You'll see people in love with this game. Calling it amazing or even best TES title. You'll see people who think it's a boring mess. You're reading one of the latter ones right now. Oblivion was the first game Bethesda tried to do in what is now arguably "their style" of "time killer walk around the open world and do stuff because you can accomplish pretty much everything and anything in a single playthrough" games. Switching from a more nuanced (and sometimes a bit too complicated) system of Morrowind, and going into the more "todo list", "enemies scale with you" and "radiant quest" systems wasn't particularly smooth in this first attempt. Playing without mods means everything is always boringly scaled to your level, so the best advice most people give when starting Oblivion is avoiding leveling up. So even at its core, before we get to the fact that Oblivion also happens to be the first game to sell cosmetic, now infamous Horse Armor, DLC, Oblivion is a deeply flawed game where you can indeed do everything. But that "everything" feels like doing the same thing over and over again without a real end or conclusion. It's not without nice things. Some of the voice acting is really good (not only from the renowned actors), Dark brotherhood questline, despite the clunky mechanics of the game, is surprisingly well done and the Shivering Isles expansion has some fun events (that also bring a canonical closure to the game, even if you can play afterwards). Perhaps for you, even without mods, this will be entertaining. Despite the sameness, despite the ugliness. Perhaps you will be as bored as I was. Personally? I wouldn't recommend spending time on it.
You'll see people in love with this game. Calling it amazing or even best TES title. You'll see people who think it's a boring mess. You're reading one of the latter ones right now. Oblivion was the first game Bethesda tried to do in what is now arguably "their style" of "time killer walk around the open world and do stuff because you can accomplish pretty much everything and anything in a single playthrough" games. Switching from a more nuanced (and sometimes a bit too complicated) system of Morrowind, and going into the more "todo list", "enemies scale with you" and "radiant quest" systems wasn't particularly smooth in this first attempt. Playing without mods means everything is always boringly scaled to your level, so the best advice most people give when starting Oblivion is avoiding leveling up. So even at its core, before we get to the fact that Oblivion also happens to be the first game to sell cosmetic, now infamous Horse Armor, DLC, Oblivion is a deeply flawed game where you can indeed do everything. But that "everything" feels like doing the same thing over and over again without a real end or conclusion. It's not without nice things. Some of the voice acting is really good (not only from the renowned actors), Dark brotherhood questline, despite the clunky mechanics of the game, is surprisingly well done and the Shivering Isles expansion has some fun events (that also bring a canonical closure to the game, even if you can play afterwards). Perhaps for you, even without mods, this will be entertaining. Despite the sameness, despite the ugliness. Perhaps you will be as bored as I was. Personally? I wouldn't recommend spending time on it.
