Tue, 28 Mar 2006 15:44:00 GMT

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

I've been a huge fan of The Elder Scrolls series since Morrowind. The scale of the TES series has always blown me away just terms of the shear amount of content that they manage to put into the game. Oblivion definitely has lived up to the standard of the series thus far (i'm level 11). There's so many neat features they've added that are really awesome. I feel that I don't need to cover them here, since there are about a hundred reviews online about it. I will however cover my gripes.

  • Mages Guild Teleports: I was going to complain about the lack of an instantaneous system of movement, until I realized that Fast Travel is the equivalent and it's free. So my gripe is that it's unrealistic. Traveling across the world should not take a few minutes. However, I can see that a method of calculating the time travel duration via roads and whatnot would be prohibitively complex.
  • Skilling from Books: The amount of Skill Books in the game is severally diminished. I've found only 1 in the 20+ hours I've played so far.
  • Chests tend to forget your stuff: I've lost about 2000 gold worth of stuff because I left it in chests that eventually get reset by the game with a default set of crap. Thankfully I'm playing the PC version and I can give myself all the stuff I lost by looking up the items in the TES Construction Set, finding the ID#, then adding the item in the in-game console. Only the hollow stump in the Merchant's Quarter in the Imperial City seems to be able to keep your stuff. I bet that there will be some quest related to it later, which might clear out my stuff later, so I'm going to play around with placing a chest with the TES Construction Set which I can use to keep some stuff in. I'd buy a house but they're rather expensive at this point (~15k). I am looking forward to buying one, so that I can arrange all the neat armour I've left sprawled all over the world, around my house. I know, it's a bit OCD to want to do that, but that's just fun to me.
  • Recharging magical items: is ridiculously expensive. If it's a 3000 charge item, it's 3000 gold. That's a gold piece per swing!

Update: I forgot to mention my Oblivion PlayLog that I'm keeping on Backpackit.

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Comments

  • Scott Hughes says
    about 3 hours later
    I'm pretty sure that time passes a proportionate amount depending on how far you are fast traveling. When I was clearing out a dungeon full of very heavy and valuable dwarven weapons and armor, I had to go back and forth to a town which was a stones throw away. Almost no time passes between those hops. But traveling to a city on the opposite side of the world causes, at least, a daylight toggle's worth of time (haven't measured it anymore precisely). This is on the xbox360 version. BTW, I made well over 20k when clearing out that dungeon. It's the derelict mine near Skingrad. It took me over an hour to complete it, but it was worth it... That's enough to buy a house (though I've been spending most of my money hiring trainers for my minor skills).
  • Miscellanous Person says
    4 months later
    The shack in the imperial city is the cheapest house. It costs 2000 gold and the storage chests upgrade is only 700 more. A charge on an item doesn't mean a swing. I have a magic longsword that does ten fire damage per hit, has 1600 charges, and 100 uses when fully charged.
  • Erik Rainey says
    4 months later
    You are correct about the charge/swing issue. However, it doesn't make the situation any better since each successful hit costs more. In your case, 16 gold per hit.