I think my biggest issue with Oblivion is how they do the auto leveled lists of enemies and items. It seems far too soon that i find all the bandits are wearing full glass and im finding like daedric stuff in chests all the time. It really just brings me outta the immersion. I probably should just try a mod that addresses that at some point lol.
@@PersonaSlates you don’t see any Daedric or glass until level 20, and even then they are both rare. I get it though, it’s a common complaint, it just never bothered me. There are some balancing issues and specifics that I think oblivion gets wrong, but the principle of scaling works great imo.
@@theoldknight85 All the time is probably an exaggeration. I'ts been a long while since i played Oblivion, its just something that stands out in my mind. I just played one character a whole lot, like a hundred hours or something. So most of my memories are of being 20+. Don't get me wrong i think its a fantastic game, it just felt too easy to get top tier gear.
@@PersonaSlatesPersonally, i think its the skill distribution. Major things, like security not being on intelligence, really fundamentally ruins the game.
@@williamchristy9463 how does security not being part of intelligence ruin the game? Intelligence doesn’t even affect security in Morrowind, agility does. The only reason security is “governed” by intelligence is because agility had too many governed skills and intelligence didn’t have enough. Lock picking is hardly a test of intelligence IRL either, more so dexterity and perception.
That's a good thing I think because it ensures that the player reaches a certain level of equipment at that level. Afterwards you have to rely on proper levelling of your character which can be harder for some people to figure out, but at least the game has helped you with better equipment until then making it easier. You could say that you should only get top level equipment at level 50 for example but then you need to rely more on your own levelling, making the game much harder for casual gamers and unbalanced characters.
I don't really think Morrowind is that difficult in the early game, it's just that unlike in Oblivion, where you build your character planning the post late-game from level 1, in Morrowind you have to put a little bit of effort to not die to a mudcrab, so you can't just sacrifice everything to be a late game powerhouse because you simply won't survive until late game. But what I really liked about Morrowind is that the lore is soooo damn extensive and immersive. People complain about the lack of voice acting, but really there is just so much text, and when the game came out it was a different time, the game's size would have been just huge if everything had been voice acted. Yeah it sucks a bit to play it today and have to read so much, you could maybe say that part didn't age too well, and I'd agree, but in my opinion the incredible amount of lore in Morrowind more than compensates for that. I really love both Morrowind and Oblivion, haven't really played Skyrim it didn't appeal to me much, so can't comment on that one, but I love both of these games just for different reasons.
Disagree about difficulty. The longer you play, more strong enemies will spawn. And at some point they will be so tanky that even high level gear and artifacts can't save you from long fights, where you just need to have more hp than your opponent. In Morrowind I could beat the game using mostly hand to hand combat. But in Oblivion mudcrabs become a death sentence upon 15 level if you go to them with fists. Not so good to me
@@stupidlizard4764 that’s fair to think that, but really if you gain enough game knowledge that’s not true. In this video I’m level 30, and in my hardest difficulty videos I’m level 35-38. On normal difficulty that mage is 1-2 shotting everything. I even have a silly video of me being naked on highest difficulty and one shotting everything, but that is arguably an exploit of game mechanics. If you have a strong character, the long fights are not inevitable late game even without any exploits. I’ll admit you need way more game knowledge for oblivion than Morrowind or Skyrim for late game, but that is what I like about it.
@theoldknight85 if that's the case, then maybe you right, because I didn't really dwell into magic system or spell crafting to create powerful spells. Maximum I had out of it was pacification spell for everyone in Morrowind, because I got tired to bash everyone with a stick, and some resistance for magic. But I also heard that magic in Oblivion is just busted, so you know, if to feel easy play you use broken system then it's not a seal of quality
@ Honestly I think the physical damage formula is a little broken, I talk about that in a video from last week. There are ways to exploit the game with custom spells, but just using weakness to shock followed by a shock spell isn’t busted, it just does enough damage to not feel like enemies live forever. Even weakness to fire with a fire damage enchant can do the trick.
Morrowind is the best game in the series. But, it's good to hear the opinion of an Oblivion enjoyer. You make some good points too! I enjoyed the Thieves Guild quests in Oblivion and especially the Dark Brotherhoods. And DLC? Shivering Isles was great fun!
I tried to play Morrowind and ur definitely just sniffing nostalgia juice, the map sucks and looks bland, no voice acting, super hard learning curve for new players. The worst combat system where u randomly miss when u clearly hit. Good game, worse than oblivion
zoomer born after morrowind came out with no nostalgia whatsoever here: i still like it the best. -the rng combat is pretty interesting when you understand how it works. All you really need to do is set a weapon type as a major skill at character creation and then ACTUALLY USE THAT WEAPON TYPE and you can have an 50%+ accuracy right out the gate, because the dice rolls are meant to simulate how good your character actually is at using the weapon you're holding! After you're like level 5, hit chance stops being a problem entirely. Then it becomes about fatigue management and trying to dodge enemy hits while moving the correct direction to swing the correct way. Which is fun. 90% of people who can't get to grips with the combat i feel like just pick up the iron dagger from the census office and spam click at mudcrabs and then give up instead of experimenting or looking it up on google. Missing with no feedback is annoying, true, but that's a feedback issue. not an issue with the system itself. -no voice acting is more of a blessing than a curse because people can actually speak for longer than a few sentences in a single dialogue tree. In oblivion and to a slightly lesser extent skyrim, they had to really cut down on the dialogue because all that voice acting audio was taking up too much disk space on consoles. As a result, you have quest givers that will give you one or two lines of directions, and you can ask maybe one or two questions, and that's all the information you'll ever get. On the other hand, in morrowind, you have hugely important npcs like Vivec who you can ask about all manner of things, and he'll give you paragraphs of interesting lore tidbits and advice, and you can choose how much you want to believe what he says because he might be full of shit. It's a system that lends itself really well to people who are interested in organically learning about the world. I can't think of any oblivion npc that I've spent more time thinking about than Yagrum Bagarn or Divayth Fyr. Except maybe Martin, he's pretty cute -map sucks and looks bland is kind of just a subjective thing. I think if you flip the switch in openMW to get rid of the fog, the weird alien looking low poly vistas with mushrooms and shit look pretty damn cool, on an aesthetic level. You can always just slap graphics mods on if you like. The hard learning curve is true. And I think that's why people give the game a bad rap. Because things aren't obvious, and you have to experiment, and you have to fuck up a few times, and your first few characters will probably be super shitty because you don't know how the leveling works. But I think that's part of what makes that game so cool. You're dropped off in a far off land with 87 gold from the emperor and the clothes on your back. you don't know anything about anything, and everyone is racist at you. Good luck you fuckin' moron. But with some blood, sweat, tears, and trial and error, the amount of godly power that you can accumulate is absurd. It's a one of a kind gaming experience BECAUSE it makes you work a little bit. I wish more people saw the value in that. and it's not as if oblivion is truly free of those problems either. Level scaling in oblivion is extremely terrible lol
@@waadi3ach569 there's no way you're arguing morrowind has a worse learning curve than oblivion. a clueless player in morrowind can grind levels to get more hp to eventually brute force everything outside of expansion end bosses.
I like that Oblivion has many quests where you need to talk to people and do non-combat activities (like that ring). Makes the world more alive, and makes it feel like I don't HAVE to make a combat-first character (even though I probably should). When I play Skyrim I have more fun aimlessly exploring than doing quests, because the quests feel so samey.
My opinion is that Oblivion is the least appreciated of the big 3 TES games because it sits squarely in the middle. Graphics and SFX are better than Morrowind but not as good as Skyrim, turning off the Skybabies. It has more story & RPG mechanics than Skyrim but not as much as Morrowind, turning off Morrowboomers. Something Oblivion does better than both, though, is quests and personality. The quests are more clever and entertaining than any of the other games. And you actually want to talk to NPCs because they’re actually interesting unlike Skyrim, and you’re doing more than reading a wall of text unlike Morrowind.
I don't think it's fair to compare the NPCs in Oblivion to Morrowind. I think Morrowind NPCs are overlooked because people can't be bothered to read and I hate reading in most contexts 😂 I do agree that Oblivion is the least appreciated of the three!
@@6CaptainFalcon9I couldn't get into Morrowind because I absolutely hate the gameplay. It feels so awful having your attacks miss because of rng, like it's a freaking Pokemon game. Then there's the lack of a quest marker and I have to waste time following directions. Hard pass for me! Oblivion on the other hand is perfect, except for enemy scaling but I can circumvent that.
The fact you can’t regenerate magic in Morrowind automatically makes it a bad game in my book just like dark souls or demon souls. If I’m role playing as a mage I expect a mage to regenerate there magic the same as a warrior with stamina. I know you can rest to regenerate your shit but that also respawns your enemy’s as well. Dark souls is even worse because enemy’s respawn everytime you rest, making any enemies you did kill pointless.
I dunno, I like how Skyrim doesn't require a particular skillset for guild questlines because it allows for more driversity in role play and game play. Not every thief is a sneaky cat burglar type, playing against type as an enforcer, rogue or barbarian type is both satisfying, fitting and very viable in Skyrim and it's not like being a sneaky thief is unviable anyway. My favourite thief guild characters in Skyrim have been a Barbarian raider "WHERE IS MAH MONEY" type and a charming merchant mage with absolutely no sneaking ability whatsoever because Illusion magic is busted and speech is underrated. I guess it's all a matter of prospective, I'm definitely more of a role player so I appreciate the options to, y'know, play a role.
If you're gonna argue that Morrowind progression is worse because you're playing in an unnatural way abusing mechanics you can't ignore Oblivion mechanical Abuse lmao. You don't need me to talk about how easy it is to get 100% Chameleon, or 100 Drain Health Weapons, or Poisons, or Weakness to Magic OR stacking Fatigue buffs on yourself. All of these are easy to perform early game and break the game and progression. You can also grind in Oblivion just as you can in Morrowind or Skyrim. Just that it's less tedious in Morrowind. In Morrowind you can exit the census and excise office with faster movement speed than you can get at the start of Skyrim or Oblivion, and with up to 90% hit chance on wood elf and redguard, 100% on Orcs and about 70-80 on everyone else easily. Beyond that i agree that the quests are alot better than the others. They're the one thing Oblivion pretty objectively does better. But yeah assuming you play naturally, progression wise Skyrim is only one that does have to force you to fiddle with the slider to have consistant fun, Morrowind is the best at building up to power, and Oblivion is an absolute clusterfuck for the most part until late when you inevitably stack such high resistances that you can't lose
im curious on the hit rate from census office comment, how exactly are you getting 90% hit chance? On orcs i know since orcs are busted, but redguard is at best only like 60 and thats assuming you choose a warrior sign
@@tomaszpawlik5091 For Redguards favor Agility and Luck, pick combat specialisation, major in Long Blade, and pick Warrior Sign. You get 50 Long Blade, 50 Agility and 50 Luck with 10 Attack. The Hit-Chance Formula is (Skill + Agi/5 + Luck/10)* fatigue multiplier + Attack At Max Fatigue you get (50 + 50/5 + 50/10)*1.25 + 10 = 91.25% Base You hit 103.75% with Adrenaline Rush on For Bosmer you hit 93.75% with the same setup. If on average you can get around 40 on a skill (most races havr atleast 1 skill with 5 starting) with 40 luck and agility and the warrior you can start with 75% Ultimately all you gotta do is keep a supply of fatigue potions OR a spell
You pick agility luck longblade and combat on Redguard you end up with 50 skil 50 agi and 50 luck (50 + 50/5 + 50/10) * 1.25 = 81.25% + 10 from the warrior you get 91.25% With Adrenaline Rush you get you get 103.25% On Bosmer with the same calc but swap Long Blade for Marksman you get 93.25% Taking an average of 40 skill 40 agility 40 luck you get 75% hit-chance. All you gotta do is keep some potions or a spell for fatigue handy.
