My problem with Oblivion is how enemies seem to be all equal, thanks to how they also level up with your character. One telling example is that a rat is about the size of a wolf and tends to take just as many hits from your sword to be killed. This reminds me of over-sensitive characters in weird Japanese RPGs, but at least those are done to not take themselves too seriously, such that I can consider the enormous rat to be some kind of hyperbole done for effect. Oblivion, on the other hand, does seem to take itself seriously, so I despise being unable to squish the rats with my foot, or at least with a single hit from my sword.
The game needs about a gigabyte of downloaded mods to become an interesting experience.
This leads to my biggest problem with most modern RPGs. The game world consists of a completely static scene (with "changing borders" being some lousy compromise for its complete lack of mobility). Then the actual inhabitants of said scene tend to be "Good guys" and "Bad guys", with the occasional random pixel moving in the sky that is supposed to be a bird. I find Oblivion's "Bandit" class quite irritating, for example. Those guys are potentially very cool, since they all have little camps with supplies, often guarding caves. However, for reasons that I cannot figure out, they are "bandits" and thus try (and fail) to kill you on sight. There is absolutely no interesting interaction, and they tend to be quite weak and guarding absolutely useless things like garlic and sleeping bags. These bandits may as well be wolves armed with swords.
...Speaking of which: Wolves often do not kill on sight. A bear tends not to attack something bigger than it. A rat almost always runs away from an enormous shiny person.
By introducing neutral NPCs that still defend themselves if necessary, there is a lot more life in the game -- especially when it comes to the moral dillemma of whether one should really be going and killing all the rats in an area, potentially upsetting the rat-powered generator that the dumb outsiders know nothing about. In Oblivion, there is no dillemma: If you see an NPC, you either kill it or walk over and press the "Talk" key, depending on whether the battle music has come on.
The game needs about a gigabyte of downloaded mods to become an interesting experience.
This leads to my biggest problem with most modern RPGs. The game world consists of a completely static scene (with "changing borders" being some lousy compromise for its complete lack of mobility). Then the actual inhabitants of said scene tend to be "Good guys" and "Bad guys", with the occasional random pixel moving in the sky that is supposed to be a bird. I find Oblivion's "Bandit" class quite irritating, for example. Those guys are potentially very cool, since they all have little camps with supplies, often guarding caves. However, for reasons that I cannot figure out, they are "bandits" and thus try (and fail) to kill you on sight. There is absolutely no interesting interaction, and they tend to be quite weak and guarding absolutely useless things like garlic and sleeping bags. These bandits may as well be wolves armed with swords.
...Speaking of which: Wolves often do not kill on sight. A bear tends not to attack something bigger than it. A rat almost always runs away from an enormous shiny person.
By introducing neutral NPCs that still defend themselves if necessary, there is a lot more life in the game -- especially when it comes to the moral dillemma of whether one should really be going and killing all the rats in an area, potentially upsetting the rat-powered generator that the dumb outsiders know nothing about. In Oblivion, there is no dillemma: If you see an NPC, you either kill it or walk over and press the "Talk" key, depending on whether the battle music has come on.