I very early got on the Morrowind bandwagon. No, scratch that. I didn’t climb aboard, I was one of the extremely early reviewers who helped in some small way to drive it. The immersive quality of the 3D visuals, along with the seemingly endless series of quests to do and places ripe for investigation, made this title one of my favorites in many years, despite the holes that allowed exploits and the poor economics. Now along comes Oblivion, and I find myself neither helping to move that bandwagon, nor mindlessly jumping onboard. There’s a good deal to enjoy in Bethsoft’s latest game, but I can’t help feeling that they’ve actually fixed many things that didn’t need repair, while leaving longstanding problems from Morrowind alone.
Let’s start with the visuals. Once again, the Elder Scrolls developers have chosen a great-looking engine for their efforts. The artwork for the styles of architecture they’ve created is distinctive, with none of the narrow tunnel style that beset Morrowind, forcing you on occasion to climb over guild members to reach a door or the next room. Similarly, the magic effects are beautiful, and the dungeons are more varied in content, with realworld physics applied to numerous traps (spiked pits, trip wires holding numerous heavy logs, etc). It’s true that most of the numerous merchants never seem to visit any other area in their large, well-stocked shops, and after a few dungeons, you’ll easily see duplicative cells, but these are relatively minor points in a truly splendid job. Let’s not forget to factor in animation, too. Overall, the impression is one of moving within a real world. That’s quite an achievement.
At the same time, it comes with a cost. The computer that could easily run Morrowind and even add on 200+ mods is often jerky and unresponsive touring Oblivion’s Cyrodil. This even holds true for Xbox users. I’ve tried the game on both platforms, and although it was marginally superior in performance on the Xbox, there were far fewer options available to correct problems since the PC allowed direct access to the game’s INI file. That said, neither was especially fast, and in both cases, the crawl in loading all those beautiful views distracted me substantially from their enjoyment. This is even allowing for the fact that Bethsoft clearly compromised by providing very few NPCs on their streets, giving the impression of deserted cities.
There are also problems with the same game physics that are otherwise so enjoyable. If you move close to a table without touching it, the oversized, invisible edges of the object meshes are bumped, and everything sitting on it is, too. This can send all the carefully arranged books, food, and other items flying. Bad enough as that is, even worse is the near impossibility of manipulating objects in that environment. In Morrowind, you could drop books and armor pieces and make a stack. In Oblivion, dropping any item precisely at a given location is an exercise in futility, as it goes flying away from you. Was it really impossible to use the Havok system to build in a command allowing players to position and drop items?
Of Oblivion’s combat system, I can only say that the new moves you gain when skills reach certain levels leave me unimpressed. I’m not the kind of player who thinks that using a special attack on something nasty directly in front of me should involve shuffling to one side or the other or taking a step backwards. This is too close to Doing the Timewarp. Assigning a special key would have made more sense, since it would have left you free to move in any direction or combination of directions at the same time. On the other hand, I do like the way monsters now attack and retreat, block, or run to acquire distance for a magical attack. They also seem quicker to use beneficial spells on themselves than in Morrowind, though I’ve as yet not seen any enemies buff one another up for the attack, as in Wizardry 8.
Speaking of magic, it’s been toned down. This is one of those areas where Bethsoft chose to correct an aspect of Morrowind, where players found plenty of exploits (Drain Health on a weapon, bypassing native resistances; Levitate for hours and shoot arrows at enemies on the ground; etc.). Some spells simply aren’t enchantable on weapons or armor any longer, while others have been severely limited. Nor can all spells be cast by anybody with enough magicka. Now, most require a certain level of competence in the relevant magic school skill, so a very powerful fireball spell with a long range and area of effect might require a Destruction level of 75. The overall balance is much better, in my opinion. Kudos to Bethsoft on this.
I like the new inventory display system, too, with its flexible sorting. The thing’s complexity takes a bit of getting used to, but it works well, except for displaying the tiny, non-resizable map. Inventory labels are easy to read and, by the nature of the beast, very well organized and scrollable. Quest details are also far easier to find and study than in previous ES releases, though once again there’s no ability to add journal entries.
