Oblivion vs. Skyrim

Okay this is maybe a little bit outdated but I feel like it needs to be said because it is trickling in to my view of the Elder Scrolls franchise as a whole. Elder Scrolls is my all time favorite gaming franchise to be perfectly honest. Oblivion was the first one that I played and I instantly fell in love. It was amazing and immersive and I would play it from sun up to sun down I even had a nightmare in which Lucien Lachance visited me in the night to invoke me into the dark brotherhood. And I have played it over and over even now I still do because games in the Elder Scrolls franchise are games with excellent replay value. You always get a slightly different story and you will never fully accomplish everything the game has to offer. Now that I have established how much I utterly adore every single game, let's get to the point. I am going to compare these two games on eleven different areas.


Graphics
For a game from 2006, Oblivion was beautiful graphically. It seems unfair to even compare it to Skyrim which released five and a half years later to be completely honest. Both were ahead of there time in this department. And while now I can't play Oblivion for too long before the graphics become hard to stomach, that is just because the game is nine years old. I would say in this department, in order to give a fair review, I need to look in comparison to their release year, in which I have to rank them equally excellent.
Oblivion: 5/5
Skyrim: 5/5

Game Mechanics
Now we start to deal in topics in which there is more of a clear difference. What I genuinely liked in Oblivion that became a thing of the past and didn't make the cut in Skyrim, was the art of persuasion. When trying to extract information or get an NPC to trust you, you had to talk with them and there was always a right and wrong way. You would tell jokes or compliment them and you could bribe them to change their demeanor, and what they thought of you would effect how you are able to proceed with your interactions with those people. Though I must admit this became very frustrating when there were people who I would work on until my score with them was one-hundred but due to a particular quest they had to treat me harshly and there was never even a hint of remorse, but outside the quest, they were smiling and happy to see me and I had a lot of confused thoughts and feelings about all of that. Then When you get to Skyrim they fixed a lot of the issues that people had previously complained about such as you could now duel wield one handed weapons or magic, and the higher you got in your destruction magic skill tree, the cooler the duel wielding looked when you had a fire tornado projecting from your hands. There are things to be said about the basic mechanics of both games, but there is one reason why I definitely have to give it to Skyrim. Simply, the player movement. the motion and turning was much more fluid in Skyrim and trying to move around the sewers in Oblivion was in and of itself reason enough to rage quit the entire game, it is honestly hard to get passed.
Oblivion: 3/5
Skyrim: 5/5

Main Story
This one boils down a bit more to personal preference, but I don't think I am so far off base here. When I first played Oblivion, I will admit I had a hard time with the story for three reasons: I thought it was hard because I got too far too fast, I kept wanting to explore and didn't realize how non-linear the game is and that it was okay to veer away, and I scare easily so essentially walking in to Mordor to face The Eye of Sauron and fight a bunch of tiny demons scared the shit out of me. However when I went back to get through it after I accomplished what I wanted to do otherwise and came back to it, I enjoyed it. Skyrim I enjoyed as well, but I felt it wasn't as complex. In the Oblivion main story, it was a bit more multifaceted. You were both trying to close this door to oblivion and defeat a Daedric Prince and his cult of followers, but at the same time bring the heir to the emperors throne to power. And though you were tasked with such a large accomplishment, it molded it all together fairly well. With Skyrim it is more of a linear type of story that may be better suited for those who don't multitask well or have a hard time following more than one story line at a time. I am not that type of person, as I am someone who will be halfway through three different quests and still be starting new ones. So for that I say to each their own, but the real problem for me is the length of the lines as well as the plain entertainment. In Oblivion you get yourself in sticky situations, there are unexpected turns, things that are almost puzzle like, and it keeps you on your toes. Skyrim was fairly straight forward with a point A and a point B, and transparent, and if you play only the main quest without anything else you could probably get through it in about nine hours of gameplay, which you could easily do in three days or less.
Oblivion: 4/5
Skyrim 2/5

Faction Stories
Plain and simple, if we did this strictly on length it wouldn't even be a discussion. Each Oblivion faction with the exception of the arena was at least as long if not longer that the main quest line of Skyrim. But there is more to it than that. Every single faction in Skyrim was the same. Someone asked you to do something, so you did it, now you are an honorary member and you are going to have to do about four more quests and you can run the entire faction and there really aren't any perks but hey, it's a title and that is pretty cool. In Oblivion you have to either do something to get approached, or you have to extract secret information, or maybe you have to pick between like three different towns to sign up and they each have a different initiation. Or maybe you have to do good before the people in the hall will even look at you. Listen okay the Fighters Guild in Oblivion you had to have your fame higher than your infamy and had to have a certain minimum fame because if you are a nobody they didn't want you. The first time I went to the Companions in Skyrim they said I was a nobody so the next play through I did everything good I could do and made myself the dragon born and a war hero and all this but still he said he had never heard of me. I literally wanted to launch through the screen to punch some pixels in the face. That was annoying to say the least. And beyond that there were so many more twists and decisions to be made in Oblivion factions.
Oblivion: 5/5
Skyrim: 3/5

NPCs
This is something that goes hand in hand with the factions and the side quests to me. The NPC's in Oblivion were unique and they were addicted to skooma, doing something illegal, hunting vampires, or maybe they are vampires, they are a secret prince, a major fan of the player, ultra paranoid, mass murderers, they had personalities. In Skyrim you get the angry Nord that supports the rebellion, the angry Nord that supports the empire, and the angry Nord who lost his sword. The most personality you get out of a Skyrim NPC was fabricated by mans1ay3r on YouTube via Machinima.

