The Cyrodiil Look: Cahmel’s New Travels (Let’s Play Oblivion, Part 11)
Edit: Fixed a few typos. Keep in mind that I finished this at such a late hour that I had to shake myself awake three times during the editing phase.
When we last left our dedicated hero, he was wandering around the Imperial City aimlessly. Okay, yeah, I guess I’m supposed to meet up with the Thief’s Guild or whatever, but they didn’t actually specify a day for me to meet them on. Maybe they’ve got nothing better to do than hang around a specific garden every single night of the year, all waiting for some random mug-fondling ex-con who may or may not be showing up. So far, this guild is reminding me less of a shadowy crime network and more of those guilds that spam the chats looking for applicants. You know the ones: “<Knights of Dragon Legion> is looking for members! No experience or equipment needed. Bank alts welcome. Acknowledgment of fellow guild members optional. You can pretend we’re a cool group or something. Make up some raid statistics, we’ll back you up if anyone asks. Garish, tasteless tabard will be provided. Contact GL Cookierandom for more information.”
The Imperial City is a touchy subject for me, because it’s honestly one of the stiffest disappointments Oblivion has to offer. There are many things that Bethesda, for all of its good qualities and areas of expertise, is absolutely incapable of doing. Chief amongst those is making a city that feels more like a metropolis than, say, a smallish medieval-themed outlet mall. Vivec was where they got closest, but that’s cheating—it’s not so much one city as a bunch, it’s full of generic patrolling NPCs, and it only feels big because its architect was M.C. Goddamned Escher. Anyway, every other “big” city they do ends up feeling like someone abandoned a suburb and didn’t bother to evict the tremendously ugly, broadly humanoid squatters.
The Imperial City was advertised as the capital of the Empire, a city vaster than any we had seen before. It was supposed to be a city that felt like a thriving nexus of activity, the beating Brobdingnagian heart of the beast. All of this sounded entirely reasonable before the game came out, but in hindsight, I guess it was probably hoping for too much.
The first problem is that it’s broken up into sequestered loading areas. Not like “pass under an archway and get a loading screen” loading, either. Like, “walk up to a door and activate it to teleport into a new area” loading. Each chunk is relatively small, and so the place doesn’t feel that put together.
Secondly, it’s a ghost town. There’ll be maybe one or two non-guard people wandering aimlessly down any given street. Combined with the fancy alabaster architecture, this gives one the impression of a lavishly-decorated shopping center that’s in exactly the wrong place to attract customers.
Thirdly, there aren’t a lot of interesting districts. There’s the Market area, also known as Three Quarters of Anything You’d Actually Want to Do Are In This One So Just Fast Travel Here and Be Done With It, the Arena (more later), and then some minor districts that are various flavors of, “People in X tax bracket live here.”
Fourthly, it’s just not that big. Vivec was larger, and—damnable wreck though it was—it was at least pretty interesting. Less so the uniform-architecture flat playground that is the Imperial City. Vivec did have the same “all dressed up and nowere to go” issue, though—once you picked a House, two of the cantons became useless overnight. And the Arena Canton was useful only for when some random guild NPC’d challenge you for the top spot.
Right, enough griping. I might as well hone my larceny skills.
Perhaps you, following my golden example, have decided to assume a life of crime. Good on you! Capitalism is a tool of the Man, man. You have to, like, free yourself from your capitalist notions of having to pay for things and stuff and shiz. Only then can you reach enlightenment.
Anyway, to get you started down your own self-destructive path, go ahead and assume that you’ve spotted a valuable item lying under some shopkeeper’s bloated potato nose. Here’s how you’d go about liberating it.
1.) Act casual. NPCs can smell fear.
2.) Begin to not-that-casually walk upstairs, then wait. The shopkeeper will be too timid to ask why you’ve just blown past his merch and are now standing outside of his room, but he will try to follow you for some reason. What, doesn’t he trust you unsupervised with his stuff?
3.) Wait until he’s as far from the desk as he’ll wander, then print past the NPC towards the item in question. Now, of course, it’s illegal to touch an item, because that demonstrates misuse of someone else’s property and is viewed as suspicious. So to act casual, what you do is hit the item with your sword. Just straight up smack it into the corner, then run in after it.
4.) At this point, you should have your item on the ground and the NPC upstairs/stuck on a corner/not in witness range of what you did, so run over and grab it like it’s hot and also your hands are frozen in blocks of ice.
It sounds goofy, because it totally is, but you can make bank doing this. I just lifted a whole steel breastplate from the armorer—that’s going to be worth a dang fortune. Of course, I have to sell it first, which does mean finding someone who will buy my stolen oh yes that’s what I was doing.
Right, let’s get this over with, then.
I never bothered with that – my method was as such – go upstairs, pick door lock, loot everything in the shopkeeper’s room that isn’t nailed down, then loot everything inside the stuff that is. Repeat if applicable for the basement – as long as you press use while hidden, you’re in the clear. Then, the shopkeeper should have followed you away from his post, so run back and steal everything you can from the desk.
