Current Events > What did Oblivion do better than Skyrim?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Hmmm

DB quests were more interesting.
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I like the environment and world a lot more.

Cyrodil > Depressing Snow Land

The faction questlines were also a lot better
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Guild quests in general were massively better.
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Voice acting
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alphagamble posted...

Voice acting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaanWXcVnWs" data-time="
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Quests and factions.
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Spell crafting
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agree, it was mostly the quests and factions that were done better
granted they still had the "why the fuck am i the leader of EVERYTHING" feel by the end of all of them

I liked it in Morrowind where joining certain factions meant you couldn't join and finish other one's quests

Should have been similar in Oblivion and Skyrim
but at least the Oblivion faction plots were interesting
and the quests had more interesting approaches than Skyrim's

The Dark Brotherhood in Skyrim just goes "kill x and return about 8 times before suddenly story happens to the sanctuary out of nowhere"
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Highwind07 posted...

It was more of an RPG like game than Skyrim but at the same time I got bored faster in Obliviion for some reason than I did for Skyrim.

oblivion definitely suffers from too much same-samey shit

personally i think they would have done better have a zone that's very Oblivion'd up
like, more than just gates standing in random places
A whole area where Oblivion spilled out of a gate and is (in-story) getting bigger by the hour
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I didn't play Oblivion, how did they make the the guild quests more interesting compared to Skyrim?
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The Mage's Guild was way more interesting in Oblivion. The landscape was more inviting. Classes had more depth. And the Shivering Isles DLC is arguably the best DLC pack ever released in the history of video games... ever.
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St0rmFury posted...

I didn't play Oblivion, how did they make the the guild quests more interesting compared to Skyrim?

SPOILERS obviously

For example, one of the Fighters Guild quests involves you infiltrating a mercenary group that's been causing some trouble. Eventually they are contracted to slaughter some Goblins that have begun infesting a town. Before you go in, they say they take a drug that makes fighting fun and easier. You do, and you enter a building full of Goblins that don't fight back, and you end the quest by killing all of them.

When you come back to, you find that the place you emptied was full of people

It's a little cliche, but it's a nice variation from simple quests.

Mages Guild was weaker than the Winterhold College though, I think. But it's not like you have to build a magicka character just to do it, so

Dark Brotherhood is WAY better in Oblivion, because it has a pretty fleshed out story from beginning to close
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YOUHAVENOHOPE posted...

Mages Guild was weaker than the Winterhold College though, I think.

I'd have to disagree with that, although my memory is hazy. Part of the problem is that the Winterhold quests just weren't very memorable for me. Yet I can remember traveling around to all of the Mage's Guild halls in the different towns in Cyrodill. Maybe they weren't a large-scale as Winterhold, but things like searching for the Khajiit who drank the invisibility potion-- or picking up the booby-trapped over-encumbrance ring while swimming under the well-- stuck out to me.

I dunno, different flavors I guess.
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You could make potions that actually boosted stats.
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Guilds, thats it. Maybe magic

You could take a goblin clan's totem to the cave of another goblin clan and they would have goblin jihad.

I thought the thieve's guild in Oblivion was a blast. You just randomly see these signs for some mysterious hooded figure around town sometimes, and by the end you are the mysterious hooded figure
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The ability to break the ever loving shit out of it.

You can still break Skyrim, but things like the athletics stat + paintbrush/clannfear claws led to some ridiculous things (like an alternate dimension Arena where you could actually loot yellow rainment)...

Oblivion > Morrowind > Skyrim (and I love them all).
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Story, world, characters, DLC
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Doom_Art posted...

I like the environment and world a lot more.

Cyrodil > Depressing Snow Land

The faction questlines were also a lot better

This is the big one to me as well
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Oblivion also had better glitches.
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Quests were way more interesting and thought out.

To tack on to everything else already said, Knights of the Nine was a great questline. Thieves' Guild actually making you feel like a thief and do thieving to progress it was good, too.

Overall, Oblivion's quests tend to make you travel from city to city more often to accomplish your goal, which is something that I loved. You feel like you're actually working towards a goal instead of just being pointed in the next direction.
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Oblivion had that DB quest in the mansion, which was by far the best quest in any ES game

clearaflagrantj posted...

