The Cyrodiil Look: Cahmel’s New Travels (Let’s Play Oblivion, Part 23)
When we last left our honorable hero, he’d managed to rack up enough Jackass McBastard Jr.’s Patented Asshole Points to qualify for an exciting position in the field of murder. Well, almost, anyway—it’d be fairer to say I’d proven myself enough of a deranged monster to land an interview. My actual entrance exam was coming up.
I’ll let Lucy take it from here:
Okay, see, I’m liking the straightforwardness. There is a man, go kill the man—I can get behind this sort of organization. It’s got a simplicity and purity of purpose to it that’s really been lacking in the other organizations I’ve dallied with. There’s no specious sociopolitical agenda, no endless parade of grunt-work gofer quests that don’t really go anywhere, no non-Euclidean architecture and fixation with hobofights—just killing things and getting paid well for it. It’s about goddamned time I found a questline that provided the basic meat-and-potatoes of adventuring without serving it alongside some kind of posturing nonsense.
Never mind.
It’s worth mentioning that this isn’t so much a commentary on the Dark Brotherhood questline in general, which is quite well written and interesting. It’s more a commentary on Loosey Goosey, here, who has the diction of a dedicated LARPer and a costume to match. You know, I’d never really thought about it, but he looks exactly like that one guy who always tries to play a character a thousand times cooler and more badass than he is, but can’t quite manage it, because all he’s got to work with is a hooded cloak from Party City and a crude pastiche of coolguy clichés—the same ones he uses for all of the plot-critical NPCs in his 2nd Edition game, the ones that are all slight deviations of the protagonist of his unfinished fantasy novel, Bladeswords of Darkshard. And I really do mean Lucien looks like him, physically resembles him: he’s got that round, chubby face, with the lazy 5-o-clock shadow and the puffy lips and the reddish eye sockets. I’m not sure how this never struck me before, but now I can’t unsee it—I look at Lucien, and I see him rolling up to the counter of a 7-11 in full costume, ordering a Big Gulp and a Maxim and daring the clerk to comment.
Maybe it’s this abrupt shift in perspective that soured me on Lachance, but I suddenly felt a distaste for him and his antics. Don’t knot yourself, I’m still doin’ the quests and all, but I didn’t feel like standing by and acting all impressed by his faux-mysterious shenanigans. So when our business concluded, and he swept wordlessly away into the night—er, afternoon—I followed right on after him.
Perhaps detecting that I aimed to spoil his exit, he slipped into invisibility. But since this is Oblivion, and “invisibility” actually means “malfunctioning Predator cloak that bends light like silly putty and looks like a mobile kaleidoscope,” this did not avail him much. So he just sort of jogged along, still plainly visible, until the situation got sort of awkward and he did exactly what he made his 2nd-Edition plot-critical NPCs do in this situation: teleport away by DM fiat, without any pretense of a logical explanation.
This is more than a little aggravating to me, because it’s blatant cheating on the part of the developers. There’s clearly no reason this should be able to happen in-game. In most cases, when the game pulls stuff out of its ass like that, you can shrug your shoulders and say, “I guess the world just works that way.” For example, the game never needs to establish how the Dark Brotherhood’s potential recruits are magically detected and weeded out, because that’s different enough from the stuff in the observable sections of the game that you can give it the benefit of the doubt that that’s just how this universe works. But in this case, all of the relevant elements are well within the observable spectrum of the game—the nonexistence of personal teleportation magic is well-established, and the game can’t even make the excuse, “You can just sort of do that ninja shiz when you get to the level of hardcoreness Lucien’s reached,” because the game allows you to get promoted right up to his level, and spoiler warning: no teleportation mojo is forthcoming. So without any justification, the message carried across by Lucien’s disappearance is the same as the message in Lucien’s 2nd Edition games: “What’s that? You’ve outsmarted my railroad plot and my supposedly-godly NPC? Screw you, I win anyway. Man, this is much easier than being a player!”
The least they could have done was wait for him to get through a loading zone before he dropped off the face of the Earth. I mean, when I go out a gate directly after an NPC and he’s not there, at least I can kind of say to myself, “I guess he ran off and now he’s outside my field of vision.” You can kind of kid yourself along there, and that’s all I’m asking—for the game to meet me halfway on the rationalization. But having him disappear well away from the gate, under cover of a spell that doesn’t work, using a spell that can’t exist, is just a little obnoxious.