Alternative: 100% chameleon, paralyze spell (only if a no-psychic-guards mod is installed) or any other spell to otherwise immoblize the NPC in question when it’s out of the way.
@The Imperial City rant:
Wait till you get to New Vegas (in a game of completely not the same name). That makes the IC be one of the most under-advertised non-disappointments of sprawling epicness ever.
And after a couple of levels every player realises that they can get more said breastplates than they could possibly carry by just walking to another town and looting the bandit corpses along the way. Also, free training in the weapon/armour of your choice. Also, no need to go hunting for a guy willing to take this stuff. At times I seriously think that developers want to avoid some kind of “advertising crime” accusation when they make it so ridiculously ineffective.
The Imperial City does feel small compared to Vivec or even Mournhold, and it’s a bit of a disappointment, but Cyrodiil in general feels small compared to Morrowind for me. It’s probably all the fast-travel and horses. Maybe they’ll remake it in some later game?
Stealing is weird. For me, before the stealth armor, it usually meant crouching behind the shopkeepers furniture and grabbing something before he reaches me. Must look real subtle, the shady-looking guy clumsily hides behind a table, reaches with his obvious hand and grabs that silver bowl, and soon all the strawberries are rolling on the floor. Though you’ve got to admire the flick of the wrist that takes the bowl while not moving the strawberries…
And more about the Arena later? I approve.
This is why I liked the towns of Daggerfall so much, they were actually alive with people. Of course they were all just cookie cutter peasants, but at least there was the feeling of life. And then of course they all hid at night when the ghost of the old emperor came out to eat them, which then made an empty town feel spooky as well.
I seem to recall that thieves or somesuch were everywhere at night and attacked you on sight in Daggerfall. So much bonus treasure 🙂
I always worked on my sneak skill in Oblivion, made the upwards scaling monsters beatable at the higher level (At least until you get nigh 100% damage and magic reflect of course). 70+ sneak meant I could just stand a few feet away in any shop and grab everything in arms reach while they look right at me.
“All of this sounded entirely reasonable before the game came out, but in hindsight, I guess that probably hoping for too much.”
This phrase is Oblivion in a nutshell.
@Sekundaari: Haven’t played Oblivion, but Morrowind felt way smaller than Daggerfall, too. I wonder if eventually there’ll be an Elder Scrolls game that takes place entirely inside a set of four rooms connected by teleport-and-load doors.
@Kevashim: I remember humans of various stripes being fairly common random encounters. Of course, the easiest way to round up treasure in that game was to walk into a store, loiter until after closing time, and then empty the shelves into your pockets and your pockets into the shopkeeper’s lap.
RE: Medieval-themed shopping centre, feels small.
That’s how all of Cyrodiil felt to me. Personally I blame it on the fact that everything is tied into eight little self-contained cities, each with a different theme to the architecture and people. Swamp city! Snow city! Forest city! Oppression city! There’s a vast world to explore, but it feels smaller because there’s nothing to really find. Everything out in the wilds is just going to be the same demon-infested fort or ghost-filled elven ruin (or a cave full of trolls and minotaurs).
The pathetically small amount of non-city settlements (there are … three? Four?) are purely window dressing. They offer nothing in terms of services. Compare this to Morrowind, where even the meanest collection of hovels would have some sort of trader, and each dungeon or cave was hand-crafted to feel unique.
Also the cities could be wandered into and weren’t sealed off from the outside world by big loading-screen doors. And they weren’t all the same uniform size. There were different levels of settlement and … bleh. I really wanted to like Oblivion, but it’s just so cookie-cutter. 🙁
@Burke The big reveal of that game being that the 4 rooms are in fact really all the same room! Just with a different coloured lighting effect and at one point it has a goblin in it.
Don’t forget Elven “The Area With the Cheap Hotels” Gardens. Wouldn’t it be funny if the whole Oblivion being less interesting than Morrowind thing turned out to actually be one of the developers making an allegory on the woes of colonization and empiricism?
Actually, I spent a fair amount of time in the Arena district in Vivec. Not only were the master trainers for Heavy Armor and Acrobatics there, but also the Morag Tong hideout. I don’t think I’ve played a character through that game that didn’t do at least half the Morag Tong quests before killing Dagoth Ur. The great part is, it’s all legal. Walk up, gut a man in broad daylight in the middle of the street, then when the guard comes running up to you, whip out your little piece of paper that says you got paid for it. Morrowind assassins have a heck of a union.
It’s bizarre. We talk endlessly about Fantasy Trope X and Generic Medieval Setting Y, but they weren’t really embodied too recently in a video game so wholly, so entirely, until Oblivion. It’s like Bethesda was benchmarking western RPGs.
@Sekundaari —
The Imperial City does feel small compared to Vivec or even Mournhold, and it’s a bit of a disappointment, but Cyrodiil in general feels small compared to Morrowind for me. It’s probably all the fast-travel and horses. Maybe they’ll remake it in some later game?
