As you may recall, I never got into Oblivion the same way I did Morrowind and Skyrim. I had assumed this was because all the characters look like weird squishy lumps that are all closely related to each other – regardless of what their race is (every race is squishy lump race). So, I installed Oblivion Character Overhaul to address this issue, and I am pretty happy with how everybody is looking now.
However, this has highlighted what is perhaps the real reason I didn’t get into Oblivion: the tutorial is a million hours long and it is super boring, which is actually foreshadowing for the game that I have yet to play. It seems obvious now, but I suppose when everybody is a horrifying uncanny valley clay monster, that can tend to obscure some lesser issues.
I don’t feel at all engaged or motivated in the whole run around the sewers while the Emperor is being attacked. The call to action is too blunt and faux-grandiose, the setting is uninteresting, and you are forced to spend hours running around on rails against your will.
Morrowind had an interesting setting and a mysterious slow build with a pacing that really drew you into the world and you started to feel like you lived there, and almost no tutorial to speak of. Skyrim had a rails-y tutorial much like Oblivion, but it was (thankfully) much shorter and it at least felt exciting.
So, I don’t know, we’ll see if I ever get around to playing Oblivion in earnest. The character overhaul was an improvement, and people *say* they love Oblivion and its quests, so maybe it just starts out rough and I’ll feel engaged eventually.
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