AWKWARD ZOMBIE

I wrote a review for The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, but since it would be kind of pointless to make a whole new thread for it and since I have nowhere to link it, I might as well just put it here.

The Elder Scrolls series started in 1994 with the release of Elder Scrolls Arena, a first-person perspective role playing game for the PC. Like many western-style RPGs, it starred the player’s created character, and set him or her across a country with not only the main storyline to occupy them, but many sidequests and the chance to really be immersed in the empire of Tamriel. Its second game in the series, Daggerfall was released in August 31st, 1996. Daggerfall took place inside two provinces of Tamriel called Hammerfell and High Rock, and it stood out in its time because of its massive amount of NPCs, or Non-Player Characters. You were also free to do as you chose. For example, you could be an upstanding citizen and work your way through the ranks of the Mages Guild or be feared as a member of the Dark Brotherhood, a guild of assassins. The gameplay was also more intricate and the graphics improved. A number of spinoffs were released subsequent years, and in May and June2002, Bethesda released Morrowind for the PC and Xbox. The game took place in a smaller area than that of the other two games, but it was much more detailed. It also introduced a few new features, like switching to third-person view. Because of its release on a console, it became more accessible to gamers. Morrowind is often considered to be the best game in the series by fans because of its engaging storyline and being the first game in the series to use true 3-D graphics (that is, using polygons instead of simple pixels.) Bethesda released two expansions, Tribunal and Bloodmoon in November 2002 and June 2003 for the PC. The game plus its expansions were consolidated into a Game of the Year Edition for both the Xbox and PC in 2003.
Three years later, Bethesda released the fourth game in the series, The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Called Oblivion by its fans, the game takes place in the capital region of Cyrodiil. After you create your character by choosing their race, gender and appearance, you find out you are in prison for reasons unknown. That quickly changes, as three guards accompany an old man in robes speaking in hushed tones about escaping. They enter your cell, opening a secret door in the wall. The guards pay little attention to you, but the man in robes stops and tells you he has seen you in his dreams. It turns out that he is Emperor Uriel Septim, voiced by Patrick Stewart, and these guards are members of the Blades, a group of guards that are specially assembled to work with the Emperor. He pardons you of whatever crime landed you here. Curious or simply wanting to get away from this (surprisingly well-lit) prison, you follow them. Soon enough, you get separated from them, having to find a route back to them. This part is a simple tutorial, teaching you the mechanics of the game such as sneaking, lock picking, combat, magic and potion-making.
When you meet back up with the emperor’s group, you get to choose your birth sign which gives you a special ability based on what you choose. The Emperor then tells you that he has seen his death coming for a while, but yours has just begun. You continue to follow them, until assassins attack them. The Blades stash you and the Emperor in a side room, ordering you to protect the Emperor with your life. He turns to you and tells you that he can go no further, but his death does not mean the end of Tamriel. He has one last living heir; an illegitimate son. He gives you his amulet and tells you to bring it to Jauffre in Weynon Priory. After he gives you the amulet, an assassin appears from the other side of the wall and kills the Emperor. Baurus, the only Blade to survive the ambush laments his death, and stays behind to make sure no assassins follow you as you escape through the sewers. At this time, you also choose your class or make one of your own. Each class has its advantages and disadvantages. When you get to the exit, you can change any of the aspects of your character.
When you exit the sewers, you see the outside for the first time in the game. You are now free to do whatever you want. You can continue on the main quest if you so choose or you can explore Cyrodiil. You are really only limited by what is in the game, so you aren’t limited by much.