Oblivion had that DB quest in the mansion, which was by far the best quest in any ES game

The game where you killed them off one by one? Yeah, that was a good one :)
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Guild quests, magic and combat, item management (I enjoyed item durability), and Cyrodiil was a much better environment than Skyrim.
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Oblivion had that feeling where if you went off the path between cities, especially at night, you worried about things attacking you. Skeletons actually could kick your ass, at least early on. Will o wisp shows up? You're dead without a silver or enchanted weapon of a type it won't resist all of the bonus damage from. Enchantments and spell creation, even without breaking the game via chain spells, would let you do things Skyrim didn't let you. None of those "only can put that on necklace and ring" restrictions. Didn't have to do as much nonsense with moving between shops to sell all your stuff, vendors were more like "I can pay up to X for any single transaction, a transaction being you the player selling an item or stack of said items." The spells that improved carrying capacity instead of needing to carry a million of those rare potions that weren't worth buying and were never really worth crafting since you would want the extra carrying weight to bring stuff back from dungeons to sell, but the components for making those potions could make more expensive ones. Less unique items but many of them felt more unique than in Skyrim if we ignore the "literally just X weapon with a tier higher base stats and Y enchantment" kind for both. Better plot lines. Skyrim doing that "overhear Z has work, general quest log entry for it with a map marker" helps but in Oblivion it was usually "overhear that, have to actually find that person through information gathering if you don't know who they are already, THEN quest log" and that made you feel like you actually did something on your own. Shivering Isles was amazing.
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It has better written quests all around.

The music is more ambient which is better if you're into that sort of thing.

Uhhhh...you can attack under water? You can't do that in Skyrim, right? Or am I remembering wrong?

Sean Bean and Patrick Stewart >>>>>>>> Old man that's in everything, other old man that's in everything and chick from Bourne

Factions and cities (not so much the overworld).

Skyrim is better in a lot of different ways, but the factions are such a big part of the games.

Morrowind is my favorite overall. It definitely has its issues though.

Oblivion had:

- spell customization
- better Thieves Guild questline
- better Dark Brotherhood questline
- Shivering Isles (arguably better than all of Skyrim's DLC, including Dragonborn)
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Is there a mod that fixes the level scaling for Oblivion?
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Veggeta X posted...

Is there a mod that fixes the level scaling for Oblivion?

99% sure there was.
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Veggeta X posted...

Is there a mod that fixes the level scaling for Oblivion?

I think I used Oblivion XP: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/15619

Looks like I'm too late to inb4 people saying Oblivion was a more interesting worldscape when Skyrim is objectively twice as geographically diverse as Cyrodiil. At least no one made the erroneous claim that Oblivion has better dungeons. Can't say I approve of the claim that Oblivion had better combat, either: remember hacking away for a solid minute on your eighteenth Xivilai of the hour because the enemy scaling was atrocious, or how archery became practically useless after the midgame?

Anyway, Oblivion had better guilds and spellmaking, definitely. And aside from the Glitch of Doom was less buggy overall; Skyrim's insidious lack of polish, even by Bethesda standards, is something that still grinds my gears to this day.
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Yeah Skyrim got rid of Oblivions copy/paste dungeons but fucked it up with copy/paste quests

X-Pac_Heat posted...

Yeah Skyrim replaced Oblivions copy/paste dungeons with Skyrim's copy/paste dungeons

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Morrowind>Oblivion>Skyrim
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I really liked Oblivion's version of vampires as well. Feeding actually had importances and gave a good sense of pressure.
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Hand to Hand upgrades were a skill tree of their own.
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Spell crafting, as many here have already stated. This was a powerful tool in Oblivion; I used custom spells for everything from leveling up to multiple feather spells.

I hated the perk-leveling up system in Skyrim. Oblivion had a watered-down version of Morrowind's leveling system, but it worked well. Also, limiting you to five training sessions per level helped balance the system in Oblivion.

The D-pad selection system in Oblivion that was nerfed from Skyrim. Never understood why.

Hyyr posted...

The D-pad selection system in Oblivion that was nerfed from Skyrim. Never understood why.

>playing tes on console
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Hyyr posted...

The D-pad selection system in Oblivion that was nerfed from Skyrim. Never understood why.

My guess (based on my own play experience) is that the removal of combining effects thru spellcrafting and addition of Shouts meant that eight favorites was no longer sufficient. I routinely have 20+ favorites in Skyrim, and if all of these things weren't favorited (particularly Shouts), I'd never use them. The two-handed / dualcasting system compounds this, since you can no longer cast magic with sword / shield equipped.

A better system is the one that other games have had for years and Fallout 4 eventually adopted, which was cardinal favorites with 3-4 slots per direction. Hopefully something similar gets implemented in ES6; while Skyrim's favorites menu is ultimately necessary for the way the game's structured, it's still quite tedious and needs improvement.
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Skyrim improved on Oblivion on most things gameplay related, but I think Oblivion just had better storytelling with the main quest and most of the guild quests. I love the lore of Skyrim, but the civil war and main quest didn't seem nearly as dramatic as they could have
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frozenshock posted...

but the civil war and main quest didn't seem nearly as dramatic as they could have

it was really weird having a main quest, and a separate imperial/stormcloak quest...
sometimes it felt like the Imperial/Stormcloak faction was supposed to be the main quest

It's the limitations of the engines that TES use
They can't support a large number of NPCs on screen, and the combat isn't geared toward group fighting at all
So they couldn't have ludicrously large battles for the same reason cities are the size of two American city blocks and have fewer people
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Bow and arrow gameplay
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