I disagree that Morrowind's early game is especially difficult. I find it to be byfar the easiest game of the Howard trilogy to become extremely powerful in a short amount of time due to the lack of leveled items and the near total lack of level gating on content. There's no roadblocks to making your character strong early. The only uniquely difficult thing about Morrowind is fatigue management. Oblivion is very fun at mid difficulty but you're nerfed compared to Morrowind in every respect except increased base movement speed, fatigue not draining while running, and hand-to-hand damaging HP. It's kind of tragic how much worse it is at max difficulty compared to Morrowind purely because they made all the weapons suck without poison and locked high magnitude spells behind the higher skill ranks in the absence of hit/cast chance.
@@ashenonekenobi421That's true of Oblivion too. I'd argue Oblivion is even more punishing, too. Morrowind's learning curve is tough but it isn't arcane to anyone familiar with CRPGs. Oblivion's learning curve is tough and utterly unique, because most games aren't designed in such a way that the majority of enemies you encounter in the world will outpace your character the more you level up.
I can personally vouch that Morrowind is easier than it seems. I started my first playthrough about a week or two ago, and the most scary thing was leveling and character creation. After a while of googling I just gave up and made a character with skills I thought were cool and useful. The only thing that I consider a must is having a weapons skill be a major, and other than that you're fine. With leveling it was easy once I figured out I can train as many times as I like the misc skills so I just trained those for the x5 bonus upon reaching the level up point. Of course I had a decent amount of experience with some CRPGs and CRPG adjacent games, so my experience probably isn't representative. I feel like half of the whole bad vibe around Morrowind comes from people just hyping it up and scaremongering, so you're scared of screwing up so you give up halfway through. The other part is Fatigue being barely explained, so you die to a Mudcrab after trying to stab 50 times.
@@ashenonekenobi421 The first time I saw Morrowind, I watched my friend die repeatedly to a rat because his spear kept going through it (he did not choose spear as a skill). My first playthrough, I found a scroll that said “jump” on a dead guy, cast it, and flew to my death. I did not see him fall from the sky back then, my Xbox/tv combo was nothing like my current setup. Back then I literally never found the puzzle box. After hours of looking I gave up. I understand most people hear difficulty and think enemy health and damage, but Morrowind felt impossible back in the day. Now that I know more about Morrowind, there is no challenge left whatsoever. I don’t feel like making a new character to try to become stronger or better, because I already outclass all the content by such a significant degree. My video was a little off the cuff and not organized the best, I’m realizing after rewatching it lol. I’m going to have to revisit this subject over winter break.
I like to play games in a type of survival mode. Levitating everywhere is too powerful and as a result boring. Games are most fun when you have limited resources but can still get the job done. If an enemy can one shot me I enjoy the challenge. Floating out of range is just boring.
@@TheIrishRushin You don't have to use levitate. Its about the verticality of a game, whether you jump or in other way get on top of a Vivec canton, or a Telvani mushroom wizard tower, or an imperial fort, or a mountain, the verticality and open Y dimension is a great thing to experience in a video game. Especially back the day of flat isometric 2.5D Rpgs.
I agree. I think the quests were structured and designed so well. They are all so creative especially for the thieves guild. Like you point out, one of the first major things you do is finding a special ring that caused the previous guy having drowned trying to recover it. One of my favorites is the murder mystery quest. Again, such a great idea and fun too. Skyrim had some good ones too, but i would argue oblivion has more depth and creativity.
I completely agree with the sentiment. However the leveling is the big issue. I have had many playthroughs that are completely borked by a few bad levels. I feel other than the leveling you're completely correct. But I feel like most players use mods to improve or subvert the leveling.
Agreed with the difficulty graph for the games especially Skyrim, which is why I only ever play Skyrim with the Requiem mod for that difficulty spike and its surprisingly fun because of it, one of the first things to do is to try and cheese getting the Dwarven power Armor from the Arkngathmz questline.
Hey I respect your opinion or whatever but I just do not agree at all. Oblivion has the worst progression system of the 3D Elder scrolls! For one, the action aspect of all the ES games is consistently bad but the least offensive in Skyrim. Skyrim can have a kind of mindless fun appeal where Oblivion mostly feels like a chore. Combat in Morrowind can also feel like a chore, but it's generally sparser (as old as killing cliff racers gets) and becomes a lot quicker in the late game. Morrowind also has a greater emphasis on resource management which occasionally leads to tense moments. Morrowind has game systems that are more suited towards telling the narrative of the player, going from a weak and rejected outlander to a demi god and savior of Vvardenfell. Folding hit chance in to just damage and level scaling have together made the feeling of progression in the game a lot less tangible and much more arbitrary. In Morrowind, min-maxing your levels is a kind of self-imposed challenge for players who enjoy that kind of thing. In Oblivion, it's necessary to min-max if you don't want the game to feel even more tedious.
The more I think about it, the more I think it's the pace of combat that I dislike, it's like they balanced the game around making all encounters as slow as early game Morrowind
Have you played Gothic 3, or any other Piranha Bytes game? If so, what do you think about it? If not, you should really try it out (hopefully with Community Patch, Update Pack and Parallel Universe Patch), it might fall right down your alley
Completely agreed about Skyrim's difficulty and the crafting skills being way overtuned and ruining the game. However, if that's your only hangup I recommend playing on Master difficulty from the start and playing with only a single life. It will greatly improve one's appreciation of Skyrim's combat mechanics and learning how block, parrying, staggering and more all interact with one another as you seek gear constantly to help you overcome the challenge. Wards play a much more vital role, as do summons, and even stealth archer isn't as crazy without smithing. That said I think Oblivion does need defending. People get way too hung up on the attribute gain and major/minor skill system. With a well built character with 50-60 in major attributes, +2 per level in a stat is more than enough to get your core attributes up to 100. The attributes sans Endurance don't even really do that much. That's because Oblivion is a game about *gear* and skills. Skill points are worth twice as much as attribute points for damage for weapon skills in Oblivion and by kneecapping your skill levels you are making the game harder for yourself unnecessarily. It's not even that hard so long as you pack potions, understand damage mitigation via block and armor, and run an enchanted sword. Efficient leveling won't save you from poor play. What you need to succeed in Oblivion is a cohesive build and an understanding of resource management. Take for example the power of Conjuration. The summons add extra damage but more importantly draw aggro from enemies. Taken as a major skill, it levels more quickly and allows you to summon powerful allies sooner than using it as a minor skill unless you really want to sit around and level Conjuration to 100 by summoning skeletons in the street and brick your character entirely for melee combat. Restoration is similarly powerful for melee builds due to healing and absorb spells. There is a lot of utility in spells even for warriors and by giving yourself access to such abilities it makes the game much easier without the tedium of efficient leveling. Even a pure warrior type character will want to utilize the bevy of enchanted gear options in the game to get an advantage, much of which one acquires from sigil stones, which most players skip getting because they hate portals to Oblivion. I think people make Oblivion more miserable than necessary and are in general just bad at the game when they say enemies are too spongey and that the game is too hard. It just asks you to pay attention to its mechanics and that should be celebrated in games
I really don't see how Skyrim's crafting system is any different powerwise from Oblivion's custom spells. Both break the game, and both are required to play the game on maximum difficulty, although at least Skyrim's system doesn't force you into playing as a mage.
I have a lot of gripes with Oblivion (mostly about it's melee combat, or that I don't really like the weird blend of typical tolkienesque fantasy aesthetic over the Greco-Roman style the Imperials had in Morrowind). Where Oblivion really succeeds is its quests. Yes, the main quest is undercooked and the Fighter's Guild is way weaker than the other guild quests, but the NPCs really bring the world to life in their side quests in a way that they don't in Morrowind and seldom do in Skyrim. Oblivion wins the title of "most Character" in the TES games for sure.
@@SR-ti6jj part 2 is already out. And part 3 is arguably my “is the combat good?” video. And part 4 is me derping around in Skyrim. So next one I make I’ll just jump to part 5 and only you will know
The final quest of the thieves guild i think its the best quest in the game. Infilitrating the Imperial palace and stole an elder scroll all without being detected is the best shit ever
Seeing as how Oblivion's my favorite Elder Scrolls game so far, I'm definitely curious to hear more of your thoughts on it. (I also agree that Oblivion's better than both Morrowind and Skyrim, for the simple reason that Oblivion's easier to pick up and play than Morrowind, but it has more nuance and better mechanics than Skyrim--the only mechanic in Skyrim that I really like is smithing because I can create weapons, armor and apparel. Alchemy's nowhere near as fun, and neither is enchanting. Also they completely gutted spellmaking...just...why?)
lol this video reminds me of the video "why magic the gathering is better than yu gi oh". You even sound like the guy in the video lmao. Your point about how easy Morrowind is to break with metagaming things like trainers and the creature merchants to get insane money and stats is valid but I have a rebuttal: Just don't do that lmao. To the first time player Morrowind's more lax level scaling with enemies when compared to Oblivion is much more manageable. You wont manage to become overwhelmed just playing Morrowind blind. There is definitely an argument to be made that Oblivion's level scaling promotes more skillful play from the player but the primary solution most people settle on is "never use your major or minor skills unless you want to level up". That alone makes a huge pitfall for new players and I don't think we can say Oblivion is objectively better in terms of gameplay. I think the games are close enough in their gameplay loop and the only real fault in Oblivion is how seriously enemies outpace you in the game. I think the real problem with Oblivion is the story and environment being so terribly generic. The mystery behind Dagoth Ur and the civil war in skyrim both have a lot more nuance to them. I think only Arena has a worse story in TES and it's pretty close. Anyway this was a decently conceived video and I enjoyed it. I trust you will touch on my counter points in the next 573 parts.
I agree in principle about the metagaming point, but as someone who has put an unhealthy amount of time into both games I feel that the metagaming eventually stuff stops being as valuable for circumventing the rising difficulty the better you understand it and becomes much more valuable as a means of avoiding tedium. Things like the mudcrab merchant saving time on getting gold in TES3 and the myriad overpowered spell effect combinations in Oblivion saving time on dungeon crawling are truly indispensable for saving time on repeat playthroughs, but neither game has a good middle ground where the progression feels "right." Oblivion is definitely much worse in that regard imo but I can see why someone who can't restrain themselves from breaking the game over their knee might find Morrowind's difficulty curve less compelling.
One thing that makes Oblivion great was the "createfullactorycopy" command that allowed you to clone your character and then have most epic duel ever.. This new npc would have default AI and would fight back when attacked, but mind you, it has all your skills and stats and plus all your items so it will kick your behind.
😂 that is my clothes dryer, I wish the repair was as simple as replacing batteries. The belt is worn. Not sure why my mic picked it up, I couldn’t hear it myself.