The first thing you will probably notice about Cyrodiil is that it is a very beautiful place. The graphics on the console versions are very good too, although on a HD television you can see every flaw. This shouldn’t detract that much from your experience though, as you will quickly be immersed in the region. I was very impressed with the graphics the first time I played it on the Playstation 3, and I loved the music, even though it can be a little repetitive. You can always turn off the ambient music completely if you wish. However, there are a few drawbacks to the wonderful graphics. Most of the character’s faces are downright ugly. I suppose Bethesda wanted to make this game look realistic. They do look realistic, but the real world has attractive people as well as people who aren’t so easy on the eyes. I cannot fault Bethesda much for this, since this was the first time they worked with their new graphics engine. Their next game, Fallout 3 used the same engine but the characters looked much better. I really disliked the Oblivion gates for aesthetic reasons, but if you like hellish lava-and-blood landscapes, you should feel right at home there.
The controls for the PC are very much like those for a First-Person Shooter game. You move using the W, A, S and D keys, and control the direction you face by using the mouse. On the console versions, you use the same setup for first-person style games. This works well most of the time as long as you have a little experience playing videogames.
My biggest gripe with the game is the Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is at the same time extremely smart and incredibly stupid. For example, for a Dark Brotherhood quest, I had to sneak through a rich person’s house undetected and drop a large heavy object on him from the second floor, killing him. I managed to sneak through undetected and I killed him, but the second I set foot on the first floor, his big burly manservant saw me and went on a murderous rampage. There is no way to sneak back into the shadows once you have been detected, and the only way to incapacitate someone who attacks you if you have no calming spell is to kill them. This makes thieves guild quests very frustrating. However, killing the manservant would mean I would forfeit my bonus, So I ran out of the city, got on my horse as far as I could away from him, hoping that the guards would not kill him, because to them, he was the one breaking the law as he was seen attacking me. I easily outran him, but it would have been less difficult if I had a way to paralyze him or put him to sleep.
Oblivion is the first game in the series to have full voice acting. The voice actors are good, but the dialogue repeats too often. Sometimes it sounds like there is one woman talking to herself. The banality of the conversations detracts from the feel of the game; it is almost comical. Here is an example of a typical bad conversation between two NPCs.
“I saw a mudcrab today.”
“Nasty creatures.”
“Of course.”
“Goodbye.”
The humor in this is multiplied when two characters of the same race and gender are speaking to each other.
Another thing that I did not like about Oblivion was the leveling system. As you gain levels in your main skills, you will get the chance to increase your level. The message suggests that you “rest and reflect on what you’ve learned.” If you do sleep somewhere, you get the chance to choose 3 stats to increase. As you gain levels, the enemies change too. What used to be a fur-wearing bandit will turn into a chainmail toting bandit with a steel sword when you level up enough. If you don’t take all your stats into consideration while you level up, you may find yourself underpowered, which is deadly in a game like this. There are a few proletariats for the PC version which make this more like a traditional RPG if you choose to download them. You could also just not sleep. Sleeping doesn’t really do anything in the game otherwise, so you won’t be missing out on anything.
The last thing that bothers me about this game is the glitches. Most of the glitches are small things, like floating paintbrushes or staves falling through floors to enemies spawning in rocks, but some of them can really screw up your game. The biggest glitch is in the Playstation 3 version where you have a side quest to get rid of your vampirism. You have to find certain ingredients and give it to a woman where she will make an antidote for your “disease.” In the Playstation 3 version, she will not take the ingredients, even if you have them. This is fine if you want to stay a vampire, but if you changed your mind, too bad, I hope you have a save file from your living days. There are patches for glitches for the PC version and Xbox 360 version, but as always, the PS3 version is neglected. This is what gamers mean when they say that the PS3 has no games.
Even for all its faults, Oblivion is a great game. It is more user-friendly than Morrowind and it is easy to get into. It is a spectacular looking game with a lot to do. If you like RPGs, you should definitely check this one out for any system. Nowadays, it isn’t that expensive, and you can also get it as the Game of the Year edition complete with expansions or bundled with Bioshock (another great game). I give it a 9 out of 10.

