Oblivion ruined everything

I feel like Oblivion is the original reason for ruining open-world and possibly fantasy games in general. Sure, it did improve upon certain aspects of Morrowind like graphic fidelity, combat and dialogue (at least certain aspects of it). But those felt more like the natural result of technological progress in the industry and the studio having more staff and a bigger budget. On the other hand:
>quest markers instead of the players having to explore things on their own and letting them be suprised
>boring, generic fantasy world instead of unique and interesting one
>plain as day story instead of leaving things to the players interpretation
>level scaling everywhere
>every guild and questline available for everyone

These might feel like small things but ultimately this is why we ended up with the marker-wridden games with generic worlds and homogenized experiences for every singla player. Suprise, wonder, discovery and unique experiences - dead.

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Nah it was Skyrim
Oblivion had something interesting or revolutiionary at the time to replace everything that was lost, skyrim is just a fucking garabge version of oblivion

Oblivion ruined everything because it set the bar too high

No it wasn't Skyrim. Oblivion already lacked choices in guilds, had quest markers, a generic fantasy world, level scaling and straight-forward story.

bla bla bla faggot skyrim is still shit and oblivion is not you're not even worth explaining why

shut up newfag one nickys thread is all you'd need to see to understand why oblivion is so unique and cool

Thanks to you people every open-world game is a ubisoft-clone.

Can someone who knows more about rpg history than me explain where we went wrong in terms of difficulty? I know that Gothic 2 and Morrowind didn’t hold your hand through quests or tell you where to go; is Oblivion really where it went wrong? Or was there some earlier game/trend that also contributed?

Depends what you mean by difficulty, none of the 80, 90s or early 00s had really hard combat. Fallout and Daggerfall already had difficulty levels. But if you mean hand-holding as in the game showing you with a compass exactly where the thing is then yeah, that would be Morrowind. Even if some obscure rpg titles had something similar, Oblivion was the first massively successful one to do that.

You're 100% right but good luck explaining that to the people who are ferociously attached to this game due to playing it as children. These days you can't even convince them how bad the voice acting is or the faces or level scaling. They just say it adds to the charm or it's not really a problem and skyrim bad.

If Oblivion didn't do it, some other game would have.

well, i dunno about that. but horse armor was really the beginning of the end of vidya in general.

Oblivion is easily the worst out of it, Morrowind and Skyrim and no amount of “b-but muh guilds…” will ever change that.
For fucks sakes the game actively punished you for leveling up.

I guess you're right, it's suprising to me though because I played it as a kid myself. I was only thirteen when it came out, but even then I recognized how much of a step down it was. It was the first real disappointment I felt with a video game. I did play bad and even worse games at that point but this was the first time where it was such a blatant dump on my expectations.

So does FF8

Why? There was no technological reason for them to do these things. Quest markers could have easily been implemented in earlier games. Level scaling actually was already a thing in many earlier RPGs.

Yes and almost everyone hates that about it.

Because "we want to make games for a wider audience"

Morrowind could get away with no quest markers because every npc came with 50 paragraphs of directions, you can't afford that with voice acting, which means that what's to blame for that and many other things in rpgs is the obsession with voice acting everything. Prove me wrong

I have an idea, cut out all the retarded unnecessary dialogue like "I work on the docks and move crates for Regulus's shipping company. It's hard work but rewarding." Also use the journal or written notes for directions if you really have to.

Would it really have been so hard to implement the Fallout talking head system of only giving a handful of important npcs a distinct face and voice

>quest markers instead of the players having to explore things on their own and letting them be suprised

yes it's better to walk for hours in bland environment (because the game is ugly) just so you can kill a guy hidden in a cave

morrowind fags need to shut the fuck up

Oblivion would have been popular anyways even if it didn't implement these changes. Maybe besides the less generic world part. People were drawn to it being a massive fantasy game with an open-world. Not to it having quest markers, lack of choices in guilds and level scaling. Sure, Morrowind had a problem with the directions being sometimes shit. But this could have been solved by the characters just giving better directions or diversifying the level design more.

Then don't do voice acting, people can read. Well, they could, at least.

So they could create less bland environments and have the characters give better directions?

I don't remember a single quest that took more than 20 minutes to get to with the directions except for a few where the directions were either wrong or fucked, but I'll take a few wrong directions over retard markers any fucking day.

no so that I could do fun things instead of pressing Z through Morrowind's shitty brown and grey areas

to get lost because everything looks the same

To do the same quest over and over again

In the same cave or dungeon

To talk to PNJ with tons of dialogues, but the same as all the other PNJ of the area


but hey, at least there are no quest markers so it means it's better right ?