Lord Chaos 2:
That the game DOES come with the modding ability is a big plus and should count in any review of the game.

Well the game does have a modding capability but it its only available on p.c. So if someone is reviewing the ps3/360 version then it wont get a mention.

pilf:
Yahtzee what's wrong? You seem to be reviewing a lot of crap recently.

Theres nothing coming out till october. He's just going to have to review old crap until Fable 2. Its going to be wierd watching that review, as Fable was his first, like he's an old teacher who has the children of old pupils in his class.

'Role playing' have lost their meaning after these games started rolling out, friends of the genre; please don't use oblivion as your idol for gaming prestige. I reccomend an older but more sattisfying game, called diablo II (hardcore battle.net) You shall be immersed like never before..

Could someone please tell me what program Yahtzee uses to do his stills? I know he makes the movies with Windows Movie Maker, but its the creation of the individual frames that I'm thinking about here. Or is that a part of WMM as well? As you might guess, I'm considering making a short along similar lines myself, not a review in this case, and I doubt I will acheive ZP's widespread popularity, but it would be fun in any case.

Any thoughts? I suppose a PM might be appropriate if possible. I'm not sure if that's a function of these forums.

Its true what he said about how you dont get immersed in the game. and its probably because they tried to fix something from morrowind which didnt need fixing, and oblivion gates are repetative.
If you think that rpg had problems, try two worlds. The worst game ive ever played to this day.

cashew:
Its true what he said about how you dont get immersed in the game. and its probably because they tried to fix something from morrowind which didnt need fixing, and oblivion gates are repetative.
If you think that rpg had problems, try two worlds. The worst game ive ever played to this day.

Thank you so much! Finally someone who agrees with me that it's something they tried to fix that was in Morrowind but wasn't broken!

And yes, Two Worlds is aweful.

If u go into the desert its all sand... u go into the arctic its all ice... forest, tree's.....What the hell did u expect them to do with the landscape, they tried to make it real so they kept the land realistic.... Whoever wants one of those games with every biome in the world mixed into one rediculous world go buy some fantasy shite... Dickheads

JohnnyRyan99:
If u go into the desert its all sand... u go into the arctic its all ice... forest, tree's.....What the hell did u expect them to do with the landscape, they tried to make it real so they kept the land realistic.... Whoever wants one of those games with every biome in the world mixed into one rediculous world go buy some fantasy shite... Dickheads

Since we got humanoid cats and lizards walking around and people that can summon big monsters made out of stones that are kept together by some weird wind power and can shoot lightning at you, I thought this was fantasy?

Zaklog the Great:
Could someone please tell me what program Yahtzee uses to do his stills?

Probably Photoshop.

I like this review, knowing the awesomeness it oozes (with it's problems too). But I don't like my computer. Cause it crashes when I play this.

*sob*

conqueror Kenny:

Lord Chaos 2:
That the game DOES come with the modding ability is a big plus and should count in any review of the game.

Well the game does have a modding capability but it its only available on p.c. So if someone is reviewing the ps3/360 version then it wont get a mention.

I agree. But he was reviewing the PC version.

I'd think he'd like the shivering isle more... i mean come on it has sean conery (lord sheogorath) in it... and of course everyone is insane...

I loved that game! I didnt really play the PC though I played with the 360. The only being like 5 voice actors got annoying but you get to create your own character, explore the map, steal stuff, join an assasin clan, and become a deidric god! It may be a bit repeated but its fun! Its extremely satifying when you kick the everloveing crap out of gaurds as well =D

I'm inclined to believe that The Protagonist was in jail for murdering all the children in the land.

I honestly thought yahtzee would be part of the dark brotherhood
but yeah i have noticed that the voices are almost all the same, there seem to be 2 male voice actors and one female, i can understand pasting random voices to the unnimprtant npcs but they need to mix it up a bit in the future
(PS be a theif or join the dark brotherhood next time, it has to be one of the best parts of the game)

Edited to make sure evil money's don't kill me

Nerdfury:
I'm inclined to believe that The Protagonist was in jail for murdering all the children in the land.

not to mention destroying all toilets.

Soooooo long after the release, didn't see it coming. I'm guessing he didn't play it long, as he didn't trash the leveling system at all. Although his statements about the landscape being the same were some what annoying. Cryodiil has a complete geographical set up, it has almost every land formation short of mesas and plateaus. There is a mountainous region to the north, you have a coastal plain in the south west and in the south east you have a swampier area, with the central area being hilly, and the dew east being outright inhospitable. Those are just in the main game area, this doesn't include the caves, various side-quest locations, or inside oblivion gates.