What made Oblivion so memorable to me specifically was the spell "Finger of the Mountain". The spell was leveled according to your characters level at the time of when you accquired it. So it could either be fairly weak or the strongest spell in the game, as far as I remember. Problem is, though, that, when accquired with a too high level, the spell becomes pretty much unable to cast due to the sheer amount of mana needed. Seeing the damage potential of the spell after I got it at high level made me laugh out loud, literally. Then I realized the mana cost... Reading about the spell on UESP Wiki made me start a new game solely to accquire "Finger of the Mountain" at, I believe it was level 23, when it was at the most optimal damage to mana cost ratio. I missed something like that so much in Skyrim.
I think you're misremembering the Finger of the mountain spell. It's a more or less useless spell because its cost is much higher than a custom spell with the exact same effect
@@exantiuse497The difference is that, at max level, it applies 200 shock damage in 10ft on target. You can't go above 100 damage per second for any singular element in custom spells, which also apply the damage over time. Finger of the Mountain is instantaneous.
The %80 knowledge thing is very true for Oblivion. Right now I’m thoroughly enjoying a hand to hand playthrough, and I’m only able to do so because of multiple playthroughs and 1600+ hours of gameplay. Currently at level 48, I mainly utilize the mobility skills, block, and restoration of course to maximize stamina, magicka, health and speed. I use powerful stamina absorption spells to keep my damage high and increase my stagger and knockdown chance. Spell absorption and fortify magicka/fatigue enchant light armor(for the challenge). I’ve gotten to the point where I toss everything around like ragdolls. My favorite part is at negative stamina most enemies will crumple to the floor, this can happen on a H2H punch which does stamina damage, their own attacks which drain their own stamina depending on the weight of the weapon and type of attack used, or via the absorption spell itself. I’ve gotten to the point where I can reliably control when an enemy hits the floor, which is very useful for kiting in large groups or making powerful enemies like ogres, Xivilai, and clannfears look like buffoons. It’s definitely hard and requires skill with the combat system because you have to be fast and precise, but it’s really fun and rewarding. I still find enjoyment in Oblivion because you can get very creative with your build, and the more knowledgeable you are about the game, the easier or harder you can choose to make things on yourself. That even applies to the hardest difficulty in Oblivion, which ironically becomes extremely easy because of the exploits you have to learn to beat it.
I imagine tes 6 to be like this: You approach enemy (they dont see you unless you do, because detection is complex!) and have 5 option. Attack, magic attack, defend, magic defend, heal. I like oblivion the most, because its not designed with braindeath in mind like skyrim is, but people actually speak unlike morrowind. A decent balance between convenience and complexity
To be honest, I never look for a challange when playing these games. I always play on default difficulty, or higher, but I never see how turning enemies into damage sponges makes the game better. Getting one shoted doesn't make playing more fun either, and it's immersion breaking to be honest. I play to expirence interesting stories, make unique character, explore cool cities and locations. That's it. And my challenge usually comes from kind of RP restrictions I put on myself, rather than difficulty itself. I do have however gamer diginity to never lower difficulty past medium, so I need to make my characters atleast somewhat functional xD
Counterpoint, combat in Oblivion is absolute trash without spellcrafting, which is gatekeeped behind either a DLC or a single questline (seven quests deep). Skyrim addressed and fixed many of the fundamental problems with Oblivion's design. Character building in Oblivion is extremely frontloaded, with 99% of the most important decisions being made in the sewers, right after you struggle through the *worst* character creator in video game history (noooo, you can't only move one slider at once!). Efficient leveling is a waste of time. It's better to just level up as little as possible and raise all your important skills to 100. Goblins with 900 health are not fun to fight unless you use custom spells, which really is not all that different from using alchemy, smithing, and enchanting in Skyrim.
Morrowind is the best of the three games because I can be playing on my axe wizard and find some daedric dagger and then make a new sneaky character and go get that fucking dagger from right where it is laying. The shit in the world is static, anything you find was put there by a developer for you to find. It makes the whole world feel WORTH exploring. Its not some leveled loot at the boss chest, its the random daedric wazashaski I found in some sunken ship.
Also I would hate if in Morrowind I managed to kill vivec, Almelexia and stop Dagoth Ur but still find common creatures and rabble to be a "challenge" That ship set sail a long time ago narrative wise and gameplay wise. I will say Oblivion has the out that you never fully become a god until the DLC. So the HoK getting bodied by some random bandit hedge mage in glass armor isnt so egregious.
I disagree with your assertion that Late game Oblivion is harder than Early game oblivion. In late game oblivion you have basically infinite health potions and poisons of paralysis among other things, so the difficulty is kind of trivial. By late game you should have infinite gold so you can solve the game how you wish, there are multiple systems by which to do so. Early game Oblivion, on the other hand, its totally possible to have some difficulty with hard fights, like siege of Kavatch quest and some Oblivion gates are actually kind of hard and you can die, kind of like mid game, although typical enemies and dungeons early game are easier than midgame and lategame. Its the tough fights early game that have the risk of dying, I agree mid game is hardest. I think difficulty over time is like 35-55-10. I remember as a kid playing on console when this game first came out (the original intended audience) I died ALOT early game, especially in Oblivion gates.
Oblivion is my favorite elder scrolls and either my first or second favorite game ever (basically tied w/dark souls 1). I feel like it's a good middle ground between morrowind and skyrim - still has a bit of depth to it and isnt entirely casualized but also plays a lot better. Has my favorite soundtrack in the series and I feel like bethesda's quests peaked around that time and have steadily gone downhill since. Hoping the rumors of the oblivion remake are true
True, but it is easier with magic, and the rewards are substantial. The thieves guild and dark brotherhood do actually require stealth as well. I’m not saying oblivion is perfect, I wish they had more of that
i made a big mistake in character creation my last playthrough and chose a high elf + apprentice birthsign mage….every mage i came across for the next 110hrs terrified me, but i completed the main story + plenty side stuff without lowering difficulty, the level of satisfaction that playthrough brought me was awesome
I disagree on Morrowind. Players back in the day understood what hit chance was and how to play RPGs. Arena and Daggerfall had hit chance. It was something people that played TES were used to. Only completely new players to RPGs or video games might not know about hit chance. Not to mention that lots of video games used to come with manuels that told you how to play the game. It is entirely a personal problem if someone refuses to learn about, or adjust to, a game with hit chance. People should integrate with pre-existing games and genres so that those games and genres don't get watered down into being action games with a handful of rpg elements tacked on.
While Oblivion's combat system is better, there is just nothing memorable in Oblivion beyond Criminal Scum. Morrowind is a better RPG in the world building and character sense, it isn't a hack and slash so those "gamebreaking" things are just a different way of solving a challenge and being able to break the game in 5 minutes is after watching videos or playing it a lot, not peoples first experience with it, espeically those who played it at release. The level scaling in Oblivion can gimp people on their first playthrough as well not knowing the game / builds so it isn't perfect. I do wish they carried and refined the oblivion style system with better lore / world building of Morrowind because everything Bethesda has done since has just been awful.
Morrowind has best progression, although Oblivion's is fine too. But I like Morrowind's system most because it gives you most freedom. For example, Monk class is unplayable in Oblivion, but it is playable in Morrowind
What I dislike about skyrim is low enemy variety and how the butchered the magic. Pretty much all magic in skyrim is related to damage: do damage, take less damage, heal damage. I'm also upset about frost spells, because I think they are the most interesting ones mechanically: they slow enemies down and drain their stamina, which whould have been cool if like 80% of enemies didn't resist it or were outright immune. Think about it, what major groups of enemies are we fighting in skyrim? Bandits, undead, animals, falmer and dwemer automatons. Great, most bandits are nords, all undead resist frost, snowy variants of animals resist frost, automatons are straight up immune and only farmer don't have a resistance, great
I started playing Skyrim and then later played oblivion when I was a teenager, have always thought the quests were waaaaaaaaaay better, couldn’t get into morrowind later as an adult despite it being super interesting to watch/learn about, playing it is just not as fun as oblivion for me, and Skyrim is so lame at this point so oblivion wins
The balance of kvatch if you go after level 10 is the most out of whack difficulty in the game. Is the only place you have to fight 8-10 daedra at once
Strongly disagree about being better. I feel most of all things considered Oblivion has very annoying unbalanced combat. I talk about melee combat. Staggered every few seconds is no fun. Power attacks dont matter, cos its small chance to proc paralyze/knockback/disarm, its better to just swing repeatedly, which again gets you staggered when enemy blocks. Physical weapon dmg output is so low I have to use poisons for every stronger enemy. I play games at high difficulties. Morrowind, Skyrim didnt have this problem in higher difficulties. You struggle or avoid stronger enemies early, and after certain levels you can engage them well prepared, eventually you became the mythical Nerevarine/Dragonborn unstoppable force. In Oblivion you are still the regular average dude after all and common enemies still gives you trouble, which I find unfulfiling. Oblivion world design is so repetitive its super boring. Vast world stretched and empty. Each aleyid ruin, each cave the same. No uniqueness to it. Feels procedurally generated to me. Not to mention the overall design being so cartoonish weird. I prefer Morrowind, Skyrim darker tones and sharp edges. Only thing that is greater than Morrowind Skyrim are quests. And music is great same as Morrowind and Skyrim. After all its based on personal preferences. This is my feeling about Oblivion. Still a good game tho.
Melee combat is pretty fun if you have decent block and armor, and you utilize power attacks. They often stagger your opponents and you don’t get staggered very much with decent armor
I may be an old knight, but I’m not THAT old. Daggerfall is awesome and I love it, but it’s just a different category of game, it’s so different from the next 3. Advantages/disadvantages are great though, I’m really sad they ditched that instead of expanding on them.
@@theoldknight85 I didn't mean to imply that you're old or not, I'm that old myself I never Played Daggerfall back in the day, I waited for completion of the Daggerfall Unity fan project. I plan to play Daggerfall properly with mods, after I beat heavily modded Oblivion. That being said, your point is fair enough. I love the Advantages and disadvantages, they should have kept those along with skills like Giantish and Orcish, allowing the player to play as a smooth talker, essentially a pacifist. And climbing too. I do love Morrowind and Oblivion, Skyrim a little less, it's too dumbed-down, but it can be modded to one's preferred taste. BTW a modder made a fix for the weapon damage in Oblivion, after he saw your ESIV : Oblivion Weapon Damage SCANDAL video, the mod is called Gentleman's Better Weapon Scaling, it's on Nexus mods, just a heads-up.
@ wow! That’s awesome! My first question would have to be to wonder if it doubles weapon damage for bandits, guards, and other NPCs as well. I think I’d really enjoy that mod if it helped the enemies deal more damage too.
@@theoldknight85 I'm not sure, I installed it in my heavily modded Oblivion mod list, but I haven't tested it. Try it yourself in the meantime, and see if it indeed fixes the issue. I subscribed, I love your videos. It's great to see someone approaching Oblivion and its systems from a more mathematical perspective. I hope your channel blows up!
