People will point at Skyrim and Morrowind to showcase how much better their older games were, but pretend Oblivion didn’t happen. :P
Personally I feel that way about Morrowind - mechanically it’s like a stripped down, worse version of Daggerfall while also being an inferior implementation of a fully 3d game than Oblivion.
Morrowind is imo the best from a gameplay mechanics perspective. The utility magic alone was such a huge loss for future games.
I could cast levitation, walk up to the moon prison, magically open the lock, use chameleon to sneak inside, steal stuff from 30 feet away with telekinesis, and if the guards find me, jump down with slowfall and then escape underwater with waterbreathing.
Of all the TES games Oblivion has aged the worst. If you didn’t play it at the time its really hard to be objective about it now. Too much Bloom and ugly potato faces combined with its floaty, clunky combat make it a chore to play today. Game had some great quest writing though and Shivering Isles is a GOAT expansion. It also has an undeniable, if somewhat unintentional, goofy charm to it that I love.
At the time a lot of Morrowind fans hated it for going against established lore and “dumbing down” the series, but it did well critically and was generally well received by the public. It got a lot of people, including myself, into the series. I went back and played Morrowind and loved it so I can see a lot of Oblivion’s weaknesses more clearly, but I still have a soft nostalgic spot for it in my heart.
I absolutely agree with you. And I did play it back when it came out.
There’s a few more things that goes in the “Meh”-pile of changes Oblivion brought to the table. Like the boundless fast-travel system and streamlining magic (although I did like the quick-cast mechanic. But that got scrapped as fast as it was implemented with Skyrim) and so on.
Oblivion is my personal favorite so definitely up to personal interpretation.
Yeah personally I reckon that Oblivion and Daggerfall are the two best TES games ever made - both are better than Morrowind, and significantly better than Skyrim.
I also reckon that Starfield will be up there with Oblivion and Daggerfall a couple years after the modding tools are released!
