Pumping Irony

In preparation for Skyrim, I’ve been dedicating myself to finishing Oblivion over the past month. I’ve had the game (GOTY version) for over a year but it just didn’t resonate with me at first. Neither did Fallout 3, for that matter.

But I buckled down, sucked it up, and pulled it off! I completed the Oblivion main story last week then immediately started the Shivering Isles expansion and Thursday night, I finished that as well, earning 100% completion for the game!

I’ve done my share of complaining about the game here, on Google+ and mumbling to myself the entire time playing the game, but I’ll admit the past few weeks where I was getting close to end of the main story then doing the expansion that the game had grown on me in a few ways. At the very least, I think I can see why, or at least some aspects of why, so many players hold it in such high esteem. So I’ll take this opportunity to share the two aspects of the game that stood out for me — the leveling system, and the world itself — and their pros and cons.

Leveling.

I’ve lost count how many times and for how many years I’ve griped about vertical leveling, primarily in multi-player RPGs. So, Oblivion “leveling the world” with you is right up my alley. Oh, I’ve read many complaints that Bethesda screwed up the algorithm in Oblivion and a gimped character would get to the point they could not continue. Honestly, I was expecting to be that person, but I never really had the slightest problem; quite the opposite, in fact.

Proponents of vertical leveling most often put forth the claim they enjoy going back to lower level zones and being more powerful or going back and thumping down a boss who defeated or frustrated them earlier in the game. Trust me, I’m all for that! But I want to defeat that boss not because I simply out-leveled him to the point where he’s grey and doesn’t even know I’m there like an MMO would do, but because I went out and increased my character’s knowledge and abilities beyond where they were. That boss still puts up a fight, he still fights the same way he did earlier, but now I have more to work with to defeat him which makes the victory so much more satisfying than waltzing up to a now-grey mob and one-shotting it with my auto-attack.

Where Oblivion falls flat is feedback. I finished the Oblivion story at level 19 and Shivering Isles at 21 — which could be considered low-level? No idea, really. At no point during leveling did I ever get any visual or otherwise feedback that my skills or abilities were increasing other than the drum beat and text notification saying they had. For me, a good part of leveling and acquiring new skills and increasing known skills is that I get to see the results of my character gradually becoming a badass. I like flashy moves, and I’m not going to apologize for it. One huge problem is that Oblivion is only really playable in first-person view, which is already cheesy as hell for a fantasy game, but makes it pretty much impossible to show off new melee moves. You’re stuck with stiff Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots melee the whole time.

So that leaves magic. Mages get some super-cool flashy spells, right? Again, I finished at level 21 so I had neither enough magicka (174 at level 21) nor high enough level in any particular school of magic to cast any of the spells that sounded cool. I hot-keyed a few spells that I used most, like Protection and Restore Health, but once I was able to cast Flash Bolt fairly early on, that was the most damaging spell I was ever able to use, and that’s not really saying much. The only skill I can look back on and perhaps see an improvement during game play is Sneak. I ended up doing pretty much every dungeon, etc. in Sneak mode so by the end of the game I could sneak by NPCs easily even relatively close to them what I would consider moderate or better lighting. If I was fast enough, I could jump out from behind a wall or pillar right in front of their face and still get the 6x damage surprise attack. So there was that, and it did come in handy a couple times, but in my book being able to stealth closer ranks considerably lower on the badass scale than, say, dodging an attack, counter-attacking by tossing them in the air then leaping into the air, blades twirling, and pounding them into the dungeon floor with my sword piercing their chest in a flashy (perhaps in slow-motion even, on occasion) critical finishing move. Just sayin’…