Last year, after playing alot if skyrim I tried Morrowind and tbh, for me, it's a 10/10 RPG. It has its flaws, like the main quest is not fully realized, and some bugs in the original version, but with open mw its really good. I can't bring myself to play oblivion for more than 20 minutes because it lacks any feedback of skyrim in battles, which already has very little of feedback, and it has no system for rolls for hits or misses, which makes fights very underwhelming imo. And also, to me, oblivion is very ugly. But I respect you liking the game, I hope you don't mean the title as "this opinion is objective". I will not even start on story quality or quest stuff, because I know of oblivion quests only from videos, so I'm not the guy to argue about it. To me the best mainquest is daggerfall, storywise, and gameplay all of tes games make main quest too... accessible because it's designed to be played by any class. Skyrim makes all of the quests accessible and its lacking in content, but skyrim got the best "feel"
Oblivion with some updated graphics , leveling system , and some new DLC would be enough to be better than the other TES titles alone. The voice acting alone is far superior to anything else in the series . Patrick Stewart as the emperor ? Come on
PLEASE make all 574 parts i have subscribed and hit the bell. (Lwk you're wrong partially Morrowind is actually Peak but your right that its better than skyrim)
Scaling is oblivions biggest double edged sword, on one hand it makes the game feel like an RPG because you have to pick a playstyle, but on the other hand if you don't already understand the scaling mechanics you might wonder why you're level 15 and your hp has barely changed from level 1 cus you didn't rush 100 endurance. Or why you keep getting +5 intellect for leveling alchemy on your assassin. Magic was the best in morrowind, the quests and world were the most alive in oblivion, and skyrim just has the best melee combat from a feeling standpoint but the worst magic. Oblivion meets in the middle and is perfect for it. There's mods that fix oblivions stat scaling like +5 mods so you don't have to grind skills you don't want to use just to avoid being outscaled. One of the biggest issues with said scaling is monster damage/monster health and player damage. And sure you could always turn down the difficulty but with it goes the challenge as you progressively take it lower and lower to compensate for bad scaling. Now people who have been playing oblivion a while know there way around this such as perma sneak/70%+ Chameleon, fortify and %shield enchants+reflect, rediculously powerful magic and potions but for a new player it was incredibly easy to end up with a character who felt way weaker at 25 than they did at 10 or 15. I'm convinced this is why they "dumbed down" the talents and leveling in skyrim because it's a lot harder to mess up and you're never locked into building a fantasy character, more like a god of all trades. I love oblivion the most it was my first elder scrolls and it undoubtedly has the best guild quests in the series as well as nailing the feeling of being a great yet accessable RPG however a lot of the depth and character were lost with skyrim for the sake of acessability. I fear for the sake of ES6 because it'll be a near carbon copy of skyrim or even more diluted. I mean not a single bethesda game since Fallout 4 has even been a good RPG. Just action games with RPG elements. Your point about becoming a god too quickly in both morrowind and skyrim are actually my biggest gripes with both games. When I play skyrim I have to intentionally avoid enchanting but if you do that or ignore improving armor you are rapidly outscaled on master or higher. Even though skyrim has the most skill expression in terms of parrying, shield slamming and gauging distance on hits you're still relegated to spamming potions, spamming enchants, spamming armorsmith or combining all 3. Add onto that in skyrim each tier of armor is actually barely even an upgrade until you smith to improve it, (god forbid it's enchanted and you don't have 60 smithing.) That weapon sure it'll do 10 points of fire damage but uh your improved war axe just does that amount of damage without the enchant. All in all great video though we might disagree about certain aspects of the scaling (I don't like grinding skills that don't fit my class just to get the stats every character needs to not fold from scaling) because it creates the same issue as a non ENCH/ALCH/SMITH skyrim run. At some point you will have to exploit terrain or pop out and shoot just to get past some terribly scaled mob and the only compensation is dirty gameplay or exploiting the systems within.
@@jamesbiggs2745 thanks for the thoughtful response, I’d just push back and say that I never efficiently level and I certainly don’t grind skills I don’t want to use. Literally the only exception is endurance, and I just go to a trainer for block at low levels to guarantee a +3 and forget about it. I definitely agree the game does a poor job conveying information to a new player.
@@theoldknight85 I ended up going and watching your attributes tier list and skill tier list and honestly I didn't know how either of those calculations worked. Knowing what those video told me I had a lot of things wrong. For example I thought intellect worked the same as endurance in terms of stacking early instead of just giving flat magicka regardless of level and that the +5 mod I play with is ultimately unnessisary because I never understood the magicka system. I thought the only way I could play on high difficulties was with some basic chamaleon, high attributes/good sneak skill. I thought the pools of both mana and health needed to be stacked up early for any late game viability. Now that I know that's not the case I can see why endurance is the only one that really matters. That being said I think this does back up what I was saying about the scaling being busted but all your videos have helped me get so much depth out of the game, thank you. I've only got 60 hours on oblivion from 2 characters and this has given me the knowledge to experiment with/build a better 3rd character. (I've never even used an enchanting table, I didn't know they existed in oblivion). Again thank you, this has given me an excuse to play my favorite game at least 1-2 more times.
Skyrim is too generic and easy. Morrowind is too convoluted and has unnecessary challenges, not to mention every attack is a roll of the dice whether it hits or not. That's why i barely played Morrowind. Skyrim is more bearable, but oblivion is soooo much better. There's a good reason oblivion is my number 1 favourite game.
Oh its about morrowind n oblivion baby Skyrim is great but it dumb down everything; magic, quest, game systems, undeads, color panel, variety monsters..... All dumb down
After binging Morrowind for 2 straight years, walking out of the sewer into the sunlight was almost Holy. The bumpmapping... the HDR lighting. The music, transcendent. Bethesdas greatest blunder was letting the mee-too's chase Jeremy Soule off.
Jeremy Soule scammed a lot of people on Kickstarter. It's clear Bethesda didn't want to work with him again after Skyrim because by late 2014 it was clear he was never planning on delivering "The Northener". He even tried to make his own music software which is where people suspect the money went, but I also heard some people say he bought an expensive yacht shortly afterwards. The allegations you're talking about happened in 2019 long after he'd vanished after taking a huge amount of money on Kickstarter with nothing to show for it. Bethesda would be stupid to hire him again, even if the 2019 allegations aren't true everything else about his character is terrible.
Oblivion suffers from sub-optimal levelling against an overtuned levelling curve. For example; Minotaurs spawn at player level 14. 300 Health, 30 points damage, and have a disintegrate armour effect. And if you've been levelling 'wrong,' you might have 140 health and do ~18 damage, fatigue permitting, wearing Mithril (~25 armour rating). And they can spawn in packs.
You have magic, enchantments, and more. Also, if you put +2 into endurance each level you’d have more health than that, and that requires a single increase to block, armorer or heavy armor throughout an entire level. Your right if you play the game like an action game and completely ignore all progression mechanics you will be weak, but that is exactly what makes it a great game. It’s not god of war or assassins creed or one of the other hundred games that plays that way that is beatable no matter what you do.
Oblivion is a game that by all rights, should be a pure classic. But instead, it's a glorified tech-demo for the Xbox 360. I only ever beat Oblivion twice; once as my failboat rogue (seriously; I do not recommend), and again as a mage. IMO: The story sucked, the level scaling made combat far more tedious than Morrowind or outright encouraged ass-backward role play in the alleged role-playing game (Cliff Racers don't randomly spawn with end-game armor, FFS), fast-travel and loop-cave logic made most exploration repetitive, and most of the quests were meh at best. It wasn't until I played The Shivering Isles that I genuinely enjoyed myself. That experience was actually pretty great. Oh...and it crashed all the goddamned time on PC. Oblivion was, hands-down, the most unstable game I had ever played up to that point. Having grown up playing DOS games and enduring the tech-horrorshow that was Windows 98, that's an impressive feat. The culprit for why Oblivion is so notoriously unstable would turn out to be the Xbox 360. By that I mean that Bethesda only optimized and QA tested Oblivion for that specific console and didn't give a damn about PC ever again. (just look at all the bugs and game crashes the Unofficial Oblivion Patch fixes; it's INSANE) Bethesda then did the same thing for Fallout 3, only it was even somehow WORSE. That was the game that finally shattered my naivete and trust in any AAA game company. My experience with FO3 and Bethesda's tech support was so bad, I didn't buy another Bethesda game from 2008 until literally this year, and even then, only because it was cheaper to get Morrowind as part of a sale bundle than buying it piecemeal was at the time. (paid 6 bucks for Morrowind; got Skyrim and Oblivion included on GOG) I genuinely wanted to love this game even more than I did Morrowind, but it was like someone took all the mystique, talent, and quirkiness out of that game, and replaced it with generic tedium and tech wank. (almost literally; because of everyone's obsession with Bloom Lighting back then, caves glowed like they were covered in fairy-spunk)
Morrowind is too boring once you get to the breaking point, Skyrim just straight up is dumbed down and literally made for babies. Oblivion is a fun romp that is legitimately based on what you as the player make it❤
HAHAHA let's look and point and laugh at this bad production notice how in the beginning of the video you can see Xbox game bar recording. Let's laugh at him guys
If you think Morrowind is difficult it's honestly just a skill issue. You like Oblivion more because you're bad, your opinions are bad, and also you should feel bad.
I said that Morrowind is worse than oblivion because after you gain some game knowledge it becomes absurdly easy, which is explicitly the reason I give for liking oblivion more. Did you watch the video?
@@theoldknight85 oblivion is just as exploitable and broken as morrowind, the first half of your vid is basically saying youre using exploits in morrowind but not oblivion
Oblivion was easily the best of both worlds between Skyrim/Morrowind, and the most balanced game in the series tbh My hope is that Elder Scrolls 6 uses Oblivion as its main source of inspiration!
I think my biggest issue with Oblivion is how they do the auto leveled lists of enemies and items. It seems far too soon that i find all the bandits are wearing full glass and im finding like daedric stuff in chests all the time. It really just brings me outta the immersion.
I probably should just try a mod that addresses that at some point lol.
@@PersonaSlates you don’t see any Daedric or glass until level 20, and even then they are both rare. I get it though, it’s a common complaint, it just never bothered me.
There are some balancing issues and specifics that I think oblivion gets wrong, but the principle of scaling works great imo.
@@theoldknight85 All the time is probably an exaggeration. I'ts been a long while since i played Oblivion, its just something that stands out in my mind. I just played one character a whole lot, like a hundred hours or something. So most of my memories are of being 20+. Don't get me wrong i think its a fantastic game, it just felt too easy to get top tier gear.
@@PersonaSlatesPersonally, i think its the skill distribution.
Major things, like security not being on intelligence, really fundamentally ruins the game.
@@williamchristy9463 how does security not being part of intelligence ruin the game? Intelligence doesn’t even affect security in Morrowind, agility does. The only reason security is “governed” by intelligence is because agility had too many governed skills and intelligence didn’t have enough. Lock picking is hardly a test of intelligence IRL either, more so dexterity and perception.
That's a good thing I think because it ensures that the player reaches a certain level of equipment at that level. Afterwards you have to rely on proper levelling of your character which can be harder for some people to figure out, but at least the game has helped you with better equipment until then making it easier.
You could say that you should only get top level equipment at level 50 for example but then you need to rely more on your own levelling, making the game much harder for casual gamers and unbalanced characters.