Immersion is my primary complaint as well. Based on what I'd heard, I expected this to be the most immersible RPG, nay, game of ANY genre, EVER. What we get instead is landscapes that are impressive up close but look horrible from a distance, zooming in unnaturally on characters faces when we talk to them as the world slows down...

Another complaint I have is the character creation screen. They give you all these options for the head, but put you under the worst lighting possible while doing so. I second guessed every shading decision I made, and I consider myself lucky that my character doesn't look deathly ill all the time.

I originally made a character with a ponytail, but started all over again once I realized that the ponytail would melt into the body if using the third person. For a game that repeatedly got 10's for graphics, that's just horrible. The game is best in first person anyway, I suppose, but I expected more.

I'm also disappointed that while I can grab at stuff, it's nearly impossible to drag corpses. I'm aware this is an odd complaint, but I thought it might be fun to push a felled foe off of a cliff and found it exceedingly difficult. Given that I'm supposed to be playing as a buff hero, I'd think it wouldn't be that hard to grab a lifeless body by their arm and drag them somewhere, but no.

This game seriously goes out of it's way to remind you that you are in a game world full of game limitations, and it's not the experience I had hoped for.

oblivan is a great game but 2 long

Awesome review, right on the money, Yahtzee. Again.

I loved Morrowind, but Oblivion was such a lame follow-up. ("Follow-down" might be more accurate.)

That's exactly our biggest complaint - the scenery. Might sound picky to someone after a dungeon-crawl hack-slash, but to me and mine, we like immersion. Morrowind had it. Someone in the art department spent an aeon on morrowind, figuring out what plants grew in what regions, what fungus resembled what other fungus, the types of plants and vegetation that would grow in each separate region, and that is a level of detail I really appreciate. That, Oblivion was totally without.

Ditto to the characters. We LIKED that Morrowind had people ambling about saying "outlander, you are wounded," or "we welcome you freely" or whatever, as you walked past. But in Oblivion they just talk without being asked - "i saw a mud crab recently." My god, call the feds. Who, on any planet, talks like that?

Also, if they rendered the cities from the outside we could have still had levitate spells. And WTF was up with the telekinesis in Ob?? I loved it in Morrowind. It nearly killed me in Oblivion.

Horses were cool, but who cares - if you can't fight from the back of a horse, you don't want a horse. (Plus it kept getting gored by minotaurs and periodically running away anyway.)

enchantment was retarded in oblivion, but excellent in morrowind.

I read somewhere about the development of Oblivion, with the AI causing problems such as guards on duty would get hungry and abandon their posts and go hunting... and so other guards would arrest them for deserting and so on. Or they would steal apples and get arrested... THAT sounds like a game i want to play. Why did they take that out? It sounds awesome.

I bought Oblivion the minute it was available. I mean, i was down there at midnight when the store had them on the day the xbox arrived and all, because i thought it would surpass Morrowind. But i got a bit over it a bit quick. Mod up Morrowind a bit and it's still light years ahead. Man, i'm STILL playing morrowind. I've been throught the main story a hundred times over, but it's still fun to waltz about in that world. There are still things in there that surprise me.

Anyway, to cut a fat story thing, i dug the review, and i wholeheartedly agree with the whole thing.

cheers.

Flatout Oblivion was a high graphics high programing, high on somthing atempt to strike the morowind bug again, however the epic falure came in when little to no atention was given to the UI, combat system, spell system, items or anything else that actualy makes an RPG worth playing. sure they where there but lets face it, they took a hoped up cracked out version of Microsoft visual earth and slapped a UI on it. the graphics could blow away a blind guys seeing eye dog across the room but who gives a shit when its not worth playing for more then 10 mints. personally I lost all interest when it became 99% apparent that the whole game world looked the same, the only time I had fun was in the iliad (whatever the fuck???) ruins, dungeon diving. In fact I did that for like..... 10 hours strait, 100% total disregard to any story and what gave you. then I got board of those places, and it had alot to do with the fact that everything you faut scaled to your level, so nothing felt like a real chalange and all the dam loot scaled with it, and at total random so nothing was worth going and getting. so I just shelfed the game tell the expansion came out.

now having been a hardcore morowind junkie who played ,beat and moded the game 9 different ways to Sunday and invented more insane spells and enchantments then I care to recant in one siting, I can say that "Seogorath" was spot on back to basics "do you remember this game" type shit I was looking for. two different sides of an island controlled by the god of maddens with there own distinct and amazing looks and feel. along with a twisted story, in your face voice acting and art that would make any modern art show look classic, and it WORKED.

so personally I think if Mr.Yahtzee Croshaw had an immersion problem, he was playing the wrong game, or at lest the wrong part of it. I say this to everyone if you Go get oblivion with the expansion and then swim out to the island thats the portal into the expansion world, YOU WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED.

but it is kinda sad that they had to add a whole section to the game to make it good.

ultimately what really scares me is, the fate of fallout 3 is in the hands of the same developers..........

