Oblivion

When I first played Morrowind, like many of the great games I’ve played, I had no idea what I was going into. Morrowind was a game of wonder, something so solid and enjoyable I couldn’t stop playing it. I picked up every expansion pack for it and loved every minute. So when Oblivion came out, I was hoping that I would get the same repeat sensation as I did when playing Morrowind. The feeling came close, oh so very close, but just didn’t quite match it.

There is a simple reason I choose to play video games and will probably continue to play them past the point I’m dead and buried. One of the core sources of this fun is generated from the idea of fulfilling a fantasy. Some fantasies included being an overbearing dictator controlling my army from space. Another is being a marine grunt with the IQ of the armour the character is wearing. However what I truly love is the idea of being a super-human god amongst men and knowing that no matter how many enemies you throw at me, I am always going to win. Two games that attempt the “send a million men towards me and I will still win” feel and managed to pull it off is “The Path of Neo”, a game finally allowing people to play the role of Neo and fighting many notable battles throughout The Matrix trilogy, including the famous Neo vs Smiths in the apartment complex. Another is Ninety Nine Nights (N3) which pitted you against literally thousands of men with two small platoons at your side and yet you still live to fight another day. RPGs also tend to pull off the god like feeling despite the need to keep the game challenging, simply by producing harder enemies whilst keeping the weaker ones around. Yes you can be challenged but you can always make yourself feel a little better after a defeat by going around and killing some low level mob for shits and giggles. However Oblivion introduced something that ruins all of that.

You see Oblivion introduced what can be best described as levelled difficulty. As the character’s level got higher and higher, the enemies got harder, the items that you could get would become better. Whilst I can applaud the restriction of better items such as glass armour and weaponry to later in the game considering in Morrowind, you could get a full set of glass armour quite quickly and easily if your knew what you were doing, the constant increase in bad guy difficulty is quite a bad thing to have in my opinion. There is no feeling of progression or achievement if the difficulty you have in a fight is the same every time. This is not to be confused with an increasing difficulty curve in which the battles start off easy and more and more challenging. What I am speaking off is when the difficulty of the game is constant rather than ever increasing until it reaches a peak. It really does ruin a game when there is no sense of accomplishment by beating an enemy that is particularly difficult or that you have levelled high enough that no one but the most powerful enemy can beat you.

Despite what I consider to be a major flaw in the game, the game itself is very solid and enjoyable. The game continues Morrowind’s style of having Fighters, Mages and Thieves Guilds, each with numerous quests, almost too many to deal with, and whilst I have never played to the end despite what would have to be over 150 hours playing the game (over different characters I would like to point out) the joy of playing the game never wore thin. The RPG elements allow for a great deal of variety although I usually created a custom class based on the whole stealth/snipe element that I always seem to choose with Bethesda games, however I did dabble in being a mage in the past. Despite the variety of skills that are available, most of them are very solid. Spells have a nice variety to them, particularly when you start creating your own and mixing up spell components in weird and wonderful ways. Being a marksman has its own challenge with trying to shoot accurately over a long distance considering the arrows will drop due to the gravity. I however always got frustrated by playing a warrior type because the controls regarding the swinging of a sword in different ways proved to be very challenging for me, particularly on the 360 which is what I spent a lot of time playing Oblivion on.

The environment itself is fantastic, creating a realistic open world for the player to move around in however this feel is ruined somewhat by the fast travel system. While I can appreciate that walking/running slowly around a massive game world can be annoying, particularly since you can be going from one end of the map to the other to complete a quest. Morrowind however had a much more elegant way of dealing with that problem; silt striders. Silt striders allowed players to travel from city to city quite quickly but you actually had to get to the silt striders if you wanted to use them and they couldn’t take you anywhere you wanted to go. The best metaphor I can use is that Morrowind had the player take the train from location to location; the train isn’t coming to you and sure as hell can’t tell it where to go. Oblivion on the other hand had people hailing cabs and taking them wherever they wanted to go and I think Oblivion is poorer for it.

However, in the end, for all my criticisms the game is good. It has kept me coming back time and time again to play it from the day it came out to day I’ve wrote this retrospective and I will probably keep playing it until Skyrim comes out, the next in the Elder Scrolls series.