Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
We have no choice but to judge a game by the environment in which it is introduced. When Raven Software set out to make Heretic, they had to add features in order for it to be a relevant, useful piece of software, even with Doom already existing. Features such as the ability to use items and the ability to look up and down gave it that relevance. When they set out to make Hexen, they added different player classes and the innovative hub-style level design. It comes to us as an obvious need for the developers to constantly push the envelope for us. So how do we feel, when the leading series of a genre takes a step backwards?
The Elder Scrolls series, by Bethesda Softworks, has long been hailed as one of the leaders in pushing the RPG envelope in terms of scale. The newest addition, Oblivion, can be taken in two distinct ways. To the casual gamer who has not played the other Elder Scrolls games, Oblivion seems mind-blowing. A continuous world full of different races, conflicts, and quests in which you seek out treasure and fame by killing monsters, becoming a rampant criminal, or murdering your way to the top. The hardcore gamer knows that this was the case in Ultima 7, released in 1992. So this concept of a free-form RPG is nothing new. So what is new about Oblivion?
Better graphics (who saw that one coming?). Comparing Oblivion to Morrowind, the last ES game, is like comparing Half Life 2 to Half Life 1. The most startling sight is the distant rendering, seeing mountains, rivers and trees miles away and knowing that you can walk there. That’s a great feeling. The outdoor areas are really quite breathtaking. Unfortunately, there’s a downside to the graphics, which is that most of us won’t be able to run it smoothly. I ran it on a 3.2Ghz P4 with a GeForce 6800 GS card, and even with most things turned all the way down my framerate stutters sometimes during combat and when looking at larger areas. My hope is that they will release a patch to ‘optimize’ the game, but as it is now, I feel it’s a shame that I can’t get a better framerate.
Combat is the other major improvement in the game. Now, instead of simply a ‘heavy attack’ and light attacks, you now have a bunch of different types of attacks which are unlocked as you progress in skill. For example, with the Blade skill, once you reach a certain level, you gain the ability to do a sword-sweep type of move that attempts to knock your opponent down. With the Blunt skill, you gain an ability to attempt to disarm your opponent. These really help give combat some depth, where in Morrowind there was very little. Oblivion now has the Havoc physics engine, and the ragdolls are really nice once people die. What I wish is that maybe the weapons would regard the rules of physics, and not be able to pass through one another. So if your opponent and you both attacked, you could hear a “clang” and be bounced back. The game has a physics engine, yet I still often feel like I’m just “clicking some damage into the hitbox” of an enemy. This is a shame. If I hit a helmet, I should get a metallic sound, and so on. The combat animations are also very jerky and fast – for example, after one attack is finished and your arm is extended downward from it, you can click again and your arm basically teleports up to the reserved position. Sometimes, when you bring your shield up, it just teleports up with no animation. I’m asking for a lot with these combat comments, and the game functions fine as-is, but I really feel that it would have been worth the extra trouble.
Another “addition” to the game is horseback riding, if you want to call it an addition. I shelled out 5,000 dollars in one town for what were called the “best horses in Cyrodill”. Within moments, both my budget and my heart were both broken. Horseback riding in Oblivion flat out sucks. First of all, when you press forward, the horse goes almost instantly to max speed. When you release the forward key, the horse instantly stops. There is no feeling of weight or inertia to the horse at all. This is totally unacceptable. Also, the fact that you cannot attack, use magic or items, or do anything at all while on horseback really makes me just never want to use my horse. It’s much better to be on foot and be able to attack things, jump around, pick harvest plants, and just feel in touch with the world. In an interview, a Bethesda team member said that the reason you cannot attack from horseback in Oblivion is because it would be imbalanced, what with you being able to circle an opponent and keep slashing him as you run by. First of all, there were ways they could have balanced it, and secondly, I think he was lying. The horse’s lack of animations tell me that this team definitely got lazy. So horses are a disappointment and I find myself not using them, but there’s an even bigger reason for that…
The reason horseback riding is almost irrelevant is because of another heartbreaking addition to the game – “Fast Travel”. In Oblivion, you can instantly, for no cost, teleport to any city in the game – even those which you have not personally discovered yet. Once you discover any temple, dungeon or location, you can also teleport there – from anywhere, excluding dungeons and the inside of some areas. In Morrowind, you could go to a town’s Silt Rider station and pay money to travel to another town. To me, that’s fine, because for one, you’re losing a bit of money, and secondly you have to be at the silt rider station to travel. Not all towns even had silt rider ports, so some towns you had to walk to. So, in Oblivion, they created this beautiful rich scenery, and then give us the ability to just teleport around, hammering out a powergame, and missing the adventure between the quests. Not only this, but the game is designed around fast travel, so if you download a mod to turn it off (which I promptly did), you’ll find yourself having to cross ridiculously long distances over and over and over again for certain quests. This whole aspect of the game is a real shame.