Olivia75:
Awesome review, right on the money, Yahtzee. Again.

I loved Morrowind, but Oblivion was such a lame follow-up. ("Follow-down" might be more accurate.)

That's exactly our biggest complaint - the scenery. Might sound picky to someone after a dungeon-crawl hack-slash, but to me and mine, we like immersion. Morrowind had it. Someone in the art department spent an aeon on morrowind, figuring out what plants grew in what regions, what fungus resembled what other fungus, the types of plants and vegetation that would grow in each separate region, and that is a level of detail I really appreciate. That, Oblivion was totally without.

Ditto to the characters. We LIKED that Morrowind had people ambling about saying "outlander, you are wounded," or "we welcome you freely" or whatever, as you walked past. But in Oblivion they just talk without being asked - "i saw a mud crab recently." My god, call the feds. Who, on any planet, talks like that?

Also, if they rendered the cities from the outside we could have still had levitate spells. And WTF was up with the telekinesis in Ob?? I loved it in Morrowind. It nearly killed me in Oblivion.

Horses were cool, but who cares - if you can't fight from the back of a horse, you don't want a horse. (Plus it kept getting gored by minotaurs and periodically running away anyway.)

enchantment was retarded in oblivion, but excellent in morrowind.

I read somewhere about the development of Oblivion, with the AI causing problems such as guards on duty would get hungry and abandon their posts and go hunting... and so other guards would arrest them for deserting and so on. Or they would steal apples and get arrested... THAT sounds like a game i want to play. Why did they take that out? It sounds awesome.

I bought Oblivion the minute it was available. I mean, i was down there at midnight when the store had them on the day the xbox arrived and all, because i thought it would surpass Morrowind. But i got a bit over it a bit quick. Mod up Morrowind a bit and it's still light years ahead. Man, i'm STILL playing morrowind. I've been throught the main story a hundred times over, but it's still fun to waltz about in that world. There are still things in there that surprise me.

Anyway, to cut a fat story thing, i dug the review, and i wholeheartedly agree with the whole thing.

cheers.

You are dead on with your Morrowind/Oblivion comparison. I'm one of those weird people who played Oblivion first, and then went back to play Morrowind. THANK GOD I DID. I don't think I could have enjoyed Oblivion as much as I did in 2006 if I knew how inferior/nerfed the game is when compared to Morrowind.

Anybody who has played both games and prefers Oblivion is clearly judging the games on style, not substance.

Got to remember that Yahtzee didn't really get into Morrowind either. (neither did I really)

And really, Oblivion isn't as "one dimensional" areawise as people claim. A lot of the time that comes from people who didn't really get into it and thus didn't get very far with it or see anything interesting. Also Oblivion only takes place in one main area, so of course it would resemble eachother. But there are swamp areas, under water areas, basic area, snowy mountains, several different dungeon styles, different city styles (and very detailed ones), etc.

I found Oblivion to be a very satisifying experience in most aspects.

Please. PLEASE, Iīm from Brazil, and if you donīt know, is a huge mass of land(5 of the 5 bigger in this planet called World or Earth)and I really try hard every new ZP launched and all, but my english is a bit sloooow so its really hard to keep it up with you Yahtzee. But if you could be a more merciful, put the whole text, so even deaf people could keep it up, what do you think?
And good review and real good choice of musics, since Hot Fuzz I donīt listen Village Green.

eltonborges:
Please. PLEASE, Iīm from Brazil, and if you donīt know, is a huge mass of land(5 of the 5 bigger in this planet called World or Earth)and I really try hard every new ZP launched and all, but my english is a bit sloooow so its really hard to keep it up with you Yahtzee. But if you could be a more merciful, put the whole text, so even deaf people could keep it up, what do you think?
And good review and real good choice of musics, since Hot Fuzz I donīt listen Village Green.

I think someone usually posts the text transcript within the first few pages of the thread.

