Oblivion is hands-down one of my favorite games I have ever played and I feel it's a more engaging game than Skyrim was. Sure it has its quirks and certain annoying features that are dated, but it captivated and locked me in way better than Skyrim. It was colorful, weirdly fantastical, and constantly had me going down random rabbit holes that revealed cool surprises! That is the Bethesda quality I desired that made me want to play their games.

If it was 2016 again and I heard this news about ES VI, I would be on the full hype train. But alas, we are post Starfield and I have lost any faith they will actually deliver on a decent follow-up. It was lackluster, boring, and all grey; nothing whimsical that used to draw me to their games. The doubling down on criticism tells me that creative spirit is gone and development has just turned into get the task done with a set time frame.

No kidding. Or how we just got used to Morrowind's erm..."unique" hit system and weapons actually collided in Oblivion, with real physics!

And I still remember that trailer shot of walking down the hallway with the traps and casting a fireball while still holding a sword. It was such a crazy feature update!

"Close shut the jaws...OF OBLIVION"

And...yeah...today's game industry is more "How can we make Ai enhanced 24k textures so the game is a 1.5 TB install, but streamline it so entire armor sets are a single item and we remove half the skills from previous titles."

I really liked Skyrim, but definitely disagreed with how "opinionated" the games got about how you were supposed to play them...