The Cyrodiil Look: Cahmel’s New Travels (Let’s Play Oblivion, Part 24)
I love to see you go, but I hate to watch you leave.
When we last left our cunning hero, he was on his way to perform an assassination pro bono because a strange man told him it was a good career move. Something to think about, isn’t it? I mean, I’m not implying that this whole ritualistic cult murder thing doesn’t seem legit—perish the thought—I’m just pointing out that I have to take it on some faith that once I’ve killed my target, I’m not going to get left out in the middle of the woods with no follow-up visit while Lucy heads back to his bosses and says, “What, Rufio? Yeah, I took care of him. No problem. Now, what are my next ten assignments?”
The journey to the location is more or less uneventful. Funny thing about Oblivion is that half the time, traveling on the road seems to lead you to more areas of interest than wandering around off the beaten path. That might seem intuitive, at first—except that it means there’s a bunch of ruins that have been sitting around in heavily populated areas, bursting with ancient treasures, significant historical artifacts, and monsters poised within striking distance of main roads…for centuries. In a realm where the two most popular professions appear to be:
1.) Working for a guild centered around some genre of murder
2.) Hanging out in the woods, killing people and things, exchanging the loot for yarn and wooden spoons
It’s the classic Fallout problem of, “Why hasn’t someone been to this supermarket full of perfectly good food and drugs in two hundred years, when it’s right next to a settlement with no obvious food source?” When combined with the level scaling, which warps every living creature in the realm to however good you are at violence, it kinda ruins the illusion that the world is their for anyone’s benefit but yours. You get the vague sense that NPCs sit around town smoking cigarettes when you’re not there, and all scramble back into costume when they see you riding over the horizon—proudly brandishing the goodie bag they’d left for you in one of their vast, gloomy activity centers.
Morrowind didn’t really have this problem. This was partially because the roads were generally winding, unclear, badly labeled, and dangerous enough that you generally just wanted to use the fast travel. This was partially because the enemies were not level scaled, and after the sixth or seventh time you got your ass fried for getting to close to Asharganafukuwup, you got a sense of why people steered clear. It didn’t matter that you’d eventually be able to level up and take the place on—hell, that’s what made it feel great when you did. It was like, “I, Outlander O’Utlander, am the only jerky-gnawing enchant-abusing mark-recalling wrecking crew who is a bad enough dude to clear this place out, and dammit, I had to work to get that way.” That worked for the higher level places, anyway–and generally, the low-level areas would be quaint, easy-to-miss cave doors, either temporarily occupied by banditos or crewed by ancestral spirits and skeletons the natives would have compunctions about messing with.
Whereas in Oblivion, it seems like half the dungeons have obvious superstructures that can be easily seen from the main trade roads—broadcasting an invitation to all potential looters/archeologists/mages looking to stomp necromancers unmentionables. And since you know you can take on any one of these dungeons at any time, it becomes harder for you to see why anyone else wouldn’t—especially when you’re first level, and every undead, goblin, bandit, and necromancer has the striking power of a hair dryer and the structural integrity of a baking soufflé.
Anyway, the point—which I think I dropped behind the seat cushion three or four paragraphs ago—was that a lot of major dungeons are clustered along the road, and if you walk off the road, you might go some distance without bumping into one. It does partially depend on where you are, and how straightforward your path is, and how unlucky you are, and whether or not you can read the compass properly. In my case–apart from a little shrine where you can give yourself a temporary piece of armor that looks silly and is of debatable application, much like those rub-on tattoos of dolphins and M&Ms you can buy at pizza joints—I bumped into buck all on my journey to the Inn of Ill Omen. Which is just as well, I suppose. It meant I’d be able to save my strength and wits for the job, which I already got the feeling was going to be tricky.
Okay, take it easy. What you’re about to do is gain access to the room of a man so paranoid, he’s holed up alone in the middle of nowhere, and kill him without attracting the attention of any guards, or private henchmen, or bystanders. This is obviously going to take a certain amount of finesse. Approach this as you would any treacherous and multifaceted mental exercise: methodically.