I can't imagine trying to follow ZP with limited English comprehension. Good luck to you.

UpInSmoke:

Olivia75:
Awesome review, right on the money, Yahtzee. Again.

I loved Morrowind, but Oblivion was such a lame follow-up. ("Follow-down" might be more accurate.)

That's exactly our biggest complaint - the scenery. Might sound picky to someone after a dungeon-crawl hack-slash, but to me and mine, we like immersion. Morrowind had it. Someone in the art department spent an aeon on morrowind, figuring out what plants grew in what regions, what fungus resembled what other fungus, the types of plants and vegetation that would grow in each separate region, and that is a level of detail I really appreciate. That, Oblivion was totally without.

Ditto to the characters. We LIKED that Morrowind had people ambling about saying "outlander, you are wounded," or "we welcome you freely" or whatever, as you walked past. But in Oblivion they just talk without being asked - "i saw a mud crab recently." My god, call the feds. Who, on any planet, talks like that?

Also, if they rendered the cities from the outside we could have still had levitate spells. And WTF was up with the telekinesis in Ob?? I loved it in Morrowind. It nearly killed me in Oblivion.

Horses were cool, but who cares - if you can't fight from the back of a horse, you don't want a horse. (Plus it kept getting gored by minotaurs and periodically running away anyway.)

enchantment was retarded in oblivion, but excellent in morrowind.

I read somewhere about the development of Oblivion, with the AI causing problems such as guards on duty would get hungry and abandon their posts and go hunting... and so other guards would arrest them for deserting and so on. Or they would steal apples and get arrested... THAT sounds like a game i want to play. Why did they take that out? It sounds awesome.

I bought Oblivion the minute it was available. I mean, i was down there at midnight when the store had them on the day the xbox arrived and all, because i thought it would surpass Morrowind. But i got a bit over it a bit quick. Mod up Morrowind a bit and it's still light years ahead. Man, i'm STILL playing morrowind. I've been throught the main story a hundred times over, but it's still fun to waltz about in that world. There are still things in there that surprise me.

Anyway, to cut a fat story thing, i dug the review, and i wholeheartedly agree with the whole thing.

cheers.

You are dead on with your Morrowind/Oblivion comparison. I'm one of those weird people who played Oblivion first, and then went back to play Morrowind. THANK GOD I DID. I don't think I could have enjoyed Oblivion as much as I did in 2006 if I knew how inferior/nerfed the game is when compared to Morrowind.

Anybody who has played both games and prefers Oblivion is clearly judging the games on style, not substance.

I agree with both of you completely, I even think you could have taken it further with saying that the world in Morrowind actually had depth. I mean Me reading books in that game might add up to 3 complete hours of gameplay in total, I loved all the info you could gather. Also the people that told you about specific stuff, they could give you hints about treasure being somewhere or a person who could do this and this, but it never gave you a journal update or a quest marker. It made me feel like the game was saying; "you're big enough to figure this out on your own", and it made me feel proud when I did figure it out.
The limitations of factions to join was also a big plus, it forced you to specialise just like in real life, you can't do everything there is to do, you might be the protagonist, you're still not god.
Damn I love this game so much that if my graphics card wasn't fucked it would probably be the only RPG I'd play until the end of time, since everything coming out now is so capitalised and mainstream (you know, like Oblivion) that it's just plain dull.
I even made an essay on Morrowind for school (come on if my teacher lets me I'm gonna take that opportunity, call me freak I don't care xD).

Only question I have; who do you mean by 'we'?
I'd join the 'we'...

"we" = my dorky little nerd herd. the morrowind/obliv gripe has come up in conversation more than once, so i figured i was ok to speak in the fp plural.

i forgot to mention that WE also didn't dig the levelling up of monsters along with our own levelling. damn did that get old fast. for ages you'd see nothing but goblins - goblins, as far as you travelled, nothing but bloody goblins. then level up (in something un-warrior-like, such as mercantile, sneak or speechcraft) and wham, minotaur are suddenly the monstre-du-jour. and they're showing up every bloody where. kicking your ass until you can get some longsword training or something. painful. and DULL. I mean really, seen one, seen 'em all. Variety is the spice of life. Etc etc.

i realise that the landscape isn't identical everywhere, but compared to the depth of detail in morrowind, it is. I'm not for a second suggesting that the caves look even remotely like the hills. I'm not blind. But generally, all the hills look the same. All the caves look the same. Unlike Morrowind, where you could tell by the scenery what region you were in. And you wouldn't find trama root growing in Pelegiad. Or Ebony sprouting in Seyda Neen. Or gold kanet growing in a cave. Or hypha facia in the ashlands. THAT's what i'm getting at. Different regions had distinct colour schemes, distinct people/race types, distinct flora (and fauna, e.g. nix hounds like green lands, hungers like ashlands, you want a mud crab, lurk on the coastlines. you want a cliff racer, find some mountains.) If the whole world is just goblins at every turn, yes, it gets samey. And if the trees all look the bloody same, it looks samey. Morrowind didn't do that. Oblivion does it to the nth degree.

