The Cyrodiil Look: Cahmel’s New Travels (Let’s Play Oblivion, Part 1)

Oblivion was a well-designed and entertaining RPG that provoked a massive, widespread, embarrassingly violent backlash–the kind where if you got to certain forums, at certain times, and listen real closely, you can still hear the sound of somebody taking it too seriously. Lines were drawn, communities were torn apart, scars were inflicted. It marked the only point in history where uttering the phrase, “I don’t see why lizards can’ t have feet,” would result in hospitalization.

One shouldn’t look too much into any of this; for hours of fun, you can mosey on back to that first word and substitute any RPG ever released in any franchise, ever, for computer or for tabletop. Fans like to form expectations; some would say fans of the nerdier stuff, like RPGs, tend to form more outrageous or specific expectations, and subsequently get more bent out of shape when their favorite series gets mucked with.

I’m in an interesting position. I can see exactly why people hated Oblivion, and I can sympathize and agree with almost everything bad its detractors say about the game (It’d be redundant to go into what these things are now, because I’m about to spend like 50 entries exploring those items, among many other things). And yet, I like the game enough to do a lengthy Let’s Play of it, and while it’ll never replace Morrowind in my heart, I can’t say I look back on my time playing it with anything like regret.

Here’s the thing: like Fallout 3, Oblivion is at its worst when it is compared to its predecessor. That’s not because its predecessor is much better (even if it is), it’s because the things that Oblivion does well weren’t really a part of the Morrowind experience and the things that Morrowind does well are by far Oblivion’s greatest weaknesses. Thus, if you’re coming into Oblivion without any prior expectations, you think: Good game, a few weak points. If you’re expecting a successor to Morrowind, your favoritest game ever, you think: Where the hell are my ski mask and breaching shotgun?

As a fan of Morrowind who doesn’t let that fact get in the way of a good time, I present to you the following Let’s Play of Oblivion. As I do the usual dumb quest/unintentional nudity/random violence routine, I’ll also go over what worked, what didn’t, and what made this game one of the most controversial Bethesda titles released in or after 2006.

I’m not going to bother with a set of personal rules this time, since those were more or less for my own amusement, and not much of it really bled into the content I delivered to you guys. I’m still not going to run any mods—no, not even that one, yes I know you practically need it to run the game, I know it’s like a totally different experience, I know the guy who made it actually needs me to physically install it on my computer or at least download it or else his mother’s going to be fed nosefirst into a bear trap. It’s true that the mods for Oblivion are extremely numerous, and many of them are measurably, objectively better than the content delivered by the developers (performance stuff, for example). And it’s true that half of my gripes can be solved by something you can yank off of TES Nexus in the time it took to write this sentence. I’m still keeping my game vanilla, and it’s for the following reasons:

1.) I’m commenting on the game as it was made, and even little things like hair packs and new sword textures detract from that. Plus, some of the bigger mods change so many things it’s hard to keep track of them all, and I’d hate to praise/chastise Bethesda for something they weren’t responsible for. I mean, I’m pretty sure I can keep straight what the modders added and what was there to begin with, but you never know.

2.) I’m usually kind of a purist; only after I’d sucked the marrow from Fallout 3 did I even consider modding it, and coming back to Oblivion after a long absence, I don’t want to corrupt the experience (even by improving it).

3.) While I truly do appreciate your input, I’ve got a funny feeling that leaving the mod option open would trigger like a million enthusiastic suggestions. That’s not exactly a fate worse than death, but I don’t want to feel pressured to install any of them, nor do I want to feel like I ignored all you guys if I don’t.

4.)  Some of the mods don’t play nice with each other, and the last thing I need is more technical issues.

5.) Ten years ago, a little girl drowned in my download queue, and now whenever I venture down there I can feel her presence. When I DL’d  Sam and Max: They Stole Max’s Brain, my faucet ran blood for two straight weeks.

Oh, and don’t let the last two Morrowind posts fool you—I’m not moving to a strictly-narrative perspective. Like the last LP, I’m going to be doing a first-person LP from my own perspective, occasionally slipping into a Cahmel persona for the sake of an observation or joke. Wow, that sounds complex once I actually bother to think about how I do these series. I should really do that less often.

Without further ado:

The first thing Oblivion does is throw a character creation screen all up in your business. This is striking for two reasons. Firstly, it reminds me that I still need to post Cahmel’s final Morrowind sheet for y’alls. Secondly, this is already the opposite of what Morrowind did—Morrowind made you walk around for about two minutes and have people ask you leading questions to find out where you’re from, what you look like, what you’re called, and how in particular you choose to murder people. In Oblivion, it throws about half of that in your face immediately, gives you a fifteen minute sewer touring and rat-killing break, then remembers to ask you the other half of the questions at the end. I’m thinking they did this because they wanted to get their improved character customization tools out on display as quickly as possible, which isn’t, in itself, a bad thing. And then we come to the character customization tools.

Let me get this right out of the way: I love slider-based character sculpting tools. I can screw around in those forever, and whatever mean things I say about the one in Oblivion, I just want it to be clear that I prefer it to the pick-a-face-any-face approach of Morrowind. Okay? Good.

