The Cyrodiil Look: Cahmel’s New Travels (Let’s Play Oblivion, Part 5)
When we last left our dependable hero, he was being given the Amulet of Kings—one of the most enduring symbols of the Empire—by the Emperor himself. It was his dying wish that I carry it to a nearby priory, where it would then be used to save the realm from a Daedric invasion and shut the marble jaws of Oblivion.
I was torn between selling it and chucking it into the river.
That’s a joke—not because I don’t want to do those things, but because I totally can’t. The Amulet of Kings is a quest item, and so I can’t sell it, drop it, or even put it into a container. All I can do is schlep it around until I find a quest-related dude to foist it off onto. Thing is, it’s not just items from the main quest that do that—any item related to any quest in the game, even if it’s Farmer Billy’s Lucky Coffee Mug, cannot be dropped or sold until the quest is complete.
This strikes me as a little overprotective, but I think it was a response to griping about how tricky Morrowind is to get into. Oblivion is different in a lot of ways from its predecessor. The Morrowind approach was something like this:
Morrowind: Here’s your vacation. It’s Belgium.
Noobskarn: Like…I mean, that’s cool and all. Belgium is cool, but…what am I going to do there, exactly?
Morrowind: (shrugs) My’unno.
Noobskarn: Well, okay, this is a big place, I’m sure I can figure something out. Any ideas to get me started?
Morrowind: Fine. There’s a nice art gallery you could visit.
Noobskarn: Oh, awesome! Where is it?
Morrowind: Northish.
Noobskarn: Could you be a little more…
Morrowind: Oh, and did you keep that slip of paper I gave you ten minutes ago?
Noobskarn: That? Oh, I thought you wanted me to throw that away. What was that?
Morrowind: Yeah, police are legally allowed to shoot you if you don’t have one of those.
It was a little stern, but you got used to it, and once you got your bearings—which took longer for some than others—you began to appreciate the freedom to get lost, screw yourself over, and generally succeed based on your own wits. Didn’t want to do the main quest? Drop the package into the ocean and get it out of your inventory. All of the fun of sticking it to the man without pissing off any actual human beings.
Then came Oblivion, which is more like this:
Oblivion: Welcome to Belgium! Have a brochure. It’s full of information on all the best art galleries!
Rutskarn: Yeah, actually, the last one turned out to just be a building full of raiders and mutant rats, so I’m thinking of taking in some theater instead. Thanks anyway.
Oblivion: Well, take the brochure anyway. You might change your mind.
Rutskarn: No, seriously, I’m good.
Oblivion: Please, take the brochure. It’s for your own good, you know.
Rutskarn: I don’t…
Oblivion: Oh, see, I think I know what the problem is. Well, rest assured, this brochure is super light. You won’t even feel it in your backpack.
Rutskarn: I guess I just don’t want to clutter up my backpack with something I have no intention of ever using. Do you see what I just did there? Because that’s the situation with the Amulet, the one that sparked this whole analogy.
Oblivion: Take the brochure or you’re not leaving this train station.
Rutskarn: Fine. If I visit one, do I get to throw away the brochure?
Oblivion: Possibly.
Rutskarn: Then let’s just get it over with.
Oblivion: Awesome! And I can tell you exactly where they are.
Rutskarn: Where’s the closest one?
Oblivion: Northish.
While I’m sure this approach is more friendly to newer players—and certainly one could stand to find a happy medium between this and Morrowind—the little restrictions started to chafe pretty quickly. You can’t discard or sell quest items, you can’t kill about a quarter of the NPCs in the game, and whenever you engage in a quest, the compass kicks in telling you exactly where everything you need to complete it is. It’s a little ironic that this massive shift towards newbie-friendliness came in the franchise’s fourth entry, after I—and a good percentage of Oblivion’s player base, if not all of them—were already familiar with the underlying mechanics and sandbox mentality.
Right, enough of that, I’ve got some responsibility-shirking to get underway. Let’s bring up the map and have a look…
Oh, hello, DISGRACE. How are the wife and kids?
What the hell kind of excuse for a map is that? Sorry, I’m sorry, roll the set pieces back out, because apparently were doing back-to-back episodes of Why Morrowind Is Better Theater. There’s just no excuse for how badly Bethesda mucked this up. When it came to the map, the designers dropped a ball that was a gun onto their foot, and then it went off, shooting their foot.
Where to begin?
