1 post tagged “oblivion”

I finished the Oblivion Main Quest and I'm feeling pretty done with the game for a little while.  There have been some interesting and useful comments about the game such as this one which I mostly agree with.  Though I had very little problem with crashes or other items and I was definitely glad I was playing the PC version so I could load mods, cheats and plugins for the game easily.  I'm not sure if xbox-360 allows them.

I have a love/hate relationship with these games.  I love them and am addicted to them mostly because of the first factor below, but so many other things drive me insane.

My overall impression is that it's yet another game in The Elder Scrolls series with its own set of problems and more similarities to Morrowind than the earlier games.  Yep, I've played them all: Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire (affectionately known as "Battle Spice," the other Spice Girl), Morrowind and now Oblivion.  I even bought their Redguard game that only ran accelerated on 3DFX video cards sometime in the 1990s and is now forever unplayable.

So my assessment of the game? It's amazing in some ways, but has both the good things and the same flaws that all of the games in this franchise suffer from. They've changed up the mixture a bit, but it's mostly the same ingredients that I've seen many, many times before.  Let me mention some of the ingredients

Beauty, Discovery and Open-Endedness

This is the single best thing about TES: Oblivion.  These elements have existed in various forms in nearly all the games.  Arena and Daggerfall tried to create a sense of discovery with a huge world and many things to do (and flexibility of action) despite the primitive graphics.  Morrowind and Oblivion constrained the world size somewhat but were still more than big enough sandboxes to play in. Starting with Morrowind, the visuals began adding to the sense of scale and added a sense of wonder. There were beautiful cities, distinct architectural styles, a breathtaking night sky and clouds and really interesting natural environments. Some naysayers complain about pixels out of place or an occasional glitch in these games, but they apparently missed the sense of wonder while concentrating on dissecting the game pixel by pixel.  In my book, the element of open-endedness, discovery and beauty is what makes these games unique and really worth playing.  I can't overstate this enough, this is the the huge draw and main reason to play these games--you have freedom to discover, enjoy and live in a huge and (mostly) open ended world.

Retarded NPCs (non-player characters)

Again, this is really the same as every previous version of the game, even though the specifics are different.  The NPCs are simply retarded in many important ways.  I know they tried to make them less retarded with "Radiant AI" which gives these people some motivations, schedules and other things (they're not all just stupidly standing around in one spot at all times like in some much earlier versions).  Radiant AI doesn't totally live up to the hype though.  Now, the characters have been freed from their asylum to roam about the world more freely and make trifling decisions for themselves.  And their big decisions seem to be about whether they should run ahead of you to chase monsters or run away if they're feeling threatened. Nice, but flight or fight isn't exactly a great emulation of humanity.  Or they can choose to talk to other NPCs about The Dark Brotherhood or about a shop in town. Their fighting AI is noticeably better, tho.

There were some funny interactions at times, like on one of the Mage's Guild quests when I was supposed to catch a highway robber with help from my NPC pals.  Well, they helped me fight the robber, but the passing highway guard kept getting accidentally struck by my NPC pal in the fight and so kept chasing her down and slaughtering her long after the legitimate highway robber was killed (had to replay a few times to not get her killed).  Or there are some fun tricks, like summoning a scamp in a crowded building and then punching it in the face three times so it gets angry and starts shooting fireballs and then watching all the people in the building try to kill it or run away. (By the way this is a good distraction to get the annoying shopkeepers from staring stupidly at you the whole time so you can steal or pickpocket things while they're busy fighting or hiding from the scamp).

Or there was the time that the great moron of all morons (Captain Burd in Bruma) wanted me to show him how to close an Oblivion gate.  I knew I wouldn't be able to stand having him along while getting attacked by monsters inside a gate since the typical move by the idiots is to run right between you and whatever monster you're fighting just in time to get chopped by your sword or withered by the spell you were casting.  And then they turn on you and try to kill you because they were idiotic enough to dive in front like a bodyguard protecting the president. Then you are forced to kill them since they won't leave it alone and just want to fight you.  And then you get a bounty for slaughtering the idiot in self-defense, and it's a huge pain in the ass all the way around.  Taking these idiots anywhere with you is enough to make you want to shoot yourself in the head with a shotgun to avoid the whole ordeal. (Or they just dash off and fall in lava pits for no reason or things like that.)

So I went through the Oblivion gate ahead of time by myself and pre-killed all the monsters so I wouldn't have to deal with Burd (IQ -10) throwing himself on my sword and fulfilling his suicide wish.  When I got him and told him to FOLLOW ME.  He just followed me into the gate and would only stand dumbly inside the gate (no matter how many times I told him to follow).  So I had to punch him in the face 3 times (just like the scamp tip above) and so he would chase me angrily throughout the entire gate-land to where the sigil stone was so he could "watch" how it was done.  (Never mind he wasn't watching, but trying to chop me to bits and yelling stuff like "Why won't you die?" the whole time and the only reason the quest was fulfilled was that he simply had to be in the same room while I grabbed a sigil stone.)

These "people" are as thick as bricks and twice as ugly.  My brother calls them "pancake faces" which seems like an apt description, since no matter what expressions they make, or how much they sit and blink at you, their faces resemble an animated pancake with the intelligence of a brick.  Expressive pancake-covered bricks for friends.  Yay.

And aside from fighting, or running away, their actions are fairly obviously scripted for all important (quest-involved) actons.  It's too bad, since games like "The Sims" have figured out how to work complex and unpredictable interactions into the gameplay in a way that is surprising and entertaining.  Part of the problem is that the quests are so rigid that they don't dare allow the NPCs in the world do anything with any autonomy since it might mess up their tightly-scripted quest requirements.  One solution might be to have at least some quests less tightly scripted so they don't have to micromanage what everyone in the world does in relation to your actions.

