How come people are saying the storyline is so simple? What's simple about it?
In Oblivion?
To me, it felt like I was on rails. The emperor guy shows up in your prison cell and you've got no choice but to follow them out... And then he dies and trusts you with his amulet... And you're told to go see the priest guy right off the bat... And you're almost instantly on the path to saving the world. There's no real build-up... No wandering around before you find your destiny... Nothing like that. You roll up a new character and
Hi there, want to save the world?After that, there wasn't anything really interesting going on. The plot was very straight-forward. No mystery or anything like that. No fumbling around to find your own way. You just kept going back and talking to Martin/Geoffry/whoever and getting the next step in your quest. That, plus the fast-travel to locations you've already visited; and the magic compass that pointed you in the right direction; and it really felt like I couldn't go wrong. Like I was being guided very carefully down a very linear path.
Then there's the fact that a good chunk of the main storyline was just a bunch of gopher quests. Go pick this up. Go find that thing. Go talk to this guy. Precious few epic battles or feats of daring-do.
And, through it all, there was absolutely no sense of urgency. I'm not a big fan of being timed... Or not being able to do side-quests because the world will explode if you delay... But there's got to be some kind of balance. We're being told to hurry up, there's Oblivion portals opening everywhere, the world is falling apart, we
need to get a Septim on the throne ASAP... And yet you can spend literally months of in-game time just picking flowers. You can completely and totally ignore the main storyline basically forever, and nothing bad ever happens. Nor is there any real reason to complete the main storyline... The ultimate reward is simply a suit of very mediocre armor.
Basically, absolutely everything else in the game is more engaging than the main storyline. If it weren't for the rails guiding you straight along the main storyline, your average player would probably wander off and never even notice that there
was a main storyline.