1.) It’s tiny. It’s an absurdly overzoomed in—there’s no way of having two cities on-screen at the same time. In Morrowind, you could see every city in the game at once. This is handy when you’re using the map to plan routes between locations, which is, come to think of it, what you use a god damned map for.
2.) You can’t rescale it. I really wanted to hold off on the usual teh-consoles-ruined-everything speech, but the focus on console interfaces really did bork PC users. In Morrowind, you could have your spells, character sheet, inventory, and map all up on screen at once—you could resize those elements, move them around like windows, and even minimize them/toggle them so that they remain visible when you return to the game. If you wanted to, you could easily scroll the map up so big you could see everything or so small that it barely allowed you to see anything—much like this map, actually. Now, everything gets moved to a different tab, you can’t view two of them at once, and you can’t scale the map up so it’s actually useful.
3.) It’s static. When you find new locations in Oblivion, the game places a little marker that you can fast-travel to. However, it does not fulfill the second-most important function of the Morrowind map, which was to show you where you’ve already been. The Morrowind map filled up with color as you explored it, which had the practical effect of showing you exactly where to search for new areas and the visceral effect of showing you just how much ground you’ve covered. Why did they get rid of that? You can’t tell me that’d be a hard feature to implement. It’s baffling. Were they just so committed to their brown-and-light-brown map aesthetic that they were afraid to sully it with something so garish as…color?
Map sucks. Moving on.*
My quest marker points to the West, which is handy because it gives me an excellent sense of the direction not to go in. I settle on a town called Cheydinhal up to the Northeast. It’s a bit of a jog—I could fast travel, but I won’t, because I’m not a cheap bastard.
After a scant ten seconds, I came across two people camping out by some abandoned ruins.
This looks suspicious, doesn't it? Yeah, definitely. I better sheath my sword so they don't get the wrong impression.
For a second I was wary, but then I remembered that I wasn’t in the lawless backwater of Morrowind anymore—this was the heart of the Empire. What were the odds a couple of bandits were going to set up shop literally an arrow-shot away from the capital city’s crenelations?
Better than I thought, I guess.
I dispatched them pretty quickly. Their armor had an AC equal to my own, and the added benefit of not having been used as a rat lavatory for a few decades. I switch.
Nothing like wearing an unfitted suit made of thick furs on a rainy night.
My trek resumed. I must say, after Morrowind, this place is a tremendous breath of fresh air. Out there, the wastelands were full of all sorts of freakish and hostile animals that’d launch suicidal, single-handed assaults on you from out of nowhere. I guess it’s just a factor of their burned-out savannah ecosystem or something. Out here in Cyrodiil, you get normal, perfectly mundane animals that launch suicidal single-handed assaults on you from out of nowhere.
Well, I guess he’s a wolf-pack…of one.
I also came across a cottage.
The map marker popped up, and I immediately identified the house as belonging to one Roland Jenseric without having the slightest idea who that is or how I know that. That’s also kind of an unfortunate name, and a little on the formal side, so I think I’m going to give him a nickname instead. I like, “Guy Who’s About to Get His Very Piss Stolen Out From Under Him.”
Oh, no, a Hard-level lock—one away from being the hardest kind of lock there is! How will I, a first-level character who has absolutely no relevant skill points, manage to oops I accidentally sneezed really hard and picked it open.
He wasn’t home. Neither, after a few moments, were any of his possessions.
What can I say? This is a sandbox RPG. If he didn’t want me taking his stuff, he should have become a pauper. On purpose, I mean, not by default.
*I know there are mods that fix this, but I’m analyzing the game design decisions of Bethesda, not xxXSephirothDEsuXxx—the work of the designers, not of the fanbase. If I were setting out to write a critique of Harry Potter, I would not end with, “It had a good story, but it loses some points for the part where vampire Draco and the goth chick went to the MCR concert.”**
**I did, however, write a critique of My Immortal. For college. It was my freshman honors research paper. I got an A on it. Academia can be stuffy and bureaucratic, but if you look for them it does have its moments.
Honestly, Rutskarn, I think everyone would love to read said critique, if it’s still kicking around somewhere. Because you don’t already spoil your readers enough with four posts of excellence a week.
We are still waiting on that paper, Ruts.
Massive agreement on the map cock-up. :/ I can’t believe a group of designers sat around in a meeting listening to some eager idiot’s ideas for how he was going to Totally Improve the map system, and after listening they all smiled and nodded and agreed that this’d be just awesome. I mean, seriously?