The point can be well illustrated by the fact that most players would be able to recognise a snapshot of any place in Morrowind and have at least a rough idea of where that was... and could probably name 3 alchemical items that were unique to that region. whereas in Oblivion, you could really only differentiate between city, country, cave, underwater, snow. And even then the content of each scene would be reasonably similar.

It's dull, that's all i'm saying.

and by dull, i mean "compared to morrowind". It still shits on most RPGs.

They definitely screwed up the dialog. Hell, they didn't even bother editing some of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaHoihnmXKA

I'm not a hack and slash fanboi, I just preferred diablo 2 over most rpg's since its immencity is something oblivion can only aspire to. If you travel through the whole of diablo, the maps change every single time you start a new game.

You have hundreds if not thousands of individual boss type of monsters to kill. Thousands of items to collect.

The hack-and-slash game is not nearly as narrow as you might want to believe......

OBLIVION IS CRAP

(sorry, did i say that outloud?)

Good show, Yahtzee! A very good review and a very TRUE review.

I was waiting for him to do this game =D
So many design flaws, so little time...

Right, so maybe there was a flaw in my game, but one of the most off-putting things about Morrowind for me is that my character spent the first two hours of gameplay moving at a pace somewhere around two yards per minute. Try going that fast in real life, while running in place. This would have been forgiven, if it weren't for the "oops you missed again" fighting system. When you see your dagger impale a mud crab, before your very eyes, you expect it to do some damage. However, because it leaned on the D&D system like a crutch, you could stab that crab twenty times, and only "hit" it once.

Both of these were fixed in Oblivion, which made me love it so much that the lack of immersion did not make me sad in the slightest.

World of Warcraft has even less immersion, I would say. Yes, you can argue about land, people, items, and so on, but considering the people who frequent the realms (even the Role Playing servers!), it's about as immersive as walking into an impromptu LARP session.

I also like the idea that you were thrown in jail for killing all the children. It explains there absence, and why everything is trying to kill you.

Speaking of Modding, if Yahtzee is going to talk about the PC gaming community like it's a superior race, he really ought to mention that the list of tweaks for Oblivion could fill a small country. Modina or something.

ETA: And on that note, I'm also shocked he hasn't mentioned Chris Livingston's brilliant Living in Oblivion blog, wherein he tries to make a living as an NPC (Nondrick P. Cairk'tir)
eking out a living collecting ingredients and selling them. He uses a few crucial mods to this end (notably the Crowded Roads mod) and is probably the best person to make an interesting blog on not doing quests.

Why am I shocked?

On April 24th, 2008 (fullyramblomatic.com):
I just noticed the other day that Chris Livingston of Concerned fame is updating a blog again, this one in preparation for (possibly) starting another Garry's Mod comic. I've always had a soft spot for old Chris, going back to his Not My Desk days, feels like he and I have a lot in common; both struggling self-effacing internet humour writers with a gaming bent and a history of menial jobs, both stopping and starting various internet projects while being remembered only for the one good thing we ever did. Anyway, his blog's a pretty fun read, especially if you're into TF2, so I thought I might link to it. What do you know, I did.

-Ash

VonBlade:
Two quick replies.

1) To the guy who thinks that the Oblivion hatefest is a new thing, try popping over to the Bethesda forums sometime. It was hated before it even appeared. (see also "Fallout3 - Pete Hines lies repeatedly about a steampunk FPS". Not sure if that's the real subtitle but it's close enough)

2) The necrophilia woman is in a shop in the town with the crazy paranoid guy behind the church (I haven't played it for months and months so can't remember the name). Anyway she's one of the lizard things and you need to talk to here as if you were a necrophiliac, then she'll tell you all. So strictly speaking you aren't jailed for that at the start, but the guy who said you were obviously thought he was :D

VB

youtube video of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyvbdacj7gw

how would a person who isn't a necrophile know stuff like that + there are more hints
that do not point at necrophilia but this makes all of it fall in place.