Alright, enough fixating on that jazz, let’s just get on with the quest. Pretty straightforward: just have to journey through the woods a ways, find an inn, and kill a certain guy inside. And now I have a weapon, so if I get attacked, I’ll have something to defend myself with besides a tangible body odor and abysmal dress sense. Hm. Come to think of it, he did put a lot of emphasis on the dagger being a “virgin blade” that had not yet been used to kill. In context, this seemed to have great ritualistic importance. So let’s run through a purely hypothetical scenario. Let’s say, purely for the sake of example, I was attacked by a wolf.
Purely for the sake of example, this wolf.
Doesn’t killing the wolf kind of ruin the whole schtick? I’m pretty sure he implied that this was intended to remain a virgin blade up until I killed Rufio–I mean, assuming I’m not reading too much into that? I kinda felt like that was supposed to be the blade’s…you know, its…first time? So, I mean, now that I’ve killed an animal with it, isn’t it sort of defl—okay, yep, just decided I wasn’t comfortable with this analogy. Let’s try this again, without Lucien’s creep clinging to the conversation like a fine layer of sweat.
…yeah, it’s not working. Forget the whole thing, please.
He had a scroll of Divine Intervention imported from the north.
Or maybe he just fast traveled, I dunno.
Maybe if you kill an even number of wolves it’ll go back to being ritualistically sound?
You can’t tell me that’s not how virginity works because we’re talking about a sharp but of metal and a needlessly creepy metaphor here. Maybe by killing two wolves it can be “twice hallowed” or something. Or it can officially be dubbed “sanguine”, which makes it holy by virtue of that being the dev’s favourite word.
It still hasn’t tasted [b]human[/b] blood.
Wait, this is Cahmel we’re talking about. He probably cut himself when Lucian handed him the blade.
… can someone tell me what BB codes on this site are?
Isn’t “posturing nonsense” the basic building block of all human social structure?
He cast Recall.
I kind of liked that hooded-LARPer guy, but only because clichés are sorta my thing. I like ’em, gave the DB questline a certain feel to it.
I never chased after him, though; I always assumed that he actually did just go to another loading screen and then vanish. Huh. Well, learned something new.
Lucien disappearing is one of those little things that could have been helped with pretty much the tiniest bit of writing. I mean, would it be that hard to add some animation before removing the model? Even one of the premade spell animations. Or the already mentioned loading screen thing.
On that note, I always assumed that the DB’s ability to locate potential recruits was due to how the highest authority in the organization works (spoilers shouldn’t really be a problem at this point but I’m never feeling comfortable about them).
“On that note, I always assumed that the DB’s ability to locate potential recruits was due to how the highest authority in the organization works.”
.
Any verisimilitude that the Dark Brotherhood had for me was lost fairly early in my adventures with the game. I was playing my typical character, a noble knightly type, when an Azura worshiper got mugged by a daedra from a nearby gate. He was looking rather badly, so I loosed a few arrows at the daedra; the man decided that jumping into the trajectory of the last one would be a good idea, and was summarily slain. By one arrow. After being well mauled by a daedra. And somehow, the DB decided I was their man:
“Hey Bob; take a look at this one! Poor guy got shot by the man trying to save him! Dodged into the arrow he did! Ha-ha!”
“I think he has potential…Let’s try to recruit him!”
“Wait, recruit a knight who probably would like nothing better than a chance to end our entire cult and exorcise the dark spirit of our mystical master?”
“Yeah! And let’s send one of our top officials to conduct the interview!”
Worira: now I keep imagining him importing Divine Intervention scrolls, accidentally getting Almsivi Intervention scrolls instead, and not noticing until he uses one.
*POOF*. Suddenly, Vvardenfell! Enjoy the Cliff Racers.
@Flavius: Yeah, I mentioned it in a comment to an earlier post that I do like to think that they actually do filter people somehow and they approach will always approach you cause “the PC is special” but I know there really is nothing in the game to support that claim.
On the one hand I think it would be nice if there was some additional filter to it rather than just “kill a guy, get an invite” (I mean even for a PC), on the other morality sliders generally suck and I have no good idea how else to implement it without putting hundreds of triggers to monitor if you’re “bad enough” for DB.
Unless there were some extra quests between the kill and the actual invite. Something like, you kill an innocent, you get the “your actions were observed by forces unknown” thing and then you are led on a questline, for example: someone sends you letters where they claim to have seen this and intend to blackmail you, and depending on how you handle this it’s either that or the DB gives you an invite… Than again game devs simply lack subtlety these day. I mean, heaven forbid the player could actually play through the game and not have hints (read: blatant instructions) on how to join the most secret organizations in the gameworld shoved in their face.