Oblivion: 5/5
Skyrim: 2/5

Side Quests
This is once again something that goes closely with the above two categories so I will try to keep it short. While the two games have about the same about of side quests to do, Skyrim feels much shorter. Just to name a few in Oblivion,  you go inside a painting to fight trolls and retrieve an artist, help bust a corrupt guard, go through a corrupt Count's torture room to find that she is slaughtering Argonians, follow women leading men into a secret hut to kill, or help a paranoid Wood Elf ease his mind or possibly go on a murdering spree. In Skyrim you will have all the joy and exhilaration of delving in to one cave after another to retrieve lost swords, shields, and other heirlooms. Though I will say that I whole heartedly believe that the Daedric quests were better thought out, better integrated, and more fun in Skyrim. I liked those and the few and far between more complex quests so much that it nearly excuses the drab side quests.
Oblivion: 5/5
Skyrim: 3/5

DLC
This is back to the sort of complicated ones. Each would probably earn a 5/5 if I wasn't pitting them against each other because on their own, each games provide excellent DLC, however there are some things to note when you put them head to head. Each game had one DLC that provided an extension of the map and had to do with a Daedric Prince so we will look at those first. Shivering Isles is a bright and colorful extension with unique and eccentric new NPCs. Dragonborn is more dreary sad looking surroundings with depressed or angry people. The monsters introduced here were however very interesting and the story of this DLC itself was better written than the entire game. While both were excellent and Shivering Isles will forever be my favorite DLC just for the feel of it all, Dragonborn may have been better written. It is very very close on this one. Then next I would look at Nights of the Nine vs. Dawnguard. Neither was super immersive, one made you a pilgrim and one a vampire hunter. They were both a fun distraction from whatever else was happening but neither were excellent. However the end of Dawngaurd (spoiler alert I guess but the damn game came out almost four years ago I assume if you are going to play it, you have) with the snow elves had a very interesting, artful, and compelling chapter to the line. I only wish the whole DLC was more like this portion. That is all the DLC there was for Oblivion, but Skyrim provided Hearthfire allowing you to adopt children and build a custom house to display your trophies which was not only nice to have, it was evidence of the developers listening to us, the players.
Oblivion: 3/5
Skyrim: 4/5

Map
This will be brief because it is simply not the developers fault. There was much more diversity in the surroundings of Oblivion than Skyrim, though this is simply because Skyrim is a snow covered, drab, northern mountain area. I much more enjoyed places like Cheydenhal and missed that in Skyrim.
Oblivion: 5/5
Skyrim 3/5

Replay Value
While both games have an excellent replay value, Skyrim is a game that will yield many of the same results no matter what you do and fewer ways to do things while in Oblivion there are so many options and also as I touched on earlier so many unique quests that aren't so much like every other in the game. I am not going to go in to too much detail because most of this has been explained above.
Oblivion: 5/5
Skyrim: 4/5

Races
There are three things to be said about the races of Tamriel. Oblivion takes the cake in two of these while Skyrim the remainder. In Oblivion we have the diversity and the simple sake that there were several people of every race throughout the game while in Skyrim I think the only Argonian was in the Dark Brotherhood, all the Kahjiits were in one of three caravans, and I don't believe there were any wood elves. Oblivion also put a certain weight in what race you choose and that, I felt, made role playing better. Each Race has a different native area and different background and so they each have differing strengths and weaknesses, this was something we lost coming in to Skyrim that I don't think should have been dropped. The one and only aspect of the races of Elder Scrolls that Skyrim was superior was back to graphics, because in Oblivion everyone looked like Benedict Cumberbatch.
Oblivion: 4/5
Skyrim 3/5

Skills and Classes
These two were very different and I liked both. Oblivion asked you through integrated questions what your birth sign and class was. The class let you select a boost for a handful of skills and your birth sign gave you a daily buff of some sort. Alternatively Skyrim eliminated many of the skills, but had a very different skill tree progression method set up with perks as you moved through your skills and rather than a birth sign there were standing stones across the map you could choose. The reason Skyrim was an improvement was because you don't have to know what you want to be when you grow up when you are still in first grade, so to speak. You can develop your character and change your standing stone with your buff and you can change directions with your skills and get the perks that are actually relevant to you.
Oblivion: 3/5
Skyrim: 5/5

Verdict
Both games were excellent and as stand alone games they are both in my opinion 9/10 or higher. However when pitted against one another they each have some key flaws. However I feel if Oblivion was remastered in to today's graphics, it would likely be more enjoyable than Skyrim.
Oblivion: 8.5/10
Skyrim: 7/10

Why am I Still Talking About This
While I just stated as stand alone games they are both near perfect for me, it is impossible to view them alone. Any time that a game is a part of a franchise or a series, you will always compare it to the other games because as they continue, you expect to see improvement. And this concerns me because from Oblivion to Skyrim we moved forward in some places but backwards in others, which to me seemed to be some of the more important aspects and the things that made the game so immersive to begin with. Additionally I fear that Bethesda is too attentive when we talk about what we want. We wanted to get married, we wanted kids running around the world to make it more real, we wanted better houses, we wanted werewolves, we wanted more Daedric DLC, we wanted to ride on a dragon, and we got it. Even Maiq the Liar, the Kajhiit who roams around remarking on various things said in forums during the production stages of the games, is further evidence that they are listening. And that is awesome, but most recently we said we wanted Elder Scrolls to be and MMO. So we got Elder Scrolls Online with a giant map. Great in theory but the quests became even more redundant because their attention was taken elsewhere and most of us also realized we didn't want an MMO. We wanted a multiplayer option on a game like Skyrim. We wanted something like Far Cry 3 where you can go about the story on your own, but you could bring your friends in to help with missions that are tough, share armor and weapons, or just show off. So sometimes, we don't even know what we want. This makes me fearful for Argonia, which is rumored to be the next Elder Scrolls chapter. Don't let me down Elder scrolls...