Finally I’ll talk about the leveling mechanic itself. It was a tremendous drag. I’m out adventuring, slinging spells, seeing notifications that my skill increased in Alteration or Destruction magic, or my Security (lockpicking) increased but… none of that mattered. Only the ones listed as Major Skills contributed to leveling. My Blade skill can determine my level? Block and Light Armor? The only way to increase those is to, respectively, block attacks (duh) or stand there and get smacked around. Hey, I stood still and let this monster beat the hell out of me and guess what? DING! Makes no sense at all. Growing my skills in magic does not help me level, but repairing my equipment does? Huh? The end result is that I ended up spending a lot of time grinding skills, in the worst sense of the phrase. I wanted a better healing spell but my Restoration magic wasn’t high enough so I stood around casting the only one I did know until my magicka was drained (three casts), let it recharge, then cast again until Restoration reached the minimum level for the next heal spell. I had to do that for any number of skills I wanted to increase for various reasons not to mention grinding the Major Skills just to level up. A couple weeks ago I was doing exactly that but also grinding Athletics so I ran laps in Bruma jumping and casting a heal spell. If I was going for “immersion” can you imagine how silly a so-called hero would look running in circles jumping while casting spells on himself?

Continuing with that theme, I remember last year I wanted to increase my Sneak fairly early on. Sneak only increases if there are other people around who could potentially see you and you have to be in motion, not standing still hiding. So I did the equivalent of “macroing” the skill: I put my character into Sneak facing a corner in Imperial City and wrapped a rubber band around the analog stick so he’d constantly walk into the corner. I left for an hour or so to get lunch and run some errands and when I came home, my Sneak skill was pretty much where I wanted it. Now that is some compelling and immersive gameplay right there! /snark

The World

I’ll start with “the world” in the larger scheme of things, and what most of us probably think about when someone says that anyway. I am reminded of the recent 40-minute dev video for Big Huge Games 38 Studios (sorry, I can never resist doing that) upcoming RPG, Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning where the developers said “open world” means different things to different people. In Oblivion, “open world” means there are no “zones” to load in and out of and seems to have the overall philosophy that “if you can see it, you can (most likely) go there.” In and of itself, it’s great to just “be” in an RPG world, see something off in the distance and say “hey, I wonder what’s there?” and lo and behold, you can go find out! My primary problem with the game is a near-total lack of diversity. Nearly all of Cyrodiil looks identical, covered in the same grass with the same trees, same rocks, same forts and ruins (re-use of limited assets is very noticeable here), and so forth. The two notable exceptions are Bruma, to the north near Skyrim, which is more bleak with some spotty, dirty snow on the ground, and there’s no mistaking Imperial City for any other town in the game. Otherwise, if I was blindfolded and someone loaded up a random area or town in Oblivion, I’d be extremely hard-pressed to open my eyes and know where I was. To accompany the visual lack of diversity, the audio is also lacking. Now, I love me some Jeremy Soule and what little music I did hear in Oblivion was good (though I’d consider it on the weaker end of his compositions) but there was so very little music. It seemed there was only one track that played in the world (there may have been two, but if so they sounded too similar), one for towns, one for dungeons, one for in-combat state. If there were more, the tracks certainly weren’t varied enough for me to notice and remember them. I love a lot of video game music, especially in RPGs, but if all I hear for hours and hours are the same few tracks, well, that’s why people eventually turn the music off and listen to their own choice of music instead.

I still haven’t quite decided if I would say that exploration is “rewarded” in Oblivion. There are a lot of POIs to discover on the map. While roaming the wilderness any POI within a certain distance will have an icon on your compass HUD so it’s easy to look at the map and notice you haven’t been there yet, and set off to discover that location. But the only reward is the text notification that “You discovered [insert POI here]” which is certainly a “micro-woot!” stimulus but that’s it, really. I think there are over a hundred dungeons in the game, but very few of them have a “point” within the game (ie. for the story, for side quests, or for my character) other than to loot stuff for gold or grind your skills to level. Indeed, I found the main use for discovering POIs was simply to have fast-travel points when I’d get a story quest so I wouldn’t have as far to run. Having said that, a fair number of those dungeons had quite intricate layouts so it was rewarding in a way to figure out how to progress through them; ie. how do I open this gate, what triggers this trap and can I disarm it, how do I get to a certain area, and so on.

