Oblivion: Shame on Bethesda

By Shamus Posted Friday Jul 14, 2006

Filed under: Game Reviews 6 comments

I have a love-hate relationship with this game. It’s wonderful, but also deeply flawed and unfinished.

A while back I mentioned a user-made patch to fix the graphics problems so that the game will actually run as promised. Now here is another user-made mod that fixes the countless broken quests, AI flukes, misplaced objects, missing objects, and other bugs and annoyances with the game. Look at that list of bug fixes. It’s shockingly huge.

I wouldn’t mind a few broken quests. This game world is complex and the AI is ambitious. The game is so huge that a dedicated team of beta testers couldn’t hope to play all of the possible quests in every possible way, looking for unforseen effects and outcomes. To a certain extent, you need this game to go out to the masses before you can find all the problems.

What makes me mad is that the current official patch is marked as “final” and they do not plan on any further updates. Given the sheer volume of issues, that is just shameful. This game is not done, and these guys should do the right thing and finish the job.

Again, kudos to the mod community for tracking down and fixing these bugs. Seriously, Bethesda should send them a cut of the earnings.

 


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6 thoughts on “Oblivion: Shame on Bethesda

  1. Mike says:

    I hate Oblivion it felt too much like they wanted to copy Tolkein and of course failed but not only that the gameplay was slow, sluggish and of course boring. When swordfighitng it felt more like waving a stick at my foe at least when I roll a D20 I can use my imagination lol.

  2. Ben says:

    Not sure if it’s the same unofficial patch, but there’s another huge patching project here: http://www.baldurdash.org/TESOblivion/TESOblivion.html

  3. Steve says:

    I felt it was a good game but you can often find people talking with themselves about the great deals at the shops they run. It’s creepy…

  4. Kelly says:

    This was the only game I ever preordered (except for TF2, but I canceled that after it’d been sitting in Amazon’s cart for over two years). Sadly, Oblivion was a wreck. When I finally updated my system (the previous one met and surpassed the requirements but still failed at playing anything above bare minimum), I was sorely disappointed by how much had been broken since Morrowind.

    Fortunately, I found that patch mentioned, as well as a number of God-sent mods to make it right. Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul (OOO) was the best thing since the unofficial patch, and various mods to make your horse not-retarded and nights not-as-bright-as-day got me hundreds of play-time hours to enjoy.

    Thank God for faithful fans who can code. Bethesda surely does owe them a heap o’ money.

  5. Psivamp says:

    Shamus, your link is dead.

  6. evilmrhenry says:

    try
    http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=5296
    I’m not quite sure if it’s the same mod, but it’s got the same name and focus.

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