If its done with gamebryo, It will fail

It has a brand new engine according to Bethesda.

“Mass Effect’s crown”? You gotta be joking. Mass Effect didn’t hold a candle to Oblivion. Oblivion was a huge open world. Mass Effect was practically a rail shooter. Mass Effect didn’t have half as many quests, nor were they all that interesting for the most part (a few were pretty darn good though). About all I can say for it was that it ran a lot smoother than TES4 and had better voice acting. And while trying to melee was indeed useless in Bethsoft’s classic, ANY combat was a joke in Mess Effect. After the fourth or fifth time I was sniped with a pistol from 100 yrds away I uninstalled. Terrible.

And don’t forget that in Oblivion, you can walk up and kill the really anoying NPCs without needing a reason.

Errrr, the crown STILL belongs to the incredible Mass Effect. Sorry

Mass Effect is not, strictly speaking, an RPG. It just has RPG elements. And it’s not even that good of a game. On Gaming-to-Food scale it is not as low as McDonalds, but maybe something like Quiznos. Oblivion, on the other hand, would be along the lines of Outback. Not without problems, but in a different class altogether.

(1) I disagree with the “practically a rail shooter” bit. You at least got to decide where you wanted to go (once you got control of the Normandy), so it didn’t ENTIRELY guide you by the hand. My biggest issue with Mass Effect was that every base except for the ones that were part of the main story were “cookie-cutter”, a problem that was resolved in Mass Effect 2. Though I do wonder if maybe there was some Japanese design influence on Mass Effect… the Japanese (in general; not all of them are this way) don’t like open-sandbox games. They *like* linear games.

(2) If you kept getting sniped in the head from 100 yards away, that’s why they have difficulty levels. Turn it down to “Casual” or something, OR… learn how to use cover properly. If you stand out in the open, even with shields and armor, you DESERVE to get popped in the head. (I admit that I didn’t defeat the game on the Hardcore setting my first time through.)

(3) I’m glad Bethesda decided to scale down the Elder Scroll games to focus on only one province at a time. When they tried to cover the entire kingdom (Daggerfall), it was so buggy that even calling the Orkin man wouldn’t help. It took ten patches just to get all the game-breaking bugs fixed, and even then, there were still bugs (mostly in the random quest generator). I could give many examples, but the one that most clearly demonstrates it is the time when I took a quest for a merchant (we will call him “Bob”) who had been insulted by another merchant who was also called Bob, and wanted me to fight a duel to the death with him. You guessed it… apparently he was schizophrenic and had somehow insulted HIMSELF and wanted to commit “suicide by adventurer”, which makes it kind of hard to collect your rewards for the mission. It was also too easy to completely forget what you were SUPPOSED to be doing.

(4) I have to agree with Benjy, Oblivion had a few game-breakers. Not in the “crash to desktop” sense, but in the “taking unfair advantage of the AI” sense. Want to avoid getting hit? Stand on a rock. Even the enemy archers couldn’t figure out what to do, while you picked them off with your own arrows. Or enchant at least five pieces of your armor with “Chameleon 20%”. You could turn ‘em into a pincushion and they’d never hit back because they couldn’t see you.

I’m not really sure you can compare Oblivion to Mass Effect, as their entirely different games. Mass effect has a story to tell, while Oblivion wants you to explore a world and tell one yourself.

I hope there’s one thing that’s fixed in the new engine: The mouse. In both Oblivion and Fallout, I would occasionally end up clicking on something on the desktop and the game would promptly minimize (and often not maximize again). It’s a bug inherent in how the engine uses the mouse, and it drives me nuts.

@Marcus,

I don’t think the amount of glitches is a good measure of comparison here. The more complex a system the more prone to glitches it is. If flawless execution is what defines a better game, then Pong and Tetris are the best games ever.

Mass Effect is not a great game. It’s an OK one, sure, but it doesn’t deserve half the praise it is receiving. The story it has to tell is not particularly good either. And when we get to the actual role-playing part of this “RPG” it is nearly nonexistent. I’m sorry but I cannot help but laugh at any game that has a system of moral choices bases on “good” and “evil”.

You are walking in the street and see a little urchin playing. Do you:

(Paragon) – Adopt him, surround him with fatherly love and affection, raise him to be a good and compassionate human being, and pay for his college.
(Neutral aka I want to skip this quest) – Ignore him.
(Renegade) – Rip his eye out and make him eat it, then violate his empty eye-socket sexually, and once he dies stuff his carcass and put him up for display in your office.

Add to this a lot of stupid game mechanics, such as having to run back and forth twenty times between a few NPCs just to talk to them, and you have a game that kinda sucks actually. You’d think that a space-faring race could maybe, oh I don’t know, invent a cell phone? o.O

Alaric, show me, on this doll, where Mass Effect touched you.

Ah, well, since you put it this way, I guess everything I said up until his point is inevitably wrong. Allow me to congratulate you, sir, on this brilliant argument. I have no choice but to concede to you.