Bethesda has always had a strong point in lore, quests and storyline. The storyline, however, in Oblivion, feels more canned and standard-issue than in the previous games. There are still quite a few quests that are innovative - one in which you must enter the painting of an artist to rescue him, battling painted goblins under a beautiful painted sky. In terms of lore, I must say it’s a lot less rich than in Morrowind. Most of the books are recycled from previous games. Story is a strong point in general for these games, however with Oblivion, the focus around power-gaming as opposed to role playing really can take you out of it. A huge factor taking me out of the story and out of the roleplaying mood is:
AI. They said so many things about what the AI would be in this game, and really, it’s none of those. The 12 voice actors for the game did a shaky job at best, however, because there are only 12 voice actors and around 1,000 NPCs, you end up hearing the same pieces of dialogue, the same voices, all over the place. Hearing the same voice for a vendor in one town as I do in 5 other towns really takes me out of it. Also, there are frequent bugs involving different voice actors playing different parts of an NPC’s speech. So you could be talking to a beggar, and he’s got a kind of old man voice, “Ehhh shunny, could you spare a coin?”, and then suddenly you ask him about the Emperor and it’s the Guard voice, super stern and powerful going into this big speech! What could take you out of the role playing experience more than that? Horrible! Also, the AI is nothing new. The only real advancement in AI would be that they have extremely shallow “routines” that they follow, basically a path that they walk every day. They don’t pick up objects, create things, organize their stores (even if you trash the store, go back a month later, its still trashed), or any of the things that NPCs did in the “Ultima 7”. That’s just shameful. Really, still the only interactions you can have with AI’s are: 1. Kill them. 2. Get quests from them 3. Steal from them 4. Use the embarrassingly bad “persuasion” system on them. Yes, the new system for persuasion is crap. It has everything to do with powergaming and nothing to do with roleplaying. They did not try to create an accurate, or even believable system. It’s basically a series of four different buttons, like intimidate, joke, etc, that you push in different orders to try to get the number higher. Great. Again, this does nothing but make the NPC feel less like a human and more like a mini-game totem that’ll spit out treats if you punch in the right code.
So, in conclusion, this game is a serious let-down. Even if you don’t apply the ‘what they claimed’ factor, this game is a let-down. For every little detail that’s better than Morrowind such as the Lockpicking mini-game, you get a heap of “features” that suck. No longer can you see where you’ve revealed on the world map. No longer can you resize map windows so that you can watch the map while you play. When you get a quest, you now have a compass that tells you exactly where to go, not that you’d even need it with FastTravel. Almost every feature in this game is geared towards powergaming.
Final word: I bring up Ultima 7 again, and with good reason. Created fifteen years ago, it’s got more immersive features than what we consider to be a top contender in the American-style RPG market. That says very bad things about the work ethic and priorities of Bethesda. It’s a laziness letdown whose technology simply isn’t optimized for today’s PCs and whose design is simply not optimized for today’s hardcore gamer. If you haven’t played Morrowind, go pick that up instead. 2.5 stars.
PRESENTATION: 3 – Pretty looking and smooth for the most part. Interface is blocky and inflexible having been created for console.
GAMEPLAY: 3 – The gameplay is definitely an upgrade from Morrowind, with much better (and harder) combat, but there’s still a lot more that should have been done.
SOUND: 2 - Combat sounds are nice, although there should have been more surface-specific contact sounds. The game is better with NPC voices turned off.
MUSIC: 2.5 – The music itself has high and low points, the high point being most notably the title screen Elder Scrolls theme and the low point being the poor application of the music in-game – you can tell when a monster is nearby by the music change.
GAMEPLAY: 3 – The gameplay is definitely an upgrade from Morrowind, with much better (and harder) combat, but there’s still a lot more that should have been done.
REPLAY VALUE: 2 – Sure, there’s a lot to explore, but after a short time you realize that most of Cyrodill is just pre-fab copy and paste dungeon here and there. No excitement there.
GRAPHICS: 3 – The world is big and beautiful looking, but poorly optimised. Some animations are either non-existent or just horrible.
OVERALL RATING: 2.5 STARS (60%)
-Keith Burgun