Wednesday 19 April 2006

Pic of the day: Magnhild, the Breton Tankmage. Don't be fooled by the cuddly face and body: This person kills horrible monsters on a daily basis while out jogging. And has fun doing it. No wait, that's me having fun. Magnhild is just a figment of my imagination. Assisted imagination, in this case.

Sweet Oblivion

I am of course still talking about the majestic role playing game from Bethsoft, the fourth and presumably final in the Elder Scrolls series. I have played it for a couple weeks now, and my opinion has gradually changed over time.

When I first got the game, it barely ran at all on a machine that could handle everything else I threw at it (except really big families or dorms in The Sims 2). Since three of my machines are defective anyway, I bought a new PC tailor made for Oblivion: A fast hard disk, a good fan and processor fan, and a modern video card (NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT). Admittedly that's pretty near the cheapest GeForce you get of that generation, but then again I haven't exactly won the lottery. It has what I need to run Oblivion, and this may well be the last PC game I buy in a long, long time.

After a few hours of traipsing around in the beautifully rendered virtual nature, the charm began to fade. After all, we humans get used to pretty much anything. No matter how beautiful the scenery (or music, or food, or lovemaking I suppose) we soon start to ignore it. (For further details, see my 4 years ago entry.) While I did not quite regret buying the new PC, I was less than impressed with the game underneath the skin deep beauty. It seemed "consolified" in the bad sense of the word, dumbed down, flattened. I found it less exciting than the earlier games in the series, not something to hold my attention for more than an hour or a two.

At some point, gradually, this started to change again. I began to discover aspects of gameplay that I had overlooked. Perhaps it was when the leader of the Mages Guild in Skingrad gave me a fireball spell to help me save a lost guild member from the caves. I wasn't really what I thought of as a fireball type of character... my class is Tankmage, which I have defined myself. My character "tanks", an expression from multiplayer games meaning being the one to draw the wrath of the enemies and take damage (or preferably resist the damage, of course) while the rest of the party takes the baddies down. In my case, the rest of the party consists of one summoned being from another plane, either a zombie or ghost or some such from the afterlife, or a demonic being from Oblivion, their version of medieval Hell. These summoned beings don't stay long (although I play with a modification that makes them last a few minutes instead of one), and they don't all have the same properties. Some of them are fast but frail, some are slower but more solid. Some do fire damage, or frost, or weakening spells, or physical damage.

At first I only had one skeleton to keep me company. Gradually I expanded my menagerie. And then there was the fireball, which packed quite a punch. I started to use it as an alternative to weapons sometimes. The game became easier, but at the same time more varied. And then more varied again, as I learned new spells. And again, and again. I started to find magic weapons and armor with various interesting effects. I started to make potions and poisons with pretty special effects too.

Before I knew it, Oblivion was one of the most interesting games I have ever played. Sure it is repetitive on a large scale: You walk along the road going somewhere, and see a burning portal to Oblivion. You go in there, fight your way to the top of the highest tower, and close the portal by grabbing the Sigil Stone. Then you walk on. But the Daedra (demons) are in the details. So far each of the Oblivion pocket universes have had a different layout. Seas of lava bar the way, and you may have to first infiltrate another tower and find the mechanism that opens a gate or extends a bridge or somesuch, so you can get to the main tower at all. It is always possible, but it takes some trial and error each time, because each is different. On the other hand, on the next level of detail again things are reasonably familiar. The layout of the actual towers is fairly similar, and there are a limited number of enemy types in each level range.

So the game consists of a blend of the familiar and the unfamiliar, always enough new things to keep it interesting, but not so much change that the steep learning curve has you breathing hard all of the time.

Usually there are several different ways of reaching a goal, although some of them cannot be reached without bloodshed. Whether that blood includes your own, however, varies. As a tanker, my character can take a lot of punishment and keep standing. She specializes in blocking and heavy armor, but also has healing magic (almost exclusively self heals, since the otherworldly pets don't stay long enough to need it). Alchemy (potion making) adds more healing and also other defensive effects like energy shields and damage reflection. The same can be done with magic items and even with scrolls that are found on defeated enemies.

An entirely different approach is to specialize in sneaking, and then take down the enemy with a critical shot from safe distance, before they knew what hit them. In this case, you don't need the heavy armor (but you may want to be able to run fast, if you are discovered). Again there are spells, potions and amulets that make you harder to detect, which adds to your sneak skill. I have reports from another player who claims to be able to actually sneak all the way up to a high-level enemy and deliver an unexpected blow. I will want to try making a sneaky character later, but for now I have so much fun with my tanker, I can barely tear myself away. It sure eats up pretty much all my game time and gnaws at my journal writing time too, as you may already have noticed.

In conclusion: The game is a lot deeper than I imagined. There are simply so many different things to do, you could stay there for months. I am not sure I should devote that amount of time to a game of this category. Then again I spent years in Daggerfall. Oblivion is much smaller in terms of square miles (but still around the size of a massive online RPG). In terms of available objects quests, and original content, I am not sure which is the largest. I have to agree with pretty much every reviewer to ever play this game: This is the ultimate single-player role playing game, if not the ultimate game at all. Whether it really is better than sex, I'm not qualified to decide. Do you do it several hours each night, every day of the week? If so, I guess it's a tie...