Step one was to find Rufio’s exact location. That meant worming it out of the proprietor. The proprietor was a calm, guarded man—easy of disposition, but with an air of worldliness and caution that instantly put me on my guard. He looked at me, and his expression was nothing but smiles and good old folksy hospitality, and I knew that he could smell what I was. The moment the door swung open, the stink of my sins and deceit reached him, and he withdrew into his fortress and barred the gates. This man didn’t just roll off the turnip cart. He was a worthy opponent. Getting this information out of him would be my first test.
I walked up to the bar and ordered myself a drink. He served it up on the bar, a midrange Surille’s of adequate vintage. I thumbed the cork open, took a long, casual sip of wine, and opened with: “Nice weather we’ve been having.”
“Sure is.”
“Where’s Rufio?”
“Down that trapdoor. End of the hallway, first left. Door’s unlocked.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
"Heya. How've you been? Name's Cahmel. C-A-H-M-E-L. If some guards come through here asking who killed Rufio, could you be a dear and let them know it was me? Only sometimes, I forget to leave a note."
Like a shadow, I walked across the well-lit barroom, nodding politely at the other patrons, and climbed the ladder downstairs.
Rufio was, as the bartender had promised, down the ladder—waiting for the end of his life to come, borne by me on semiswift wings. Perhaps the only way to give you an accurate impression of the chaotic, blood-pounding, tooth-and-nail battle that followed is by sharing the following pictures with you:
Well, that was a close one. I was dangerously close to falling asleep myself.
It’s the secret, untitled chronicle of Cahmel’s exploits!
Blah, and I just have to go and won’t be back for the whole day to read it.
This one didn’t bug me. You’ve proven that you’re ABLE to kill people, that’s how you got the interview. Now they want to know if you’re willing to kill someone in their sleep for no reason other than that you were ordered to. It’s a nice way to weed out those with some vestige of morals or honor.
That was me. I’m not a ghost, no idea why my computer thinks I’m one.
Looks like you have some sort of mold infestation on that there virgin blade of yours. I blame the wolf blood, m’self.
Funny thing you mention the dungeons and their inexplicable lack of being explored although sprawling settlements sit right next to them.
I remember leaving either Skingrad or Leyawin, taking the road north and I wasn’t even 5 meters away from the towns gate when there was a fork with a road that lead around the town. And along that road within viewing distance sat an Ayleid ruin.
Well shit, now I want to go install Morrowind again.
Yeah, thanks a lot Rutskarn, it’s not like I have [i] anything [/i] else I need to do.
Yay, Cahmel. Alas, poor Rufio.
Stunningly original thought follows:
I don’t know that I’d say that Morrowind didn’t have the whole ruins-on-the-road-waiting-just-for-you thing, after all there are a couple of pretty obvious slaver dungeons right next to Sedya Neen, and plenty of Dwemer/Daedric ruins just sitting around the road near Vivec and Balmora and what have you, but Morrowind did a whole lot better at suggesting that you perhaps weren’t the only dungeon delver in the land by dumping adventurers and such around. And of course the awful level scaling just highlights that so well, doesn’t it.
And it’s just another one of those things where Morrowind was so much better at suggesting the existance of a real economy, but.
Too, how offensive are fort ruins, really? Really, the Legion? Cyrodiil is your main base, and you can’t even keep a fort running? I dunno, maybe you guys DESERVE to lose.
My favoritest, hug-it-and-squeeze-it-and-love-it-foreverest example of this particular trope, though? Miscarcand. Epic ruins, right on the road, filled with goblins, plot doored until you’re at the level where you kill some daedra just to get your coffee in the morning. Impossible to take seriously.
@Dwip
One thing I absolutely loved about the world of Morrowind is that Vvanderfell is presented as this backwater, barbaric backward island nobody gives a damn about.
Sure, there are some GLARINGLY OBVIOUS bandit hangouts, daedric ruins full of crazed bloodthirsty cultists and demons, cryps crawling with undead abominations and other dangers near the roads, but nobody is bothered enough to go and take care of them.
The Imperial authorities couldn’t care less about what’s going on as long as glass and ebony exports keep flowing, Hlaalu are too busy trying to get in on the Imperial action and killing eachother over it, Redoran barely has enough men to keep Cliff Racers out of Ald’ruhn and Telvanni never even pretended to care. Even the Fighters Guild won’t do anything because it’s upper management is in bed with Cammona Tong.
