a fairly kind example when compared to some of the conversations I've overheard since then - at least it makes sense.

If anything, Oblivion's system so far seems worse than Morrowind's, just because Beth decided to jack up the font size for the console kiddies. In other words, the character interaction is just as poorly-designed, but the ratio between content and screen real estate is now much worse.


6. Speechcraft
Special mention goes to the new Speechcraft minigame. I'm a native English speaker and a pretty decent writer with a few awards to my credit, but I can't even begin to imagine a vocabulary for the extent to which this minigame is utter horseshit. Besides being an incredibly stupid design idea without even a tangential relation to real social interaction (something with which most players probably have at least a modicum of real-world experience), it simply doesn't make sense.

I think it's probably fair to suggest that the system sucks if I can't grasp it within about 5 seconds. I'm a reasonably intelligent guy, but the more important point is that this is supposed to analogize ordinary human conversation.


7. Interface
Oblivion's interface is a huge step backward from Morrowind's, which was already deeply flawed.

Oblivion's interface is organized around hierarchical nesting of menus, which makes a lot of sense if you're using a console gamepad. Indeed, this is de rigeur for console menu design, and it works fine in, say, Resident Evil 4. The problem here is twofold:

First, Beth doesn't effectively implement a good hierarchical structure. My biggest complaint is that, tho menus are hierarchically nested, you can't navigate back to the previous menu using the Esc key (or any other key that I've been able to discover); instead, you have to actually choose the "Return" option on the menu. It's frustrating as hell and imposes a totally unnecessary level of interface latency. And I assume it's not structured this way in the XBox 360 version, since the console world is basically standardized on hitting "B" to travel up (back) one menu level.

Second, Beth is foisting a hierchical scheme on an entire user population whose UI everywhere outside of the game is spatial rather than hierarchical. I'm not saying spatial is necessarily better; I'm just saying it's what everyone uses in the non-console world, and it makes no fucking sense to force your players to use an alien organizational scheme when there's a totally effective model with which your entire fucking user base is already 100% fluent. Grow up.

The problem is even larger than that, of course. The conflict isn't just between the Oblivion UI and that of the rest of the Windows universe; games frequently deviate from familiar mouse-driven interface, sometimes very effectively. The more significant conflict is between the way you interact with Oblivion's game world and the way you interact with Oblivion's game interface: the first is mouse-and-keyboard-driven, standard FPS fare, while the second is downright inimical to mouse use. I'm thinking of buying a wireless mouse just so I can throw it across the room every time I need to open the goddamn menu.

It's also worth mentioning that the game offers neither interface tooltips nor the ability to name your saved games; Beth seems to have forgotten about both mice and keyboards. Oh, and they also never learned about scaling UI to higher resolutions (or they forgot that functionality since including it in Morrowind). The level of grade-school bullshit here is downright baffling.


8. Plot
I'm not going to get into any significant spoilers here, even tho it probably doesn't matter. But I will happily ruin the tutorial dungeon for you: just before perishing at the hands of shadowy (but laughably low-level) assassins, Emperor Patrick "Uriel" Stewarptim bequeaths to you the sacred amulet of his bloodline, to be conveyed to a secret heir. A few narrative problems become apparent if this scenario is subjected to even minor cognitive rigors:

First, the Blades - the hand-picked bodyguards of the holy emperor who leads an entire nation - are so low-level that two of them meet their (apparently scripted) deaths at the hands of assassins whom you can dispatch with relative ease. Their equipment also happens to be only marginally better than your starting gear. In other words, the idiocy of levelled monsters is painfully obvious within the first 5 minutes of playing the game. (The only reason you can't easily save the Emperor, and thus obviate the entire fucking storyline, is that the game literally freezes your controls while a new shadowy low-level attacker emerges from a monster closet to kill him. Uh, rofl?)

Second, the captain of the Blades is alive at the end of the fight which kills the Emperor, but he behaves as if he's just received a massive cranial trauma: he immediately trusts the Emperor's judgment in giving the Amulet of Kings to you, which is odd enough, but he also seems to think it's a good idea to send you - an escaped convict - alone into the world, with instructions to bring the Amulet to a distant town, in a nation where the emperor and all of his known heirs have been brutally assassinated and where the Amulet somehow seems to be the key to this.

See, he has to stay behind to guard the Emperor's lifeless corpse.