The first time I got invited, it was for killing the Champion in the arena. I did the quest that made him lose the will to live*. In the arena, he runs at me and begs me to kill him. So I do, and get an invite from the “mysterious organization”.
I thought it was neat. I performed a cold-blooded execution in front of a crowd of thousands of people, and no one realized what was really going on except the mysterious observer who saw me murder the man in cold blood with a clear conscience.
I don’t think the guild would’ve had half the cool factor if it wasn’t for this exact way I went about killing my first innocent, but for me it worked very well. If it had been a misplaced arrow a la Flavius, I think I would have been very annoyed…
*Incidentally, the champion telling me he wanted to kill himself completely freaked me out after Morrowind, where “I’m going to kill myself” translated into “I will fight you to my last breath.”
My invite was for hacking down a grave-robber.
It’s seriously pretty lazy not to at least wait for Lucien to get to a loading screen before vanishing, because vanishing after a loading screen is game-designer code for “This guy’s location is no longer important until he shows up again”.
Incidentally, I killed the grave-robber on behalf of the local mercent cartel in order to pressure someone to stop undercutting their prices and join the cartel, so I guess that’s actually a valid reason to send the invite.
I like how they’re “He’s not in the union and he’s undercutting our prices, a valid business practice! I bet he’s up to no good!”
Hmm? I’ve never had him teleport before, he always leaves via a door in all my games and then doesn’t appear on the other side. And I don’t really begrudge them for it, there’s no real reason to force him to invisibly walk all the way to his tower when this is supposed to be a shorthand for the same that doesn’t force the game to track another NPC.
You want to get into unfair teleportations and the game breaking its own rule though, Baldur’s Gate 2 remains the undisputed king
L. usually vanished at or around a door for me, too, but that’s probably because I always sleep indoors.
I hate the stupid “Enforcer for the Merchant Cartel” mission, but I always end up doing it because it’s easy, local, and provides decent disposition boosts with the people I buy things from. Terribly-written, though.
My first murder was a shopkeeper who had things I wanted, as I recall, because my default character in Bethesda games is a greedy bastard.
Is Rutskarn going to encounter a continuity error? IIRC, he already killed everyone on the pirate ship, but that was the original playthrough.
I don’t think the blade is actually in any way important to your first murder. He just gives it to you as a gift from the Dark Brotherhood, it doesn’t serve any purpose except to be soon awash with blood (provided you don’t already have a better weapon) and its purpose is only revealed further down the questline. You can kill Rufio with your bare hands and they treat it the same, so yeah I think killing that wolf was actually just fine and perhaps what he wanted, as it shows you have the kind of murderous Sithis-may-care attitude that lets you kill without remorse, (at least when you are attacked in the woods).
Thanks for ruining my mental image of Lucien forever. And here I was about to make my next guy a Dark Brotherhood guy.
Having created a few of those “go invis then teleport the guy” things, I can pretty much tell you why it works like it does, which is that having him run away via script + AI rather than just AI works a whole lot better over long distances. Also takes forever to just let them run, not that that’s much of an issue with Lucien.
Of course, if they really wanted to do it right, they should have had him use invisibility (not chameleon, which is a whole other animal) and then immediately script teleport him. To the player it’s pretty much all the same thing (he raises his hands, magic appears, he goes away) but prevents the pesky “I follow him until he teleports” thing.
Somehow all of this is still better than the entire Fighter’s Guild questline.
You know what would be real fix to this issue? Instead of being annoyed that the engine is really a bother to use when you want an NPC to go some place, why not add that to the engine itself? Can you imagine what a joy it would be for the level designers if they could just drop a marker somewhere, and tell any NPC “go there, use all means available to you”, and the NPC buys a horse and does so? Instead of scripting it painfully for every NPC, write a (more or less) complex AI routine once!
@Sleeping Dragon: I suppose what you mentioned was what upset me the most; until the moment I described, I thought that the game’s mechanics were somewhat more complicated than they turned out to be. I thought that there was a calculation going on in the background, keeping track of your actions, and only offering you the invitation once certain criteria were fulfilled; perhaps not after the first, second or even third murder. Since I never played in a way that allowed me to see otherwise, I maintained that illusion for quite a while. Then it came crashing down in the quite spectacular way (to me, at least) that I previously described.
Flavius, the problem is, complexity introduces more bugs. And the game is already buggy enough. There’s also the problem that some characters will not fit the mold no matter what you do.