The small amount of dialog and ridiculous names don't help much to disguise the fact that everyone is a tightly scripted (even if randomly scripted) idiot.  I can't tell you how much I wanted to scream in annoyance when yet another of the 3 voices say "I hear if you kill someone, the Dark Brotherhood comes to you in your sleep.  It's how they recruit new members."

The Repetitive Quests of Sometimes Annoyance

There are really very few quest types.  The ones I can think of are:

1. Find person/object for me
2. Kill person/monster for me
3. Protect or escort person
   

And of course there are combinations like the Burd quest mentioned above which is quest 3 and 1 combined (escort Burd while finding Oblivion stone in his local gate).  The basic quests have different cover stories which give them varying degrees of disguise and interest.  They might be sort of interesting if you get to explore a different or interesting place or see some new pancake-faced friends along the way.

The finding aspect can become aggravating and TES people tried to patch this annoyance in Oblivion with the new compass marker guides.  They help some, but at times it's still very hard to get to the right person or place in a non-annoying way.  The fast-travel helps a bit too.

And finding a person is even more annoying since you'll never remember their names since they make no sense.   Ah I have to find "Sqobwliej Frupsklot" and ask him about the "Trigglesnoort of Lafribba."  And these are way more memorable than the usual crap they come up with.  Really.  You'll have to refer to your journal every 10 seconds since you'll never remember the names of all the retards you've been dealing with or where they live.

And was it just me, or was the "Allies for Bruma" quest really stupid and boring?  I mean every city was pretty much exactly the same.  Talk to the local ruler to get the sub-quest.  Do the Oblivion Gate thing yet again, go talk to the ruler again to let them know you finished.  It began feeling like doing the dishes or mowing the lawn.  The recommendation quests from the Mage's Guild were actually less annoying than this (tho somewhat similar since you had to go do something in all the cities) since at least it was a different variation each time.  By this point I was really tired of the Oblivion Gates since they were so similar.   And how interesting is it to fight a bunch of monsters while making the way up a tower that is really similar to all the others?  And the "scary" gore of "the punished" just seemed kind of dopey.  I think after closing 3 or 4 oblivion gates I was pretty bored with them, which isn't great news when the main quest used them so heavily.

Things that Annoyed me more about Oblivion than Previous TES Games

No Levitate--Yes, people used levitation for exploits sometimes, but so what?  If they're really hard core gamers, they could choose not to levitate or install an anti-levitate patch.  Or you could make it part of the fun (like in Daggerfall with the randomly generated dungeons where levitate was practically a requirement since sometimes the dungeons didn't allow walking everywhere and you'd get stuck in dead-ends and pits without levitation).  I liked levitate since it was fun.  Games are supposed to be fun. Everyone has those flying dreams, right?  Why kill the dream?  It was also sneaky and unique.  And it also allowed you to go someplace high-up and get great views. And it was also a shortcut instead of walking up miles of winding stairs (remember the horrific pyramid cities in Morrowind?). Plus it was a funny way to fall and get yourself killed. So many fun possibilities all wasted because the designers want more control and are trying to herd the player into the "stupid moron" role and limit their actions.  Loosen up on the control already. The joy of these games is their open-endedness. Don't take it away, morons.  Speaking of control, I even liked being able to kill off essential characters (more then them popping up like a punching bag after being knocked out).  You're autosaving like every 3 seconds, so even if you kill off an essential character you don't lose that much.

Leveling and Skills--The leveling system is broken.  Having leveled monsters everywhere on par with the character's level is just annoying.  In some places it makes sense.  But I liked the feeling that it was getting easier to kill the mundane monsters around in the wild and on minor quests.  It made me feel like I was progressing in some way and that I wasn't just staying at the same relative skill level at all times.  But even more retardedly, the leveled monsters make it even harder as you gain levels since you have to focus on only improving battle skills at every second.  When you gain levels on non-battle skills, all the monsters battle skills suddenly become better.  So if you level based on skills like berry-gathering, lock-picking or mercantile you rapidly start feeling less competent and more like monster-food than you did earlier in the game. How annoying is that?  And again, why NOT level on whatever skills I want to?  It's my character.  Let me play him how I want.  What happened to the open-ended thing?  I don't want to be forced to level on the combat skills to prevent myself from falling behind the monster leveling-curve.  Plus it's ok to make some quests so hard (with non-leveled baddies) that you just have to be a high level to complete them.  It just means you will have to do some other quests to build your character up and you can't complete the main quest as a level 3 character or something. Bad, bad decision on this one, Bethsoft.

Limited Dialog and limited voice actors--some other people have complained about this, also.  There is the guy with the Hearty Voice.  There is the snobbish woman voice.  There is the cheesy bad-russian accent voice.  The spoken dialog is nice sometimes, but if you don't have the resources to do the broad scope then you could do it for limited

cases or not do it at all.  I can read text, I promise.  And I mentioned before, the general conversation topics get infuriating after a point.  The "I've heard others say the same" dialog comes up every 5 seconds.  Or The Dark Brotherhood line.  These make me want to go on a rampage to kill all the idiot characters.  I think most players have saved their game, gone on a rampage to vent their rage at the idiot NPCs and then reloaded the old save once they've gotten the anger at the stupidity out of their system.

So Is it a Good Game?

Yes.  It's a lot of fun and it's worth playing with.  Really the whole beauty, discovery and open-endedness makes up for so many annoying things.  But I'm not always so sure that Morrowind or even Daggerfall wouldn't be better games than Oblivion if they could be translated into this engine in a reasonable way.  Really it's very fun and addictive.  Yes it's true.  Even with the things that annoy the crap out of me, it's a fun game.