That's some serious text, but I'll have a dig.
Disclaimer: I have not yet played Oblivion, so I can't actually argue about whether or not the game plays a certain way. However, it also means I'm not a fanboy. And I can certainly spot when someone has an axe to grind.
That in itself is the prime reason why Oblivion has sold as well as it has. Aside from the obvious shortcomings that were becoming apparent leading up to release, the game still had a very solid premise, and even someone as skeptical as myself would have bought it on day one, if I wasn't principled enough to refrain from giving Bethesda money. But when you get down to brass tacks, it's even kind of disappointing for the pessimists.
Except that a game with a world that big and so many quests to perform and keep track of is antithetical to what a game designed for casual players normally is.
Not really, in this day and age, where absolutely everything is tracked for you in most games, and you have to consider that Oblivion doesn't just hold your hand, it tugs urgently on it whenever something significant happens. For instance, if you have a quest to find someone, you'll get pop-ups:
Journal: Go find so-and-so's house. He lives in <town> behind the <landmark> [Continue] [Make this my Active Quest]
...and you'll go there (following a GPS arrow that leads you straight there. And then...
Journal: I've arrived at so-and-so's house. I should enter through the front door and talk to him. [Continue] [Make this my Active Quest]
It's that fucking blunt that it gives you instructions in case you can't figure out why there's a big fucking red arrow pointed at the door. A door that's typically labelled "So-and-so's house."
And also, with regard to the scale of the world, and quantity of things to do, it's not even remotely overwhelming, because not only is everything tracked, indicated with GPS and mapped, there's very rarely any need to even spend time trudging from location to location. I got absolutely no sense of scale from playing Oblivion, because everything is at your fingertips within seconds.
What, they consolidated a few skills, cut down on the repetitive and extraneous dialogue, and streamlined the interface but kept the massive world, and it's suddenly a game for casual players? Give me a break.
Er, yeah, and on the topic of that "massive world," it's not really. As I said, fast travel bring everything in close, and even if you're "manually" travelling, movement speeds have been scaled considerably, and there are also (largely useless) horses.
The repetitive and extraneous dialogue hasn't been done away with, there's just less of it. Something I foound utterly fucking amazing, was that for the race variations of dialogue, they didn't even bother using the opportunity to differentiate! So basically, every race says exact the same canned responses... with a slightly different voice. Way to waste 50+ hours of VO.
As for streamlining and things, the interface is a lot slicker, if you're playing the 360 version. It's a great interface design for a limited control input. But it's ported over with the sole addition of mouse support for PC, and so it becomes ridiculous and convoluted. That's actually one of the bits that is antithetical toward casual gamers, because it requires lot of page tabbing, scrolling, has no tool-tips, and is frankly, very poor. Most roguelikes have a more accessible interface, and that's fucking scary.
I highly doubt that the game has suddenly become so much more fast-paced than any of the previous Elder Scrolls games.
Then you'd be very surprised. Movement speeds have been scaled up quite a bit, and all aspects of combat are far more geared toward player skill. And aside from that, my experience with Oblivion just felt like less of what I got from Morrowind. It is vastly improved in many areas, but for an experienced gamer like myself, I couldn't find anything to interest me after exploring the multitude of avenues the game had to offer. However, I can easily see how the game would really shine in the eyes of someone who hasn't seen it all before.
In that respect, Oblivion is like a joke book that collects old chestnuts. It's fucking great if you're not the sort of person who has bandied around every joke under the sun with your mates for years. So VD is very much right in his assessment that Oblivion is "a game for casual players."
Wouldn't it then have made a lot more sense to simply make it an action game for casual gamers sold as an action game, streamlined into a 20-hour game? sure would have been easier, and less expensive for the developers. Actually, isn't that what they did with Reguard?
You're making the erroneous assumption that casual gamers don't want to play an RPG. Or more specifically, a beautifully rendered, first person, "immersive" fantasy world RPG. It's not as though the LOTR trilogy was only watched by geeks. There's no real stigma attached to high fantasy anymore, and while rolling dice, crunching numbers and what not still bears that stigma, Oblivion conveniently does away with all of that!