It’s pretty much an accepted fact of life that the roads are dangerous and filled with ax murderers nobody will do anything about, so people either hire silt-striders, boats or just stay at home.
That comment above was made by me
Well I suppose the anonymous comment had to be made by someone afterall.
HAR HAR!
/shoot fish-barrel
There can’t be any axe murderers on the roads, not with plentiful magic-using lady vigilantes to stop them.
Wait a minute, since when did you start doing the Hitman LP in screenshot format?
So were we clear on whether or not Lucy got off on the whole murder thing or not? The whole ‘virgin blade’ thing is pretty uh..sexual. I just don’t like to think of him back in his..hut, uh, ‘workin’ it so right’ while he thinks of Cahmel thrusting a dagger in to some poor chumps neck. I mean, urgh.
Leigh: Damn, now you gave me another reason to hate Lachance. My reason-box is about to explode, I think.
I prefer Oblivion’s level scaling to Morrowind’s “Put em wherever” because it lead to some absolutely HORRIBLE area design.
For example, let’s say you hop off the boat and want to be a good servant of the Emperor Picard, so you go off to join the Legion. The Legion tells you the only fort with openings is up by Gnisis, so OK you go there. On about your 3rd quest you are sent down a road which has (a mear 20ish feet from town) a door leading to a cave, this cave has slaves, but also an orc wielding an axe worth more than the sum total of all the armor on all the legionnaires in Gnisis. Now, if you manage to survive the first hit you may decide “fuck this” and try to leave, but THE DOOR IS TRAPPED WITH A PARALYSES SPELL.
So the devs know that low level characters are going to be coming this way and yet they STILL decide that a high level orc would be an appropriate challenge to throw in this dungeon. This is exactly why some people clamored for auto-leveling foes, because at least it stops low level areas being spiked with high level foes you couldn’t possibly know where there. And this happens all over morrowind. Deadric shrines look big and “fuck-off-y” to let you know that they have big, fuck-off enemies, but just about ever ancestral burial ground and cave look exactly the same until you run into an uber-enemy who will kill you in one shot. The IDEA of this kind of area design is good, some areas are for low level characters, some are for high level, but there needs to be some kind of delineation so the beginner knows “don’t go here” and the expert isn’t bored killing rats. The most logical thing would be that ruins near towns be full of low level creatures and sparse loot, while the ones further away and off the beaten path be filled with great treasure and powerful creatures, but it couldn’t even do that.
Also, I’m pretty sure Morrowind included a degree of autoleveling as well, as you revisited Daedric shrines after leveling up, you would find Scamps replaced by Clanfears, who would be replaced by fire, then frost, then storm atronachs, dremora would be replaced by dremora lords, etc.
Arg, and I didn’t remeber to say it in the last post but the reason spiking low level areas with high level enemies turns me off is because it discourages explorations. Morrowind’s entire travel and combat system were tedious enough that leaving the towns was more a chore than an adventure, but add to that the fact that you could never guess what was in a cave or ruin (since being near or far to a town was no measure of the power of the enemies inside) and I decided that I would just skip dungeon diving entirely rather than get knocked back to the loading screen more often than not.
I really really adore Morrowind’s ideas, and everywhere I look at it I see “this should be a game I absolutely love,” but it just put me off so thoroughly on the thing I enjoy most about RPGs: the dungeon diving and map exploring, that I just can’t. Morrowind has an excellent story and setting, and I loved the conversations and books relating to it, but then I’d get a quest to go outside of town and I knew I was in for a boring, tedious time of it.
The main problem with signposting difficulty is that it’s difficult to do it in-world without leading directly to the problem of the world actually looking like it’s made for the player, rather than being a place they happen to be exploring. Maybe if there was a more pronounced adventurer presence, it might make sense for ruins to have signs with symbols that show the level and type of danger/benefit in a shrine, similar to hobo signs about where to get meals and lodging. The only pitfall with that is that you can’t really have chests lying around with goodies, unless it’s really high level gear or near worthless for anyone who’s strong enough to take it because of weight-to-value ratio, your loot has to be from plants, creatures, and other renewable resources. It’d be interesting if you could learn different symbols from different guilds, then have things like the Fighters Guild symbols saying the dungeon’s impossible, the Mages Guild saying it’s difficult unless you have a particular kind of magic, and Thieves Guild saying they’ve already cleared it out.
