one of the most overrated pieces of crap ever invented
GAMEPLAY: terrible. The combat , which makes up most of the challenge in the gameplay, is repetitive in the extreme. Admittedly, it has taken a step up from most WRPG combat systems. Rather than simply clicking on enemies until they die, you have to block until an enemy attacks and then strike back. Sounds cool until you do it millions of times with every enemy in the whole damn game. Another thing I hate about the combat is that blocking doesn't prevent damage, it just reduces it. And another thing is that your spells are pathetically weak and use up far too much mana (or 'magicka' as it is named in a futile attempt to sound like Final Fantasy) so they're very useless. Same with bows, but maybe that was just because I didn't play as an archer.
Outside of combat, gameplay is similarly lame. Mostly it involves walking around talking to people and occasionally sneaking, which I found next to impossible. There are no puzzles or variety although there are a few stupid minigames like lockpicking and stuff but they are all VERY shallow.
GRAPHICS: everyone says "WOW IT HAS LIKE FIVE BILLION POLYGONS AND HIGH DEFENITION LIGHTING WITH REALTIME THINGYNESS!!!11!" but that doesn't change the fact that the game is butt ugly. The art designers were all smoking crack when they worked on this game, and not in a good way like how the art designers on Katamari Damacy were also smoking crack. The environments and enemies are all the same generic stuff we've seen in hundreds of other WRPGs. The people are literally ugly. All the dungeons are recycled, cut and pasted so that while the game claims to have something like fifty dungeons, it's actually two or three dungeons, endlessly copied with minor variations. The same can be said of the towns and overworld. SOUND: Admittedly, there is a LOT of voice acting in the game - almost everyone talks with sound. But everyone, even the main characters, have absolutely terrible voice actors who sometimes seem not even to understand the words they're saying. This is made worse because the facial animations are crap and emotionless, and the story would suck even if it were just written down. So you never give a damn about the story. The music is mostly not even there and when it is it's bland and generic.
VALUE: OK, so it does have 200 hours of gameplay if you do absolutely everything. But that's actually about 20 hours of gameplay, copied and mixed around until you've played every part of it 10 times over.
TILT: I give it a really low tilt because of many other bad things about it. The physics suck. Not only are they unrealistic, many objects which should be physically simulated, like pots hanging from strings, simply aren't . Another reason is the AI. The AI is A JOKE. It was said before the game came out by the developers that it had the best AI in any game ever. HAH! what a load of crap! It's more like the worst. All that stuff they said about the reactive characters is bull. The characters are stupid in the extreme. Combat AI is even worse. Allies and enemies get stuck in scenery and try to walk through walls. They ask you the time of day when you're pillaging the town. Sometimes when you talk to a guard who is attacking you, he just forgets that you did anything wrong. They are all SO FRICKEN STUPID I HATE THEM ALL. Once I even talked to a guy who bluntly told me: "I HAVE NO MESSAGE". What the hell is with that?
Yes, everyone in the game has a 24-hour schedule. But when you think about it, it's actually really boring to follow someone in an RPG around just to see when they go to bed and stuff. Oh, and the story, even the sidequests, is not reactive at all. Occasionally in a sidequest you get a pathetically obvious choice of how you carry out the last part of the quest, but it's all really lame.
Plus another thing: You may be able to talk to everyone in the game, but none of them have anything interesting to say.
OK, I've ended up just listing individual faults, so I'll wrap it up here. TESIV: Oblivion is a fundamentally flawed game. The basic philosophy behind it is wrong. By focussing so much on making a realistic world, Bethesda forgot that just being realistic doesn't mean it's fun. Take the world from Twilight Princess as an example of how they should have done it. See, the world is smaller in TP, and less realistic, but here's the thing: There is actually fun and interesting stuff to do in that world. I would take just one interesting, linear, unrealistic level over a whole world of boredom. That's all from me.
like you care,
William Broom