What I did like is that dungeons don’t reset, per se. The monsters don’t just respawn. If I clear a dungeon (or not, even) then over time as the dungeon is not seeing use from us pesky adventurers (excuse me, pesky adventurer since there’s no co-op) monsters will gradually start moving back in.

Speaking of dungeons, they are way too dark. I had to maximize the brightness setting and even then had to use some form of light in the dungeons to see where I was going most of the time. My character was a khajiit so he had the racial Eye of Night ability but believe me, it got old real fast running through blue dungeon after blue dungeon. Of course, had I not been playing a stealthy character, I could have just used a torch or Starlight spell so that I could appreciate the natural look and feel to the dungeons at the cost of every monster charging me immediately. The dungeon crawler in me loves these things and I want to experience them as the designers built them, not coated in hues of blue. There should be some sort of middle ground where it can be dark but not so dark that I have to crank the brightness, close the curtains and turn off all the lights to play and then still end up having to use some sort of light or night-vision ability. There’s “immersion” and there’s “inconvenient pain in the ass.”

Finally, most non-guard and non-monster NPCs have their own little lives. No static MMO pez dispenser statue NPCs here, no sir! Many have their daily schedules such as from 8am to noon, she visits the chapel, then from noon to 2pm she’s at the local Inn for lunch, but not on this day of the week, and so on. Oblivion is also a “no punctuation marks over quest NPCs” game so that could be a nightmare without the POI pointer on your compass, but purely for the sake of “immersion” or attempting to create a “living” virtual world, I simply love this feature!

My last real beef with the game is that you end up becoming the “guild master” for every guild in the game. The Dark Brotherhood (assassins), Fighter’s Guild, Mages’ Guild, Thieves’ Guild plus the Imperial City Arena, too. That makes absolutely zero sense to me, but neither does being a “master adventurer” and a “master craftsman” in MMOs. However, since sadly my experience in Oblivion was weighed by more negative experiences than positives, I was in a purely Achievement Hunter mindset just to get it over with, complete 100% of the achievements and move on with life, so in that single context I was glad I was able to do them all in a single play-through. Unfortunate, but there it is.

Originally, I had planned to jump into Fallout 3 (which I last played in May, 2009) and start that over (ugh) to finish it before Skyrim but after Oblivion for a month or so, I think I just need a break from Bethesda instead so I’ll be fresh for Skyrim in November.

I bought The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion last year because everyone raves about how great it is, or was. I didn’t think very highly of Fallout 3, which I still haven’t bothered to finish, and which is in some ways Oblivion 2.0, but got the game anyway in hopes that these two highly-rated Bethesda RPGs would finally "click" for me.

No luck yet, but I am slowly plodding forward inch by inch to finish the game. Mostly out of spite at this point, and to get all 1250 Gamerscore for it (I have the Game of the Year edition which includes the Shivering Isles expansion) so I can trade it and move on with life.

Oblivion starts you off escaping from a dungeon cell, meeting the Emperor (voiced by Sir Patrick Stewart) who dies shortly thereafter and you finally exit the dungeon into the world with the urgent mission to find the Emperor’s heir. Only, it turns out, the mission isn’t all that urgent after all because Oblivion is such an open-world game, it really doesn’t matter when, or if, you bother to do anything. In fact, it would prefer you didn’t, because there are Guilds to join, Arenas to fight in, and all manner of individual NPC who’d like you to do favors for them. I could almost submit that Oblivion is a single-player MMO in that "story" is very sparse and as an "adventurer" all you really do is act as a mercenary doing odd jobs for the NPC’s and/or find caves to "grind" for loot, usually with no real reason to be there other than that.

My initial reaction last year once entering the world is that everything looks the same, which diminishes my feeling of exploration. Since then, I have encountered a few areas that are different in appearance (snow-covered with constant snow weather effects, etc.) but otherwise I’ve traveled to every town on the map and my initial impression seems to hold true. With precious few exceptions, once you exit that first dungeon to begin your adventures, you’ve just seen everything the world has to offer.

