It’s still the closest you can come to being in a Claude Lorraine painting though. I’m gonna go ahead and call that an accident.

i hadn’t read this review myself, since writing it. i just read through it again, apropos of your comment showing up in my inbox, and it got me thinking about Something Important. yay!

Oblivion is great for two things.

1) Making you feel like you’re in a painting by Claude Lorraine. That’s a good thing.

2) Let’s just say the final thieves guild quest was like a Legend of Zelda dungeon times a million, IN REVERSE: start a million miles deep in the shit, a million miles deep into this gigantic confusing network of caves and tunnels swarming with monsters, make a mad dash for the exit with one heart (more like a marathon than a dash since it took several hours), then break down in tears when you finally reach daylight and gaze upon the sun again, and you kiss the earth at your feet. The desperateness and overwhelming odds of it was a lot like Dead Rising if it took place in a huge dungeon instead of mall. (The quest at first was skulking and dark and somewhat gentle, like Super Metroid or Thief: The Dark Project, but when the shit hit the fan it was like Dead Rising.)

Anyhoo.

As you pointed out, Oblivion is a textbook example of bad design. Not just bad design, but the most piss-poor GAME design that is even humanly possible. Chief example: yes, when you try to rest/sleep in mid-air, time freezes, you hover in mid-air, a dialog box pops up to say “You cannot rest while in mid-air”, then you have to click “OK”. They coded the game like it was a goddam python script. “Well obviously if there’s an error, we should have an error alert pop up, so the player knows what the hell went wrong!”

Idiots.

Nobody had the balls or the vision to just make it so you collapsed into a heap whenever you tried to sleep in mid-jump. A cute and/or clumsy heap. Either way. Some injured groans would help. If it functioned as a Feigned Death all the better. Or hey, maybe when you try to sleep in mid-air, nothing happens at all, your feet return to the ground as usual, and you take it from there.

I happened to unknowingly contract vampirism in the game. The idiotic “computer programming 101″ shit bit me in the ass there too. I had no idea I even contracted vampirism. I just noticed that people stopped liking me and that my face was ghastly. It was so weird to realize that my character’s face looked strange. “Um? I don’t remember making my skin gross and wrinkly during character creation. I’ve aged terribly.”

Eventually I googled it and found how to cure myself, which was to go on a 14-hour crapshoot quest. I assume the game wrote ‘You got bit by a vampiric rat! You contracted vampirism!” to Std.Out and let it hang there for .3 seconds. I missed it.

How about when you go to feed while you’re a vampire, and instead of actually drinking blood, you get a dialog box? (FEED? OR PICKPOCKET? CLICK ONE.) It’s like a text-based adventure in 3d. It’s so disconnected. Or how bout the way the act of rummaging through a container stops time and makes you see the world in sepia? How about how the AI detection and criminal status is awful and makes no sense? A horse can detect whether you’re stealing somebody else’s property and will file the appropriate paperwork with the authorities? Can’t I at least bribe the witness horse with some food? If some horses are intelligent enough to have a passionate sense of human morals then some other horses should be intelligent enough to be morally corruptible. It would be like in those cop movies where the hero simply throws a steak to those loudmouth dobermans who are guarding the facility that he needs to secretly investigate in the middle of the night. In other words, it would be GOOD.

Speaking of the holodeck: it occurs to me now that the fear and confusion, the sudden onset pallor, the gradual loss of friends, the googling for the cure, the extreme frustration, is probably what it’s like to turn into a vampire in real life. For a minute here I was thinking, “A holodeck is supposed to let you simulate FANTASY and ACTION, not let you contract a hideous disease and ruin your life!.” But actually a holodeck program which does exactly that could be kind of cool.

Let’s face it. Oblivion really IS the holodeck of Star Trek: The Next Generation, if it was limited to the Middle Ages and was programmed by Microsoft.

Yes, it is true that escaping the law is easy, but after that, you´re damned forever because until you pay your debt or turn yourself in, there is no way to calmly enter any town or city, because there is always the pressing fear that some guard may recognize you. Which is also what being a criminal in real life must feel.

