My totally awesome wiz got me a 360 and a bunch of games for Christmas, including “Oblivion,” which I’ve been lusting after for a while. I expect to lose a good 300 hours of my life on this game, esp. since it’s the “Game of the Year” edition with the expansions.
I’ve never played an Elder Scrolls game before, so I don’t really know much about their classes and stuff - what basic things should I focus on when building my first character? What particular skills or attributes should I choose or work on developing? And so on.
I love Blades, Mysticism, Stealth, and so forth. Conjuration is great.
I will tell you the following: either get yourself a mod to change the levelling system and levelled items or be prepared for some pain. For unknown reasons, the game has issues. All the monsters and things level up with you. Fast. In fact, by the end of the game, even common bandits are bloody-handed gods of war. So do yourself a favor and mod it. You can get some online, I’m trying to remember the website.
Now, on the bright side, once you do you can just walk around and do whatever you like.
The problem with the base game (and it’s very nearly the only dark spot on the game) is that most of your abilities are functionally useless. You don’t want to level up. My first game saw me levelling a lot from stealth and talking. When I had to fight the monsters, however, I got murdered. And if my primary weapon skills increased, I got stuck with even more powerful monsters. Trust me, mod it.
But he has the Xbox 360 version. Will he be able to mod it?
If you can, I completely agree with Smiling Bandit, the scaled leveling is retarded and almost completely puts me off the game. I prefer to play Morrowind on my computer over Oblivion on the 360 as it is.
I suggest making one of those lizard fellas (I forget what they call that race). Basically, go for a thief type character who can snipe with a bow and arrow. Go heavy on the acrobatics, archery, and sneaking. While you can conceivably bash your way through the game with a muscle-bound oaf with a huge sword, you will enjoy it much more if you sneak around and try to assasinate your targets.
I love Oblivion quite a bit, but I have to admit I’m not sure I’d want to play it on the 360. I can’t stand the monster leveling or the leveling system in general. If I were to play it on the 360, then I would design a character that lets you more or less control how fast you level. In other words, pick the skills you DON’T want to use as your major skills. A good option would be to put athletics, acrobatics, and maybe also stealth as majors, and make sure all your other major skills are ones you can avoid using, such as armorer, the weapons skills you don’t want to use, and the armor skill you don’t want. Then, you should level up at a fairly slow, but consistent rate and probably stay in a happy place for difficulty.
If you want to maximize stat gains at level up, though, things will get a lot harder. Really, it’s a great game, but I definitely prefer the game with mods. Also, in Chorrol there’s an Argonian running a shop, check in with her every now and then till you get asked to find her missing daughter. That’s one of my favorite quests.
I just want to say that stealth is almost broken it’s so effective. If you manage to crank up stealth early on, you can walk right up to people and set them on fire with barely any trouble.
I really enjoyed that playthrough. My regular mage playthroughs always involved a lot of lap-running around my enemies.
I agree that the leveling system is pretty atrocious. If at all possible you’re better off getting the PC version, both to access the huge wealth of mods and to take the edge off of the weird leveling system. If that isn’t possible, my advice would be to construct a custom class whose primary skills are things that you’ll never use. (Do NOT make athletics a primary skill, no matter what you do.) the trick here is making sure that you have at least one non-primary skill that corresponds to each attribute.
In any case, after you’ve made your character you can play for a while at level 1, until your favorite skills have increased a fair bit. At that point, you need to look at which three non-primary skills have increased the most, and grind a bit to make sure that you’ve gained at least ten ranks in each skill. You’ll want to emphasize different things depending on how you build your guy, but I recommend increasing STR and CON as soon as possible, since STR makes your life a lot easier and CON determines how many hp you can with each new level.
Anyway, once you’ve ground your way into getting +5s in each of your three chosen skills, bump your primary skills up by a total of ten points, rest, and start again.
So you can see the problem. It’s an absolutely amazing game, but progression kind of sucks without homebrew solutions.
If your playing the 360 version, think about whitch skills you plan to use a lot and make most of them minor skills. Ideally you will want to keep upping minor skills, as that doesn’t change your level, and therefore everybody else’s level. You’ll want to be lvl 20 by the end to complete the Daedric quests but level up slowly.
It’s really easy to up rmagic and weapon skills very quickly, even if they are minor, by continually hitting an important NPC character or constantly casting an extremley minor spell
The character you pick depends on how you like to play. Are you patient and stealthy, or do you like action and fighting? If stealthy then play a thief character, if you like action be a fighter or battlemage.
It’s a fun game just to explore, I’ve had it for months and haven’t even touched the main quest.
I often wonder what is the design rationale behind this. If gaining a level doesn’t actually, you know, make you stronger relative to the enemies, why have a leveling system at all? I’m convinced Final Fantasy VIII only bothered with the appearance of levels because Square didn’t want fans to realize how different the game was from VII until after they’d bought it.
I know what kind of character NOT to build - I did one that was fun initially, but failed miserably. It was silver-tongued thief and archer, excelling also in alchemy (mostly for poisoned arrows). It was fun to play initially, but ultimately become totally unplayable. Every NPC loved me. Plundering castles was fun. And sneak attacks on unsuspecting enemies also. But any wilderness encounter become sudden death. Damn, even mere imp or goblin eventually could off me with couple of hits. Not to mention some vampires or mages. Put me off of game for like two years.
