Zero Punctuation: Oblivion

[Melaisis]

Oh God!

So funny!

He's back on form! Its wonderful! Celebration!

 

[The Sorrow]

Here I was, expecting a Ninja Gaiden II review, and I end up getting the most pleasant surprise in weeks.

I love Oblivion (I even quit WoW to play it more), but I understand his criticisms.

Very well done, Yahtz.

 

[VonBlade]

He complained about the repetitive environment, so I'm going to assume he never made it into any of the Oblivion portals.

Hahaha. Yeah that'll show him. Every single one was a black sludge with loads of lava. Seen one you've seen them all. There is a reason they wouldn't let the journos go into the Oblivion gates, it was to stop them all going "Meh, I coulda guessed it would look like hell".

RUMOURS!

 

[SomeBritishDude]

This is exactly how I felt about oblivion. A friend who's obsested with the game recomended and I've never forgiven him for it. Apsolutely the most boring, unimaginitive game I've ever played. Most RPGs are set in the same old medival england, but at least they bring there own feel to it, something to make it different. Take Fable for instance. The levels looked fantastic and a real feel to them. Take any screenshot of fable and you know what your looking at. But Oblivion was just plain boring, it could been anything from WoW to D&D with all the wierd looking dog men and brightly coloured big boobed girls cut out, replaced by samey looking bad guys and flat chests *sad face*

It reminded me rather of when I tried to read Lord of the Rings. I'd read the hobbit (which I loved) as a kid and I thought I might as well live up to my title as a geek and get started on th rest. But I was just bored by it. Maybe its not tolkens fault, maybe its because every other game/movie/book since has copyed him but it just felt like a boring world with boring charcters where even the most epic fight is a lecture interrupted by spoits of poety. But I could tell it was technichley briliant, even if it didn't draw me in. Thats how oblivion felt. I knew there was a good game there somewhere but I had to fight past coma inducing dialogue and enviroments to get to it.

 

[HomeAliveIn45]

The first time I approached Kvatch, I made the accident of picking up something from a refugee stall. Apparently I hadn't assumed that picking items up counts as stealing punishable by death from a fat ogre woman. Immersion ended there.
I always thought that that game was out to get me, to trip me up somehow....

 

[greyhairdgamer]

i don't agree with you this time Yahtzee (but then who cares what i think) but still funny as fook as always mate.
keep them coming

 

[VMerken]

Touché, and indeed hindsight is always 1:1!

 

[Nighth@wk]

Hilarious review as always. I liked the "If nothing else remember this" image but you forgot to give the if an argument. I know it is a huge nitpick but seeing code that is syntactically incorrect just gets under my skin.
if( nothing() ){
}else{
remember(this);
}
Will compile assuming nothing() returns an int or a bool, you are calling this from a class function, and remember is a valid function that takes the class this is a function of as an argument.

nice one ^^

as for the review....
...brilliant as always...

i'd like to post few more words, but can't...
... off playing EVE ...

 

[keithburgun]

C'mon yahtzee, you could have ripped into this game much worse. The game is a total piece of trash, everything about it is FLAWED to the MAX. How about the auto-leveling of monsters? If they level up with you then WHAT IS THE POINT OF LEVELS?!?!? how about if you steal ANYTHING everyone in the world knows about it. How about the auto leveling of equipments - bandits who have a full suit of Glass Armor? Why don't they just sell it and live like kings!!

 

[Odjin]

He also didn't mentioned the utter lack of cross-bows. I had so much fun with cross-bows in Morrowind... and here you have a useless bow. Stealth-hit gives x2 for bows? Erm... guys... it doesn't matter if I hit you with an arrow square in the head if you see me or not... you are fucking dead one way or the other.

I also liked Morrowind more. Oblivion is not bad, that's not the problem, it's just mediocre. At the beginning it's exciting and new but once you got around you've seen it quickly and then it becomes boring.

The main story line really is the worst I've seen in a long time. The side ( and especially guild quests ) are a lot better. Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild are the best side quests. All the others are very annoying.

You can play this game in a week since enemies ( no matter if common or bosses ) are affected by your level hence you can rush through at level 1 and beat the game. That's one of the jokes.

Another joke is fast traveling. Of course I used it all the time since it is so utterly boring to ride between cities just because some stupid quests requests you to fetch a dull item from one place and bring it to another. I want to play a game and have fun and not ride miles along boring and repeating scenery to do errands.

It's one of those games which has this bad property that whenever you even remotely think about playing it again it repels you by only thinking at the bad problems it has. And if a game repels you more than it attracts you then something is wrong.