There’s no sense of progress like there is in Morrowind, as you watch the map fill in. Early on I started circling around ruins and such as far as I could because I didn’t want them to show up on the map until I was ready to explore them, because there was no other way to indicate on the map whether I’d done it or not. (It’s been a while since I’ve played Oblivion, but IIRC they also left the note-taking function out of the maps, yes? :/ ) Or maybe I’m thinking of something else, but at any rate this was one of several “improved” systems that, along with the massive bugs, had me wandering away from the game way before I was anywhere near done with it.
Angie
Got to love how massively unamused Cahmel looks in that wardrobe shot. It’s like behind his cold, dead eyes he’s planning on how best to cook your liver.
I got used to the map eventually, what annoyed me was the fast travel system, I preferred the way it was in Morrowind: you still could travel between key locations but it was integrated into the world so you could justify it along the lines “I paid for the giant bug transport”. Aside from the whole immersion thing that designers use as an argument to justify half the faults in games nowadays there was also the added feature of “aaaand your autopilot turns off in the middle of the bandit camp, enjoy” that we so enjoyed in FO3.
And, yeah, the quest items tend to clutter the inventory, particularly since a number of them don’t disappear or become non-essential after the quest is done. Even more so with some quest mods. The mod to delete the quest items and spells at whim was one I was extremely thankful for, and miraculously I managed not to screw myself with it by deleting something like the amulet of kings… They should’ve made stuff like “quest items cannot be removed” a toggle option, or part of the difficulty settings.
And guess what, the map/inventory in Fallout 3 is even worse. At least Oblivion used 80% of your screen and had a legible font.
Without mods, the interface is *prettier* than Dwarf Fortress, but not really more *practical*. Guess what I care about more. Interface mods are pretty much required to enjoy Oblivion on PC.
i agree with the map but less so with the extra help given. it can be a little overboard at times but morrowind pissed me off so much. i completed it but i don’t really know how as i spent most of the game lost and frustrated.
Good point about the map, but Morrowind was also a console game.
/come on, Ruyskarn. We need that goffik paper.
The map actually shows your “covered land” in Oblivion, but it does so by covering the dark brown with a slightly lighter shade of brown.
I don’t recall ever seeing the map like that. Have I been using an interface mod from the very beginning? Possibly, I got some tips from a magazine…
The bandits (and marauders) are there in Oblivion, and the suicidal wildlife, but at least you’re not running into a quest giver every 100 meters, half of them dreaded escort quests.
The wiki claims there was a flawless diamond in that cabin, do you have it? Anyway, the direction of Cheydinhal sounds interesting. If you’re going to join the Fighters, now’s the time, before the goblins become too strong for your colleagues. Or for a warm and fuzzy welcoming quest instead, join the Mages Guild and go for the recommendation.
It’s funny. I just (about 2 weeks ago) finished playing about 150 hours of Oblivion (modded to hell) and I started playing Morrowind again and half of the time I’ve been playing I’ve been bitching about how much better Morrowind is and all the stupid decisions Bethesda made with Oblivion.
It’s amazing how much feeling of freedom was lost in Oblivion in comparison to Morrowind.
I was all psyched for this LP, hoping you’d somehow rutskarn-brainwash me (Rutswash [tm]. We’ll lick your brain clean.) into forgetting how awful oblivion was. And yet as I finished reading this post I found myself scanning the room for my copy of morrowind. Dammit, Rutskarn.
I’d love to see a comparison of all the things Bethesda has done better in each instalment of The Elder Scrolls (there are four games you know, and some spin offs!), and all the things they’ve changed for the worse.
My favourite still is Daggerfall, despite it being a buggy mess (even once you have the latest patches).
What I’m really looking forward to is http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/ – the potential is awesome.
Fun history fact: It was actually for the two reasons listed here — the trigger-happy legal-murder police and the rather barbarian-esque art galleries — that we Dutch allowed the Belgians to have their silly little independence after the grossly exaggerated ‘Belgian Revolution’.
Historians will tell you that it was through intense violent combat and French military intervention that the Belgians gained their hard-earned freedom for a Kingdom of the Netherlands that was none too keen to give up its territories and tax revenue. Do not listen to their lies.
I hate people who are smug about being good at the lockpicking mini-game. When I first tried to pick a very hard lock, I broke 30 picks and ended up cheating to be able to ever pick anything again.
