The Cyrodiil Look: Cahmel’s New Travels (Let’s Play Oblivion, Part 16)
Today's forecast calls for low draw distances with scattered premeditated animal assaults.
When we last left our dedicated hero, he was wandering around the countryside looking for hostile life forms—that is to say, life forms. Yeah, I’m about as likely to find a nonthreatening man, animal, or manimal in the Cyrodiil countryside as I am to find a 7-11. We’re talking vast ecosystems, economic models, and criminal syndicates based solely on harassing that one guy who occasional wanders out to pick flowers and bum around mountain ranges. Alternately: squatting in a depressing, vermin-infested hole in the ground and waiting for him to show up.
Don’t believe me? Explain the next drabyrinth I came across: an old, abandoned fort full of necromancers. What, exactly, were they doing there? I can buy caves full of bandits—bandits need some place to crash, not to mention store all the illicit yarn and calipers that nobody in this country will buy from them. But necromancers? Yeah, I know, blah blah Mannimarco blah blah cult blah—you can definitely argue that this makes sense. It just seems a little silly at first blush, like when you try to imagine their weekly itinerary:
Monday: Wake up, eat rat for breakfast, necromance.
Tuesday: Wake up, eat rat for breakfast, play with ball of yarn, necromance.
Wednesday: Wake up, eat imp gall for breakfast, vomit, stand guard outside the door all day.
Thursday: Wake up, eat rat for breakfast, necromance.
Friday: Wake up, eat rat for breakfast, contemplate career change.
Saturday: Strip bingo in the lobby.
Sunday: Killed along with everyone you know by a lone adventurer.
Guess what? It’s Sunday.
I’m doing pretty well against these guys, although I kinda have to amend my tactics from the last dungeon. The first couple fights go like this: I try to sneak up them, they smell my presence, they start summoning a monster, I run up and hit them to death, their monster pops in for a fraction of a second and gives me that dammit-I-got-up-for-nothing look before vanishing back to the realm from whence he came. Less stealth, more naked being better than them. Attempting to waylay more difficult targets does mean that I’m getting very, very gradually better at the sneaking part—as in, moving from having no points in it to having a small amount of points in it. We’re not talking mastery, we’re talking lessons like these:
23.)It is generally best to wear shoes of leather or cloth, instead of noisier footwear constructed out of live parakeets.
Here’s an out of character lesson: what to do when your opponent is a little sharper than usual–which sure isn’t not a mean feat—and can detect that the heavily-armed shambling madman, lurching down the corridor with a laden backpack, isn’t actually any kind of rodent. This strategy involves branching out into another skill I didn’t pick, Marksman. Turns out, going into sneak mode a nautical mile away from some twit and putting an arrow into his spinal column is not only a fun and viable strategy, it appeals to my lazy sensibilities by giving me a way to assassinate people that are all the way over there.
Dudewithanarrowstickingoutofhisnecksayswhatwasthat?
I also discover that the most significant factor contributing to stealth success and failure is whether I am currently walking. Not moving—just running and walking. Let me illustrate thusly:
The first necromancer I came across was on the other end of the hallway. Obligingly enough, she had chosen to have her daily stare-at-a-stone-wall-until-the-urge-to-kill-myself-fades session facing away from the front door, so I had a theoretically clear shot at her backness. However, I didn’t even make it close to blade range before she whipped around and decided to blame every single wrong decision she’d made in her lifetime on me. Then I was forced to handle her the hard way, AKA the traditional way, AKA the up-front face-to-face murder way.
Okay, I thought, I guess these guys are just a little more on the ball than the last group. So I saddle up and press on into the next area, which involves a dude on a bridge. I shoot the dude, then start to cross the bridge in sneak mode. I get distracted by something shiny, swivel my mouse, and accidentally walk right off the bridge.
I drop down to the floor ten feet below, and land right in front of a necromancer.
I think I can see her brain through her nostril. Wait, no, that can't be right.
Yeah. Whereas the other one caught me within shoe-flinging distance, I’m close enough to pick this lady’s nose and she still can’t see me. And it’s because instead of walking up to her, which would have been terribly conspicuous and got me caught immediately, I just plunged down from a well-lit bridge and landed heavily at the flagstones directly in front of her.
Such a situation had the potential to be pretty awkward, but I think, given the circumstances, I handled it smoothly.
Next: A guide to the wonders and splendors of Bravil, and then another paragraph.
Wait, why is the draw distance so low? I originally played this on the 360 and could see clear across Cyrodiil from a high enough spot. The pretty (if generic) vistas are on of the things this game has going for it.
Luckily, Skyrim is shaping up to be both better looking, and a more interesting landscape. Thus: http://www.gameinformer.com/games/the_elder_scrolls_v_skyrim/b/xbox360/archive/2011/01/17/the-technology-behind-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim.aspx
That site’s whole section on Skyrim has me so so so optimistic. I need a new Morrowind. Please don’t let me down, Bethesda!
Noticed you’ve been using “twit” a lot lately. It’s all that damn redcoat Jibar! You better watch him, or next thing you know you’ll be talking about Her Majesty’s delightful tea and crumpets.