Sure, they could have done something much simpler, but there are some pretty fucking compelling hooks that come from Oblivion being what it is.
"200+ hours of gameplay? For the same price as all these other games with 10 hours? Sold!"
"Wow, I can go anywhere I want, but still never get lost in a 16km^2 world? Fucking Awesome!"
"Immersive? I don't know what it means, but I know it's good!"
If you want casual buyers to buy your not-RPG game, marketing it as an RPG is not a very sound marketing plan.
It's labelled an RPG, but if you'd paid attention, very little of the marketing was directed toward RPG elements. Graphics, scale and detail were that major PR points, along with the periphery of that, like havok physics, etc. There was also quite a bit on how great the combat and stealth were going to be. Bethesda's overall marketing plan was actually pretty sound, despite lots of general incomptence in the day-to-day. They knew they had the RPG fans wrapped up, since we'll get excited over whatever morsel comes to break our starvation, and so they pushed everything that would get casual gamers excited.
Doesn't this apply to many RPGs that allow the player open-ended exploration? An exciting plot tends to have a sense of urgency to it, or it really isn't very exciting. Do any of these sound familiar:
Okay, there are certainly degrees here, and there's a lot the depends on the execution. For instance:
"Please, find a replacement water chip for us before our vault runs out!"
"Please, Chosen, find us the GECK before all of our crops wither and die and we starve to death."
In the case of both Fallout's, even though you spend most of your time being distracted by other issues, you're always seemingly pressing forward with a pivotal goal that is
unknowable. "I'm trying to find a GECK/Water Chip, which I need ASAP, but don't really know where to look!"
Oblivion on the other hand, puts everything on pause while you're off doing other things. When you deliver the amulet to the heir and his cohorts, they speak as though you've shown up with all haste, as if the Emperor's body is still warm. There are countless other instances where everything is presented as undeniably urgent, "we have to do this right now," kind of stuff.
And that's why Oblivion fails miserably in that respect. You have someone saying "Help, fucking shit, if you don't do something right this very second, the world is doomed!" You ignore that, and you suddenly realise it's all lies. Whereas Fallout 2 maintains it's sense of urgency by never glaringly revealing to the player that it's all smoke and mirrors.
Oblivion: Dude, check it the fuck out. Smoke. Mirrors.
Player: Dickhead. Why did you show me that?
Fallout was better again, because it kept ticking off the days. It's urgency may have been generously paced for a player who knows the game, but there wasn't much fake about it. You HAD to find that fucking chip, or game over.
Just to recap, when you're tasked with urgently finding something, and you have no fucking idea where it might be, you can be reasonably expected to
explore all available avenues in the hope that some kind of clue turns up. When you're told to do something very specific, right this second, and there's no leeway whatsoever, to be able to abandon it at any point to chase your tail, is a glaring fault.
A plot isn't very exciting if it comes down to "the demons will enter the world and it will be consumed by utter darkness! But no rush... take your time. They won't come out until you're ready to face them." Yes, an urgency in the plot creates a disconnect with the open-ended exploration that the game allows, but... it's a trade-off.
Yeah, and like most of the trade-offs in Oblvion, it's poorly thought out, and winds up compromising both sides far more than they ought to be. Basically everything on the main quest is completely directed, with a couple of notable exceptions. Go here, do this, follow the big red arrow. It would have made a lot more sense to have more nebulous goals and locations to be discovered as you progress through the peripheral quests.
On the other hand, the open-ended nature suffers greatly from a large number of invulnerable NPCs, arbitrarily locked doors (with no chance of lockpicking) and various unquantifiable shortcomings that could very probably be a result of the game's main quest focus.
I don't see most of that as a minus, other than staves not being usable as melee weapons. Fewer varieties of weapon skills means that you actually get to use more of the interesting weapons that you find, rather than just selling them off because you haven't spent any time developing that skill.
I can see a limited upside to that, in the same way as I can see the upside to being able to tell your mother you want some motherfucking chocolate milk, and she gets it for you. But, it hardly rewards the choices you've made. In fact, you get more reward from whatever the random loot generator rolls up than you do for having made a specific choice.
