On Oblivion
Jan. 4th, 2011 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mistersandmanI loved The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind as a kid. Probably for the first two years that I owned it, I was without a doubt awful at it--assuming one can be terrible at a game that presents you with a sprawling, open-ended world and asks you to explore it in whatever way you see fit. I had never played an action game that was so unrestricted and was quite beside myself. I did what any thirteen year old would do: I attacked a townsperson with a rusty knife and was promptly slain by the guards. Later adventures would prove to be as moribund as they were stimulating to my fertile young imagination: After rooting through the belongings of a corpse that fell from the sky, I too discovered the consequences of experimenting with "Scrolls of Icarian Flight," lovely artifacts which launch the curious and the illiterate hundreds of feet into the air... and sent them back to the earth accelerating at 9.8 meters per second.
I remember wandering aimlessly for hours through the countryside, marveling at the level of detail that flourished across every inch of the continent. I remember the first time I wandered into the enormous city of Vivec, named after the self-made god who lived at the top of the tallest canton of the floating metropolis.
This talk of the spectacle of Morrowind does a disservice to the complex political machinations at work within the world of the game. Briefly:
There are three Houses of nobles (the immortal, insane wizards, the desert warriors struggling for relevance, and the corrupt traders run by the mob) each of whom has their own relationship to the local faith, which is at odds with the religion of the occupying Imperial army from across the sea. Theological differences aside, the Imperials (think Romans) are having a great deal of difficulty winning the hearts and minds of the indigenous Dunmer (red eyed, blue skinned elf) population.
There aren't any good guys or bad guys. Even the Imperial/Dunmer conflict has a lot of grey areas. The Imperials are exploitative conquerors hoping to extract as many natural resources as possible, simultaneously foisting their culture upon the conquered. At the same time, they are introducing law and order to areas that have never known rule of law. The culture they are hoping to supplant is one of xenophobia and slavery.
The player can explore and exploit the multitudes of conflicts between these factions for hours without getting so much as a whiff of the "main plot," which is excellent, as you might imagine by now.
That wasn't brief at all. Sorry.
Some four years later, Bethesda Softworks gives us The Elder Scroll IV: Oblivion. I didn't play in when it originally came out because I was in high school and I had comic books to read, AP classes to study for, and successive broken hearts to mend! With that many irons in the fire, I didn't play the much-lauded sequel until I got it for my 21st birthday.
I wasn't exactly thrilled.
My first reaction was a rare combination of awe and disappointment. As far as the controls are concerned, Oblivion is very much Morrowind's superior. In Morrowind, combat consisted of a lot of clicking (and hitting of the jump button, if you're me). Now there are many more fun options. The game designers clearly put a lot of work into making stealth- and magic-oriented characters viable. The only hiccup is the game is designed for people with an actual mouse and not just a finicky pad on a laptop, or better yet, someone with a console.
With such a well-polished game I'm ashamed to admit most of my problems with Oblivion are purely aesthetic. One thing that bugged me right away were the character designs. Everyone looks extremely goofy. The Dunmer went from looking like this:
to this:
And so on:
In the name of realism I think they slipped into the uncanny valley. No matter how many times they blink or shift their eyes, the characters look totally soulless. It's unnerving.
Another thing that made the Morrowind-fanboy in me squirm was the overworld. After a brief introductory segment featuring a prison and the voice of Patrick Stewart, you are released into a beautiful field overlooking a lake. The landscape is truly something out of a fairy tale: serene and *very* European--and unfortunately, all too familiar.
There are no buildings carved out of the exoskeleton of an extinct emperor crab, ash-blasted wastelands or mushroom fortresses. A series that celebrated the world of an Other now places the player in the shoes of a normalizing force, one who strives to protect a centuries-old monarchy from the forces of Darkness. The "Oblivion" of the title is highly analogous to a Western Hell, totally lacking in nuance or ambiguity.
Morrowind was so appealing because it was never a clear-cut case of good vs. evil. Every faction, even the the antagonistic Sixth House of Dagoth Ur, Morrowind's final boss, had a legitimate claim to supremacy. How you, the player, chose to have these conflicts play out meant you never played the same game as anyone else.
So another way that Oblivion fails from a pure role-playing aspect is the way it handles the levelling-up mechanic. After murdering hundreds of rats and mud crabs and slowly working my way up to vampires, assassins, and ultimately, gods, my Morrowind character was basically so powerful that he could effortlessly tear through any force that opposed him. Such was a fitting reward for one who had played the game for months.
This sense of self-satisfaction is bizarrely denied in Oblivion. No matter how strong you become, the same bandits, rats and wolves that pestered you in the beginning stages will always present a challenge because they level up at the same rate as the character--if not faster. Thus, you run into the predicament where threats that you faced at a lower level, such as the final boss, could have been defeated by the random highwayman you encountered much later in the game. Personally, I feel like this cheapens the whole idea behind 'levelling up,' a mechanic designed to express the player's rise up the hierarchy of relative badassitude.
