The Cyrodiil Look: Cahmel’s New Travels (Let’s Play Oblivion, Part 26)

When we last left our principled hero, he’d finally proven himself worthy of being paid to stab people for a living. Well, I mean—stab regular people. People who weren’t trying to kill me. Not like the Fighter’s Guild and stuff. Sort of an important distinction, professionally speaking: the one career is characterized by legality, nobility, altruism, whereas this one is characterized by being easier: also, giving access to sweet duds, digs, and oxen.

Alright, enough stalling outside the front door bitching about secrecy and subtlety and whatever. In fact, enough of those two things in general. If that last job taught me anything, it’s that Dark Brotherhood assassins require about as much guile, deceit, and cloak-and-daggery as a pizza guy. In a porn film. I guess it’s reasonable to expect things to get harder from here; then again, there’s that level-scaling mentality kicking back in. If a mission ever requires *too* much stealth ability, then it won’t be accessible to lower-level characters, and thus goes against the underlying balance philosophy of the game. This means that at least on a mechanical level, I can expect only so much difficulty escalation as I, through leveling myself up, create. Oh, alright, I suppose the missions do get a tiny bit trickier, but often not as much as the designers want you to think. You’ll see what I mean later on.

The Whackjob Welcome Wagon ambushes me right inside the threshold.

Pictured: Ocheeva, here giving you your complimentary gear and expository orientation. Also, in the background, the skeleton dudes that ostensibly guard the place, just in case some rival whacko cult assassin's guild shows up and starts putting hits out on their NPCs.

After a brief introduction, instructions on how to use the coffee machine, and a short-but-meaningful lecture on sexual harassment as it applies to freaky lizard-people, I am granted my assassin’s gear and pointed in the direction of my first questgiver. Not being the time-wasting sort—unless it’s funny, or profitable, or easier than going out of my way to do something—I head straight for him and get my first job.

Turns out, dude’s a vampire. You’d think this would be a bit of a disadvantage for an assassin, as it limits the hours you can be active and makes you about six thousand percent more high-profile to anyone who’s read horror novels or teen literature—but then again, that might be why he’s camping out here, essentially acting as my personal inbox of assignments, promotions, and payouts.

He gives me the breakdown: jobs give me payments. Doing the job the “right” way will give me an additional payment; doing the job the “wrong” way will get me the disapproval of my peers and the nagging sensation that I’m playing the game wrong. The additional payments are actually usually pretty good and worthwhile, and the extra parameters you need to meet to get them are often pretty basic; i.e., don’t kill the target in front of a dozen polite witnesses, hurl a handful of your business cards at them, then pivot around and thrust your wrists at the nearest guardsman. Again, there are some notable exceptions—and then again, there are a few occasions in which it’s more or less impossible not to get the reward. It varies a little bit.

This time, for example, my target is a pirate captain, and the bonus objective—which is actually a little loosely defined, and may not actually be possible to fail to accomplish—is to get on the guy’s ship without too much fuss. Apparently the ship has a contingent of pirates and stuff guarding the top deck, but they’ve got a suggestion for me: find a crate on the pier and smuggle myself in with it—apparently hoping the crewmen will not question why a man just grabbed one of their crates—within view of the ship—cracked it open, dumped all of its contents out onto the pier, and then climbed awkwardly into it before lowering the lid, loosely, back in place.

That’s one plan—and it’s not a bad one. However, being the slick muthajumper I am, I think I’ve managed to hit on a better one. It took a lot of planning, a few back-of-the-napkin calculations, a good understanding of human psychology, and a two-week course in infiltration, but I think I’ve got it all worked out: what I’ll do, see, is cleverly have already murdered all the pirates for no reason ages ago. See? That’s murdering smarter, not harder. Or smarter, honestly, but “murder luckier” doesn’t really sing.

I show up at the ship, breeze past the assortment of corpses, and trot up to the captain’s quarters.

"Oh, hey, there's a silver lining to my day. You wouldn't happen to know anything about sailing, would you? Only most of my crew was butchered earlier. By a Redguard. With a knife. Would you like some tea?"

It’s probably a bad idea to kick off your assassination by openly admiring your target, but there you go. Look at that guy: sitting up there, quietly dining at his captain’s table with that the-sea-is-serious-business look on his saltworn mug, looking like the workaholic dad in a coming-of-age movie, while meanwhile pretty much his entire crew has been sitting around outside baking into corpsepies for, like, for a long time. I don’t know exactly how long, but measured in festering body years, it’s basically forever.

"Sit down, won't you? Or walk behind me and crouch into a furitive stance that makes you one with shadowy death. I'm not a pushy host."

Then again, maybe he just hasn’t noticed. This hypothesis is corroborated by the way he continues to sit there, eating contentedly, as I stroll up, situate myself behind him, eyeball a weak spot to put the knife into, mark it off with a sharpie, take a couple practice swings, ask him to lift his chin a little bit, and then top him off with aplomb.The first swing does not kill him, but it does make him high-five the table with the bridge of his nose, which gives me more than enough time to finish the job.

Yeah. I’m practically a goddamned ninja.