I agree that Morrowind felt a lot bigger. The whole horse thing disappointed me pretty quickly, and I just ignore horses now. I think part of the problem, though, is that you can go anywhere in Oblivion, pretty much at will. And if you want to join the Mage’s Guild, you have to. That’s it, you’re level two or whatever and you’ve explored and quested in every city on the map. Have a fun rest of the game. :/
Someone apparently decided that the existence of areas too tough for baby adventurers in Morrowind was a bug that needed to be “fixed” in Oblivion. I always considered it a feature, and the openness of Oblivion removes a lot of the sense of accomplishment and working hard to explore the higher level areas.
I think Morrowind just plain is bigger than Oblivion, as well, but the way you can go anywhere and do anything in Oblivion just makes it feel even smaller than it actually is.
Major disapointment. I go back and play Morrowind periodically, but I don’t know that I’ll ever go back to Oblivion. [shrug]
Angie
@Angie
Actually, I think the developers said that Oblivion had more square footage.
How does morrowind feel like it takes longer to traverse, even with the boots of blinding speed? I don’t know. It is smaller, but it feels huge. I blame the variety, not just vaguely different shades of grass.
I agree with you about the city. To me it seemed very fortress-y, with everything enclosed and the streets mainly populated with guards. And the careful order, with not so much as bucket or blade of grass out of place, made it feel like a theme park. It was a raging disappointment–both Leyawiin and Skingrad feel and look twice as big.
Fun fact: There’s a mod that removes all the city walls. Best guess of the modder was that the separate cells aren’t for performance issues, they’re to prevent wild animals from wandering into town and killing people. This still doesn’t explain the Imperial City, though that may have been them trying to make fast travel even easier.
And I agree about the city size. Balmora and Sadrith Mora felt large. Balmora had 4 taverns. One for the thieves, one for the Tong, and two for whoever. Did the extra taverns serve a purpose? No, but they made the town feel lived-in.
Not to mention that the cities in Morrowind, and by extension the areas around them, feel different from one another. There’s the swamps of Seyda Neen and Hla Oad and the like, the red-brown ash storms around Ald’Ruhn, Sadrith Mora’s giant mushrooms, Vicec’s floating cantons of horror, and probably some more types I’m forgetting.
If you travel from Ald’Ruhn to Sadrith Mora, you’re actually somewhere else. It’s instantly visible, and it really feels like you’ve come a long way.
Oblivion? Grass and trees. Rinse, repeat, fall asleep.
Jarenth:
Now, now. It’s occasionally broken up by stone brick buildings, all alike.
Uncle Rutsy, I’m going in to Pig Girl withdrawl.
I think what contributes to making Morrowind feel so large is the fact that the ash fog makes the draw distance very small. There are mods that remove this and give the game similar draw distances to Oblivion. Standing in Vivec and being able to see Balmora and Suran made the world feel a lot smaller to me.
@Jarenth: Ah, yes, but if you look carefully you can see the grass and trees vary slightly from district to district. Definitely awesome variety there. [/sarcasm]
For some reason, I have this weird masochistic thing where I don’t use fast travel in games.
Or run.
Talk about making Oblivion feel endless, let me tell you.
One thing that makes Morrowind feel big is the very limited view distance – you instinctively assume that the horizon is very far, though in vanilla game it’s not really true. Mods that bring it to Oblivion’s level on near infinite view distance destroy the illusion pretty nicely, e.g. http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a325/kdog03/Morrowind2007-01-3000-40-10-89.jpg (yes, that’s everything between Suran and Seyda Neen in one landscape shot)
Reminds me of what first tipped me off that Morrowind wasn’t quite that big: The silent pilgrimage. I’d made some constant effect fatigue restoring clothing by this point, so I ran, bunny hopped and levitated across the landscape without a care and it only took about twenty minutes or so. No Boots of Blinding Speed because my first character was a Khajiit.
Now, when I was a little younger and not a fat sack of lard, it took me thirty five minutes to run from the town I live in to the neighbouring one. That’s only a couple of kilometres. True, there’s not that much of interest between Hatfield and Welwyn Garden, but that’s Hertfordshire for you.
Makes me think of Shamus’ ranting about procedural content. Really, the things you’d expect to give a town bigness would be a lot of houses and basic services for people who aren’t important, all that interesting or relevant to your big quests, which could be done by computer. There’s even a mod for Morrowind that generates FedEx quests automatically, VafEx or something.
Of course, you’d have to do something to make stealing less than insanely profitable, like giving traders a minimum value and other standards for things they’ll buy(they won’t buy one wooden fork, but will buy a complete set of matching silver cutlery, for example), having people lock away and guard their valuables after a spate of thefts, or making people suspicious of the outlander who came into town with a rusty dagger and ragged clothing a few days ago but is now dressed in enchanted exquisite gear and has daedric weapons.
The entire Imperial City would’ve been much better if they just had some more people on the streets.
There’s no reason it couldn’t be done, either. Hitman: Blood Money had you pushing through massive crowds of people in the Mardi Gras level, people you could shoot to bits if you had the time, and that was released in the same year.
I don’t even need to talk to the NPCs. I just want them to be there.
You, good sir, win 50 points for using the word “Brobdingnagian”.