@thebigJ_A
I’m pretty sure it’s fog.
I suspect Rutskarn is running Oblivion on Jibar, and a Jibar cannot handle high graphics settings.
Also, personally – I somehow always think that the ‘unknown things hidden behind a perpetual mist, and then appear in view gloriously’ is much, much better than seeing the same land textures and low-poligon bottom-level LODs way across the map. For one, it’s prettier that way, and two, the world feels much much bigger than it really is.
Wow, the mental image of diving off a bridge and not being seen from six inches away, then stuffing an arrow up someone’s nostrils? This is almost as broken as Fallout 3 stealth with a chinese stealth suit.
NPCs are so dumb that they have lost the ability to see anything that’s not moving. Like T-Rex’s.
But they gained the ability to smell people in sneak mode.
Why all this harshness? The situation is entirely plausible: the guy on the bridge you were trying to kill at first is, well, not very good at bridges (not unlike a certain hero), and so Ms. Necromancer below has learned to ignore all these little plummeting incidents.
That last screenshot is excellent. Fort Variela I guess?
I wonder if the imp gall has some rat in it.
@X2-Eliah: The longer view distance has its benefits though. I imagine Morrowind would have less clueless getting lost and wandering if the central landmark would be visible from everywhere.
Wouldn’t shoes made out of parakeets allow you to fly? I’d gladly give up stealth for that.
@Jarenth
Nah, flying is impossible in Cyrodiil, since there is much more gravity than in the other regions.
@Someone: With a sole ecxetpion for items and, sometimes, corpses. They often float or jump arpund like crazy.
Seriously, why has noone here mentioned this weird bug yet, where things start to jump as if they were just hit by a fireball because you picked something up that was enxt to them? That is a very common bug in Bethesda games. I encountered it in Oblivion, Fallout3 and New Vegas.
@Jarenth: Nah, they are too weak. They’d just flap their wings comically while producing cries and squishy sounds. Somewhat entertaining, but ineffective.
@Someone: Congratulations on that Catan game, sounds neat.
There’s a reason I always do Sneakk+Marksman.
Mind you, hitting the duststorm-heavy final area becomes really annoying…
Oh wait, I was thinking of the better game. No real issues with Sneak+Marksman in Oblivion…
@Sekundaari: thanks! Was a really tense match. Now I just need to find out what a Catan game is, who I played with and whether or not I won something.
@Sekundaari: “I wonder if the imp gall has some rat in it.”
Well, there’s plain rat;
imp gall and rat;
stinkhorn and rat;
imp gall, stinkhorn, troll fat and rat;
rat, troll fat, imp gall, rat and rat;
rat, rat, rat, fly amanita, stinkhorn and rat;
and mutton steak baked with primrose, finest Tamika’s vintage wine and rat.
In any case, most things you find in a dungeon have rat, with varying degrees of subtlety.
I think you’re mixing sketches here…
… but okay. Could I have imp gall, stinkhorn, troll fat and rat without the rat?
I’m afraid it’s quite impossible as per the last point, but otherwise: eww! Rat is the only ingredient there that doesn’t have Damage Health effect.
Importantly, though, Skyrim’s soundtrack will heavily feature a Nord choir. Here’s to hoping for some easter eggs…
Ahh, but there is so much more to the “realistic” and “complex” economic system of Oblivion. For example, the growing_under_the_trees bandits also attack the infinitely_spawning_from_city_gates road guards when the two happen to wander nearby (at least they did the last time I played this, heavily modded though). I guess with so many delicious corpses just resting around every fork of the road, cave or a bunch of bushes pretty much everything that can be defined as fauna (and probably some flora) has long decided that if it has four limbs and is covered in metal it is food.
I do love performing Sneak Archery on skeletons. A single arrow sends them exploding in all directions. It’s all the satisfaction of a long-range headshot in [Insert multiplayer manshoot of choice here], but without the shrieking accusations of wallhacking.
And to be fair, most caves tend to have barrels with actual food in them. One assumes that’s what the necromancers eat, although I do question the logic of storing two apples and an onion in one barrel, two more onions in another, and a single strawberry in the third.
@Someone
I’m pretty sure it’s not fog, it’s a low draw distance.
Exhibit A: the caption of the picture has the words “low draw distance” in it.
Exhibit B: That’s not what fog looks like in Oblivion.
Exhibit C: The image shows goldenrod. Goldenrod grows only in the Gold Coast region. The Gold Coast region is never foggy.
Great, now I see an X-COM episode on the livestream page (“X-COM 2”), but I’m fairly sure I’m missing at least one episode before that one, after “Origins”. Seems to start on a different mission, not the one in the end of Origins. Does anybody know of a missing link?
thebigJ_A: Yeah, but you can see the mountains on the horizon. I’m pretty sure those vanish if you turn the draw distance down. Not completely sure though, because I always have distant terrain turned on. That’s one of the things Oblivion really did right, in my opinion. I mean, really, how often does the visibility drop to 50 feet in real life? Sometimes, sure, but not every damn day. Seriously, I can’t play Morrowind without the distance extender.
Very nice article, tottally what I was looking for.