I don't really think Morrowind is that difficult in the early game, it's just that unlike in Oblivion, where you build your character planning the post late-game from level 1, in Morrowind you have to put a little bit of effort to not die to a mudcrab, so you can't just sacrifice everything to be a late game powerhouse because you simply won't survive until late game. But what I really liked about Morrowind is that the lore is soooo damn extensive and immersive. People complain about the lack of voice acting, but really there is just so much text, and when the game came out it was a different time, the game's size would have been just huge if everything had been voice acted. Yeah it sucks a bit to play it today and have to read so much, you could maybe say that part didn't age too well, and I'd agree, but in my opinion the incredible amount of lore in Morrowind more than compensates for that. I really love both Morrowind and Oblivion, haven't really played Skyrim it didn't appeal to me much, so can't comment on that one, but I love both of these games just for different reasons.
Disagree about difficulty. The longer you play, more strong enemies will spawn. And at some point they will be so tanky that even high level gear and artifacts can't save you from long fights, where you just need to have more hp than your opponent. In Morrowind I could beat the game using mostly hand to hand combat. But in Oblivion mudcrabs become a death sentence upon 15 level if you go to them with fists. Not so good to me
@@stupidlizard4764 that’s fair to think that, but really if you gain enough game knowledge that’s not true. In this video I’m level 30, and in my hardest difficulty videos I’m level 35-38.
On normal difficulty that mage is 1-2 shotting everything. I even have a silly video of me being naked on highest difficulty and one shotting everything, but that is arguably an exploit of game mechanics.
If you have a strong character, the long fights are not inevitable late game even without any exploits. I’ll admit you need way more game knowledge for oblivion than Morrowind or Skyrim for late game, but that is what I like about it.
@theoldknight85 if that's the case, then maybe you right, because I didn't really dwell into magic system or spell crafting to create powerful spells. Maximum I had out of it was pacification spell for everyone in Morrowind, because I got tired to bash everyone with a stick, and some resistance for magic.
But I also heard that magic in Oblivion is just busted, so you know, if to feel easy play you use broken system then it's not a seal of quality
@ Honestly I think the physical damage formula is a little broken, I talk about that in a video from
last week. There are ways to exploit the game with custom spells, but just using weakness to shock followed by a shock spell isn’t busted, it just does enough damage to not feel like enemies live forever.
Even weakness to fire with a fire damage enchant can do the trick.
morrowind is the best cuz it has the most free magic system
Morrowind is the best game in the series. But, it's good to hear the opinion of an Oblivion enjoyer.
You make some good points too! I enjoyed the Thieves Guild quests in Oblivion and especially the Dark Brotherhoods. And DLC? Shivering Isles was great fun!
I tried to play Morrowind and ur definitely just sniffing nostalgia juice, the map sucks and looks bland, no voice acting, super hard learning curve for new players. The worst combat system where u randomly miss when u clearly hit. Good game, worse than oblivion
zoomer born after morrowind came out with no nostalgia whatsoever here: i still like it the best.
-the rng combat is pretty interesting when you understand how it works. All you really need to do is set a weapon type as a major skill at character creation and then ACTUALLY USE THAT WEAPON TYPE and you can have an 50%+ accuracy right out the gate, because the dice rolls are meant to simulate how good your character actually is at using the weapon you're holding! After you're like level 5, hit chance stops being a problem entirely. Then it becomes about fatigue management and trying to dodge enemy hits while moving the correct direction to swing the correct way. Which is fun. 90% of people who can't get to grips with the combat i feel like just pick up the iron dagger from the census office and spam click at mudcrabs and then give up instead of experimenting or looking it up on google. Missing with no feedback is annoying, true, but that's a feedback issue. not an issue with the system itself.
-no voice acting is more of a blessing than a curse because people can actually speak for longer than a few sentences in a single dialogue tree. In oblivion and to a slightly lesser extent skyrim, they had to really cut down on the dialogue because all that voice acting audio was taking up too much disk space on consoles. As a result, you have quest givers that will give you one or two lines of directions, and you can ask maybe one or two questions, and that's all the information you'll ever get. On the other hand, in morrowind, you have hugely important npcs like Vivec who you can ask about all manner of things, and he'll give you paragraphs of interesting lore tidbits and advice, and you can choose how much you want to believe what he says because he might be full of shit. It's a system that lends itself really well to people who are interested in organically learning about the world. I can't think of any oblivion npc that I've spent more time thinking about than Yagrum Bagarn or Divayth Fyr. Except maybe Martin, he's pretty cute
-map sucks and looks bland is kind of just a subjective thing. I think if you flip the switch in openMW to get rid of the fog, the weird alien looking low poly vistas with mushrooms and shit look pretty damn cool, on an aesthetic level. You can always just slap graphics mods on if you like.
The hard learning curve is true. And I think that's why people give the game a bad rap. Because things aren't obvious, and you have to experiment, and you have to fuck up a few times, and your first few characters will probably be super shitty because you don't know how the leveling works. But I think that's part of what makes that game so cool. You're dropped off in a far off land with 87 gold from the emperor and the clothes on your back. you don't know anything about anything, and everyone is racist at you. Good luck you fuckin' moron. But with some blood, sweat, tears, and trial and error, the amount of godly power that you can accumulate is absurd. It's a one of a kind gaming experience BECAUSE it makes you work a little bit. I wish more people saw the value in that.
and it's not as if oblivion is truly free of those problems either. Level scaling in oblivion is extremely terrible lol
@@waadi3ach569 damn, bro struggles with readiing
If he could read that he'd be mad
@@waadi3ach569 there's no way you're arguing morrowind has a worse learning curve than oblivion. a clueless player in morrowind can grind levels to get more hp to eventually brute force everything outside of expansion end bosses.
I like that Oblivion has many quests where you need to talk to people and do non-combat activities (like that ring). Makes the world more alive, and makes it feel like I don't HAVE to make a combat-first character (even though I probably should). When I play Skyrim I have more fun aimlessly exploring than doing quests, because the quests feel so samey.
My opinion is that Oblivion is the least appreciated of the big 3 TES games because it sits squarely in the middle.
Graphics and SFX are better than Morrowind but not as good as Skyrim, turning off the Skybabies.
It has more story & RPG mechanics than Skyrim but not as much as Morrowind, turning off Morrowboomers.
Something Oblivion does better than both, though, is quests and personality. The quests are more clever and entertaining than any of the other games.
And you actually want to talk to NPCs because they’re actually interesting unlike Skyrim, and you’re doing more than reading a wall of text unlike Morrowind.
I don't think it's fair to compare the NPCs in Oblivion to Morrowind. I think Morrowind NPCs are overlooked because people can't be bothered to read and I hate reading in most contexts 😂 I do agree that Oblivion is the least appreciated of the three!
@@6CaptainFalcon9I couldn't get into Morrowind because I absolutely hate the gameplay. It feels so awful having your attacks miss because of rng, like it's a freaking Pokemon game. Then there's the lack of a quest marker and I have to waste time following directions. Hard pass for me! Oblivion on the other hand is perfect, except for enemy scaling but I can circumvent that.
glad to be in the presence of someone with an opinion me and few close irl friends share.
The fact you can’t regenerate magic in Morrowind automatically makes it a bad game in my book just like dark souls or demon souls. If I’m role playing as a mage I expect a mage to regenerate there magic the same as a warrior with stamina. I know you can rest to regenerate your shit but that also respawns your enemy’s as well. Dark souls is even worse because enemy’s respawn everytime you rest, making any enemies you did kill pointless.
I dunno, I like how Skyrim doesn't require a particular skillset for guild questlines because it allows for more driversity in role play and game play. Not every thief is a sneaky cat burglar type, playing against type as an enforcer, rogue or barbarian type is both satisfying, fitting and very viable in Skyrim and it's not like being a sneaky thief is unviable anyway.
My favourite thief guild characters in Skyrim have been a Barbarian raider "WHERE IS MAH MONEY" type and a charming merchant mage with absolutely no sneaking ability whatsoever because Illusion magic is busted and speech is underrated. I guess it's all a matter of prospective, I'm definitely more of a role player so I appreciate the options to, y'know, play a role.
If you're gonna argue that Morrowind progression is worse because you're playing in an unnatural way abusing mechanics you can't ignore Oblivion mechanical Abuse lmao.
You don't need me to talk about how easy it is to get 100% Chameleon, or 100 Drain Health Weapons, or Poisons, or Weakness to Magic OR stacking Fatigue buffs on yourself. All of these are easy to perform early game and break the game and progression.
You can also grind in Oblivion just as you can in Morrowind or Skyrim. Just that it's less tedious in Morrowind.
In Morrowind you can exit the census and excise office with faster movement speed than you can get at the start of Skyrim or Oblivion, and with up to 90% hit chance on wood elf and redguard, 100% on Orcs and about 70-80 on everyone else easily.
Beyond that i agree that the quests are alot better than the others. They're the one thing Oblivion pretty objectively does better.
But yeah assuming you play naturally, progression wise Skyrim is only one that does have to force you to fiddle with the slider to have consistant fun, Morrowind is the best at building up to power, and Oblivion is an absolute clusterfuck for the most part until late when you inevitably stack such high resistances that you can't lose
God just make a video atp
im curious on the hit rate from census office comment, how exactly are you getting 90% hit chance? On orcs i know since orcs are busted, but redguard is at best only like 60 and thats assuming you choose a warrior sign
@@tomaszpawlik5091
For Redguards favor Agility and Luck, pick combat specialisation, major in Long Blade, and pick Warrior Sign.
You get 50 Long Blade, 50 Agility and 50 Luck with 10 Attack.
The Hit-Chance Formula is (Skill + Agi/5 + Luck/10)* fatigue multiplier + Attack
At Max Fatigue you get (50 + 50/5 + 50/10)*1.25 + 10 = 91.25% Base
You hit 103.75% with Adrenaline Rush on
For Bosmer you hit 93.75% with the same setup.
If on average you can get around 40 on a skill (most races havr atleast 1 skill with 5 starting) with 40 luck and agility and the warrior you can start with 75%
Ultimately all you gotta do is keep a supply of fatigue potions OR a spell
You pick agility luck longblade and combat on Redguard you end up with 50 skil 50 agi and 50 luck
(50 + 50/5 + 50/10) * 1.25 = 81.25% + 10 from the warrior you get 91.25%
With Adrenaline Rush you get you get 103.25%
On Bosmer with the same calc but swap Long Blade for Marksman you get 93.25%
Taking an average of 40 skill 40 agility 40 luck you get 75% hit-chance.
All you gotta do is keep some potions or a spell for fatigue handy.
I disagree that Morrowind's early game is especially difficult. I find it to be byfar the easiest game of the Howard trilogy to become extremely powerful in a short amount of time due to the lack of leveled items and the near total lack of level gating on content. There's no roadblocks to making your character strong early. The only uniquely difficult thing about Morrowind is fatigue management.
Oblivion is very fun at mid difficulty but you're nerfed compared to Morrowind in every respect except increased base movement speed, fatigue not draining while running, and hand-to-hand damaging HP. It's kind of tragic how much worse it is at max difficulty compared to Morrowind purely because they made all the weapons suck without poison and locked high magnitude spells behind the higher skill ranks in the absence of hit/cast chance.
If you know nothing about the game, Morrowind's early game is really hard. In retrospective it might not seem so, but I'm sure it is.
@@ashenonekenobi421That's true of Oblivion too. I'd argue Oblivion is even more punishing, too. Morrowind's learning curve is tough but it isn't arcane to anyone familiar with CRPGs.