I'm not exaggerating this plot device. It really is that puerile. What strikes me most is that it didn't need to be puerile. It's not hard to cook up workaday narrative solutions for all of these plot idiocies, so I'm left with the conclusions that Beth's writers and designers are either really stupid, archly cynical about the stupidity of their audience, or simply lazy. None of those alternatives is particularly inspiring.

One of the few things I enjoyed about Morrowind was the narrative sophistication of some of the text. Hell, the main storyline was predicated on an obscure disagreement of textual interpretation, and the lit crit in me thought that was actually kind of cool (even tho the game was totally unable to deliver an effective overall narrative). The narrative sloppiness in the first 15 minutes of Oblivion is dismaying and really dampened my desire to see how the storyline develops.


THE GOOD

1. Loading times
They're a non-issue, at least on my rig. It's downright puzzling that BS chose to superimpose "Loading New Area" on the screen; if they hadn't announced it, I honestly wouldn't have noticed the loading at all, and I would have been suitably impressed with their area loading. (Contrast this with Morrowind, where even bleeding-edge rigs can stutter when every new outdoor cell is loaded.) And my hard drive setup isn't exactly tomorrow's tech; I'm running a single standard ATA drive, so I'm guessing my disk access should be pretty typical for most PCs running the game.

Otoh, the loading times will be a major issue on any rig where they're an issue at all, because I run into a loading message on average about every 15-20 seconds in the outdoor areas.


2. Stability
Oblivion has been rock-solid for me, except when alt'tabbing and exiting the game.


BOTTOM LINE: RPG?

Noes.

Many of the quests are more interesting than Morrowind's, and Oblivion does a better job than Morrowind at offering the same sort of "role-playing" experience that you can get from, say, Deus Ex: the freedom to approach situations differently with different character types. I'm kind of role-playing a character, and the game doesn't generally force me into situations that don't work for that character. Otoh, it also doesn't present meaningful options for different responses based on character; BG2 had much better role-playing options than this, and that's damning with faint praise. And social interaction is at least as bad as in Morrowind, which sort of pre-emptively forecloses entire role-playing approaches.

As a stat-based, combat-heavy, exploration-focused adventure game, it's fun within its infuriating technical limitations. I'll probably enjoy it in the same way that I enjoyed Morrowind, and I don't really regret the purchase. But that doesn't mean I don't harbor genuine hatred for the game reviewers salivating over it. The inferior design elements of Oblivion are impossible to miss - they persistently interpose themselves between you and whatever positive experience you might eventually discover in parts of the game - and I can only shake my head and chalk this up as another lesson in the intellectual bankruptcy of game journalism.

As for BethSoft designers learning lessons from Morrowind...well, turns out they were pulling our leg. Surprise!

Can I just save people some time and point out it that you've just posted is the sort of typical antifanboy rant that bores me to to tears? :)

Summary:
1: Wah! The graphics arent photo real!
2: Wah! The graphics arent photo real!
3: Wah! The graphics arent photo real!
4: Wah! I dont like the map! I cant work out how to use it!
5: Wah! Not all of the hundreds of NPC characters have fully fleshed out dialogues, even though they are all voiced. Anyone would think they didnt have limited time/resources/storage capacity/infinite probabability speech generator engine.
6: Wah! I dont like the way the designers have made persuasion a bit more exciting than just relying on stats.
7: Wah! I dont like the interface, even though most people do! Bonus points for mentioning the lack of tool tips (RTFM?) and "dumbing down for consoles).
8: Wah! I dont like the storyline! Even though I'll only mention the opening level, which the "plot device" used is perfectly legitimate. Oh and the baddies you meet during the tutorial arent even real baddies!!!

Conclusion! WAH!! I wanted Morrowind 2, and all I got was a new game. Why couldnt they just repackage Morrowind and sell it again. Wah!

That looooong post is awful, just awful. I think I disagree with about 99% of that.

Reading the forums on the official Elder Scrolls site was an exercise in masochism.

Filled with PC snobbery. They call Xbox 360 users "console kiddies". I've never actually heard of anyone under the age of 25 owning a 360; they're too expensive and rare for children to have obtained one.

