This game easily has 100 hours of content
I agree. Literally I see 100 hours of play time in this thing without getting bored. While level 1 I found a Vampire colony by accident and killed them, did a quest, explored. Then I wasn't happy with my character and I started over. I went back and killed those damn Vampires again (Vampire dust is $$$) but I'm still not happy with my character so tonight I'm starting all over agin.
"Power leveling" isn't so attractive in Oblivion as it was in Morrowind. Mostly I think because there aren't any Misc skills anymore. But that's a good thing. This time around I'm giving my character the skills he truly uses most. I was trying to power level with my first two characters, the first much more than the second. But it became clear fairly early on that that wasn't a good idea.
The interface SUCKS. I can't believe how much worse it is than Morrowind. Much of it screams console--the big huge fonts, the need to scroll everywhere. And why the goddamn hell doesn't ESC get you out of every menu? It's ludicrous. But other sucky things are puzzling since they would benefit both consoles and PCs. Where the hell are the tooltips? For god sakes give us some tooltips! Is the interface customizable in the CS? In Morrowind you left-clicked your mouse and it brought up EVERYTHING you needed. This F1 through F4 stuff is getting old fast.
When people used to bring up how parallel Console/PC development invariably screws up a game, I'd agree with them but always mention Morrowind as the exception that proved the rule. Bethesda managed to do the interface right with Morrowind. So how they could fuck up Oblivion so bad is bizarre and puzzling and very sad.
3.6 GHZ, 2 MB RAM, ATI X800XT, performance is very very good.
It crashes a LOT. I would say half the time I try and load a save game it CTDs. Sometimes, rarely, it will crash when loading a new zone, once it crashed during lockpicking. But I don't have the latest drivers installed--I'm guessing I'm almost a year out of date--so I have no right to complain about that ... yet.
Weird weird slowdown when there are invisible characters in view. Remember in Morrowind when sometimes in a dungeon something would be visible--you never knew what--that caused you framerate to drop down to 1 or 2 FPS? This happens in Oblivion too. But again, not the latest drivers so I have no right to whine about it.
I can find no way to read a a book or scroll in a container without first putting it in my inventory, then closing the container, going into my inventory, scrolling aaaaall the way down to find the damn thing, reading it, then dropping it. In Morrowind you had something like 30 or 40 items in your inventory in view at once. Thanks to consoles, you now have something like 8, and they're overly huge, take up way too much space. But oh, I guess they're ever so easy to read on a low res TV sitting on the other side of the room.
Is it just me or does the water look WORSE than it did in Morrowind. I was blown away the first time I saw Morrowind's water. I'd never seen anything like it. As far as I can tell Oblivion's water doesn't look so good. The waves are all tiled or something.
But combat is sweet. I'm actually using a bow and arrow and loving it. Now I know if I aim right I'll hit something! And the little "health" arc is a nice improvement. Very unobtrusive and definitely useful. Things are MUCH more balanced, you can tell already even at level 1. Creating an übercharacter will not be as easy as it was in Morrowind, if it's possible at all.
Deers, horsies, and doggies! BAD doggy! I love them.
So 90% good things, 10% shitty things. I can live with that.
This comment was edited on Mar 22, 13:00.