The new zoom-in faces during discussion are a nice touch, though the small number of voices used repeatedly for the 1000+ NPCs quickly becomes wearing. The changeover of voices is sometimes annoying, too, as when an elderly, senile mendicant switches to a posh young voice when you ask her about rumors; a friendly NPC suddenly scowls and insults you when giving out quests. It doesn’t make sense. On the other hand, Bethsoft has finally gotten around to using a faded gray on discussion topics that only repeat what has been said. About time. NPC writing is more distinctive overall, though the old ES flaw of no real character interaction continues to exist. There are no dialog trees, much less the kind of cleverly designed branching of Baldur’s Gate II that made it seem like you could really choose to split the game through a major choice, at least for one chapter. You either accept a quest in Oblivion, or you don’t. Nearly everything else is just a matter of listening silently, and that’s hardly roleplaying, is it?
Much was made of NPC schedules due to AI advances in advance publicity, all of it preternaturally glowing. However, this was also possible in Morrowind. It simply wasn’t used very much by a development team that had other priorities. And truth be told, it isn’t used very much by the NPCs in Oblivion’s towns, who generally move to and from work, or engage in brief, standardized activities, or flat conversations that have the disconnected quality of dreams. (I dub thee Stepford NPCs.) No, the AI changes can best be seen, instead, in the improved NPC combat as mentioned above, that affects not only your enemies, but also any summoned creatures or friends that have temporarily joined you. The latter are more proactive than before, wading into battle rather than waiting for you to be attacked. They let you know when you’ve accidentally hit them in battle and are more forgiving of this, and they no longer target enemies with lethal spells that have the minor side effect of killing you as well.
Fixing What Ain’t Broke
Unfortunately, Bethsoft has chosen to draw upon the Morrowind experience to correct some aspects of basic gameplay, and these don’t work well, at all. For instance: in Morrowind, you didn’t have to level your character up at any given time. You could do so, or keep playing at that same level until you had accumulated sufficient increases in different skills to get large attribute multipliers. Then, when you finally leveled your character by sleeping, you would acquire a strength (or intelligence, agility, etc.) modifier of 4 or 5, instead of 1 or 2.
Not so, in Oblivion. Whether you like it or not, as soon as your major skills improve sufficiently through use, you’re informed that you’ve reached a character level and should sleep. Any further improvements to your skills will not affect attribute multipliers on that level, but the next one. Thus, you no longer have the option of deciding how quickly you want your attributes to rise, which is annoying. And as a bonus, you have to pay undue attention to character creation and advancement. Should I choose Athletics as a major skill, or will that go up too quickly because my character runs a lot, forcing me to level up before I’ve improved enough skills to affect my other attributes? What other skills should I avoid assigning as major ones while creating my character, to slow down its advancement? The whole character leveling part of the game, transparent in Morrowind, has become a strategy game in its own right, and a boring one, unfortunately.
There are additional legitimate reasons for not leveling too quickly. One is that due to game balance issues, a very new character will find it extremely easy to complete a raft of quests because Bethsoft has made the appearance of nearly every potential enemy in the game dependent upon your level. Regrettably, the skew is such that as you improve, your enemies tend to improve far more, gaining considerably greater strength and endurance. As a result, by level 15 or 20, you’re getting the bonemeal beaten out of you by appropriate enemies, whereas at level 3, you were managing to hold your own.
Or consider treasure-leveling. In Morrowind, there was baseline treasure you’d find on bodies and in chests, with a slight chance of something showing up that was better. The lure of these better items kept you out hunting for more occupied, hitherto unknown caves and potential loot. But Bethsoft now believes all loot should be tied to character level. Their “improvement” makes certain you never see any treasure, in merchant shops or on the kill, that is inappropriate for your current character. Just finished an epic battle with three opponents that nearly took you and your summoned creature out? You can hardly wait to open that boss’s treasure chest. Then you discover it contains nothing different from every other chest you’ve seen so far in the game, and all of it is exactly what a character at your level would already own.