Part of the problem is that you can quickly max out primary skills (like alchemy or speechcraft) - and thus gain levels. But in the meantime your opponents gain lots of hp and ass-kicking skills. And your meager short blade skills don’t even scratch them. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I don’t want to play with paper and pencil, counting which skill I have to train now and planning leveling ahead. It kills immersion for me and takes away any fun from game.
Now I’m going to try again, this time with mod called Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul . Hope it helps. I loved Morrowind and really, really want to love Oblivion.
Damn. Looks like I know what game not to get for the 360 that I bought a month ago. How on Earth could anyone release a game so fundamentally broken that you have to resort to mods and workarounds to get anywhere at all? I thought they had game testers to weed this stuff out.
The OP notes that he got a Game of the Year edition. Does anyone know if they fixed these problems when they released that?
I really don’t know. If it had just meant adding a few tough guys to dungeons, it would have been fine, but since everything levels with you, it does suck. The level 30 god-bandits running around with Daedric weaponry gets really old, fast.
I think the idea was that the enemies would continue to prvde a challenge for you later, but I personally think that it was the fact they hyped their junky AI to Oblivion and back and realized that, frankly, they were dumb as rocks. Half the AI features they hyped were either nonexistent or moronic. I never surrendered to an enemy because they never spared me, and they never begged for their lives, either. Their “AI conversation” nonsense was useless, and half the time I picked up quests from people I couldn’t see (much less hear) yacking across town! And the NPC’s really didn’t do anything except follow the pre-scripted location paths.
Also, endurance doesn’t help you retroactively when it goes up, so you wind up desperately trying to maximize it early. This is totally different from everything else, as no other stat works like that.
Sigh
The sad thing is I really do like Oblivion, but I HATE hype.
I guess, that for some styles of play and for some characters it works. Maybe like straight fighter or mage types that kill enemies rather than talking with them or avoiding them.
I must be playing an entirely different game than everyone else who has already responded. There is a reason that at least one review site that I really trust gave Oblivion the highest rating ever for a 360 game (9.6/10 tied with Gears of War). I have played through the game three times: first with a fighter/tank (to answer the OP, I’d start with this type of character), once with a battlemage, and now with a thief/archer. You don’t ever HAVE to level. You only go up in level if you go to sleep. As there is actually no need to sleep, I don’t do that very often, but often enough. I believe my fighter was around level 28, the mage around 22, and the thief is now around 15, and I haven’t touched Shivering Isles, Knights of the Nine, or the main quest with that character.
Yes, you can wank it to death to make sure you’ve upped the right skills to make sure that you can get the +5 to your characteristics when you level up, but you don’t have to. You can also make essential skills non-primary (those are not the right terms, but whatever), but you don’t have to.
The game is not fundamentally broken. The fact that some people release mods changing the leveling scheme because THEY THINK the system isn’t optimal doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with the game. I like the fact that the monsters level. It is a good challenge. To me it would be very boring to be a high level character able to dispatch monsters with ease. If the monsters are too hard, the game does have a difficulty slider in the options menu - turn it down. Mine is set at about 3/4 - just enough challenge that nothing is a cake walk, but not so much that I want to coat the disk in peanut butter and give it to the dog.
I love OOO. I haven’t gone back to the game since I reformatted, but I was running OOO + Martigen’s Monster Mod (and about two dozen other mods; I love modding the game). I put about 300 hours into the game and still never finished the primary quest.
I think they justified it by saying that they were emphasizing the exploration of the world, and wanted you to be able to explore everywhere. But who really wants that? Seriously, I expect the places far away from civilization to be dangerous. I want a couple of places that are too deadly for a level 1 character. It gives you something to work towards. I don’t find it either realistic (you know, for a game with magic and goblins) or enjoyable that anyone can go anywhere at anytime.
It’s also annoying that high level items don’t even exist when you are a low level. If they don’t want me to get my hands on a master’s mortar and pestle at level 1, they should just make it really rare, and really expensive.
Oh yeah. It become surrealistic later for my style of playing. My character was quite pacifistic gentelman thief who even when caught during attempt of thievery preferred daring escape over fighting and killing innocents. What was surreal, that even later in the game there was nothing worth mentioning to steal in castles - all high-quality items on displays were fakes. But everywhere just outside of town were bands of super-bandits equipped with top-notch weaponry and trained like friggin ninjas. Every single one worth more in equipment than whole hoard that I just stolen from castle… Yeah right. Why they were even robbing peasants on roads? They could buy half the city if they wanted.
I liked Morrowind much more. I wish they’d make Morrowind with Oblivion graphics and physics.
We just picked up the 360 version a couple of weeks ago. IMO, they have done some serious patching and balancing of the game when compared to the PC version (which I played to death). Enemies are a bit smarter, more organic in their fighting. The original ridiculous auto-leveling has been toned down quite a bit. Monsters still scale with you, but at a reduced pace (not getting glass-armor-daedra at level 10 anymore).
Sure, modding was nice on the PC, but the 360 version is less crash-prone, and has far superior graphic detail and framerate than I was able to eke out of my PC graphics card. I highly recommend it.
(Currently playing a sneaky archer lizard with heavy armor and conjuring specialties)
