Originally posted by: Bateluer
Your choices in Oblivion are very slim. When the Fighter/Mage/Thieves/Dark Brotherhood Guild gives you a quest, there's almost always only 1 way to accomplish it. You run out, complete that objective, run back to the quest giver, click on a single word of phrase as your dialogue choice, get a simply reward, begin next quest. Thats a small variation on the common 'Fedex' quests (Go get this, bring it here VS Go do this, come back). In a proper RPG, you'd be given at least two possible ways of completing the quest. At the base, these could simply be the 'good' way and the 'evil' way. You could make this more complicated by playing various factions and guilds against each other. Where a fighter's guild quest has you do something against the mages guild, but if you speak to the mages guild, they'll give you more information that would allow you to complete the quest in a different manner. In that case there'd be three possible outcomes, Fighters Guild Benefit, Mage's Guild Benefit, Neutral. This type is only done a couple of times in Ob.
Another thing, when you turn in a questin Ob, generally a few things happen. You get a small reward, usually coin, then either say good bye or ask for more work. In a proper RPG, you'd be able to demand more for your efforts. For example, the quest giver has you go to some ruins to retrieve an artifact. When you return, he offers you 50 gold. Through dialogue, you could demand 100 gold, or decline the reward entirely and simply give him the artifact. At its simplest, this is also just good vs evil. You could take this further depending on what the artifact was and what he was going to use it for.
The player character is Ob feels like they don't impact the world as much as they should. Nobody knows who they are. Hell, most players probably don't even know their character. When I completed a quest in Ob, such as the female thieves ring in Anvil, some of the guards would then have a small blurb about it as one of their possible gossip blurbs. This is a good thing, makes the player feel like them impact the world. Unfortunately, most of quests don't do this. And even after your fame rating rises very high, nobody seems to recognize your or now your name, unless they've met you before. Reputation should play a bigger role.
Since its solo based, there are also no memorable characters. There aren't even any well done, memorable NPCs. Because you have no dialogue with them, they don't leave an impact on you. They are simply quest givers, merchants, repair bots, and space fillers. A good RPG is kinda like a good novel. The reader/player should be part of the story, interacting with and impacting the individual characters in the game as much as they impact the overall story.
In Torment, you can influence your party members in several ways. Several, (Nordom, Dak'kon, Fall-from-Grace, Vhailor) come to you with 'baggage.' Nordom's orderly, logical mind was infected by chaos from the plane of Limbo, you help him re-establish order within his own mind by embracing the individuality that chaos has given him, or you can royally fvck him up.
Dak'kon swore to serve you for the rest of your life without knowing you were immortal, and has been bound to you ever since, and you can't release him because you are not the incarnation he made the oath too. Dak'kon's people, the Githzerathai, are fiercely independent and despise servitude. Serving you is never ending torture for him. You can choose to rub salt in the would every time you talk to you, by addressing him as 'slave' and so forth, or treat him as a trusted friend. Treating him as a friend (though dialogue) grants you both extra experience, quest solutions, and more insight into the game's story.
I won't get into Grace or Vhailor or Morte here, but you get the general idea. Ob has no memorable characters that the player can identify with.
The first person shooter aspects have no place in an RPG. They make battles less strategic and simplify the overall game. In IWD(2), also action oriented RPGs, far superior to Diablo IMO, battles are often long and complex. Like playing Chess. In Diablo, you simply entered the location and began clicking with the left mouse button regardless of your class. In Oblivion, you ready your weapon or spell, sneak (if you have it), and click away while hitting the movement keys to vary your attacks. In the IWD games, you enter, assess your opponents strength and weaknesses, position and equip your characters where they can do the most damage, then start the battle. Battles can often last for a good half hour or longer, keeping you on the edge of your seat the entire time. Often, the enemies will yield to you, advancing the plot. This doesn't happen in Oblivion.
Oblivion was a fun game to play for a while, its graphics are beyond compare to be certain, but it doesn't leave an impact on you after you've beaten it. In my opinion, its replay value is also pretty limited as well. Because its possible to do every with one character, you simply do everything you can with that character, and then quit playing.
Oblivion's greatest strength is their toolset. I am definitely looking forward to some total conversation mods on the Oblivion engine. There are already some good mods under development for the Morrowind engine, such as The Titans of Ether's Ultima 9 Redemption project.
Edit - I think this is my longest post ever.
Here are some good NWN modules.
This guy is a great module maker for NWN and already has a promising NWN2 module far into development.
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