Oblivion's learning curve is tough and utterly unique, because most games aren't designed in such a way that the majority of enemies you encounter in the world will outpace your character the more you level up.
@@ashenonekenobi421morrowind is much much easier than oblivion its not even close
I can personally vouch that Morrowind is easier than it seems. I started my first playthrough about a week or two ago, and the most scary thing was leveling and character creation. After a while of googling I just gave up and made a character with skills I thought were cool and useful. The only thing that I consider a must is having a weapons skill be a major, and other than that you're fine. With leveling it was easy once I figured out I can train as many times as I like the misc skills so I just trained those for the x5 bonus upon reaching the level up point. Of course I had a decent amount of experience with some CRPGs and CRPG adjacent games, so my experience probably isn't representative. I feel like half of the whole bad vibe around Morrowind comes from people just hyping it up and scaremongering, so you're scared of screwing up so you give up halfway through. The other part is Fatigue being barely explained, so you die to a Mudcrab after trying to stab 50 times.
@@ashenonekenobi421 The first time I saw Morrowind, I watched my friend die repeatedly to a rat because his spear kept going through it (he did not choose spear as a skill). My first playthrough, I found a scroll that said “jump” on a dead guy, cast it, and flew to my death. I did not see him fall from the sky back then, my Xbox/tv combo was nothing like my current setup. Back then I literally never found the puzzle box. After hours of looking I gave up. I understand most people hear difficulty and think enemy health and damage, but Morrowind felt impossible back in the day.
Now that I know more about Morrowind, there is no challenge left whatsoever. I don’t feel like making a new character to try to become stronger or better, because I already outclass all the content by such a significant degree.
My video was a little off the cuff and not organized the best, I’m realizing after rewatching it lol. I’m going to have to revisit this subject over winter break.
How can a game without spears and levitation be better than Morrowind.
🤣
@@lanelesic honestly this is the strongest argument I’ve heard yet. I do miss levitation, and I know people love their spears.
I like to play games in a type of survival mode. Levitating everywhere is too powerful and as a result boring. Games are most fun when you have limited resources but can still get the job done. If an enemy can one shot me I enjoy the challenge. Floating out of range is just boring.
@@TheIrishRushin You don't have to use levitate. Its about the verticality of a game, whether you jump or in other way get on top of a Vivec canton, or a Telvani mushroom wizard tower, or an imperial fort, or a mountain, the verticality and open Y dimension is a great thing to experience in a video game.
Especially back the day of flat isometric 2.5D Rpgs.
They say syndicates of wizards have led a boycott of Imperial goods, in the land of the Altmer.
I agree. I think the quests were structured and designed so well. They are all so creative especially for the thieves guild. Like you point out, one of the first major things you do is finding a special ring that caused the previous guy having drowned trying to recover it. One of my favorites is the murder mystery quest. Again, such a great idea and fun too. Skyrim had some good ones too, but i would argue oblivion has more depth and creativity.
Just found your channel with the why Clannfear are strong vid. You're doing Shezzar's work. Subscribed!
Yup stendarr be with him.
I completely agree with the sentiment. However the leveling is the big issue. I have had many playthroughs that are completely borked by a few bad levels. I feel other than the leveling you're completely correct. But I feel like most players use mods to improve or subvert the leveling.
But isn't that part of the fun? The potential for failing. Except you don't really fail, the game becomes a bit harder.
@birdybird712 I wouldn't really call having to hit the enemies more fun. The enemies feel super spongy, and I've never found that fun.
Agreed with the difficulty graph for the games especially Skyrim, which is why I only ever play Skyrim with the Requiem mod for that difficulty spike and its surprisingly fun because of it, one of the first things to do is to try and cheese getting the Dwarven power Armor from the Arkngathmz questline.
@@justsomeguywithlasereyes9920 like I said, those tables and graphs were based on scientific and rigorous research.
Hey I respect your opinion or whatever but I just do not agree at all. Oblivion has the worst progression system of the 3D Elder scrolls!
For one, the action aspect of all the ES games is consistently bad but the least offensive in Skyrim. Skyrim can have a kind of mindless fun appeal where Oblivion mostly feels like a chore. Combat in Morrowind can also feel like a chore, but it's generally sparser (as old as killing cliff racers gets) and becomes a lot quicker in the late game. Morrowind also has a greater emphasis on resource management which occasionally leads to tense moments.
Morrowind has game systems that are more suited towards telling the narrative of the player, going from a weak and rejected outlander to a demi god and savior of Vvardenfell. Folding hit chance in to just damage and level scaling have together made the feeling of progression in the game a lot less tangible and much more arbitrary. In Morrowind, min-maxing your levels is a kind of self-imposed challenge for players who enjoy that kind of thing. In Oblivion, it's necessary to min-max if you don't want the game to feel even more tedious.
The more I think about it, the more I think it's the pace of combat that I dislike, it's like they balanced the game around making all encounters as slow as early game Morrowind
Have you played Gothic 3, or any other Piranha Bytes game? If so, what do you think about it? If not, you should really try it out (hopefully with Community Patch, Update Pack and Parallel Universe Patch), it might fall right down your alley
Found it! No I haven’t played gotchic 3. I’ll have to look into it
Completely agreed about Skyrim's difficulty and the crafting skills being way overtuned and ruining the game. However, if that's your only hangup I recommend playing on Master difficulty from the start and playing with only a single life. It will greatly improve one's appreciation of Skyrim's combat mechanics and learning how block, parrying, staggering and more all interact with one another as you seek gear constantly to help you overcome the challenge. Wards play a much more vital role, as do summons, and even stealth archer isn't as crazy without smithing.
That said I think Oblivion does need defending. People get way too hung up on the attribute gain and major/minor skill system. With a well built character with 50-60 in major attributes, +2 per level in a stat is more than enough to get your core attributes up to 100. The attributes sans Endurance don't even really do that much. That's because Oblivion is a game about *gear* and skills. Skill points are worth twice as much as attribute points for damage for weapon skills in Oblivion and by kneecapping your skill levels you are making the game harder for yourself unnecessarily. It's not even that hard so long as you pack potions, understand damage mitigation via block and armor, and run an enchanted sword. Efficient leveling won't save you from poor play. What you need to succeed in Oblivion is a cohesive build and an understanding of resource management.
Take for example the power of Conjuration. The summons add extra damage but more importantly draw aggro from enemies. Taken as a major skill, it levels more quickly and allows you to summon powerful allies sooner than using it as a minor skill unless you really want to sit around and level Conjuration to 100 by summoning skeletons in the street and brick your character entirely for melee combat. Restoration is similarly powerful for melee builds due to healing and absorb spells. There is a lot of utility in spells even for warriors and by giving yourself access to such abilities it makes the game much easier without the tedium of efficient leveling. Even a pure warrior type character will want to utilize the bevy of enchanted gear options in the game to get an advantage, much of which one acquires from sigil stones, which most players skip getting because they hate portals to Oblivion.
I think people make Oblivion more miserable than necessary and are in general just bad at the game when they say enemies are too spongey and that the game is too hard. It just asks you to pay attention to its mechanics and that should be celebrated in games
I really don't see how Skyrim's crafting system is any different powerwise from Oblivion's custom spells. Both break the game, and both are required to play the game on maximum difficulty, although at least Skyrim's system doesn't force you into playing as a mage.
I have a lot of gripes with Oblivion (mostly about it's melee combat, or that I don't really like the weird blend of typical tolkienesque fantasy aesthetic over the Greco-Roman style the Imperials had in Morrowind). Where Oblivion really succeeds is its quests. Yes, the main quest is undercooked and the Fighter's Guild is way weaker than the other guild quests, but the NPCs really bring the world to life in their side quests in a way that they don't in Morrowind and seldom do in Skyrim. Oblivion wins the title of "most Character" in the TES games for sure.
My favorite game in the series AND my absolute favorite game ever.
Can't wait for parts 2-574
@@SR-ti6jj part 2 is already out. And part 3 is arguably my “is the combat good?” video. And part 4 is me derping around in Skyrim.
So next one I make I’ll just jump to part 5 and only you will know
The final quest of the thieves guild i think its the best quest in the game. Infilitrating the Imperial palace and stole an elder scroll all without being detected is the best shit ever
Seeing as how Oblivion's my favorite Elder Scrolls game so far, I'm definitely curious to hear more of your thoughts on it.
(I also agree that Oblivion's better than both Morrowind and Skyrim, for the simple reason that Oblivion's easier to pick up and play than Morrowind, but it has more nuance and better mechanics than Skyrim--the only mechanic in Skyrim that I really like is smithing because I can create weapons, armor and apparel. Alchemy's nowhere near as fun, and neither is enchanting. Also they completely gutted spellmaking...just...why?)
Preach, incredibly true, hard to out here for a hero of kvatch
lol this video reminds me of the video "why magic the gathering is better than yu gi oh". You even sound like the guy in the video lmao. Your point about how easy Morrowind is to break with metagaming things like trainers and the creature merchants to get insane money and stats is valid but I have a rebuttal: Just don't do that lmao. To the first time player Morrowind's more lax level scaling with enemies when compared to Oblivion is much more manageable. You wont manage to become overwhelmed just playing Morrowind blind. There is definitely an argument to be made that Oblivion's level scaling promotes more skillful play from the player but the primary solution most people settle on is "never use your major or minor skills unless you want to level up". That alone makes a huge pitfall for new players and I don't think we can say Oblivion is objectively better in terms of gameplay. I think the games are close enough in their gameplay loop and the only real fault in Oblivion is how seriously enemies outpace you in the game. I think the real problem with Oblivion is the story and environment being so terribly generic. The mystery behind Dagoth Ur and the civil war in skyrim both have a lot more nuance to them. I think only Arena has a worse story in TES and it's pretty close. Anyway this was a decently conceived video and I enjoyed it. I trust you will touch on my counter points in the next 573 parts.
I agree in principle about the metagaming point, but as someone who has put an unhealthy amount of time into both games I feel that the metagaming eventually stuff stops being as valuable for circumventing the rising difficulty the better you understand it and becomes much more valuable as a means of avoiding tedium.
Things like the mudcrab merchant saving time on getting gold in TES3 and the myriad overpowered spell effect combinations in Oblivion saving time on dungeon crawling are truly indispensable for saving time on repeat playthroughs, but neither game has a good middle ground where the progression feels "right." Oblivion is definitely much worse in that regard imo but I can see why someone who can't restrain themselves from breaking the game over their knee might find Morrowind's difficulty curve less compelling.
One thing that makes Oblivion great was the "createfullactorycopy" command that allowed you to clone your character and then have most epic duel ever.. This new npc would have default AI and would fight back when attacked, but mind you, it has all your skills and stats and plus all your items so it will kick your behind.
Look up "nickies black". Apparently, those clones can have emergent behaviour. Spooky stuff.
Please replace your smoke alarms batteries before recording audio for anything
😂 that is my clothes dryer, I wish the repair was as simple as replacing batteries. The belt is worn. Not sure why my mic picked it up, I couldn’t hear it myself.