On top of that, the may as well be a single "Melee Combat" skill, since for all intents and purposes, the weapon types are all identical. You get the same perks, the same damage; there's basically no differentiation of weapon choice. Except, there tends to be a lot more magical blades about.
A lot of skills weren't really worth the effort of investing in before, as they simply weren't as strong a choice as others. If all skills are roughly treated as equal in terms of how difficult they are to improve, then they should all be roughly equal in how useful they are.
Hah, roughly equal, I like that. On paper, combat skills are fucking congruent. And yet still, Bethesda managed to fuck up the balance so that Blade is the clear winner simply through availability of "exotic" weapons.
Enchanting was a pain to raise, and usually I just ended up spending money to raise it to the point where I could use it. Making it a service seems quite reasonable to me, and hardly constitutes "dumbing down." Streamlining can be a very good thing, especially if it takes several options that were sub-par and re-distributes them amongst the remaining options to make them all on more even ground.
Well, once again, you're obviously speaking from somebody who hasn't played the game. There are still just as many skills that are hard to raise, or in some cases, just plain redundant. And anything that has some semblence of balance, basically is exactly balanced, so there's no fucking point in making the choice.
Was that much different in previous games? Picking a Combat specialty in Morrowind gave you bonuses to all of the weapon skills as well, even though it doesn't make sense to do so. Is the way that Oblivion handles this appreciably different?
Well in Morrowind, it
did make sense to pick a couple of weapon skills, since as a jack of all trades "you actually get to use more of the interesting weapons that you find, rather than just selling them off because you haven't spent any time developing that skill.' Obviously at the cost of another skill slot. Still pretty pointless, but at least there's a shallow reason to pick a couple of melee skills. But in Oblivion, standard weapons are basically statistically identical, and since you hit every time, any magical weapon is getting that all important "cast on strike" with every fucking swing, so basically, you're better off being completely unskilled in Blunt and swinging a magical mace than you are being quite proficient and swinging a mundane sword of equivalent level.
That does sound disappointing. No telekinesis spells of any kind? Even Ultima IX had that, although I think you really only needed to use it in the tutorial.
There's object telekinesis, but there's absolutely no integration of Havok physics into combat, so you can't push or pull enemies, nor can you drop heavy stuff on them. The whole spell repertoire is pretty dull, and in terms of combat, the only worthwhile spells are those that kill things fairly directly, or make things easier to kill (resist debuffs and such.)
This sounds identical to Daggerfall and Morrowind, unless I' missing something. Well, and the majority of RPGs out there asll well. Many RPGs still don't offer any alternative to violence.
True enough, but at least in Daggerfall you had the option to decline quests that directly involved violence, and a plethora of character options to gear up as a pacifist. Even Morrowind in providing a far greater range of guilds and quests had more outlets for non-violence, even if it still forced it upon the player in many instances. Besides, this is the Codex, and as such, RPGs are generally compared against the best the genre has to offer, rather than the "many RPGs" that are basically pretty unremarkable.
But, within the context of the review, VD has faulted the violent nature of the world, and the reader is perfectly entitled to dismiss the criticism, given their own predilections.
That's still better than the combat of previous games in the series (as you say in the next paragraph). Making combat real-time, where one click of the mouse button equals one swing of your sword, but still "rolling the dice" to determine if you hit, is a strange and incongruous hybrid. It certainly never really did it for me. On one hand, it wants to be a "traditional RPG" and roll the dice. On the other hand, it wants to make me play an action game. It's not a very satisfying system.
I definitely agree on that count, and there are ways to still preserve random chance based on character skill, but unfortunately, Oblivion doesn't really include a decent implementation that does that. Basically, Oblivion's combat is a step forward from Morrowind, but just one step. It still has a long way to go.
I haven't seen it yet, but I'd take one really well-done ranged option over three "blah" ones. I've never really bothered much with bows in these games though, as enemies advance pretty quickly.
Well for one, it ain't "really well-done." It's adequate. It's like Thief, but without funky arrow choices, and amazingly, also without any kind of AI reactions unless you score a direct hit, front and centre. And secondly, it's not as though crossbow-like physics can't just be plugged directly into Havok. The only real limitation would be animations. And even with that in mind, I don't think there are bows that handle differently. For instance, a shortbow with a fast refire rate, but less range and damage vs a longbow that takes a lot to pull back the string, but carries that potential into the arrow flight.