All of the default faces in Oblivion look like a ventriloquist’s dummy had congress with an alcoholic pumpkin, who, upon learning of her impending motherhood, proceeded to purchase a set of maternity tops made out of Uranium-238. There is no excuse for the menagerie of misshapen, grotesque, putty-like lumps that Bethesda presents to you as mockeries of the human face. Click random as many times as you like: your only chance is to find a face that looks like the ugliest human being alive tried to catch a girder with his forehead. It then falls to you to, utilizing the suddenly inadequate-seeming chargen tools, to sculpt something that resembles a normal human being. Beauty is practically out of the question, so it’s best to drop that notion as soon as possible. Think of your starting point, the misshapen freak Bethesda puts on your digital operating table, as being zero, and an attractive and well-shaped human face as being infinity. No matter how many steps you take, you’re never going to reach that point, but you‘re compelled to keep going anyway because every step does carry you that much further from where you started.

Eventually, I end up with this.Yes, this sad sack is supposed to be Cahmel. I’d provide a comparison shot, but I’d rather not do him the indignity.

Oversized drawstring? Baggy, boxy clothing? Headband? Those things are only styling if it's the 80s, they're all garish neon, and you're in a vaguely racist/homoerotic workout video.

Notice that while he looks like an orange refrigerator lazily cosplaying as a scarecrow, his face, at least, is kind of human. I wanted to keep Cahmel’s bald look, but for some unfathomable reason there was no hairless option. It’d be real easy—just, you know, don’t give the character any hair. I know they modeled the top of the scalp because there’s a tonsure model, so it’s really hard to understand why they didn’t just have a Remove button in there. There wasn’t a bald look in Fallout 3, either—what’s the deal? Did Bruce Willis kill the art director’s dog, or do they just have an unnatural hair obsession?

Upon clicking Okay, you’re released into your squalid Imperial City prison cell. Immediately the game sets a tone of high-stakes heroic fantasy by inviting you, by way of popup message, to play with some cups and femurs lying around your cell. Indeed, unlike its predecessor, Oblivion is fitted with a twitchy but basically functional physics system. That was a welcome addition, because if Bethesda games have one universal failing, it’s the disconnect between your character and the environment. One of the major things that allows a player to get immersed in a game is the sense that they are part of that world, able to influence it measurably and directly. In first person games, this usually means being able to do stuff like shoot out windows, blow up barrels, open doors, and shoot bullet decals into the level geometry. Probably because of their persistent-world nature, Bethesda games have always kept this sort of thing to a minimum. You can’t break anything in Morrowind, Oblivion, or even Fallout 3 (with the exception of nuclear cars)—not windows, not crates, not even glasses and plates. By employing a physics engine, Bethesda gives players the ability to pick things up and move them around, thus exerting a distinct and measurable control over the environment. Now, Bethesda does muff it in two ways;

1.)    The pickup key in Oblivion is frankly anemic. By holding down the Z key, you sort of gently lift up items as if you were grasping them between your thumb and forefinger—they seem to be dangling loose in space, held up by a spider’s web and sheer will. Heavy items like bodies can only be lifted about a half inch above the ground, and other items will flutter annoyingly out of your grasp if you mouselook too quickly. There’s no excuse for this; Half-Life 2 had already gotten this right, dammit. In that game, you pick something up and it remains secure and elevated, just as steadily and firmly grasped as it would be in real life. Perfectly immersive. In Oblivion, you’ve always got the vague sense that somebody just sucked all of the blood out of you and you suddenly have to struggle to pull your fly up. Fallout 3 fixed this system by giving you a pickup toggle, allowing you to pick things up by pressing a key and have them stay up until you press it again, and by greatly improving your character’s apparent lifting strength.

2.)    This is a minor gripe, but the ability to physically interact with objects makes their unnaturally invulnerable nature all the stranger. Pick up a pottery plate and throw it at a wall—it bounces off like it’s made of plastic. Drop a glass off a building, watch as it bounces once and then rolls down the street. Shoot a vase, watch it get knocked off the table and spin around the room a bit. If I spend too much time screwing around with manipulating items, this makes my sense of player empowerment drop almost instantly, and I have to go throw bottles at a wall in Half-Life 2 until I feel mighty again. Then I guess I curl up into a ball, cry, and forget what a gangplank is.

Right, back to the jail. The cellmate across the way busies himself talking smack about your character, putting you down with insults specific to your race. For example, if you’re a Breton, he mocks your apparent lack of magical ability, and if you’re a Redguard, he laughs at how you’ve gone from roaming free to confinement in a tiny cell. This is an enjoyable little scene that makes your choice of race seem marginally more significant, which is good, because basically nobody will ever mention it ever again. I guess maybe some NPC junk dialogue is different (“Say something or move on, <insert race here>!”), but this is the only time where a couple of sentences at a time will directly reference what kind of character you’ve created. This is a touch disappointing, but understandable—this game already has something like four hours of spoken dialogue as it is, so re-recording even a fraction of that for every single race would be a massive waste of resources. It does mean that all picking a race does is affect trivial things, like your stats, skills, abilities, and build.

You know, it’s not that this playing with stuff I found on the floor and getting harassed by my neighbor isn’t fun, but I have to say, I’m getting a just a little bit nervous. I don’t suppose anyone has seen–

Oh, there‘s the plot. False alarm, guys. I was too pretty for jail anyway.

NEXT EPISODE: Unfortunately, I’m also too pretty for everywhere else.

(To be continued when I don’t have to get up an ungodly hour and schlep over to the Hall of Justice.)