Someone on Twitter last week described Oblivion as an "open world exploration RPG" and I’d be inclined to agree with that assessment, only it’s not quite the type of exploration I care for. Since so far, most of the world looks identical there is very little feel that any area is different from another. That limits the "exploration" to simply wandering the world waiting for "You discovered [insert POI here]!" to appear on the screen and a POI icon will appear permanently on your map. That’s enjoyable in its own small, shallow sense but there’s precious little else to "discover" that I’ve come across so far. Worse, it seems an awful lot of "exploration" is the type I don’t like: examining every pixel of the room or area I’m in to see what objects are there and whether they have enough value for me to bother taking them to sell. The only other "exploration" is speaking to every NPC you find to see if they have something for you to do or not. I’m not crazy about MMO Quest Dispensers who stand still 24/7 with glowing punctuation marks over their heads. But even worse is the very old-school CRPG method of being forced to speak to every NPC, not to mention having to waltz into everyone’s home as if you owned the place, to "discover" any "content" the game might have.

The quests themselves, for the most part, are standard fare you’d get in a fantasy RPG or MMO. Go kill someone; go talk to someone; go retrieve and/or deliver an item. Each quest has its own little backstory relating to the NPC delivering it and perhaps with the history or politics of the town or region. You know, the type of stuff you skip over to click the ‘OK’ button if it were an MMO. But since you’re forced to stare at the bobble-head people and listen to the voiceovers, it makes the presentation far superior to a simple quest text in an MMO. Technically, you can skip forward one statement at a time in the voiceovers, and I regularly do so if I already get the gist of the conversation. Nothing about the game has yet made me care enough about my character, the "main story" or the world, so I certainly don’t give a rat’s ass about some random bobble-head’s story. If the voiceover and story is interesting enough, I’ll watch and listen to the bobble-head, otherwise it’s "get to the point already" just like an MMO would be. This is something Star Wars: The Old Republic will have to contend with, as well, but that’s another story for another time.

During character creation, your choices determine your primary skills rather than simply selecting a "class" like you would in an MMO. The problem I’m seeing so far is that all the various skillsets are defined in a strict "fighter, thief, mage" system and you’ll need all three to continue through the game. What you end up with is despite the illusion of all the choices of how to create and play your character, every character is still a "fighter, thief, mage." It doesn’t matter if I play a goody-two-shoes or an "evil" character who sneaks around stealing and assassinating people. The quests can only be played out to a singular resolution so we never have any choices to make, therefore there’s really no "role playing" within the game itself, only to ourselves in the sense of "I’m playing a sneaky thief" or "I’m playing an archmage who throws fire and lightning." That’s a problem I’ve always had with so-called "sandbox" games and players raving about the ability to "tell their own story." I suppose it’s just my own particular perspective or definitions, but I don’t consider "this is how I killed the dude to finish the quest" to be anywhere near the league of "this is my character’s story."

The leveling also bothers me, but possibly not in the same sense it seems to bother many others. I’m not a fan of vertical levels in (massively-) multi-player RPG’s but in single-player RPG’s it doesn’t matter. Oblivion scales as you level, which I approve of in concept if not in execution. The "problem" with Oblivion’s particular leveling system is that I never have any incentive to actually bother leveling. At level 2 I reached Grand Champion rank in Imperial City’s fighting arena. I was the most fearsome fighter in the world and could easily thrash multiples of the worst opponents they sent at me. At level 2. Currently, I’ve done many a quest for many an NPC and have nearly topped out with the Mage’s Guild, getting busy with the Fighter’s Guild and just joined the Thieves’ Guild. I’m only level 7. I could easily finish the game without reaching level 8 unless it’s purely by accident, simply from incidentally raising enough skills to level. In fact, other than leveling would allow me to increase my Strength so I could carry more than two or three decent items to sell, or to increase my Magicka to cast some of the cool-sounding spells, I really have zero incentive to go out and level more because leveling in Oblivion is mindless grinding of skills, and that is not why I play RPGs. The loot also scales with level, so I’ll never see any cool gear unless I level, either, but again if the only way to ever see "cool stuff" is to "waste time" grinding, I guess I’ll just have to do without that cool stuff. I read people post of their high level characters and just boggle at how or why they bothered to get that high (level 20+) considering all the time you have to spend (unless you "macro" your skills… another pet peeve) doing it.