My most recent character is a thief, but she only kills when she has to. That said, going through the Mages Guild quests have put her in a lot of situations where killing is necessary, and the use of sneak attacks has meant that most of those deaths were unprovoked. Still no murders, but between that and the thefts she has a decent body count and a sizable infamy. And then I encountered Countess Alessia Caro in the middle of the wilderness. The Countess is a racist who has a special torture chamber off of her bedroom specifically so she can listen to Argonians screaming. And my character brutally murdered her, because it was basically her duty as a decent person. And got invited to join the DB, whereupon she killed Lucien, because, again, he’s a monster and she’s a good person. I doubt any amount of scripting could have avoided that and still made joining the DB doable for an evil char. .
@Kdansky – The “drop marker, use an AI pack” system is, in fact, the system that exists, and for the most part works just fine (except horses. Horses work…less than well as is, nor do I expect that the “just buy a horse” routine would work near as well as you expect or even be desirable, but that’s another set of arguments). Nor is the scripting all that complex (5 lines or so for Lucien here, IIRC, I use longer timers and use a couple more in my stuff. I’m also obsessive).
Couple of obvious problems that crop up, though:
1. I’m not sure he can actually fit into the hollow tree at Fort Farragut to get to the trapdoor to his base. That takes like 3 seconds and a pathgrid node to fix though.
2. There are also possible timing problems where you could kill Rufio and he’d need to warp back to you before he was home/while he was fighting wolves on the road/something, and the scripting there would really get you in trouble. That’s pretty rare, but it can happen. Probably they could have designed the MoveTo and MoveToMarker functions better to avoid the crashes, but.
3. What I suspect the real killer here is is that it’s entirely possible for the player to be sleeping in a place that it’s impossible for the AI to get out of. The Bloated Float at sea is one, Paradise is another, and those two are specifically checked for in his script, but it’s impossible to check for every possible instance of this sort of thing, given mods, nor is it a particularly useful thing to spend the time on. I suppose they could have just written a bit more code in the travel AI, but I can envision plenty of ways in which that could end up being worse than what you see here. Slightly more elegant to script it. Really, it is.
One can debate if they did it particularly well or not, of course, but given the amount of time it’s worth to spend on something this minor, I can’t fault them too hard for it.
Too, the one murder to trigger Lucien thing is kind of dumb (they could have done it at like 5 or something, the mechanics are there and it’s about as much scripting), but at least it’s better than joining up with the Morag Tong in Morrowind, which is basically “Hey, I hear you murder people. I want to murder people. Legally.” “Yeah, murdering people legally is great. Here, go murder this guy in a tavern legally and you can join us. To murder people. Legally.” Bad execution, but credit for trying.
@Viktor: Believe me, you don’t need to convince me of the added complexity; I read Twenty Sided enough that I can almost hear Shamus Young explaining it to me in my head! I am more complaining about how the transparency hit me; which was like a ton of bricks, and how a very little work would have covered it much better.
A slightly more complex trigger, say positive infamy, and a random number of murders between, for example, two and four, would have been a better scenario in my book, though that may (or may not) have been enough of a ward to keep your good thief from receiving the invitation.
Another possibility that might have helped would have been a clause that the murder had to be committed without gaining a bounty, or witnesses (and [probably] not in the Rutskarn version of “no witnesses”). However, I am not sure how difficult this provision would have been to add.
@Dwip: According to the wiki, the Morag Tong initiation requires the player to find their super-secret hidden base (possibly without help?), which if I recall, is quite out of the way.
Re: Morag Tong, yeah, you do have to find their Super Secret Death Fortress Of Solitude, but that’s literally stumbling upon the right broom closet in Vivec. Granted there’s a lot of broom closets in Vivec, but it never seemed to me to be the most logical method of recruiting people. Whatever the many faults of the DB initiation here, at least it’s better thought out than that. Or at least, given Morrowind’s tech, better constructed, since Lucien here isn’t even possible in Morrowind.
Re: Complexity of the DB invite trigger, you know, actually not that hard. Just a little bit more scripting is all. Not sure positive infamy is necessarily a good idea (you can get that lots of ways), and the whole “No witnesses!” murder would be super tough to pull off in scripting (I’ve tried. It’s hard), but making it only trigger after, say, four or five murders? I’m pretty certain you could do that just by changing one line in the script.
Of course, that would make it a lot harder to get into the DB, and one of the design decisions about Oblivion was “Make it really easy to join all the factions,” so why they didn’t do it that way is fairly obvious, I guess. Most likely a very poor design decision, but.
He fast traveled. If players can do that, why can’t he?