What made Oblivion so memorable to me specifically was the spell "Finger of the Mountain". The spell was leveled according to your characters level at the time of when you accquired it. So it could either be fairly weak or the strongest spell in the game, as far as I remember. Problem is, though, that, when accquired with a too high level, the spell becomes pretty much unable to cast due to the sheer amount of mana needed. Seeing the damage potential of the spell after I got it at high level made me laugh out loud, literally. Then I realized the mana cost... Reading about the spell on UESP Wiki made me start a new game solely to accquire "Finger of the Mountain" at, I believe it was level 23, when it was at the most optimal damage to mana cost ratio. I missed something like that so much in Skyrim.
I think you're misremembering the Finger of the mountain spell. It's a more or less useless spell because its cost is much higher than a custom spell with the exact same effect
@@exantiuse497 Oh, you are right
@@exantiuse497The difference is that, at max level, it applies 200 shock damage in 10ft on target. You can't go above 100 damage per second for any singular element in custom spells, which also apply the damage over time. Finger of the Mountain is instantaneous.
The %80 knowledge thing is very true for Oblivion. Right now I’m thoroughly enjoying a hand to hand playthrough, and I’m only able to do so because of multiple playthroughs and 1600+ hours of gameplay.
Currently at level 48, I mainly utilize the mobility skills, block, and restoration of course to maximize stamina, magicka, health and speed.
I use powerful stamina absorption spells to keep my damage high and increase my stagger and knockdown chance. Spell absorption and fortify magicka/fatigue enchant light armor(for the challenge). I’ve gotten to the point where I toss everything around like ragdolls. My favorite part is at negative stamina most enemies will crumple to the floor, this can happen on a H2H punch which does stamina damage, their own attacks which drain their own stamina depending on the weight of the weapon and type of attack used, or via the absorption spell itself.
I’ve gotten to the point where I can reliably control when an enemy hits the floor, which is very useful for kiting in large groups or making powerful enemies like ogres, Xivilai, and clannfears look like buffoons. It’s definitely hard and requires skill with the combat system because you have to be fast and precise, but it’s really fun and rewarding.
I still find enjoyment in Oblivion because you can get very creative with your build, and the more knowledgeable you are about the game, the easier or harder you can choose to make things on yourself. That even applies to the hardest difficulty in Oblivion, which ironically becomes extremely easy because of the exploits you have to learn to beat it.
I imagine tes 6 to be like this: You approach enemy (they dont see you unless you do, because detection is complex!) and have 5 option. Attack, magic attack, defend, magic defend, heal.
I like oblivion the most, because its not designed with braindeath in mind like skyrim is, but people actually speak unlike morrowind. A decent balance between convenience and complexity
Oblivion has the best music, too.
Why is the combat music so much quieter than the "calm" music?
To be honest, I never look for a challange when playing these games. I always play on default difficulty, or higher, but I never see how turning enemies into damage sponges makes the game better. Getting one shoted doesn't make playing more fun either, and it's immersion breaking to be honest. I play to expirence interesting stories, make unique character, explore cool cities and locations. That's it. And my challenge usually comes from kind of RP restrictions I put on myself, rather than difficulty itself. I do have however gamer diginity to never lower difficulty past medium, so I need to make my characters atleast somewhat functional xD
574? 574 parts? Geez, maybe you'll be finished when ES-6 comes out!
Counterpoint, combat in Oblivion is absolute trash without spellcrafting, which is gatekeeped behind either a DLC or a single questline (seven quests deep). Skyrim addressed and fixed many of the fundamental problems with Oblivion's design. Character building in Oblivion is extremely frontloaded, with 99% of the most important decisions being made in the sewers, right after you struggle through the *worst* character creator in video game history (noooo, you can't only move one slider at once!). Efficient leveling is a waste of time. It's better to just level up as little as possible and raise all your important skills to 100. Goblins with 900 health are not fun to fight unless you use custom spells, which really is not all that different from using alchemy, smithing, and enchanting in Skyrim.
Oblivion enjoyers, rise up!
Why did you show up just now. I’ve been arguing on behalf of oblivion with morrowind plebs my age for 10+ years.
Oblivion respecters unite
Morrowind is the best of the three games because I can be playing on my axe wizard and find some daedric dagger and then make a new sneaky character and go get that fucking dagger from right where it is laying. The shit in the world is static, anything you find was put there by a developer for you to find. It makes the whole world feel WORTH exploring. Its not some leveled loot at the boss chest, its the random daedric wazashaski I found in some sunken ship.
Also I would hate if in Morrowind I managed to kill vivec, Almelexia and stop Dagoth Ur but still find common creatures and rabble to be a "challenge"
That ship set sail a long time ago narrative wise and gameplay wise.
I will say Oblivion has the out that you never fully become a god until the DLC. So the HoK getting bodied by some random bandit hedge mage in glass armor isnt so egregious.
I disagree with your assertion that Late game Oblivion is harder than Early game oblivion.
In late game oblivion you have basically infinite health potions and poisons of paralysis among other things, so the difficulty is kind of trivial. By late game you should have infinite gold so you can solve the game how you wish, there are multiple systems by which to do so.
Early game Oblivion, on the other hand, its totally possible to have some difficulty with hard fights, like siege of Kavatch quest and some Oblivion gates are actually kind of hard and you can die, kind of like mid game, although typical enemies and dungeons early game are easier than midgame and lategame. Its the tough fights early game that have the risk of dying, I agree mid game is hardest.
I think difficulty over time is like 35-55-10. I remember as a kid playing on console when this game first came out (the original intended audience) I died ALOT early game, especially in Oblivion gates.
Looking forward to the Remake Remaster of Oblivion
I would agree if the game had kept the alien setting of morrowind, and if it wasn't level scaled.
Oblivion is my favorite elder scrolls and either my first or second favorite game ever (basically tied w/dark souls 1). I feel like it's a good middle ground between morrowind and skyrim - still has a bit of depth to it and isnt entirely casualized but also plays a lot better. Has my favorite soundtrack in the series and I feel like bethesda's quests peaked around that time and have steadily gone downhill since. Hoping the rumors of the oblivion remake are true
You don't need to be a mage in oblivion either for the mages guild
True, but it is easier with magic, and the rewards are substantial.
The thieves guild and dark brotherhood do actually require stealth as well.
I’m not saying oblivion is perfect, I wish they had more of that
Dark brotherhood doesn't either you just lose the bonuses and if you're a mage chameleon and alteration for locks for the thieves guild.
i made a big mistake in character creation my last playthrough and chose a high elf + apprentice birthsign mage….every mage i came across for the next 110hrs terrified me, but i completed the main story + plenty side stuff without lowering difficulty, the level of satisfaction that playthrough brought me was awesome
That’s my favorite build, the glass cannon mage.
Excellent Video Topic, I agree Oblivion is the best.
I disagree on Morrowind. Players back in the day understood what hit chance was and how to play RPGs. Arena and Daggerfall had hit chance. It was something people that played TES were used to. Only completely new players to RPGs or video games might not know about hit chance. Not to mention that lots of video games used to come with manuels that told you how to play the game. It is entirely a personal problem if someone refuses to learn about, or adjust to, a game with hit chance. People should integrate with pre-existing games and genres so that those games and genres don't get watered down into being action games with a handful of rpg elements tacked on.
While Oblivion's combat system is better, there is just nothing memorable in Oblivion beyond Criminal Scum. Morrowind is a better RPG in the world building and character sense, it isn't a hack and slash so those "gamebreaking" things are just a different way of solving a challenge and being able to break the game in 5 minutes is after watching videos or playing it a lot, not peoples first experience with it, espeically those who played it at release. The level scaling in Oblivion can gimp people on their first playthrough as well not knowing the game / builds so it isn't perfect. I do wish they carried and refined the oblivion style system with better lore / world building of Morrowind because everything Bethesda has done since has just been awful.
Morrowind has best progression, although Oblivion's is fine too. But I like Morrowind's system most because it gives you most freedom. For example, Monk class is unplayable in Oblivion, but it is playable in Morrowind
I do love morrowind too, but monk is very tedious in both games in my opinion. Add damage fatigue spells and monk is actually good in oblivion
no it doesnt
What I dislike about skyrim is low enemy variety and how the butchered the magic. Pretty much all magic in skyrim is related to damage: do damage, take less damage, heal damage. I'm also upset about frost spells, because I think they are the most interesting ones mechanically: they slow enemies down and drain their stamina, which whould have been cool if like 80% of enemies didn't resist it or were outright immune. Think about it, what major groups of enemies are we fighting in skyrim? Bandits, undead, animals, falmer and dwemer automatons. Great, most bandits are nords, all undead resist frost, snowy variants of animals resist frost, automatons are straight up immune and only farmer don't have a resistance, great
I started playing Skyrim and then later played oblivion when I was a teenager, have always thought the quests were waaaaaaaaaay better, couldn’t get into morrowind later as an adult despite it being super interesting to watch/learn about, playing it is just not as fun as oblivion for me, and Skyrim is so lame at this point so oblivion wins
The balance of kvatch if you go after level 10 is the most out of whack difficulty in the game. Is the only place you have to fight 8-10 daedra at once
Strongly disagree about being better.
I feel most of all things considered Oblivion has very annoying unbalanced combat. I talk about melee combat. Staggered every few seconds is no fun. Power attacks dont matter, cos its small chance to proc paralyze/knockback/disarm, its better to just swing repeatedly, which again gets you staggered when enemy blocks. Physical weapon dmg output is so low I have to use poisons for every stronger enemy.
I play games at high difficulties.
Morrowind, Skyrim didnt have this problem in higher difficulties. You struggle or avoid stronger enemies early, and after certain levels you can engage them well prepared, eventually you became the mythical Nerevarine/Dragonborn unstoppable force. In Oblivion you are still the regular average dude after all and common enemies still gives you trouble, which I find unfulfiling.
Oblivion world design is so repetitive its super boring. Vast world stretched and empty. Each aleyid ruin, each cave the same. No uniqueness to it. Feels procedurally generated to me. Not to mention the overall design being so cartoonish weird. I prefer Morrowind, Skyrim darker tones and sharp edges.
Only thing that is greater than Morrowind Skyrim are quests.
And music is great same as Morrowind and Skyrim.
After all its based on personal preferences. This is my feeling about Oblivion. Still a good game tho.
Melee combat is pretty fun if you have decent block and armor, and you utilize power attacks. They often stagger your opponents and you don’t get staggered very much with decent armor
0:18 its the newest one
Over a decade old.
13:32 Woahhhhhh there buddy, ovlivion racism is uncalled for 😂
No love for Daggerfall?
I may be an old knight, but I’m not THAT old. Daggerfall is awesome and I love it, but it’s just a different category of game, it’s so different from the next 3.
Advantages/disadvantages are great though, I’m really sad they ditched that instead of expanding on them.
@@theoldknight85 I didn't mean to imply that you're old or not, I'm that old myself I never Played Daggerfall back in the day, I waited for completion of the Daggerfall Unity fan project. I plan to play Daggerfall properly with mods, after I beat heavily modded Oblivion. That being said, your point is fair enough. I love the Advantages and disadvantages, they should have kept those along with skills like Giantish and Orcish, allowing the player to play as a smooth talker, essentially a pacifist. And climbing too. I do love Morrowind and Oblivion, Skyrim a little less, it's too dumbed-down, but it can be modded to one's preferred taste. BTW a modder made a fix for the weapon damage in Oblivion, after he saw your ESIV : Oblivion Weapon Damage SCANDAL video, the mod is called Gentleman's Better Weapon Scaling, it's on Nexus mods, just a heads-up.