All in all, as I said early on, I am continuing Oblivion simply out of spite and to get all the achievements. But I feel that as an RPG it’s an exceptionally poor one. As an "open world exploration game" it’s great if one happens to enjoy the (in my opinion) limited means of exploration the game offers.

After completing all the Guilds, I will finish up the main story then Shivering Isles. I’m interested to see if my opinion changes once I’m doing full-on story content. But for now, while just grinding enough quests to have something to do while raising skills, I have to wonder why Oblivion is such a big deal to so many RPGers…

After a Twitter conversation about this with @Longasc and @adarel, I thought I would be better suited to write down my feelings on the matter.

The discussion was the dialogue mechanics in Dragon Age: Origins versus the Mass Effect series. Adarel and Longasc both prefer the lengthier responses in Dragon Age, while I prefer Mass Effect showing me the Cliff’s Notes list then Shepard gives his actual response.

Adarel and Longasc each went on about how they felt Dragon Age gave them more real choices, but after after playing both of them myself, plus a lot of DLC for both DA:O and ME2, I really don’t see a difference in the available choices or their influence at all. Both titles give players a “Good Guy (White)” choice, a “Bad Guy (Black)” and a somewhat “Neutral (Grey)” choice. From there, character advancement may present additional options such as the Paragon or Renegade selections in the Mass Effect series. Each game may have a much longer list during the “gain more information” phases of dialogue but when it comes down to the actual story-influencing decisions, Good, Bad and Neutral are all you’re left to choose from. Many players have complained over the years that BioWare really only craft their stories based on Good or Bad (my own experiences corroborate this argument) and the varies “shades of grey” have no bearing or influence on the story progression whatsoever. From dialogue choices to story progression itself, there’s a reason the (tongue-in-cheek) BioWare RPG Cliché Chart exists, after all.

When it comes to CRPG’s, the thing is we don’t really have much choices available at all. We’re playing in someone else’s creation, through someone else’s story using someone else’s characters who say someone else’s dialogue. In Mass Effect, or even games like the Final Fantasy’s we play a specific character – Shepard, Cloud, Tidus, etc. – written by someone else. All we really do is put points into their RPG attributes and collect gear. Even Dragon Age, which lets me create my own character, fails to really give me real choices because it’s a hard-coded storyline in a CRPG. It doesn’t matter which race or origin I started off with, because I’m funneled into the same storyline with the same choices: play the Good hero or the Bad hero.

Taking a look at MMORPG’s, even when some story might be available, we have no choices whatsoever because the games have to be tailored for so many players. The stories are nearly always about the NPC’s and rarely our own characters anyway. The only choice we have as players is whether to do a batch of specific content or not. BioWare’s first MMORPG, the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic, simply looks to be a fusion of by-the-numbers “been there, done that” MMORPG content with BioWare’s trademark Black or White dialogue choices during the story arcs, primarily to serve as “new content” for additional replayability when leveling alts.

Back to Dragon Age vs. Mass Effect, my perception of what both Adarel and Longasc were getting wasn’t so much the issue of available choices (or the lack thereof) as the presentation of them. In Dragon Age, your character is mute, lacking any voice acting at all, therefore the dialogue choices can be a bit lengthy because the player has to read each and decide which to respond with. In Mass Effect we are shown a very brief response onscreen then after choosing one we see Shepard act it out in the cinematic, complete with voice acting which gives the lengthier dialogue audibly since it was never a visual presentation. Longasc in particular voiced his distaste for Shepard not saying precisely what he wanted him to say, but honestly, are the choices in DA:O any different? There are only so many available, and being forced to read the selections verbatim I can say that many times I would not have had my character say those phrases so I had to choose which one was closest to how I wanted to role-play that character. Again, same end result but simply a different presentation to achieve it.