@Guy: I don’t think he was trying to be smug (well not trying hard at least) and was just pointing out how stupid it is that there is a skill for lockpicking that becomes completely useless if you become really good at the minigame.
@Jarenth, now that I remember to ask: How was your research? All done now?
Sekundaari: Well, thanks for the interest. 🙂
Unfortunately, it turns out I didn’t get quite enough people, so I’m halfway through another three weeks of running tests. This time, we’ve taken the approach of trying to get the new year’s freshman to participate; so I’ve been busy trying to get new, mostly male students to participate in a study where they play Unreal Tournament for half an hour and get paid for it.
For reasons I can honestly not comprehend, this is not going as well as projected.
Ramsus: Exactly, yeah. I’m only okay at the minigame, but as long as you’ve got enough picks you can jimmy just about any lock anywhere.
@Jarenth:
Freshmen who don’t feel they could use more money, huh? My educated guess is the multiverse is out to get you. Have you tried luring them with candy?
Of course in my mind I’d like to imagine they all know the joys of more realistic and strategic multiplayer FPSs. So were they offered a game of, say, ArmA, they would have jumped at the opportunity for no additional compensation, unless an expectation of a reward is important for the study.
Sekundaari: (Do I really need to add that? I think at this point it’s obvious who I’m talking to. Anyhew)
What’s important for this study is for some people to goddamn participate. I’d hire strippers to lure people into the lab if the university had budgetted me for it.
Seriously though: I use Unreal Tournament for reasons of comparability; some other researchers at my faculty have conducted studies with that game, and if I were to change that up it could be an additional source of data noise, which I never ever need.
Also, I get quite a lot of people who just plain suck at FPSs, or gaming in general. There was this one player who managed to end up with a score of -2 frags – quite a feat. Unreal Tournament is by no means *easy*, but it’s certainly simple enough for just about anyone to work out in the span of two times ten minutes.
Also, the reward thing is sort of university culture here. It’s cool to be able to help out a friend in need and all, but everone knows there’s budget for these experiments. 😉
I would totally do your study Jarenth 😛
What exactly are you measuring anyways?
Hey Rutskarn, have you watched Bennett the Sage’s Masterpiece Fanfiction Theater of “My Immortal”? If not, or just to anyone interested, here’s part one:
http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/bt/the-sage/fanfic-theatre/15170-ep012a
If you even want to see the other three parts after that, you’re certifiably insane.
That fanfic….
wtf.
Has that been on the same internet I use all these years? I feel dirty…
It is a parody. Probably. No one is certain, since IIRC it came from a new account that posted that story, defended it in the comments(in similar language to the fanfic), and did nothing else. I’ve personally never read it, out of fear of it and hatred of typos.
I’m surprised there was no mention of the paltry “valuables” one tends to loot from people’s homes. That was something I found frustrating my first time through; you go to rob someone’s house, and all they keep in their containers are random trash barely worth the cost in lockpicks to break into the place.
Volatar: the short story is that I’m looking at how ‘close’ two game-players feel (in a relational sense) when playing games under different circumstances. I hope to achieve this by manipulating either a)having them in the same level or in different levels, or b) allowing them to see each other’s scores during gameplay.
The long story takes about four months to properly appreciate, and involves phrases like Social Presence and Direct and Indirect Interaction Channels. Trust me, you don’t want to hear that.
I agree with every gripe so far, with about tenfold the ferocity…
So WHY in the name of the NINE GODS, does this make me WANT TO PLAY OBLIVION AGAIN!!!
Evidence suggests you might be a masochist.
All I have to say is thank God for the Construction set, I couldn’t even play the main quest until the first fan made patch came out. After that I got bored killing the bandits with Dedric and Glass armor and weapons. I love my modded Oblivion, and my Modded Morrowind. Come to think of it would it really kill them to make it on PC and then send it to consoles a few weeks later after the necessary additions and subtractions. I mean we just got the news that Dragon Age 2 will be using a updated tool-set, which we the fan base will get.
And Rutskarn, post your rant…
…Having wandered the halls of academia myself, I would very much like to read the term paper you wrote for “My Immortal”. I think of myself as a patient man, but twenty minutes into the thing I just about clawed out my own eyes.
Funny, I remember being able to zoom the map using mouse wheel…maybe I’m remembering it wrong…
Eljacko: You can do that in Fallout, maybe that’s what you’re thinking of? I don’t think you can in Oblivion. I’ve even got a mod that claims to let you zoom the map and I still can’t manage it.