Sunday, April 16, 2006

More on Oblivion

A friend lent me his copy of Oblivion, so I could try it out. I played it for half an hour before deciding I didn't like it. Just like in Morrowind the cursor is fixed in the middle of the screen. If you want to do anything, you need to move the camera so that the cursor is over the item or mob you want to interact with. That means a LOT of camera movement, which causes me video game motion sickness. I just can't play this.

I found out how to use the mouse wheel to switch to third person mode, so I see my character from behind. But in that case the cursor still is in front of my character, and I just can't see the cursor any more at all, as I can't see through the head of my avatar. Really stupid control system.

Anyway, I'm not a fan of the class-less, level-less skill system that this series has. Because you *do* have a hidden level, you just don't know it. Your skills tell you how good you are in fighting, and to kill a certain monster, you need a certain amount of fighting skill. Same as level, just harder to know what you need. Especially since you don't get any info about how hard the monsters are that you see, you can just attack and hope they aren't too hard for you.

The graphics aren't bad, but they are more in the EQ2 photo-realistic style, with grey goblins in a grey cave, not very visible. I do prefer the cartoonish WoW style. In the end, Oblivion is just a MMORPG without the MMO part, making it less interesting to me. I'll give the game back to my friend.

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