You know me: I'm a twitchy,
instant-gratification kind of gamer,
the sort who isn't happy unless
there's a gun the size of a motorbike
in his hands and a severed alien willy
bouncing off the front of his space helmet.
But every now and again, the planets would
align and I'll be affected
by weird cosmic rays, and suddenly
all I want to do is play a nice fantasy RPG.
Not a JRPG, God no - it's just space radiation,
not the infinite power of Christ
but a Western RPG, something with goblins
and swords and men in loincloths
going on about wenches; so this time,
I pumped steroids into my video cards
and had a crack at Oblivion.
My only previous experience with the Elder
Scrolls series was a brief spell of Morrowind
during the previous planetary alignment,
in which I ran around some muddy countryside
in the rain for a few hours fending off
weird sub-human creatures (so basically it
was just like Glastonbury Festival).
In Oblivion, you start off in a dungeon in
the imperial palace. You're never told what
crime you committed - I guess you're supposed
to fill in that blank for yourself
so I choose to believe I was in there
for shagging the emperor's wife and daughter
at the same time while playing
a rock guitar solo
on the desecrated corpse of God.
Anyway, then the emperor showed up
(played by Captain Picard -
and I have to say I liked him a lot;
he was the only character who actually
seemed to know they were in a fantasy RPG),
he took one look at me, noticed the camera
floating behind my head, and said,
"Oh, bugger; you're the protagonist,
guess I have to die now." And die he did,
but not before giving me the address of
a mate of his for advice on the
world-saving quest I could maybe think
about following in between
looting bodies and fast-traveling.
I chose to play as a Nord
(a race of brave William Wallace-types
big on football violence)
and I picked specialization
in swords and heavy armor -
partly out of a total lack of creativity,
but mostly because I'd tried playing
a mixed class in Morrowind and found that
switching between magic and weapons
mid-battle was as smooth and intuitive
as shifting from fifth to reverse
in a car with a missing gear lever.
Oblivion's interface, however, seems
a lot more user-friendly - for a PC RPG,
anyway; I still had to check the manual
to figure out how to fucking drop things,
but if you can at least swing a sword
without cutting your own legs off, then
it's still a hell of a lot more intuitive
than anything Richard Garriott ever made.
But even if Oblivion had the most perfect
interface ever devised and dispensed milk
and cookies while cooing gentle reassurances
in a soft motherly voice, it would still be
condemned by its biggest flaw.
Let me tell you about immersion: Immersion
is when you go for a midnight walk after a
weekend marathon of Thief II and catch yourself
looking for your visibility gem.
Immersion is when you're playing Condemned
and your cat suddenly jumps onto your lap,
only to be immediately launched off by a
reflexive cannon-like blast of terrified piss.
If a game can truly draw you in,
it can make up for a lot of flaws.
Take something like Assassin's Creed -
so stuffed with bad design choices
they were leaking out of its pores,
but I didn't despise it because
Assassin's Creed presents itself so well;
and if you go into it with the right mindset,
it'll suck you in like a thousand-dollar whore.
Immersion can save the life of a bad game,
and inversely, a lack of immersion can be
a dog-shit bullet right between the eyes.
For a game that is obviously trying so hard,
Oblivion is one of the least
immersive RPGs I've ever played.
The world map is huge - granted,
if you intend to walk from one end to the other,
you better pack a few sandwiches,
but frankly, take one good look around
the moment you first emerge blinking
into the daylight, and you've pretty
much seen everything.
It's like they took two hundred
square yards of medieval English countryside,
added a few wolves, then copy-pasted it
until it was roughly the size of Yorkshire.
Fortunately, you can bypass the insipid
landscape and instantly teleport to anywhere
you want, but that defeats the point of
having a huge gameworld in the first place.
I really hate to say this,
but compare to that electronic smack-
addition World of Warcraft -
every territory has different terrain,
colors and monsters, and the fast-travel
system (while badly in need of an in-flight
movie) at least gives the impression of a
huge epic world. Oblivion, by comparison,
might as well be entirely taking place
in the same fucking meadow.
And then there are the characters:
They all have this weird, stiff, unreal
quality about them, indicating that Cyrodiil
is apparently located inside
the uncanny valley.
And that's before you try
to talk to them -
besides the main characters,
there are about a hundred million
individuals with maybe two actual
personalities between them
(neither of which are particularly
well characterized).
One crazy beggar woman switched between
a grackled drawl and a well-spoken
aristocratic tone from line to line,
so either she's pulling a very inept con,
or the dialogue assignment is fucked.
The attempt to create a
procedurally-generated NPC conversation
system was courageous, but then, so is
jumping into a skip full of used syringes.
The tiny number of voice actors just makes
it laughable, with characters frequently
found conversing with themselves about
how much they enjoy buying from the
shop owned by themselves. On top of that,
the endlessly repeated lines are so badly
written and awkwardly delivered, it's like
you're trapped in a middle-school amateur
dramatics production of The Lord of the
Rings adapted for stage by a deaf budgerigar.
Oblivion might be incredibly deep
and full of interesting quests that
all end with foxy night elves giving you
soapy tit-wanks, but it's all for naught
because it just won't let me in.
Whenever I thought I was starting to lose
myself in the experience, some NPC
would get stuck on a paving stone
or force me to feed them that
stupid conversation pie, and I'd
come crashing back to reality,
where I am nothing more than an
Anglo-Australian tit trying to outsmart
a cloud of ones and zeros.
The root of the problem is simply that
they try too hard to impress us,
so if nothing else, remember this:
Spinning a plate on a stick is impressive,
but try to spin three at once,
and you'll just end up digging
porcelain out of your face.