User blog comment:Draevan13/Thoughts on TES IV: Oblivion./@comment-4113369-20130305164712/@comment-4113369-20130306143752

"European is European"? Admittedly I'm more than a little biased here (I'm Norwegian m'self), but that strikes me as a mind-numbingly ignorant statement. So the same goes for the Netherlands and the Ukraine, then? And India & Japan? Egypt & Kongo? How about Mexico & Canada? They all share landmasses as well, but they sure as hell have their differences, both geographically and culturally. And that's not even getting into how not every single country developed at the same pace, making for rather big differences between e.g. Finland and Germany during the middle ages (Countries from Northern & Central Europe, respectively).

As for the terrain itself, fair enough. They are rather similar, but the fact remains that there are hardly any recognisable features in Oblivion's terrain, because it was for the most part procedurally generated. It all feels the same. In Skyrim, the geography is more varied, both above and under ground.

And as for Morrowind being the problem, I don't think so. The same happened when Morrowind was set to be released: plenty of the "old guard" were initially displeased. But even most of them came around eventually, and I honestly haven't seen the same thing happening with Oblivion. I can't speak for others here, but while I initially considered Oblivion to be a truly amazing game, the novelties it offered wore off after a while.

"Filled to the brim" was probably a bad way of putting it (I was kinda writing in a hurry, I tend to choose the worst times to write stuff like this). What I miserably failed to get a across, was that the enemies themselves were rather generic (I actually agree, the critter population of Skyrim is annoyingly dense). Again, I'd compare it to a cheaply made DnD-setting. Skyrim at least spices it up a little, if not exactly a lot. The roster doesn't feel quite as cheap.

And I don't think Oblivion is a bad game either. It's fairly good, but rather dissapointing compared to its predecessors and successor. Take the levelling system, for instance. It's like they started streamlining the system in Morrowind, and then just went "screw this" halfway through. What you get is more or less as complicated and obtuse as in Morrowind, but with much simpler mechanics. The auto-levelling was also rather horrid (although, fair enough, it was their first shot at it): Marauders somehow getting their hands on daedric gear, for example. Or an artifact becoming absolutely useless later on, because they for some reason let you do the quest for it while you were still in the single digits, and modified the artifact to reflect that.