u/BeignetEtouffee

Oblivion is my favorite game, and I hate it

This isn't going to be a long rant, as most (frankly all) of what I'm going to say has already been said by other people. If you're new to the Elder Scrolls series you might think Oblivion's problem is its leveling system -- you'd be only partially correct; in truth, Oblivion's leveling system is fine. Yes, it can be frustrating trying to get +5 to certain attributes because, unlike in Morrowind, training is limited to 5 times per level, which forces you grind if you want a "perfect" level up. But this is not as big a deal as people think. Attributes hardly matter in Oblivion, and yes, even Endurance hardly matters because by level 20 you'll have so much health and armor that your health bar won't be a concern, even with "imperfect" leveling.

Oblivion's biggest problem is actually level scaling, and the remaster didn't fix it. Certain enemies like goblins will continue to gain absurd amounts of health with each new level long after you've maxed out your own characters damage output through intended game mechanics. This has the effect of turning every character, regardless of roleplaying, into what is essentially a battle mage. Eventually you'll resort to using less than intended game mechanics like weakness to magic stacking and min/maxed enchantments just to keep up with the bonkers level scaling of certain enemies.

This brings me to my point. I LOVE Oblivion. I think in many ways Oblivion was the absolute peak of Bethesda. But every time I drop 20-30 hours into a new character (which I have done dozens of times at this point), the game becomes an absolute slog around mid game. You see, when your primary source of damage is your enchantments and magic, there is 0 reason to select blade, marksman or blunt as major skills. I'd even go one step further and say that you're better off not training them at all because the amount of damage you gain from them (maybe an additional 20-30 damage per swing between level 5 - 100) is completely irrelevant once you reach mid game. And this sucks because enchanting is available to ANY character at level 1, unlike in Morrowind where it was an actual skill that needed to be trained. Enchanting and weakness stacking break the game in a way that's not fun. And there isn't an option to "just don't use it" because of the broken level scaling that I mentioned above.

All that said, I keep coming back to Oblivion time and again and thinking that this time it'll be different, only to eventually find that I can't play the game the way I want because of the level scaling.

/Rant

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u/BeignetEtouffee — 2 days ago