User:Collector

Oblivion Review

Morrowind was released for X-box and poof went four months of my life, smiling the whole while. When Oblivion was announced I intended to buy a 360 solely for the purpose of playing it. Know that I’m a bit of a fanboy so that after 100 hours invested in Oblivion I feel justified in lamenting the singular (legitimate) problem I’ve found:

Why must my PC game suffer because people still have bad TVs?

I understand development for multiple platforms and realize that if you’re aiming for a console it’s best to develop for that rather than try to dumb down a PC game. I know that using a controller is the only way some people have ever experienced electronic gaming. With this in mind I still find it difficult to believe that someone at Bethesda has ever tried to sell more than three things in one trip to a shop, on a PC using a mouse. After several hundred clicks trying to sell 20 potions while haggling, I need a carpal-tunnel exam. I can’t press enter as an equivalent to OK, who thought this was a good design call? Only a handful out of potentially hundreds of inventory items visible at once? I know it can be hard to read small text on a console game, I played Morrowind in lo-def, but for my PC-based copy to be burdened with this low-res interface is simply laziness.

That out of the way allow me to say that this is now the best game I have ever played and I say that with no intention of hyperbole (though watch for it throughout the rest of this review). Myriad creatures, NPCs, items, weapons, spells and quests in addition to the sprawling landscape dotted with cities, towns, villages, camps, mines, ruins, forts, caves, shrines and landmarks make up a deep world in which to adventure. Voice acting for all NPCs, a superior soundtrack and environmental effects ratchet up the immersion. I’m over 100 hours in (questing most of that time) and I feel like I’m just now getting into the meat of the game.

It is almost impossible for me to discuss Oblivion without comparing it to Morrowind because they stand so far above other games in the genre and have absorbed my attention away from on-par games in other genres. They’re superficially the same but there are important differences in the details.. In Morrowind the “spreadsheet” seemed much more visible around the edges of the game. You could see the math at work and because of this design it was easily exploitable. Crank out fortify intelligence potions and your alchemy skill became powerful to the point of ridiculousness. This type of in-game exploit for me really made the game feel open and free. If I’m a high level mage why can’t I create a potion that makes me nigh invulnerable for game-days at a time? It was fun to tinker within the rules to see what you could get away with. Playing Oblivion, even though the same free-form quest structure is in place, feels much more limiting. It seems more effort was taken to hide the “spreadsheet” but it has changed the flavor of the game for me in that I often feel like I must have a quest (or at least a targeted dungeon) in order to stay busy in the world. It is no longer fun for me to experiment with mechanics like enchanting or alchemy for their own sake because the effects your character is capable of seem to have been fenced in by the formulas used to compute them.

While I somewhat miss being able to “play the spreadsheet” I found the depth of immersion in Oblivion more than made up for it. The quests (billions and billions) are pretty much your standard role-playing fare but the voice acting really helps to make you feel like your interacting with people instead of just plot points. There were times when picking up a random quest that I would feel a bit anxious about abandoning whatever errand I was on to pursue it. In Morrowind I never once felt obligated to an NPC.

The addition of horses and the vastly improved fast travel options (though no Mark/Recall?) have eliminated the tedium of: get directions to point of interest, walk to town, strider to another town, boat to yet another town, walk to where you were going in the first place with load screens aplenty in-between. When I want to walk I walk but otherwise I can skip it in favor of getting on with the game with minimal hassle and no real impact (time passes but no encounters). Walking an hour in one direction to pick up an item and turn around again isn’t immersion, it’s sadism.

There are numerous changes to the skill and equipment system, the merits of which have been hotly debated, but almost all of these can be overlooked as necessary balancing elements in the face of the new combat system. The close my eyes and swing wildly technique I had perfected in Morrowind hasn’t really worked too well in this game. Special attacks which include the ability to disarm your opponent, knock them down or even paralyze them combined with the necessity of blocking/parrying have dramatically increased the depth of every fight. Battle has a much more visceral appeal in this game due to the ability of your opponents to cleverly utilize their abilities during duels lasting more than two swings of your uber-weapon. In Oblivion you assume a defensive stance and deflect your opponents’ blows with your shield before attempting to counter-attack while dodging missile fire and spells from their allies in the distance, combat is much more alive. Each conflict carries the possibility of your death (still not so much if you’re a min/max player but more so than in Morrowind) and only by application of your player and character skills will you emerge triumphant. When my weapon enchantments run out I still run screaming away from mountain lions.

Though the leveling system bears mentioning at this point I have little to say on the subject other than: It works. I just don’t see how you could realistically balance a game of this type with a world this large without using such a system. The world leveling with your character is a simple and elegant solution to a complex problem.

The game’s content is another short topic for me. It’s a sprawling epic-fantasy game. You can nit-pick the occasional texture, story line, character model, voice performance etc., but the sheer magnitude of this game renders such criticisms moot. A good number of guilds and factions to join, with associated trials and tribulations, flesh out the world along-side the main plot so that you are never without something you should be doing. The world is beautifully crafted and populated by a vast array of creatures and people who are much more active than previous incarnations.

I have nothing but praise for the new quest system. Some have thrown accusations of handholding but I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit laying down a CSI style grid looking for a door in the wilderness in Morrowind and prefer not to repeat the experience. Active quests are given waypoints, current quests stay listed in their own neat boxes and you can go back and review all the cool things you’ve done with the new journal system. It is a vast improvement over the linear scroll method used in Morrowind. It was more realistic but hampered the open-endedness. It limited the number of quests you could have open at one time to your ability to remember where the details of each were in your journal.

I’ve spent too much time typing this. Play this game, lots. Then download some mods and play it more. It’s fun.

--Collector 22:33, 26 January 2007 (EST)

10/10

(This review was moved here from Oblivion:Review Page as part of a general reorganization of that page)