You will probably regret ever saying this and sending me on this rant, but oh well
.
First off, I really like this game. I finished the main quest yesterday and I will most likely restart it with a new character after coming back from short vacations next week. So I really do like Oblivion...
BUT...
I don't know how many of you are old enough to have played the Ultima games, and particulary I mean the Ultima VII. That's the one that really became a point of reference for me, according to which I judge all the other RPG/adventure games I play. On this scale Oblivion places much better than Morrowing but still...
So you have the much hyped AI engine that has a 24 hour cycle and makes people go to sleep at night... wow... and they also eat sometimes, and practice archery or swordplay and maybe something more... wow...
But at the same time you have to realize that the Ultima VII game I mentioned had the same
and much more well over 10 year ago. AND MORE, because those people in Ultima really felt like they were having lives. Smiths didn't just stand there at the counter, they actually made swords (using tools, the bellows and a furnace). Bakers baked bread, and it wasn't just appearing out of nowhere. No, they would get flour, get water, make the dough, fire the oven, put the dough in the oven, wait a bit, and take out a loaf of bread. And you could do the same yourself BTW.
Also, Ultima had children, starting with toddlers in cribs and finishing with adolescents. And those children had their own AI patterns, they didn't work usually, but they would run around, play tag, play with toys, etc. IMHO despite all the bells and whistles of oblivion, that wourld was just much more real and fleshed out.
I daresay the 10+ years old Ultima had much better logic when it came to NPC or team members following you around. Playing Oblivion I nearly always had to look behind me if the person supposed to be following me was still following me or maybe got lost, stuck on a hillside or whatever. I actually had to revert to the last save once or twice, because I lost the person who was supposed to be following me.
Then, dungeons are really boring in Oblivion. Take the Ayelid ruins for example - you've seen one, you've seen them all the differences are really minor and are pretty much limited to variations in the twists and turns of the corridors. Same with forts, same with caves. Oh sure, one is flooded, the other is not, but there is just nothing
interesting inside! A few monsters, a few chests. In Ultima many caves were just caves, but many actually had something
special inside. An inhabited section where some weird society lived, a dragons' den or, for example, a giant heap of child bodies that made you go
what in the world happened here???.
And so on. Chests - I may be prejudiced here because my character sucked both at alteration and at security - but comeon, here I have a wooden chest and a big effing axe in my hand... Do I really have to fumble in the lock with a frigging lockpick? In Ultima - sure enough, you could just hack a chest open.
And so on, and so on. This is not to say Oblivion is bad. Only that all those things have really been done before, and I think 10+ years is long enough time for somebody to do them better at last.
Sure, there are few things in Oblivion that were less elaborate in Ultima. Alchemy for example. Oblivion has many more ingredients and many more potion effects. Graphics - no doubt, but then again these were different times. Player stats are more elaborate, true...
But as for AI and realism, there's really
nothing in this game that would not have been here 10+ years ago. And it's a shame really because with today's processing power I'm sure something interesting could be achieved. Aparently this is not what people want. Maybe for some reason people prefer ragdoll effects to elaborate NPC AI, because somehow ragdoll physics gets done, and AI doesn't... I don't know. I just hope one day I'll see something better that U.
BTW, anyone who still happens to have original Ultima VII game files can download a free Windows engine called Exult and run the game on Windows. It works briliantly.
(especially if you can afford a bit of AA to go with it) And not much slowdown, at least in my case I can't see much.
"
. The platform comes down, and he's just standing there like a complete jerk. The platform goes up again, he gets smashed again 
. But fortunately, a few up & down trips later he did. Boy, was the convalescence spell useful afterwards. 
100strg 85 will,65 int ,90 end ,30 per ,45 agility ,50 speed.ehehe. and today i will start another character.i think i made lots of mistakes and it is not possible to get level 35 with that character.
