I’m at level 32 and still not sick of WoW…

Luckily, there are mods that deal with that too. I started looking into mods since I got another urge to play the game after talking about it here, and I found one called “SPAM” that removes the tedium from leveling so you can play your character how it was meant to be played without having to worry that you’re upping your major skills too fast and will only get a couple +2s when you level up. I found a lot of others that help with immersion, including one that starts you off arriving on a ship like Morrowind, so I’ll probably try to play through the game with those mods running.

OOO + SPAM + Living Economy is probably enough to remove almost all of Oblivion’s issues. The one I had tried before was called Francesco’s Leveled Creatures/Items or something that incorporated a lot of changes all together. I’m not too familiar with OOO in how it compares to Francesco’s, but I’ll probably use OOO this time around so I can see if there’s a noticeable difference.

Perhaps we should rename this blog OblivionTalk? :P

I have a lot of faith in Bethesda, I’m sure their next Elder Scrolls game will learn from the lessons of Oblivion. They did so many things well and they can only get better from here.

I bought Morrowind some time ago but I’ve yet to do anything with it. I think my poor experience with Oblivion as far as trying to perfect a class and thus repeating a lot of stuff has scared me away from that type of game. :[

Mods are a huge plus to Oblivion over WoW, since they allow you to craft the game to fit you and your style of play. Very few games allow these sorts of things, especially to this degree. There are mods that make huge changes to the gameplay or story if you feel you would enjoy the game more that way. For instance, I recall reading about a mod that got rid of the main quest so you were simply an anonymous entity within a virtual world who could go in any which direction “life” took you. You just don’t see that kind of stuff in most games.

I find Molloy’s comment a fascinating comparison between the RTS genre and MMORPGs. The RTS genre is built around everything being competely fair, even to the extent that the maps are symmetrical. The factions are balanced so that while styles differ the ability to win is identical. Thus the skill of the player alone determines victory and this purity is attractive. However, every time the game is over you lose the entire base you just built. WoW, on the other hand, lets you keep what you won every time you log off, so that you can see and enjoy a gradual progression of your character. Whether one genre is more enjoyable than the other is going to be up to an individual, but I think they both have their merits.

Lastly, @Deman, how can you say EVE is more casual than WoW? EVE is an insanely intense and PvP-driven game, where your character is capable of enormous losses very quickly and where you can see weeks of work disappear in one short battle. The fleet maneuvers can take hours and hours and the logistics are massively complex. I think EVE is a fantastic game that greatly rewards teamwork and offers a deep player-driven environment, but casual it is not, unless you stay in High-security Empire space the entire time in which case I would argue you are missing out on the meat of the game. Compared to EVE, WoW is a kids game where you can sit back and kill some stuff without worrying that dying will cost you everything you are carrying as it does in EVE, and enjoy the fun story telling as you slowly make your way to Lvl 70. The hardcore gameplay in WoW, the high-end raids, are completely optional.

Anyways, all this to say thanks for the concern, I don’t think I am addicted too badly, any worse than any other game I’ve played at least.

I really fucked up Oblivion. It could have been great for me, but I spent so much time trying to perfect my class that I replayed the same, tired crap in the beginning 5-7 times over. All those quests were redone so many times that nothing was a surprise or a challenge. I really, really liked the game when it was fresh (even on my crap computer), but as I started redoing things with a new classes it became increasingly annoying to the point that by the time I’d get a somewhat decent distance into the story I’d suddenly lose all interest in playing. Because of that I never got very far along in the story — the furthest I got (not sure which time through) was to where I had just started convincing other towns to provide support to Bruma. And I never reached a double-digit level because I spent so much time trying to ensure my class didn’t suck by developing skills as much as possible. Even now that I have a computer that would allow me to play at 1680×1050 with highest details I’m very wary about installing that game again, because I fear I will once again dip out after doing the same early quests (seemingly) for the billionth time.

In my defense, the first time I restarted the game was because I had no idea you could catch diseases or heal them. I eventually turned into a vampire, and I started the quest to cure it, only to realize it was really fucking hard. Because I also had no idea you could bite sleeping people to nullify the vamiprism, I thought I was completely fucked and restarted. :[