One more example: if you killed the nefarious occupants of a cave in Morrowind, left and returned a week later, the place would still be empty. You could go away for three months and then show up, secure in the knowledge that it was still open real estate. Perhaps it was to stop players from taking over such places and making them into private homes, but in Oblivion, you’ll find that new, equally nasty inhabitants move into any dungeon you’ve cleared out within a matter of days. By solving one problem, Bethsoft has created a worse one. There’s no good reason now for the player to explore new dungeons in the wilderness, since they’ll find new monsters in the old dungeon they’ve investigated ten times before, right outside town. And as monsters and treasure will be leveled to the character, why seek elsewhere?
Dumbing. As in, Down.
Let’s briefly consider quests. They were fairly open-ended in Morrowind. You got one, and you were expected to find one of sometimes potentially several solutions to it, frequently without any hints. In Oblivion, you’re not only directed every step of the way, with a map that tells you exactly where to go, but messages show up telling you how you think and feel and what you should do next, even when it isn’t directly part of the quest’s main goal. There’s far too much from-above direction, and every bit of it leeches the game’s best feature, a sense of immersion. It’s difficult to remain truly involved in a world when dialog boxes pop up to tell you what you should do next.
This leads me to think that Bethsoft made a strategic decision with Oblivion to grab a much younger playing audience, one which needs more handholding. It stands to reason: they have a captive market of older players from earlier titles, so they can concentrate on increasing revenues among pre-teens and early teens. I’ll be the first to admit that this is complete speculation on my part, but there’s nothing speculative about the dumbing down of the ES series at this point. It looks beautiful, and it has many of the thrills of yore, but it seems to be aiming not for the kid in me, but for the nine-year-old kid down the block who has to be told in advance precisely where the cave he’s seeking in Cyrodil is, and what to do and how to do it when you’re told to locate an artifact in it. Pardon my lack of enthusiasm.
And talk about freebies! You couldn’t grab an object from one of the Morrowind guilds for fear of being attacked on sight. Members were protective of their property, and rightly so. But rare and popular alchemy ingredients, weapons, soulgems, armor, books and scrolls are free and found in abundance at all the Oblivion guilds. It amounts to a Monty Haul giveaway that again would appeal to the child player. Bethsoft, if you’re so anxious to close up loopholes that allowed players to have uber-spells and loot the occasional strong weapon in Morrowind, why create new exploits by giving newbie guild members full access to plenty of goodies?
If my theory of targeting a broadened market is correct, that might help to explain why there are far fewer books in Oblivion than in Morrowind, with all the stories and lore that helped add real background and detail to the place (Kids, the theory goes, don’t like to read; they only like their characters to kill and grab ever more powerful goodies). The developers have, in a not very subtle fashion, chosen to compensate for the lack of books by putting multiple copies many times over on every shelf you can find. Even private houses seem, for some strange reason, to possess half a dozen copies of a few basic texts, and some of the guilds boast of nearly two dozen copies of a single title despite having only five or six members.
There are many other instances of changes that point to a more youthful clientele for Oblivion, but why bother?
The Core Game
There’s still much to enjoy that was carried into Oblivion over from previous ES games, including a huge land, tons of quests that sometimes seem to appear spontaneously, lore-based artifacts whose purpose you must determine, and a mix of possible careers in thievery, magery, ranged and melee weaponry that actually work. Alchemy, too, remains a well-balanced and varied game system, and the overall structure of the title itself is of a unified design that claims my admiration. Despite the criticisms I have of Oblivion, it’s easy to perceive a fine game under the surface, which accounts for its rating. What remains troubling is that the excellence in this title is arguably aimed now at a younger audience, much as Bioware’s KotoR took a huge dive in intelligence from Baldur’s Gate II. But would an Oblivion that didn’t patronize its audience have done as well? I’m inclined to think so, especially with two platforms and all the advanced publicity Bethsoft used. I suppose, though, that at this point we’ll never find out.
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