The Cyrodiil Look: Cahmel’s New Travels (Let’s Play Oblivion, Part 12)

When we last left our industrious hero, he was bumming around the Imperial City like a larcenous tourist. I’ve dueled fierce pirates, robbed an armor store, exchanged witty banter with the local beggars, and taken a variety of completely unusable photos of me posing next to IC landmarks (Run-Down Shanty, Empty Shrine, Too-Small Doors of the Arena, That Barrel Full of Cheeses). And now, I should probably go ahead and actually do the thing I came here to do: have a meeting with the shadowy organization that invited me to this city in the first place.

Right after I take a nap.

Well, no, seriously. I gained a level at some point, probably midway through hacking that pirate wench into pieces of eight. You can’t level up unless you rest in a bed, which means finding a spot to hunker down. Now I just have to go through the daunting task of finding lodgings in a city where there are more inns than people.

I head into a place in the Market district.

The stuff on the table's scattered because I'd just gotten finished batting it around with my cutlass. Entirely legal. Touching it, of course, is potentially punishible by death.

The first thing I notice is that I can’t actually talk to the man behind the bar. He’s lurking just outside my reach, fixing me with his stony raisin-faced glare while I desperately grind against the bar in an attempt to engage him in conversation.

And now I'm standing in his corn. He hasn't complained yet.

That’s better.

Turns out that I walked into a tavern instead of an inn. As such, he has only one room for rent. The lock’s a bit annoying, and it’s not very luxurious, but there’s all sorts of free stuff inside, like some bottles of wine and books a wardrobe full of clothing and a desk full of personal letters. It’s little extras like that that ensure repeat business.

Anyway, enough stalling. Time to head out to the specified garden and wait for midnight of an entirely unspecified day.

Darkness falls. Despite myself, I begin to grow nervous. I am to be meeting with a representative of a clandestine cabal of thieves so vast that they have fingers in every major city, yet so mysterious that their mere existence is an unproven legend.What form will this meeting take? What figure will step from the shadows of the gardens and draw me into their secret rituals–so clandestine that they can only be undertaken at midnight, when the sky is at its darkest and there are none about?And the one I am to meet with, the agent who liasons with the untested public–what dark-kin stealthlord must he be?

At this point, a man steps off of the main street and into the gardens. He’s dressed in bulky leathers and holding aloft a massive lit torch. His greased-back hair glows like a miniature sun, and from his belt hangs a mace with the size of a bobcat.

This is the least suspicious gathering I've ever seen. No wonder the guards have yet to wise up to your covert conspiracies.

Yeah. This guy’s a goddamned moonshadow.

As it turns out, I’m not the only recruit he’s auditing–there are two others, an argonian guy with no shirt and a wood elf lady. All of us have more or less equal qualifications (i.e, we got arrested), and for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, he’s only going to hire one of us. To determine who is the best thief, he’s going to have us run a little larceny race.

Some guy has a book. We have to find the guy, then take his book. First back with the book gets into the guild. Sounds interesting enough. His only hint is, “Ask a beggar.”

Well that’s a bit too straightforward, isn’t it? I mean, there’s only two places that sort of thing can go. Either the beggar knows exactly where the guy is, and then the whole thing seems a bit too easy, or the beggar has no real useful information, in which case you’ve royally wasted your time. And of course it’s going to be that last one–Bethesda’s terrified that if they hand you an actual puzzle, your brain will scramble and fry itself within the skull. If they don’t hand you a perfect–not to mention arbitrary–lead right out of the gate, how else would you go about finding your target’s house? I mean, besides:

• Asking a bookseller
• Shadowing one of your fellow thieves
• Searching manually/relying on your hard-earned map of the Imperial City
• Asking random people until one of them knows
• Asking a guard
• Finding a census taker and stealing the information from him

I go up to a beggar (there’s on literally five feet from where I’d been standing), give him five coins, and find the house. Then it’s just a matter of dashing inside and grabbing the book. Well, that was easy.

On my way out, I bump into the Wood Elf lady. She immediately calls me a “thief,” insisting that I have “stolen” the book from her. It is an interesting and nuanced definition of “stealing” that extends towards taking property one intends to take at a later date. I am nonetheless unconcerned, as I have difficulty envisioning her pressing charges.

(Okay, there’s a somewhat rational explanation for her dialogue, although–since this is Bethesda we’re talking about–even the rational explanation is baffling. See, the lady starts off knowing pretty much exactly where the book is, so if you drag your feet even a bit getting to it, she’ll arrive first and trumpet about how she recovered the book successfully. At this point, you’re expected to steal it off her person, whereupon–should you talk to her again–you’ll be prompted with that dialogue. Of course, this doesn’t explain why:

1.) Playtesting didn’t determine that a player who knows what he or she is doing will get the book first 100% of the time

2.) They thought that was a good idea anyway

3.) She doesn’t just try to steal it back from you

An interesting idea, an odd implementation, a gobsmacking bug. In other words: Bethesda in a nutshell.)