Kudos for mentioning Thief-II. You should also mention once Deus-Ex ( NOT the IW crap ) as a god father of FPS+RPG mixture ( well, besides SS of course which inspired them )

 

[Iron Mal]

I largely agreed with what was said in this review. I, like Yahtzee, am not on good terms with RPGs and I got this game purely because it was reccomended by a grand total of 3 friends, and I ended up with mixed feelings after a couple of hours. I've never played an RPG in the first person before so it instantly earned praise from me for that rather than being a 3rd person turn based or clicking type of game that I've seen pretty much everywhere else.

Points I believed he missed out (besides the 'leveling up' issue everyone repeatingly mentions) include:
1. Every character has their own personal timetable, this means that you can spend anywhere up to 30 mins trying to find NPCs depending how much you've studied their movements and how many 80's style police stakeouts you've done.
2. Items that raise your skill rating do not give you the benefits of having that skill as far as I could tell, meaning some of these items are ultimatly useless.
3. It is painfully difficult to make money seeing as most items can oly be sold for about one tenth of how much you have to pay for them.
4. There are many glitches, too many to list here.
anf finally 5. Due to the particular skills and advantages of particular races/classes/star signs, you useually find most of your characters are more or less the same simply for the practical reason of ensuring you stand a chance when you do the somewhat further on missions.

Final note, good call on the part about foxy night elves...even though you never do get any soapy tit wanks in Oblivion...and I have realised stating that makes me quite a sad individual.

 

[rebochan]

tl;dr - Good review, I lol'd.

original version:

From one extreme to the other - the JRPG is incredibly linear, the CRPG is so non-linear that the vast majority of them, such as today's subject, forget that you're supposed to *want* to do stuff.

I actually don't hate Oblivion, but after my first runthrough, I never really found myself wanting to dive into it again. The fact the game corrupted all my saves as soon as I installed the expansion didn't help. But I do remember long, long hours lost to it and the obsessive mod downloading (which on further reflection likely led to said save corruption).

Yahtzee, you get a gold star for not whining like the whiny whining whiners on the Bethesda forums about how it's not really an RPG because it's in first person and released on the 360 and whatever, blah blah blah. It does look like he never got far into it though, but since the game doesn't do much in the way of encouraging you in any paritcular direction, I'm not shocked if all he did was run around in muddy fields for awhile after the story-intensive prison break.

 

[The Tingler]

God I hate this game. I hated it when I found out that picking up a banana was punishable by imprisonment. I hated it when I spent a couple of hours trying to find something interesting, and failing. I hated it when I bought it expecting Thief in an open-world setting and got a crap faceless world where stealing was impossible to get away with. I hated it when every magazine in the world seemed to implode with delight over it.

Thanks Yahtzee for bringing the bile back into my throat!

 

[Sennz0r]

Now I have to say I completely agree with Yahtzee, and now love him even more for picking Morrowind over Oblivion. I loved that game and Oblivion just took all the depth away from my Elder Scrolls experience and turned it into a pathetic shallow puddle. Don't get me wrong I liked the gameplay and tricks you could pull off but the repetitiveness of the storyline and the same voices everywhere you go just doesn't make you feel like you're going somewhere new (in the case of the Oblivion Gates you were in fact never going anywhere new. Christ there was more copy /paste going on there than in my school essays).
And fuck; the fast travel made the world so small...

 

[Cutlesnap]

Sweet review once again. Never played the game, and, well, won't because I don't like RPGs.

Ah, immersion! I remember ducking (like, irl) once when I heard a high-pitched noise and thought a manhack was coming at me.

 

[rebochan]

God I hate this game. I hated it when I found out that picking up a banana was punishable by imprisonment. I hated it when I spent a couple of hours trying to find something interesting, and failing. I hated it when I bought it expecting Thief in an open-world setting and got a crap faceless world where stealing was impossible to get away with. I hated it when every magazine in the world seemed to implode with delight over it.

Thanks Yahtzee for bringing the bile back into my throat!

Are you joking? Thievery was freaking *easy*. Just exploit lock picking and break into everyone's houses when they're not home or asleep.

 

[star_topology]

you mixed up Night Elves with Dark Elves though

No body cares.

You spelt nobody wrong.

That's just too easy.

 

[mcdeath ob]

Genuinely one of the funniest reviews you've done, had me laughing out loud a lot. And seriously, people complaining about Yahtze losing his touch...tbh I come to watch these videos because they're fucking hilarious, I seriously don't base whether I play a game or not on them...what does it matter if it misses a few flaws, these reviews are different because they are incredibly funny...

 

[mcdeath ob]

you mixed up Night Elves with Dark Elves though

No body cares.

You spelt nobody wrong.

That's just too easy.

Your mum's too easy

 

[roo18]

I think in Shivering Isles they tried to fix the repetitive voices by adding sleep/sick characters, changing the world type a lot and although it did work for a while, towards the end it fell back to the same feeling there was in Cyrodiil.

But atleast the NPCs had a reason to be stupid or vain in New Sheroth.