What is not like that in real life, however, is the fact that every guard in every city recognizes you and starts chasing you the moment you enter the city door, not unlike how they did when you first stole a tea cup on a city on the other edge of the world. In this aspect I admit what you said is true, because it feels very wrong. Betheseda needs to make some sort of algorithm as to whether X guard recognizes you or not, and how many guards chase you after that.

Oh, and here´s something you should try: make someone pursue you and go to, say, a house invaded by trolls. Seeing the trolls and your pursuers fight each other is quite the spectacle, and you can rejoice in the spoils!

have to admit, though: much of what i’d do in the game was antagonize guards/common-folk and then see how long they’d keep up the chase, because it was hilarious. once had a dude follow me for a couple miles before i accidentally glitched the game and got myself doing the swimming animation on land, whereupon said dude just didn’t know what the hell to do (on the side, i’d also managed to aggro a wolf and wandering sorcerer, both of which were equally unsure of how to handle the situation).

But ambition is something to look up to. I mean, yes, that 10 year-old boy might not get to become the best writer, plane pilot, president and doctor that has ever been, but still, him trying as hard as he can is admirable, and him not quite, downright, failing at each ambition is even more admirable. Becasue, you know, just being the best at each indivual activity is hard enough as it is.

Case in point: making a believable dialogue interface in any game with as many characters as Oblivion is impossible. But in a make-believe world with the scope of this game, there is simply no way to not include some sort of dialogue interface for every character in the game (even when nearly every character in the game is killable, and killable by pther NPCs at that). To try and do that would simply mean another Duke Nukem Infinity (or whatever, the thing is that it would be too goddamned time-consuming).

I can, therefore forgive Oblivion´s flaws, because it does a lot of things. And you know what? It doesn´t even do them completely worng. Betheseda could, for example, release a linear game based completely on the stealth interface about being a thief, and it wouldn´t even be a bad game.

And, also, super-kudos on Oblivion for doing something that GTA always fails to do: actually punishing you for commiting crimes.

If you ever kill a citizen in Oblivion it is near impossible that you get a reward larger than the punishment, and it´s also very hard to evade/defeat the guards (unless you find a rock and have a hell of a lot of arrows, which, yes, would be my biggest problem with the game). Why do they even let you kill people then, you might ask? Well, that´s because you can kill people in real life. And, as in real life, it´s not a very smart thing to do.

Now, I understand how it fails as a “videogame” in the ways that, say, Super Mario Bros. succeeds as a videogame. But I don’t care, I tend to lose myself in it, and get a huge kick out of it – which I guess says more about me than the game…

That’s certainly true, but as an avid D&D avoider in my youth (and having never played WoW), this probably comes the closer to scratching some latent fantasy-immersion itch than anything else. Whether that speaks to some personal deficiency is up for debate, but there may be some some threshold of disbelief that things like NPC’s disappearing through doors triggers for you, whereas it’s not quite enough to kill the overall illusion for me. Sometimes it’s about the little things… casting a flame spell in a bandit’s mug and watching him/her tumble down a hill, moonlight glinting in their armor. I understand the complaints about the combat, but this is such a monumental step forward from the shocklingly un-visceral Morrowind that I can’t drudge up any real disappointment… the time to criticize the fat girl is not when she comes home from the gym, you know?

I also revel in the opportunity to chart my own moral ascension or decline via the various guilds and questlines. There’s something special about a game where random citizens make it a point to tell me how they once looked up to me, but now know I’m a sinner, just like everybody else.

I hope the thing coming by pipe-travel is a mash-up of oblivion and Tsugunai: Atonement. graft the game onto the diversion and you might get ….a diverting game.

When I first bought the game, a year ago, I went with a pure-melee character, found I was dying all the time and the times when I wasn’t dying, I was being bored to tears. I put the game on a shelf and ignored it for 12 months.

I picked it up again solely because I wanted to get some of the Achievement points from it, and it was the only game left that I had (well, apart from Ridge Racer 6, but that game is notoriously stingy with the points.)

Again, I got bored with it within hours, but I asked around. The advice I got was “ignore the main quest, and add some magic to your character.” I did that, and now I’m hooked. I don’t know how long it will last though.