They dispise the way Oblivion was designed equally for the Xbox 360. "The text is large, for the console kiddies...", "The menus are designed for the joypads the console kiddies use..." I should point out that this is a 360 review right here - why are disgruntled PC gamers whingeing about the game's console suitability in *this* comments section?

They seem confused that their average PCs can't reach maximum spec and make the game look as good as the Xbox 360 version. For such technically-minded people, it's odd that they've forgotten the concept of scalability. Perhaps the new generation has confused them - the "kiddie" console version achieving better graphics than their PC spec? Unbelievable!


They hate the level-matching. They actually *want* to be able to cheat the system by getting hold of weapons they shouldn't have yet, and to kill everything with a single slash by level 20 like in Morrowind.

They feel conned because the "radiant AI" isn't actually an earth-shattering improvement. One pompous thread: "I demand an official apology from Bethesda on their front page for misleading people about the radiant AI..." Here's a tip: if you actually *believe* the hyperbole of videogame previews, you should probably check your dictionary to see if "gullible" has been removed.

Then to attack reviewers for scoring too enthusiastically. Heaven forbid a reviewer actually capture *feelings* about the game that these autistic human calculators are unable to feel. Too wrapped up in the graphics, game engine, PC elitism, and the snobbish idea that Bethesda *owes* them an experience beyond what £35 can buy a gamer.

Oh please, the official forums are a nightmare, yes, but the 360 people there are just as bad at least. Fanboys of the worst kind that defended the game against even the most justified criticism (while the PC people there tried to discuss the game), generally eager to insult, and trolling in the tech support threads.

The threads I saw about the UI didn't use the word "kiddy", they just stated the fact that it was designed with consoles in mind, and is not ideal for PCs. Maybe the word kiddy fell after the aforementioned 360 fanboys then stormed the thread.

If you say "elitist", I say "inferiority complex". ;)

Furbs your post is positively puerile.

Why dont you respond to the criticism(or ignore it and play the game) instead of paraphrasing it into something it isnt, just so you can easily invalidate it.

Let's sum up this review:

1)Wah! Oblivion has purty graphics
2)Wah! Oblivion has big wurld
3)Wah! Oblivion has many quests
4)Wah! Oblivion has almost identical combat to Morrowind("Combat itself is fairly clumsy and repetitive. All you have to do is hold down the mouse button to power up your attack and then release it to take a swipe at whatever you're facing." from the Morrowind review)

Cool, that was so easy Furbs, I'm going to follow your example in the future.

One part I really liked was "But all this grand scope for freeform adventuring would mean little if the fundamental combat was broken from the outset, but things have improved massively since the last Elder Scrolls came out almost four years ago."
Yet it doesnt list ANY improvements, it describes the combat/controls, but lists no improvements whatsoever.

Or how about "Using a basic topic/question-based conversation system, you get the chance to grill almost everyone you meet, giving Oblivion the feel of one of those old-school adventures where you end up making progress almost as much by being plain nosey and inquisitive as your actions. This might frustrate the type of gamer that just wants to wade in and kill everything, but for the investigative gamer who admires storytelling, interaction and questing, all of this is instantly intoxicating stuff."
Yes, most of the NPC's having a single selectable topic of conversation(rumours) certainly is intoxicating interaction/role playing.


PS, I'm enjoying the game enough that I'm buying a new motherboard/7900gt mainly for this, but the free handjob Oblivion is getting everywhere pisses me off, and it'll just encourage Bethesda to make Fallout 3 a futuristic Oblivion.

Ryuken, look to the review posted by ave. Some people don't understand or get it as I said earlier. This is a game of massive ambition and scope. To those that pick it apart makes you out for what you really are, someone who is incapable of appreciating 5 years work of a game with massive ambition and of such massive scale and scope that it is easy prey for the fanactics that look to try and chop the legs from under it. Cry me a river and all I will do is hand you a tissue.

I've always preferred playing first person games on pc,with keyboard/mouse,so bought the pc version.Enjoyed the tutorial,was disappointed with my first sight of the outside and struggled to get a decent framerate with my setup.

Decided to buy 360 version to comapre the experience and found that the graphics engine seems to suit a (non-digital) tv screen,the framerate is pretty decent and the game is very playable with the 360 controller.As a diehard pc gamer i'm enjoying the "console" experience,so much so i'm 6 or 7 hours further into the game on 360.

So i have to decide now,am i a pc fanboy or a console kiddie?