[HEADING=3]A long, long time ago, there was a great hero. This hero did stuff, and things... along the way they saved the world too... I think... I can't remember.[/HEADING][hr]
[sub]For those who complain about the lack of pictures, I present a funny conversation between Ted and Sarah that can sum up the finer points of this review. (NSFW for language)[/sub]Defining a genre is about the most subjective, arguable thing you can discuss next to the idea of "What is Porn?" So, calling The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion an RPG is like calling Alien a sci-fi movie (it's horror by the way). So yes, while the game has RPG elements, it should really be called more of a "Generic Medieval Hero Simulator." If there were any genre that can suck the story out of an RPG, it's the western "Hero Sim" genre. So get ready generic, face-generated, dice-rolled hero #106, you're about to take a journey into a world where you can do a bunch of random stuff for random people so you can make money to get really cool armor you're not going to see 98% of the time.
The cool thing about being an editorial writer is that you're allowed to disagree with 98% of the general populace and still consider yourself "right." It's totally fun; try it sometime. That being said... The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion released to nearly universal critical appeal; you'd be hard-pressed to find a truly negative review of the game that wasn't laden with opinion and subjective-ness (like this one, for example). Garnishing near universal praise from every possible angle from Japan to Europe and everywhere in between, Oblivion seems to be the game that can do no wrong; to which I say: bullsh*t. It did plenty wrong... but what it did was mask its wrongness in so much... stuff... that no one could see the wrongness underneath. What Oblivion has going for it, is that it's big... it's really big; and despite what those girls keep telling you, size certainly does matter. For arguably the first time in gaming history, you were put into a world that if you could see it, if you were clever and patient enough, you could get to it. That, I'm afraid, is where the good stuff ends and the game itself begins.
Starting off in a fairly typical way, you're a (basically) nameless, (basically) faceless hero with zero back story or motivation, who has been thrown in jail for some reason or another (which I'm assuming you're supposed to invent for yourself) and it just so happens that they put you in the jail cell with the super-secret door to the "escape this way if all goes to sh*t" room that on this one particular day during your duration-less sentence, just happens to be needed. Then, when King Patrick Stewart and his decidedly non-Asian guard posse with their decidedly Asian katanas come through and press the rock that you most likely pressed your "A" button several times already, somehow their "A" buttons are more powerful than yours because at that time, a mechanical section of the stone wall moves out of way (with no apparent actual visible mechanical mechanisms) revealing a super secret, rather well-kept tunnel leading to supposed safety. As they all enter the tunnel, King Picard tells you he's been having dreams about you (creepy) and invites you, the prisoner, in jail, for quite possibly attempted-genocide, baby-eating and/or public threats of killing the King because you're actually a Medieval ancestor of Magneto, to follow him and his band of merry men on their way to the ultimate safety zone... I believe they call it "outside;" because obviously the ultimately evil forces at work went to the Grand Theft Auto school of pursuers and will give up the chase if you can get approximately 483 yards away from them for approximately 24 seconds. Happily tagging along so that you may escape and once again resume your baby-eating ways, the guard captain, with his menacing "big black man with the voice of a white 80's game-show host" demeanor, warns you that if you happen to betray the group and kill the king, he's going to be very upset about it.
It's at this time that the all-too-common "take this (random artifact) and give it to (random person)" story-opening mechanic gets underway. Shortly after handing you, the newly escaped convict/baby-eater, the cleverly named, fate of the world altering "Amulet of Kings", Professor King X gets murder-ified much to the discredit of the supposedly unstoppable secret-service bodyguard troupe that was the "Blades." It's sad, if only you were allowed to choose your class and powers before this whole nonsense, you probably could have landed a few well placed stealth back-stabs or fire spells that would have prevented this whole nonsense. Sadly, you don't receive any of your superhuman like proficiencies until after you leave the darkness of the sewers (origins only manifest themselves in sunlight apparently).
Okay, so the story is nonsensical, whatever... that's fine; I'm a fan of games like Final Fantasy and such so nonsensical stories are pretty much the norm for RPG's right? So let's not worry about that for a bit. What made Oblivion great is the exploration right? I mean, you can totally walk to that tree you see in the distance! How cool is that?! Well, very cool, if for the fact that the game didn't constantly make you walk to the damn tree you see off in the distance. Oh, but no worries, once you go to that tree, you can always fast-travel back to that tree, so really, you only have to walk to that tree once. Thankfully, you have available to you fine thoroughbred racehorse specimens like "Controls-Like-Sh*t" and "Stops-On-Bush" to help you get to that tree with the blistering speed of 1-Horespower. The neatest thing however, is while you're walking to said tree off in the distance to further the main story, you can stumble upon ancient tombs that hold treasures untold. The problem with that, is while you're walking to that tree off in the distance, you can stumble upon ancient tombs that hold treasures untold... thus completely distracting you from the fact that there is a main story.
