I booted this up yesterday and it still struck me how beautiful the game is

Far too much use of bloom and all the characters faces seem to glow, seems to me that graphics havent dated well at all.

rubbish

Not really there are far better looking games out there, and even in my review I commented about the massive overuse of bloom and the characters faces seeming like they have a light bulb inside them. Not to mention the low res faces. Its a fantastic game but I really aint a fan of the engine.

On PC, a bit of tweaking in the oblivion.ini can fix the glowing faces, I hear.

I think Oblivion's strength is its ability to render such huge environments - and it still looks great when you're riding through the trees on a horse.

Have no problems with bloom on my PC, engine pisses over anything else for environments at the moment

Yes you are right that the forests etc do look stunning on max, it just annoys me as a large part of the game is spent interacting with people and in cities. So when the people look so ugly and have so little detail it fails to suck me in. The facial animations in half life 2 are FAR better than the ones in Oblivion. Also I found Oblivion lacked the areas in the previous game that just took my breath away, with most things feeling very similar.

I just found the game amazingly dull