TES4:Obilivion

Use ImageShack. You can't use urls that have .php?& in them in the forum.

And with a few .ini file tweaks, your PC will beat the Xbox for visual quality.

 

The adaptive difficulty is annoying, It sure was no fun raiding deadric ruins in morrowind with a maxed out char, but oblivion does a 180 making it increasingly too difficult to fight your way through certian places. Unless you're a munchkin, maxing out the most vital combat stats. It sure is fun to an extent, since it motivates you to think instead of slashing away, actually making summoning a storm elemental a reasonable thing to do, at the time you're able to do that anyway. But it also makes the static elements stand out too much, with crappy stuff laying around on tables and in non-rnadom chests. Also I always get that annoying feeling that a-I should wait to level up before cleaning some ruins, becouse otherwise I'll be missing out on cool equipement, and b-The enemies and stuff I find change with my level and it's way too obvious to give a seamless RPG experience. Other than that, it's the best fantasy hack&slash I've ever seen.

 

You forgot about the size 36 font which only allows for a small amount of text on screen at any time.

 

It sure is awesome, at first at least. After some hours of playiing i turns out to be quite straightforward and predictable tough.

I mean, sure, the enemies *do* cast spells and do other things than just charge whenever they see the player. At least the archers and mages do, with the former often holding position on the other side of a long hallway.
Also I've seen signs of flanking, while fighting multiple city guards, becouse of a bumfight. Other than that, all I've seen was swarming, retreating when low on health and summonung stuff. But it's too predictable, like 'right, so when i hit him over the head now he'll run off and cast a healing spell'. Not as if I'd expect the mage to plymorph into a pink elephant and stomp me till i have to reload, but after doing the same thing at every oblivion gate/ruins/fort it gets repetitive.

Unfortunately most of the cool things are scripted, like guards changing shifts and sitting around in the barracs. Also characters exchanging rumors is fun at first, hearing marouders talk about Kvatch and whatever - hearing exactly the same conversation a nth time is not fun. Not to mention they feel more like a placeholder that had to do in the final version, since the dialogues seem forced and sometimes don't make much sense.

Kinda like Morrowind, there's a lot of cool stuff but it isn't quite polished yet, reminding me of the gameplay mechanics whenever i try to roleplay. But that's what happens when you get quantity over quality. Not as if the quality sucked, it's great but should have been better, with beautyful graphics *not* making up for other flaws to a dedicated roleplayer.

 

Well, you can use scaling to your advantage, if you want to enjoy the story, don't level up, so all of your enemies will be even weaker than you. Then again if you want to play with the high-end equipement like glass weapons and ebony armour, find yourself a cave and level up abit by summoning skeletons and practicing your brawling on them. Did that when I wanted to try out the frost elemental-thingie, but was 30 points short in conjuration. 8 levels later i crawled out of the cave, to be rushed by a random bum, wielding an elven mace (instead of steel mace). Couple of levels later your average highwayman had a glass weapon and enchanted arrows. The moment I decided that it's getting too tough was after i got assraped by a pack of dread zombies, in some ruins southeastish of the imperial city.
Dunno, maybe it's made that way on purpuse, to disencourage people from leveling in such way, with the impact being less severe if you advance slower.

And as for WoW, it can be fun, as long as you don't have to pay for it on a monthly basis, that is for playing along people who just munchkinize characters to sell them to wannabes. Grouping up with some real people on a pirate server and doing some quests that way can be good fun, as long as the server dosent crash that is. As for WoW dying becouse of pepole like me, hell, it deserves to die.

 

Scaling sure sucks if you're not a combat oriented character. That being a bit silly in a combat oriented game, but the possibilities being here, the option is just too tempting. Playing a breton conjurer, I found out the hard way.
The point is, Oblivion can't support poorly designed characters. Or perhaps not-as-perfectly-designed, perfection being a berserker canned inside thick platemail.
The problems with playing a mage are that mana runs out quickly, potions are expensive and alchemy ingridients not numerous enough to work in a long run. In other words, I've found the game rather unbalanced, biased toward simple hack-and-slash gameplay, with cunning not being rewarding enough. They sure are there, all these bells and whistles, but they simply don't do the trick if you rely on them.