Really, for all intents and purposes, they should have just let you break out of jail and sent you on your merry little way. It would have been great if you could choose your class and have that dictate the game's origin story, like... a thief for example. As a thief, once you broke out of jail, your immediate goal was to do thief-y type things, or possibly to repent yourself in the eyes of the townsfolk, your call. If you chose "guard" as your class/profession, maybe your immediate goal was to go get hired by someone to guard... something. If you were a "gladiator," your goal upon breaking out of prison would be to gladiate things. The story could have unfolded from underneath those basic, relate-able goals. For instance... maybe, as a thief, your basic personal goal is to steal the "Amulet of Kings" from the castle vault, where King Captain Ahab meets you and instead of stealing the amulet, he gives it to you as you, being a master of unlocking, should be able to protect it. Or, as a gladiator, you need to win a tournament to be granted an audience with King Ebeneezer Scrooge and he determines that as the winner of the contest, you would be the best person to protect the amulet from the Mythic Dawn, as his personal body guards tend to suck and let him get killed on occasion. The point being, is there were so many more interesting possibilities that would have set up the narrative in a much more personal way that tied in to who your character was as a person. Thankfully, BioWare, through their Dragon Age title gave us a decent (far from perfect) example of how this is possible.
When you start to analyze the mechanics of the game itself, things get even more crazy. [strong]Attention game designers[/strong], unless you design the entire game around it, melee first-person combat will suck. It's not something you can hide underneath other game elements like exploration or magic use. If you intend to give your player the ability to use a sword, you had better make them feel like they're using a sword in a logical, non-robotic way. Honestly though in melee combat's defense, nothing in the game moved well. Walking/running felt floaty and stiff at the same time; combat overall, melee or ranged, felt cheap and robotic... the entire game felt like your character was stuck in molasses and not at all as proficient as you were supposed to be given the fact that you were supposed to be able to beat up vampires and save the world. The whole game felt like it was designed in the 90's and then polished up to an unbelievable shine.
I will say this, for its day, few games looked prettier. The environments were unparalleled in their scope and lushness; so regardless of how inept you felt when you were there, at least the game did a good job of making you feel like you were there. Everything shimmered (for better or worse) as if it just came out of the dishwasher in a late 1980's dishwasher soap commercial; and while this may for the first few times make you feel as though your character has some sort of eye condition or was just birthed every time the sun came up, eventually you got used to it and understood that sh*t just glows. The actual textures were astonishing in some places and completely horrific in others... like people's faces. Seriously, it was like a person from a game from the late 90's was wearing the armor ripped out of Crysis; you can definitely tell where the design team spent their effort. If someone had stepped in from a project management position and said, "Dave, maybe instead of spending so much time making an armor texture where all 2,281 scales were perfectly drawn, we can work on a skin texture so we don't have to use the one from Morrowind?" then the experience of zooming in on someone's obnoxiously ugly face every time you spoke with them wouldn't have been quite so jarring.
Speaking of which, if you're going to have a game where in every character you meet has something verbal and voice acted to say, hire more than six voice actors; and if you can't, make sure each actor can do more than one or two voices. Hell, Seth McFarlane does about 12-15 indistinguishable voices between his two main shows (Family Guy & American Dad), you should at least be able to have your actors change it up a bit and not rely on people's hideous faces to help the player remember who they're talking to and if they've talked to them before. At no point in a voice acted RPG should a player get stopped by a peasant in the streets and say to themselves, "wait, didn't you just arrest me a second ago? Weren't you wearing armor? Why are you white now?" With as much development time and budget that they had for this game, these kinds of shortcomings are inexcusable. If you were walking around Cyrodiil (because all fantasy worlds require extra unnecessary consonants or vowels) and were blind, you'd be truly screwed as you'd never be able to tell who you were talking to. However, if you were blind, you'd be able to enjoy the fantastic musical score by composer Jeremy Soule who has scored more games you have played than you know (including a favorite of mine The Secret of Evermore).
All of this, everything I've written here, does not matter (as usual) as this game seems to get an overwhelming pass from the gaming community as a whole. There are people who still play it to this day citing the obnoxiously expansive AI as a reason to keep coming back. They all tell me the same thing "Oh, the main quest, that doesn't really matter; it's sort of meh." So let that be a lesson future "RPG" designers, main quest? Doesn't matter... just give people the opportunity to run around in a big shiny world and make up what's happening in their own head. Don't waste time and money on writers to craft a clever twisting narrative that spins through the world you create... just make a good AI system, give it some wild parameters and let the game do weird sh*t on its own.
