In Oblvion, you don't have to close all the oblivion gates outside the towns to finish the game. It makes one part of the game a little easier, but it's not a necessity. The difference between Oblivion and Assassin's Creed is, that in Oblivion, you don't have to "rinse and repeat." You can play it at your own pace, doing whatever you want whenever you want. In Assassin' Creed, you HAVE TO eavesdrop on the guy and pick his pocket, beat up, interrogate, and kill the stooge, and perch on top of a dozen tall objects. It's not like you can just go and find something more interesting to do until you feel like doing your main objective, because that's all there is to do.
And if you need some more opinions to back up mine, then look at the Metacritic for Oblivion vs. Assassin's Creed.
http://www.metacritic.com/games/pla...rms/xbox360/assassinscreed?q=assassin's creed
AC has 66 reviews with an average of 8.2, with exactly 1/3 of them being 50/100 to 79/100.
Another thing to remember is that Oblivion will take most people about 60 hours before they complete the main quest, if not longer. While there is some repetition in the game, there's so much variety that by the time you have to repeat something, you'll have already have done lots of other interesting stuff. In Assassin's Creed, the only place where there's variety is the actual assassinations, and unfortunately those usually don't take longer than 10 minutes to complete.
I don't care about Oblivion's reviews. The reviewers that marked it up so highly need to have their heads checked. To explain this to you, I'll just re-post one of my previous rants.
...When I played Morrowind, I thought it was a beautifully crafted game. I enjoyed the story, enjoyed the large and very distinct world, etc and so on in that direction. I thought the whole continent/subcontinent of Morrowind was beautifully realized and executed in its entirety. Might not of had the most beautiful graphics or best swordplay, but I thought it was more than adequate in those two areas. My opinion of Bethesda upon the release of that game was fairly high.
However, when Oblivion was released, I was instantly disappointed. Character creation/customization was complex, but half-assed in its complexity. The graphics were pretty, but otherwise all else left me rather let-down. (The story was good too, just short) Fast travel ruined the whole adventurous feeling of the last game to me. Instead of trekking through mountains and swamps, I was trekking through the almighty load screen to quickly get from point A to point B. Even if I did take the time to ride/run from one area to another, I didn't particularly feel the need to. The environments looked as if the designers took the same 8 set pieces, made slight alterations, and filled the game world with them.
With that said, the entire game was one large cookie cutter. You have your forests, snowed on forests, slightly droopy forests... add in a river or two there and some ocean and that was the game. Oh yes, and the dozens of ayleid ruins with almost the exact same layout and look, and the imperial fortresses with the same. Ditto with mines. Oh, and let's not forget those pesky Oblivion planes! Most were incredibly cookie cutter and really didn't have their own "personality" per se. On top of that, the environments looked washed out. I'll warn you, I'm a staunch defender and enthusiast of Fable... and that left me expecting much more out of games. I expect colors that pop out and thoughtfully-placed environmental effects. Instead, I got Killzone-syndrome. Which a lot of "next-gen" games tend to have. Washed-out, dull look. No life, no color, no personality. Utterly boring to look at.
/end rant...
And to add onto that spiel, those "things you can do" in between fast-traveling from town to town, closing Oblivion gates over and over in planes that look exactly the same were also exactly the same. Hey! Why don't we plunder one of those Ayleid Ruins that all look
exactly the same with one or two exceptions. Or maybe one of those imperial fortresses that also all feel the exact same, with the same group of 5 or 6 bandits and/or some skeletons and zombies sprinkled in! Or hey, maybe we can go take a nice stroll through town, in which almost all of the houses look exactly the same, with NPCs that all have the same 10 lines of dialogue! Woohoo! Or, maybe we can climb to the top of a mountain and look down upon an in-game world that all looks like one big ****ing forest made of the same 3 trees, yayyy!!! At least Assassin's Creed had some interesting vistas, damn.
Or hey, maybe we can go do cookie cutter missions for a Daedric prince that all involve the same basic premise. "Go here, kill some people, come back and get your reward!" Hell, the only ones that didn't involve actively killing people to pursue an outcome were those for Nocturne (stealing back the Eye of Nocturne) and Molag Bal whom had you get killed by some random *******.
The game was
primarily composed of battling the same eight or nine enemies: Mystic Dawn brainwashees, Bandits (Highwaymen, Marauder, all the same damn thing), Clannfears, Churls or whatever the hell they were called, Skeletons/Zombies/Ghosts, and Scamps. Woo-****ing-hoo. That was probably one of the most varied parts of my whole play experience. Killing the same nine enemies over and over until the cows came home. And no, you could not get around going through 10+ Oblivion gates throughout the game. That's what the main quest line was pretty much composed of. Not to mention that exploring the world was so boring that I spent most of the time in my loading screen impatiently waiting to insta-travel to some random location I had the unenviable task of having to travel to the first time.
The whole game was built with a same-y mentality. Sure, you could do sidequests to fill up the time, but all they really boiled down to was either go here and kill this or sneak over there and steal that. Meh and a half.
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