Wall o text.
Edit: Finished reading wall o text.
heres a TL;DR version.
I Like Oblivion

really now

gg

game i thought it was well written

It was. I thought it might have been just copy pasted from some online magazine at first.

Thanks, guys.

I resisted the urge to reference Crush Bandicoot's rudeness in this because he constantly calls me a noob during my livestream.

And? All it takes is a "I Made This" to destroy all doubts?

Look gais I wrote Twilight just nao! I said I did on the internet so it must be true!

See what I'm getting at? cuz sometimes I don't get my point across or I get the wrong point across. I'm not saying Game Angel stole this. All I'm saying is plagarism is quite comon on the internet.

Edit: In retrospect the twilight thing isn't the best example.

Edit the second: Better example. Let's say someone had drawn a particularly hilarious image on an obscure sight. Now say some one else took said image, simply recolored one spot on said image on a different site and claimed the entirity of the image as their own. He changed one or two things so that makes it completely his right?

Edit the third: Nothing but corrections.

i generally have a lil faith in people

my bad

I'm sorry if I came off as a douche here but I have had very bad experiences with people. As I keep saying people are unpredictable creatures. I thought I knew someone and they turned around and stabbed me in the back. I've been a cynic ever since.

In all honesty?
It sucks.

No, sorry, I'm not gonna butter it up. The review really, really sucks!

Lemee break it down for you:
First, you start off with a not-so-brief history of the series. As you can guess, that does not make a review! It's only acceptable to do that if you're trying to draw a comparison between this game and its predecessors, but you're not!
You follow this up with... basically writing out the script of the first part of the game. Again, this is not reviewing the game, this is just padding it up! You're meant to give a very short summary of the general story so that people get what its about, and maybe follow up with how you consider the story, although it's not necessary. Saying things like "Baurus, the only Blade to survive the ambush laments his death, and stays behind to make sure no assassins follow you as you escape through the sewers" is not only horribly boring to read, but it's even so elongated that Wikipedia wouldn't have even accepted it in its plot synapses section!
And then you talk about the graphics. Whereby you say that the graphics are great but sorta shoddy but brilliant but ugly but MAKE UP YOUR MIND! And you do the same for the music too!
Controls... again, not reviewing the game! Had you said something along the lines of "the controls are smooth/clumsy" then it'd be fine, but you just said "you use these buttons"!
AI? Would be good. I mean, if you didn't spend the entire paragraph just giving one elongated example, especially when only half of said example is bad AI and the other half is just regular gameplay.
The voice acting section is just... again, really padded. You don't need that big a paragraph to say "There isn't nearly enough dialogue in the game for NPC interaction, unless you think everyone saying "I saw a mudcrab today" to each other over and over again is a normal day at the office!"
Again, the levelling section is... both overly long AND too short! In that you say a lot, but don't actually tell us much. I presume your main point was "Because the opponents level up as you do, and because the system is... less than balanced, its notably easy to find yourself woefully underpowered relative to your opponents in comparison to when you were still just Level 1". Except all you said was "you may find yourself underpowered" and bulked the rest up with a long way of saying "enemies level up when you do".
And glitches... same as the AI thing, don't just focus on one example!

And that's just the things you DO have. There's a buncha stuff you really should've included in the review, but didn't. Y'know, like REVIEWING THE ACTUAL GAMEPLAY!
And I have no idea why you felt the need to point out what "3D graphics" are, or why you needed to tell us that an acronym for artificial intelligence is "AI", especially considering you never used the acronym again!

Also, use double-spaces for dividing unrelated paragraphs.



And yes, I am aware I just reviewed a review.



I rage'd! Polygons still use pixel textures!


I rage'd again! People used to say the PS3 had no games because, well, there were very few decent PS3 exclusives before, as a result of its (sorta) late release and the fact that big-name exclusives were pressured into taking advantage of the ability to have brilliant graphics, thereby delaying their release; along with the fact that the PS3 was hardly selling, due to its humongous pricetag. It has nothing at all with multi-platform games having less after-game support on the console!


Yes, we get your point. But there's no real reason to think she's lying to our faces about it either, since there's no indication at all she didn't write it.


Just a heads up: by saying people are unpredictable backstabbing creatures, it ends up sounding like you're telling us not only that you're better than everyone else, but your favourite creature(s) are too! Stick with just "I have trust issues" and don't try pad it into something 'deep'.
Yeah, DnD has this same problem.

When did I say I was better than anyone else? I am a person, therefore I am an "upredictable backstabbing creature" too.

You didn't say it, but it did sound like that. Because in actuality, nobody really considers themselves backstabbing and certainly don't consider themselves unpredictable (unless they're going for attention). And I presume I don't need to point out what connotations calling someone a creature actually has.

I'm sorry if my opinion on people isn't as high as all of yours. I have trust issues.
And I do think we have sufficiently derailed this topic enough.

just hit 80 on my shaman and doin 2.6k dps without cds on heroic dummy

woo