And, while I don’t want to be the stereotypical Morrowind fanboy, Gnisis is on the other side of the continent to Seyda Neen. There’s a limit to how far you can travel from the starting area and still expect things to be balanced for starting characters. Exploration is a reward in Morrowind, the basic idea is to power up and conquer it and people like me love sneaking across the landscape perpetually terrified of what might kill us by looking at us funny. It builds suspense, and you can’t achieve that with level scaling, because whatever the situation, you’ll always be at the same relative power level and thus facing the same threat.
Gnisis is the very first city for the Imperial Legion questline, it is the ONLY place to START the Legion questlike. It doesn’t matter how far it is, they send you straight there.
And what I’m saying is that maybe traipsing across half the continent should be a clue that this is a more advanced questline, if you’re going by what you’re advised to do you start by doing errands for Caius and then get told to faff around doing odd jobs for the guilds for a bit. And anyway, what’s wrong with just reloading and going somewhere else if you get completely slaughtered?
Maybe I just have an overly cautious mindset. Hell, I’m the sort of person who’ll spend weeks of his own leisure time stealing everything of value in Vivec and buying training. And then complain that the game is too easy when I actually start fighting.
@Someone –
That is so. Although I wonder how much that would actually be the case if there hadn’t been such strict AI limits at the time. Would you have seen Legion patrols? More Ordinators raiding ruins? I always wonder if that atmosphere is a “We wanted it this way!” or “We just can’t do it, it’s beyond our power” thing.
Both Fallout 3 and F:NV probably portray what Vvardenfell might have looked like with the technical aspects solved, I think.
@Nidokoenig –
Yeah, but it’s not like there aren’t overpowered dungeons in the should be beginner areas, too, like that one not appreciably far from Sedya Neen on the road to Balmora that kills me every single time I start a new game.
@Johan –
For what it’s worth, as far as I remember the actual engine mechanics for level scaling in MW, OB, and both Fallouts are almost exactly the same. They’re just applied differently in each game, with Oblivion being the most obnoxiously obvious about it.
I love how you apparently still felt the need to Quickave before killing Rufio. I guess, you know, in case he woke up just before and turned out to be too badass. For you and your Virgin Blade.
Dwip, not sure which you’re referring to. Addamasartus and Andrano Ancestral Tomb are designed for low-level chars, while Mannammu is hard to find.
And yes, sometimes Morrowind screwed you, but things like Intervention mean you can almost always run, something lacking in Oblivion. I also usually viewed that Orc as a test. If you can’t beat him easily, level up before continuing the Legion, which is another element lacking from Oblivion.
Go the other way and you run into Zainsipilu and the various unpleasantnesses near Hla Oad, though. And those will make you pretty dead pretty fast at low levels.
@Cobalt
He had the weapon, the initiative, and the element of surprise, but anything can happen. Did you hear the story from Bravil about how a heavily armed and armored cultist, skilled in combat and worshiping the Daedric God of Destruction god killed by some Bosmer with a pair of hands?
Dwip, the alternative is actually ending up in Hla Oad, and death is a mercy compared to that.
*The entire west coast of the island is a mess of swamps, hateful dunmer, bandits, mudcrabs, and general unpleasantness, with no good loot to justify it. I’d be perfectly happy if everything west of Ald-Run dropped into the ocean.
*laugh*
So true. Although there are a couple of cool Daedric ruins out there, and that one statue, so there’s that at least.
Oh, and the sounds are really cool. So at least while you’re getting chased by xenophobic dunmer and nix hounds while being devoured by bugs, it’ll sound really atmospheric…
I may be remembering incorrectly, but Oblivion and Morrowind handled levelling differently as well. Combined with the enemies levelling, and you end up running in place – you’d only ever increase in power by gaming the system, not by actually levelling up.
Then there’s the issues of bandits running up to me in full Daedric armour trying to mug me for 100 gold, at a point where I’m more than willing to kill them for THEIR armour.