Oblivion falls into an unfortunate period of both the Elder Scrolls series and games as a whole. It came out at a point where games were increasingly expected to expand technologically, with full voice acting and a larger selection of locations and quests, but also not really able to do that without cutting out the variety and depth that people liked about older RPGs. The result is a massive open world that’s breathtaking and immersive until you’re forced into any kind of interaction with the world or other characters, from dialogue to combat to simply seeing a deer try to walk around the landscape.
Every NPC has the well-documented Play-Doh face and is voice acted by a handful of voice actors who, collectively, do not deliver a line even passably throughout the entire game. I normally wouldn’t talk this much about aesthetics because I don’t especially care and I don’t think many other people do either, but the fact is the staggering mechanical depth and detail that made Morrowind a delightful, eclectic blend of weird and wonderful that just absorbed entire days of my life at a time was sacrificed so that the new instalment could have full voice acting and detailed facial animation, and both are so bad that they make the game actively worse.
I’m not going to go into specific detail about the way Morrowind’s amazingly complex magic system was gutted and replaced by a strictly worse version of itself, but I do think it’s worth noting that this seems to be a good representation of the overall design philosophy behind Oblivion – nobody wants to play anything remotely resembling a pen-and-paper RPG, so cut out as many of the ‘looking at numbers’ bits as you can without getting in trouble for calling it an RPG.
Some people are going to like this a lot more than Morrowind, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. The reason I wouldn’t recommend Oblivion isn’t because I hate the more action-oriented style of RPG; it’s because I think Skyrim does exactly what it was going for without any of the horrible style and design that make it impossible to get into. This doesn’t cater to either the hardcore ‘break the game by minmaxing’ guys or the pure action game guys because the mechanics are shallow and the actual combat feels like fighting your brother in the pool by splashing and swinging a pool noodle.
Dylan's Morsels 