It's really nothing special at all. Turok was better. Thief was better. Half-Life is better. In fact, pretty much every game I can think of that involves first person archery is at least as good, if not better.
It's about time. The conversation system in previous Elder Scrolls games sucked. Most characters would say exactly the same thing about most topics, and it was a tedious waste of time trying to find the one or two topics that they would actually have something different to say about.
Well, true. I hated Morrowind's wiki system. But Oblivion hasn't really improved. It's basically got all the same shitty, repetitive, canned responses, but has a single wiki topic to randomly look them up. So, instead of wasting time trying to find an interesting topic, you're just wasting your time talking to 95% of the NPCs. Most of the world is like the cookie cut generic NPCs from any other RPG, except instead of clicking once and getting a random line spammed at you, it takes you into a dialogue interface just to click a single option. Whee.
Or one at a time to keep it synched with the voice acting. I would actually appreciate knowing that I have the option of accepting a quest later, because it sucks when I turn down a quest because I want to save my game first, and then I'm not given another chance. I forget what game that happened in.
Well, that's a given, in most circumstances, and most RPGs worth their salt give the player the option to take up quests according to their own sense of time. But that's not the point VD was making. He was pointing out that that's basically the only time you ever get an actual dialogue choice. It's about as feeble as the token YES/NO option presented in the typical JRPG.
Again, Oblivion is hardly the sole offender here. It's just flavour text, don't read too much into it.
Wait a minute, it's not flavour text if it forces you to roleplay a character you're not interested in playing. If I want to play as a man of his word, there's plenty of shit that flies in the face of that. In fact, most of the quests are geared to be solved in a single specific way, and many of them have no regard for activities certain players might be hesitant to indulge in. For instance, I can think of a couple of Mage's Guild quests that involve outright theft, and plenty of others that require the player to engage in illegal activities, when there are clearly other ways the quest
should be solvable.
And this is unlike 98% of other RPGs in what way?
Is it wrong to hold 98% of RPGs to the standard set by the 2%? Obviously, not every game will meet that standard, and obviously a game can still be enjoyable despite that, but this is a review after all. VD has obviously put his personal slant on the comment,but again, it's still factual info that you can then say "well, it doesn't bother me that most NPCs are just nameless drones, or that the ones who can talk rarely have anything worth listening to."
Also, it should be noted that we're talking about a game that is supposedly in that upper echelon. It's averaging 94% on Metacritic, which definitely ranks among the top 2% of games, let alone RPGs. So I say - "Fuck yes Oblivion should be held up to the highest standard and criticised accordingly!"
Hey, I agree with you completely. But even the greatest of the great RPGs are just as guilty of this. Why is Oblivion getting singled out?
Because again, it's something that can, and has, been done better. In a critical review, I think it's fair to "single out" a game for it's shortcomings. An unreasonable criticism would be "Oblivion doesn't look photorealistic" because that's beyond technical limitations, and certainly hasn't been done before.
And yet this is a game for casual gamers? Slow paced, long hours, yup, sounds like what the stereotypical casual gamer wants.
The casual gamer has the freedom not to set foot in every dungeon if they get bored by them.
The Radiant AI certainly isn't perfect -- or even close, apparently -- but it at least tries to do things in a different way. And there isn't going to be any progress towards a believable AI system if designers just stick to scripted activity schedules and finite-state machines. It will improve, but it has to go through these growing stages first.
I agree entirely, and I think RAI has great potential, but this is a review of what we have, here and now, in Oblivion, and it's not up to spec. In fact, as VD pointed out, it's outshined by a 5 year old game. That's a lot of broken eggs for a potential omelette.
It was a really long point, but basically I'm saying, if this stuff applies to Oblivion, you should be complaining about it with regards to nearly ever other RPG ever made as well.
Heh. You could probably pare that down to a lazy "you should be complaining about every other RPG ever made," and you've basically nailed the whole purpose for the Codex's existence.
, Oblivion combat is fun, and is much better MW combat.