So it was for all these reasons that Thanksgiving Break I found myself obsessively playing the latest version of my friend's puzzle game, Inner Demons, instead of the newly-installed Oblivion.
Coincidentally, Bethesda just announced the next game in the Elder Scrolls series, Skyrim, which I probably won't be playing for at least four years. When I own a computer capable of running it, and I will probably compare it unfavorably to Oblivion when I do!
I remember wandering aimlessly for hours through the countryside, marveling at the level of detail that flourished across every inch of the continent. I remember the first time I wandered into the enormous city of Vivec, named after the self-made god who lived at the top of the tallest canton of the floating metropolis.
This talk of the spectacle of Morrowind does a disservice to the complex political machinations at work within the world of the game. Briefly:
There are three Houses of nobles (the immortal, insane wizards, the desert warriors struggling for relevance, and the corrupt traders run by the mob) each of whom has their own relationship to the local faith, which is at odds with the religion of the occupying Imperial army from across the sea. Theological differences aside, the Imperials (think Romans) are having a great deal of difficulty winning the hearts and minds of the indigenous Dunmer (red eyed, blue skinned elf) population.
There aren't any good guys or bad guys. Even the Imperial/Dunmer conflict has a lot of grey areas. The Imperials are exploitative conquerors hoping to extract as many natural resources as possible, simultaneously foisting their culture upon the conquered. At the same time, they are introducing law and order to areas that have never known rule of law. The culture they are hoping to supplant is one of xenophobia and slavery.
The player can explore and exploit the multitudes of conflicts between these factions for hours without getting so much as a whiff of the "main plot," which is excellent, as you might imagine by now.
That wasn't brief at all. Sorry.
Some four years later, Bethesda Softworks gives us The Elder Scroll IV: Oblivion. I didn't play in when it originally came out because I was in high school and I had comic books to read, AP classes to study for, and successive broken hearts to mend! With that many irons in the fire, I didn't play the much-lauded sequel until I got it for my 21st birthday.
I wasn't exactly thrilled.
My first reaction was a rare combination of awe and disappointment. As far as the controls are concerned, Oblivion is very much Morrowind's superior. In Morrowind, combat consisted of a lot of clicking (and hitting of the jump button, if you're me). Now there are many more fun options. The game designers clearly put a lot of work into making stealth- and magic-oriented characters viable. The only hiccup is the game is designed for people with an actual mouse and not just a finicky pad on a laptop, or better yet, someone with a console.
With such a well-polished game I'm ashamed to admit most of my problems with Oblivion are purely aesthetic. One thing that bugged me right away were the character designs. Everyone looks extremely goofy. The Dunmer went from looking like this:
to this:
And so on:
In the name of realism I think they slipped into the uncanny valley. No matter how many times they blink or shift their eyes, the characters look totally soulless. It's unnerving.
Another thing that made the Morrowind-fanboy in me squirm was the overworld. After a brief introductory segment featuring a prison and the voice of Patrick Stewart, you are released into a beautiful field overlooking a lake. The landscape is truly something out of a fairy tale: serene and *very* European--and unfortunately, all too familiar.
There are no buildings carved out of the exoskeleton of an extinct emperor crab, ash-blasted wastelands or mushroom fortresses. A series that celebrated the world of an Other now places the player in the shoes of a normalizing force, one who strives to protect a centuries-old monarchy from the forces of Darkness. The "Oblivion" of the title is highly analogous to a Western Hell, totally lacking in nuance or ambiguity.
Morrowind was so appealing because it was never a clear-cut case of good vs. evil. Every faction, even the the antagonistic Sixth House of Dagoth Ur, Morrowind's final boss, had a legitimate claim to supremacy. How you, the player, chose to have these conflicts play out meant you never played the same game as anyone else.
So another way that Oblivion fails from a pure role-playing aspect is the way it handles the levelling-up mechanic. After murdering hundreds of rats and mud crabs and slowly working my way up to vampires, assassins, and ultimately, gods, my Morrowind character was basically so powerful that he could effortlessly tear through any force that opposed him. Such was a fitting reward for one who had played the game for months.
This sense of self-satisfaction is bizarrely denied in Oblivion. No matter how strong you become, the same bandits, rats and wolves that pestered you in the beginning stages will always present a challenge because they level up at the same rate as the character--if not faster. Thus, you run into the predicament where threats that you faced at a lower level, such as the final boss, could have been defeated by the random highwayman you encountered much later in the game. Personally, I feel like this cheapens the whole idea behind 'levelling up,' a mechanic designed to express the player's rise up the hierarchy of relative badassitude.
So it was for all these reasons that Thanksgiving Break I found myself obsessively playing the latest version of my friend's puzzle game, Inner Demons, instead of the newly-installed Oblivion.
Coincidentally, Bethesda just announced the next game in the Elder Scrolls series, Skyrim, which I probably won't be playing for at least four years. When I own a computer capable of running it, and I will probably compare it unfavorably to Oblivion when I do!