@ wow! That’s awesome! My first question would have to be to wonder if it doubles weapon damage for bandits, guards, and other NPCs as well. I think I’d really enjoy that mod if it helped the enemies deal more damage too.
@@theoldknight85 I'm not sure, I installed it in my heavily modded Oblivion mod list, but I haven't tested it. Try it yourself in the meantime, and see if it indeed fixes the issue. I subscribed, I love your videos. It's great to see someone approaching Oblivion and its systems from a more mathematical perspective. I hope your channel blows up!
Pretty ambitious assuming you'll be able to fully explain why Oblivion is better in only 574 videos.
Last year, after playing alot if skyrim I tried Morrowind and tbh, for me, it's a 10/10 RPG. It has its flaws, like the main quest is not fully realized, and some bugs in the original version, but with open mw its really good. I can't bring myself to play oblivion for more than 20 minutes because it lacks any feedback of skyrim in battles, which already has very little of feedback, and it has no system for rolls for hits or misses, which makes fights very underwhelming imo. And also, to me, oblivion is very ugly. But I respect you liking the game, I hope you don't mean the title as "this opinion is objective". I will not even start on story quality or quest stuff, because I know of oblivion quests only from videos, so I'm not the guy to argue about it. To me the best mainquest is daggerfall, storywise, and gameplay all of tes games make main quest too... accessible because it's designed to be played by any class. Skyrim makes all of the quests accessible and its lacking in content, but skyrim got the best "feel"
Maybe after fall of avelon fully releases I give oblivion a shot again
Broken morrowind is better than morrowind lol
Oblivion with some updated graphics , leveling system , and some new DLC would be enough to be better than the other TES titles alone.
The voice acting alone is far superior to anything else in the series .
Patrick Stewart as the emperor ? Come on
PLEASE make all 574 parts i have subscribed and hit the bell. (Lwk you're wrong partially Morrowind is actually Peak but your right that its better than skyrim)
Scaling is oblivions biggest double edged sword, on one hand it makes the game feel like an RPG because you have to pick a playstyle, but on the other hand if you don't already understand the scaling mechanics you might wonder why you're level 15 and your hp has barely changed from level 1 cus you didn't rush 100 endurance. Or why you keep getting +5 intellect for leveling alchemy on your assassin. Magic was the best in morrowind, the quests and world were the most alive in oblivion, and skyrim just has the best melee combat from a feeling standpoint but the worst magic. Oblivion meets in the middle and is perfect for it. There's mods that fix oblivions stat scaling like +5 mods so you don't have to grind skills you don't want to use just to avoid being outscaled. One of the biggest issues with said scaling is monster damage/monster health and player damage. And sure you could always turn down the difficulty but with it goes the challenge as you progressively take it lower and lower to compensate for bad scaling. Now people who have been playing oblivion a while know there way around this such as perma sneak/70%+ Chameleon, fortify and %shield enchants+reflect, rediculously powerful magic and potions but for a new player it was incredibly easy to end up with a character who felt way weaker at 25 than they did at 10 or 15. I'm convinced this is why they "dumbed down" the talents and leveling in skyrim because it's a lot harder to mess up and you're never locked into building a fantasy character, more like a god of all trades. I love oblivion the most it was my first elder scrolls and it undoubtedly has the best guild quests in the series as well as nailing the feeling of being a great yet accessable RPG however a lot of the depth and character were lost with skyrim for the sake of acessability. I fear for the sake of ES6 because it'll be a near carbon copy of skyrim or even more diluted. I mean not a single bethesda game since Fallout 4 has even been a good RPG. Just action games with RPG elements. Your point about becoming a god too quickly in both morrowind and skyrim are actually my biggest gripes with both games. When I play skyrim I have to intentionally avoid enchanting but if you do that or ignore improving armor you are rapidly outscaled on master or higher. Even though skyrim has the most skill expression in terms of parrying, shield slamming and gauging distance on hits you're still relegated to spamming potions, spamming enchants, spamming armorsmith or combining all 3. Add onto that in skyrim each tier of armor is actually barely even an upgrade until you smith to improve it, (god forbid it's enchanted and you don't have 60 smithing.) That weapon sure it'll do 10 points of fire damage but uh your improved war axe just does that amount of damage without the enchant. All in all great video though we might disagree about certain aspects of the scaling (I don't like grinding skills that don't fit my class just to get the stats every character needs to not fold from scaling) because it creates the same issue as a non ENCH/ALCH/SMITH skyrim run. At some point you will have to exploit terrain or pop out and shoot just to get past some terribly scaled mob and the only compensation is dirty gameplay or exploiting the systems within.
@@jamesbiggs2745 thanks for the thoughtful response, I’d just push back and say that I never efficiently level and I certainly don’t grind skills I don’t want to use. Literally the only exception is endurance, and I just go to a trainer for block at low levels to guarantee a +3 and forget about it.
I definitely agree the game does a poor job conveying information to a new player.
@@theoldknight85 I ended up going and watching your attributes tier list and skill tier list and honestly I didn't know how either of those calculations worked. Knowing what those video told me I had a lot of things wrong. For example I thought intellect worked the same as endurance in terms of stacking early instead of just giving flat magicka regardless of level and that the +5 mod I play with is ultimately unnessisary because I never understood the magicka system. I thought the only way I could play on high difficulties was with some basic chamaleon, high attributes/good sneak skill. I thought the pools of both mana and health needed to be stacked up early for any late game viability. Now that I know that's not the case I can see why endurance is the only one that really matters. That being said I think this does back up what I was saying about the scaling being busted but all your videos have helped me get so much depth out of the game, thank you. I've only got 60 hours on oblivion from 2 characters and this has given me the knowledge to experiment with/build a better 3rd character. (I've never even used an enchanting table, I didn't know they existed in oblivion). Again thank you, this has given me an excuse to play my favorite game at least 1-2 more times.
Skyrim is too generic and easy. Morrowind is too convoluted and has unnecessary challenges, not to mention every attack is a roll of the dice whether it hits or not. That's why i barely played Morrowind. Skyrim is more bearable, but oblivion is soooo much better. There's a good reason oblivion is my number 1 favourite game.
Great video with many good points. 🙂
brave take
imho Morrowind is the best but good vid
Creeper and mudcrab merchant break the game, i agree
you sold me on morrowind succesfully and reminded me how oblivion failed entirely mechanically for me, thanks :)
Oh its about morrowind n oblivion baby
Skyrim is great but it dumb down everything; magic, quest, game systems, undeads, color panel, variety monsters.....
All dumb down
Here before this blows up
It never gets old when things blow up
Finally, an objectively correct TH-cam channel
In my humble opinion, it is the worst.
After binging Morrowind for 2 straight years, walking out of the sewer into the sunlight was almost Holy. The bumpmapping... the HDR lighting.
The music, transcendent.
Bethesdas greatest blunder was letting the mee-too's chase Jeremy Soule off.
Jeremy Soule scammed a lot of people on Kickstarter. It's clear Bethesda didn't want to work with him again after Skyrim because by late 2014 it was clear he was never planning on delivering "The Northener". He even tried to make his own music software which is where people suspect the money went, but I also heard some people say he bought an expensive yacht shortly afterwards. The allegations you're talking about happened in 2019 long after he'd vanished after taking a huge amount of money on Kickstarter with nothing to show for it. Bethesda would be stupid to hire him again, even if the 2019 allegations aren't true everything else about his character is terrible.
Oblivion suffers from sub-optimal levelling against an overtuned levelling curve.
For example; Minotaurs spawn at player level 14. 300 Health, 30 points damage, and have a disintegrate armour effect. And if you've been levelling 'wrong,' you might have 140 health and do ~18 damage, fatigue permitting, wearing Mithril (~25 armour rating).
And they can spawn in packs.
You have magic, enchantments, and more. Also, if you put +2 into endurance each level you’d have more health than that, and that requires a single increase to block, armorer or heavy armor throughout an entire level.
Your right if you play the game like an action game and completely ignore all progression mechanics you will be weak, but that is exactly what makes it a great game. It’s not god of war or assassins creed or one of the other hundred games that plays that way that is beatable no matter what you do.
The art style alone makes Oblivion worse than skyrim
Oblivion is a game that by all rights, should be a pure classic. But instead, it's a glorified tech-demo for the Xbox 360.
I only ever beat Oblivion twice; once as my failboat rogue (seriously; I do not recommend), and again as a mage.
IMO: The story sucked, the level scaling made combat far more tedious than Morrowind or outright encouraged ass-backward role play in the alleged role-playing game (Cliff Racers don't randomly spawn with end-game armor, FFS), fast-travel and loop-cave logic made most exploration repetitive, and most of the quests were meh at best.
It wasn't until I played The Shivering Isles that I genuinely enjoyed myself. That experience was actually pretty great.
Oh...and it crashed all the goddamned time on PC.
Oblivion was, hands-down, the most unstable game I had ever played up to that point. Having grown up playing DOS games and enduring the tech-horrorshow that was Windows 98, that's an impressive feat. The culprit for why Oblivion is so notoriously unstable would turn out to be the Xbox 360. By that I mean that Bethesda only optimized and QA tested Oblivion for that specific console and didn't give a damn about PC ever again. (just look at all the bugs and game crashes the Unofficial Oblivion Patch fixes; it's INSANE)
Bethesda then did the same thing for Fallout 3, only it was even somehow WORSE. That was the game that finally shattered my naivete and trust in any AAA game company.
My experience with FO3 and Bethesda's tech support was so bad, I didn't buy another Bethesda game from 2008 until literally this year, and even then, only because it was cheaper to get Morrowind as part of a sale bundle than buying it piecemeal was at the time. (paid 6 bucks for Morrowind; got Skyrim and Oblivion included on GOG)
I genuinely wanted to love this game even more than I did Morrowind, but it was like someone took all the mystique, talent, and quirkiness out of that game, and replaced it with generic tedium and tech wank. (almost literally; because of everyone's obsession with Bloom Lighting back then, caves glowed like they were covered in fairy-spunk)
Morrowind is too boring once you get to the breaking point, Skyrim just straight up is dumbed down and literally made for babies. Oblivion is a fun romp that is legitimately based on what you as the player make it❤
and?
HAHAHA let's look and point and laugh at this bad production notice how in the beginning of the video you can see Xbox game bar recording. Let's laugh at him guys
Oblivion will always top Morrowind and Skyrim
i will always bottom for the Adoring Fan
If you think Morrowind is difficult it's honestly just a skill issue. You like Oblivion more because you're bad, your opinions are bad, and also you should feel bad.
I said that Morrowind is worse than oblivion because after you gain some game knowledge it becomes absurdly easy, which is explicitly the reason I give for liking oblivion more. Did you watch the video?
biggest cope ever
@@theoldknight85 oblivion is just as exploitable and broken as morrowind, the first half of your vid is basically saying youre using exploits in morrowind but not oblivion
@ trainers are not exploits. Neither is the scamp, but if you think that is cheesy he isn’t required.
Stop meta gaming
@@TheVisitorSNAFU huh?
Oblivion was easily the best of both worlds between Skyrim/Morrowind, and the most balanced game in the series tbh
My hope is that Elder Scrolls 6 uses Oblivion as its main source of inspiration!