Zero Punctuation: Oblivion

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.