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Oblivion or Skyrim?

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greybeard

Jan 14, 2013 5:02 am GMT
Right, after over three years playing Morrowind in four large chunks (500+ hours) the last over a year ago. I'm finally doing the second, Tribunal, expansion pack. I'm still finding diversions outside Mournhold ie. undiscovered caves, side missions etc so I'll probably be at it for several weeks but after that I think I've got to move on.

So should I go for Oblivion GOTYE or skip it as some have suggested and go straight to Skyrim instead?
crazy4rpg

Jan 14, 2013 9:02 am GMT
Well I've never played Skyrim, though I read just about everything Elder Scrolls wiki and Uesp.net has to say about it.

I don't like how Skyrim starts out with your character's head on the chopping block for no god damn good reason other than you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Sir he's not on the list? HE GOES TO THE BLOCK!!!".

The empire's judicial system is seriously messed up.

And then you have the civil war mess to deal with. Which side should I take? Naturally I would not be fond of the empire after they tried to take my head off. I don't even think they apologize for that do they? And Ulfric is a racist jerk so to hell with him too!

You can of course just ignore the civil war mess. Which is what I'd probably do until Bethesda gives us a canon ending to it.

And then there is the fact that you play the Dragonborn, i.e. Nordic Jesus. Which means it would be awkward to play as anything other than a Nord.

I prefer to play as a Breton, Nords hate Bretons. Being a Breton Dragonborn would be a real slap in the face to many Nords.

And what if I wanted to play a Dunmer, Kahjiit, or Argonian Dragonborn. If Ulfric wasn't bound by AI script he'd probably have his Stormcloaks assassinate me for heresy.

Playing Oblivion there is no predisposition (is that the right term?) to choose any particular race. You can play the game comfortably as any race.

I like how Oblivion starts compared to Skyrim. Sure you're in jail, but the nature of your incarceration is ambiguous. You could be in for murder, or you could be in on a drunk&disorderly charge. Judging by how your character doesn't even know why he's in there I'm guessing he was passed out drunk when the guards brought him in.

In Skyrim they replaced ambiguity with stupidity and I hate it. But I'd still play it if I had a computer that could handle it.
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If life is a game, how do I enable God Mode?
NepentheNeo

Jan 14, 2013 10:53 am GMT
I'd say get and play both, if you can. They are both great games.
JC_Phoenix

Jan 15, 2013 7:51 pm GMT
Sky rim has better graphics, combat, and leveling system.

However for me OBlivion has better locations, quests, guilds, and setting.

Skyeim had some big ideas but really poor execution with bland quests, characters, guilds, and stories.

Also moders are having some issues with making complex mods for skyrim, so it not many quest mods to remedy my issues with it either. At least with oblivion there's the giant modding community to fix just about all of its shortcomings.
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"You are a planned organism, the offspring of knowledge and imagination rather than of individuals"-Morpheus
Marikhen

Jan 15, 2013 9:26 pm GMT
In all honesty there are three major reasons to place Skyrim over Oblivion.

Despite using a Gamebryo engine and the inherent optimization issues which it entails the graphics in Skyrim are definitely superior to those in Oblivion in many areas. The art style also achieves an "epic scope" sensation for me more often than I felt with Oblivion. Of course the fact that I couldn't "get into" Oblivion as easily/quickly as I could with Skyrim may have had something to do with that.

Likewise character creation, and by that I'm strictly referring to the physical aspects of your character and ignoring anything like background, (meta-)story, or stats, in Skyrim is much improved over Oblivion. With Oblivion the best I could manage during the character creation process was a female who looked vaguely like a shaved, albino gorilla. With Skyrim it was much, much easier to make a human female that looked, well, human.

The third, and perhaps most important, reason you would play Skyrim over Oblivion is the modding community. More specifically due to Oblivion's age and (at least some of) the engine's limitations modding and mod support for it is nowhere near as active as it is for Skyrim. Granted it has a large library, perhaps larger than Skyrim's current library, but it's very likely that a larger percentage of Skyrim's mods are still being actively updated (for those with bugs or that need tweaks still) as opposed to Oblivion's mods.

If you don't mind dated graphics, characters with the faces of moose knuckles, and don't care much about mods then it probably doesn't matter much which game you play, though Oblivion might actually be a better choice given that both the official and unofficial patch makers have had more time to patch up the bugs with Oblivion than with Skyrim.
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Stop complaining. I could have done this more painfully. - Dryad from Sacred 2.
greybeard

Jan 16, 2013 4:41 am GMT
Thanks for the feedback - very helpful.

I'm edging towards Oblivion GOTYE now as I'm not bothered about the graphics. I'm still playing Morrowind and think that can often look great despite the draw distances, dodgy frame rate and limited character models. I play in FP view so, assuming that is allowed in Oblivion/Skyrim what my character looks like also isn't important to me.

I can get Oblivion GOTYE for almost half the price of Skyrim now too.

One thing I would like is a game which doesn't crash as much as Morrowind. Despite enabling all the recommended settings to minimise this there are certain areas which cause significant problems (Ebonheart). I had five crashes there only last night during a three hours session. That and other similar game stopping glitches are the main things that would really put me of a game. Fallout being a good case in point.
Marikhen

Jan 16, 2013 7:36 am GMT
The limited models, especially around the faces, might be annoying, but it's much less frustrating than spending hours trying to create human faces and ending up with monkey faces. I played a little Oblivion before loading up Morrowind for the first time in half a decade or more and immediately thought to myself, "You know, these faces are kinda blocky and ugly, but they're better than my Oblivion character's."

That said as far as draw distances and frame rates go, you might try looking into http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=utilities.detail&id=22 . It seemed to help a bit with things when I tried it.

Another option would be to try Morroblivion. http://morroblivion.com/

It's not too hard to install, just so long as you pay attention to the instructions on the web-site and not the instructions in the text files enclosed with the archives, and there are compatibility patches with at least some of the mods that might conflict with it like Better Cities and the Vvardenfell Imports mod which is needed for Morroblivion. I've been playing it for a little bit and while the site claims no outstanding issues, or something to that effect, it's not quite accurate, or I'm missing something, as the giant white ants don't make a thumping sound and the jumping worms have been replaced with rats. Other than that I got my character to the first city (been so long I can't remember the name even though I based out of it the last time I played the real Morrowind) without too much hassle other than the frame rate seeming oddly low. I did a quick test with Oblivion and was pulling 60 FPS pretty often while outdoors, but in the Morrowind content I was seeing 30 FPS more often than not it seemed.

Tradeoffs galore, but at least the Oblivion engine has native widescreen support. :-D
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Stop complaining. I could have done this more painfully. - Dryad from Sacred 2.
greybeard

Jan 17, 2013 6:53 am GMT
Thanks for the advice.

I'm actually playing Morrowind on an original (softmodded) Xbox so there's not a lot I can do about that now. I really don't fancy restarting it when I eventually get my new, first games' capable desktop build up and running.

I didn't enjoy the first ten hours of the game much TBH. Only once my character had got to a level where they could take down Rats and particularly Racers with a bow did I begin to explore and started enjoying the game.

But I will have the option of whether to play Oblivion/Skyrim on PC or XB360. I guess I don't have to ask which platform people here would recommend.