I think pretty much everyone agrees that having voice acting for each race and gender in Dragon Age: Origins would have been expensive; perhaps prohibitively so for a new and untested IP, and I still feel the cost was the major factor behind the mute characters. The other is that it’s easy to simply insert a character’s name in text but the voiceovers would have to be generic to accommodate players being able to name their own characters versus using pre-written characters such as the aforementioned Shepard, Cloud or Tidus.

What did BioWare themselves have to say on the matter? First, go read this article on IGN. Back already? Good! According to BioWare, they did test out a Mass Effect-style dialogue system during the development of Dragon Age but chose the lengthier text trees because it worked better due to the perspective of the writing. Mass Effect is written from a third-person perspective, which is why we get the entire dialogue acted out with voiceovers based on player input on the dialogue tree, but leads some players to feeling like they’re not fully in control of the game. Dragon Age: Origins, on the other hand, was written from a first-person perspective. The player makes the direct choice from the dialogue tree, verbatim, and the NPC’s respond accordingly. The cinematics in Dragon Age never truly include our character in the conversation because we have made our choices, reading the words onscreen and mentally applying the voice we’ve given the character instead, so the cinematic skips ahead to the NPC responses being acted and voiced.

Additionally, I feel that some players, myself included, may have viewed Dragon Age: Origins distastefully if it had kept the lengthy textual dialogue and then had verbatim voiceovers. I’ve been in too many classes where the “instructor” (I use this term as loosely as possible within this specific context) does nothing but read PowerPoint slides verbatim with no exposition. Personally, I feel insulted by this “technique” (which is also proven to be one of the worst for educating) because I already read the slide faster than he was able to speak. I’m not an infant; I don’t need to be read to, and if he’s incapable of expanding on the message of the presentation then he is not doing his job. Of course, Dragon Age is not an educational lecture so that argument may not have applied, but I felt that case needed to be stated nonetheless.

In the end, I suspect what Adarel and Longasc were getting at was a simple preference for the first-person writing of Dragon Age: Origins. If they fall within the subset of players who felt a certain “lack of control” with Mass Effect’s more cinematic third-person writing (and it sounds as if they do) then Dragon Age: Origins would have felt more like they were in direct control of everything the whole time. Perhaps that feeling of control gives a perception of more available choices?

A lot of Dragon Age fans are skeptical of Dragon Age 2 since BioWare has stated now that Origins gave the… origins (ha!) of the setting and its races, Dragon Age 2 will be a story about a single character, Hawke, who will be fully voice-acted. The player can choose the gender and whether the character will develop along the Good or Bad story arc. In other words, similar to Mass Effect. Whether or not BioWare shifts to a third-person writing perspective for Dragon Age 2 has yet to be announced, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

When it comes to sequels, game or otherwise, I personally don’t demand an identical experience to the first. In the case of an RPG, it’s the world, the setting, that I want to come back to, not specific characters or specific dialogue perspectives as we’ve been discussing here. If BioWare totally changes the feel for DA2, I’m fine with that because at least I get to come back and have more adventures in that world. Conversely, if they make a future Mass Effect game in the style of DA:O I would jump on board that as well. I am a gamer for varying experiences; I do not “demand” each title within any given genre, of any given IP for that matter, give an identical experience to every other within that category. This is precisely why the MMORPG genre is in such a rut and players call everything a “clone” of something else (almost always WoW) after all. However, I also do not “demand” drastic innovation or change, either. Look at the faux fury over Starcraft 2’s near-total lack of innovation to the RTS genre or to the Starcraft IP. Guess what? It will sell millions and players will be happy regardless how much they complained in forums or blogs. Nearly every review of Crackdown 2 denounces Ruffian for “merely” providing “Crackdown 1.5” because it is… more of Crackdown. But isn’t that what the fans asked for? Developers can go either way with sequels, and with various sub-factions of the playerbase, they will always be a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” position. All I ask of the developers is to do what’s best for that individual title.