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On Oblivion
Jan. 4th, 2011 10:34 pmI 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.
( Read more... )
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.
( Read more... )