[sub]SavingPrincess is a consistently disagreed-with, late-to-the-party game editorial author who fails to see the purpose of character level progression when the enemies level up right along side of you and thinks that would be like a car race where the harder you pressed the gas pedal, the faster the other cars would go. He also did about 90% of those Patrick Stewart references from memory.[/sub]
[hr]
[sub]For those who complain about the lack of pictures, I present a funny conversation between Ted and Sarah that can sum up the finer points of this review. (NSFW for language)[/sub]Defining a genre is about the most subjective, arguable thing you can discuss next to the idea of "What is Porn?" So, calling The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion an RPG is like calling Alien a sci-fi movie (it's horror by the way). So yes, while the game has RPG elements, it should really be called more of a "Generic Medieval Hero Simulator." If there were any genre that can suck the story out of an RPG, it's the western "Hero Sim" genre. So get ready generic, face-generated, dice-rolled hero #106, you're about to take a journey into a world where you can do a bunch of random stuff for random people so you can make money to get really cool armor you're not going to see 98% of the time.
The cool thing about being an editorial writer is that you're allowed to disagree with 98% of the general populace and still consider yourself "right." It's totally fun; try it sometime. That being said... The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion released to nearly universal critical appeal; you'd be hard-pressed to find a truly negative review of the game that wasn't laden with opinion and subjective-ness (like this one, for example). Garnishing near universal praise from every possible angle from Japan to Europe and everywhere in between, Oblivion seems to be the game that can do no wrong; to which I say: bullsh*t. It did plenty wrong... but what it did was mask its wrongness in so much... stuff... that no one could see the wrongness underneath. What Oblivion has going for it, is that it's big... it's really big; and despite what those girls keep telling you, size certainly does matter. For arguably the first time in gaming history, you were put into a world that if you could see it, if you were clever and patient enough, you could get to it. That, I'm afraid, is where the good stuff ends and the game itself begins.
Starting off in a fairly typical way, you're a (basically) nameless, (basically) faceless hero with zero back story or motivation, who has been thrown in jail for some reason or another (which I'm assuming you're supposed to invent for yourself) and it just so happens that they put you in the jail cell with the super-secret door to the "escape this way if all goes to sh*t" room that on this one particular day during your duration-less sentence, just happens to be needed. Then, when King Patrick Stewart and his decidedly non-Asian guard posse with their decidedly Asian katanas come through and press the rock that you most likely pressed your "A" button several times already, somehow their "A" buttons are more powerful than yours because at that time, a mechanical section of the stone wall moves out of way (with no apparent actual visible mechanical mechanisms) revealing a super secret, rather well-kept tunnel leading to supposed safety. As they all enter the tunnel, King Picard tells you he's been having dreams about you (creepy) and invites you, the prisoner, in jail, for quite possibly attempted-genocide, baby-eating and/or public threats of killing the King because you're actually a Medieval ancestor of Magneto, to follow him and his band of merry men on their way to the ultimate safety zone... I believe they call it "outside;" because obviously the ultimately evil forces at work went to the Grand Theft Auto school of pursuers and will give up the chase if you can get approximately 483 yards away from them for approximately 24 seconds. Happily tagging along so that you may escape and once again resume your baby-eating ways, the guard captain, with his menacing "big black man with the voice of a white 80's game-show host" demeanor, warns you that if you happen to betray the group and kill the king, he's going to be very upset about it.
It's at this time that the all-too-common "take this (random artifact) and give it to (random person)" story-opening mechanic gets underway. Shortly after handing you, the newly escaped convict/baby-eater, the cleverly named, fate of the world altering "Amulet of Kings", Professor King X gets murder-ified much to the discredit of the supposedly unstoppable secret-service bodyguard troupe that was the "Blades." It's sad, if only you were allowed to choose your class and powers before this whole nonsense, you probably could have landed a few well placed stealth back-stabs or fire spells that would have prevented this whole nonsense. Sadly, you don't receive any of your superhuman like proficiencies until after you leave the darkness of the sewers (origins only manifest themselves in sunlight apparently).
Okay, so the story is nonsensical, whatever... that's fine; I'm a fan of games like Final Fantasy and such so nonsensical stories are pretty much the norm for RPG's right? So let's not worry about that for a bit. What made Oblivion great is the exploration right? I mean, you can totally walk to that tree you see in the distance! How cool is that?! Well, very cool, if for the fact that the game didn't constantly make you walk to the damn tree you see off in the distance. Oh, but no worries, once you go to that tree, you can always fast-travel back to that tree, so really, you only have to walk to that tree once. Thankfully, you have available to you fine thoroughbred racehorse specimens like "Controls-Like-Sh*t" and "Stops-On-Bush" to help you get to that tree with the blistering speed of 1-Horespower. The neatest thing however, is while you're walking to said tree off in the distance to further the main story, you can stumble upon ancient tombs that hold treasures untold. The problem with that, is while you're walking to that tree off in the distance, you can stumble upon ancient tombs that hold treasures untold... thus completely distracting you from the fact that there is a main story.
Really, for all intents and purposes, they should have just let you break out of jail and sent you on your merry little way. It would have been great if you could choose your class and have that dictate the game's origin story, like... a thief for example. As a thief, once you broke out of jail, your immediate goal was to do thief-y type things, or possibly to repent yourself in the eyes of the townsfolk, your call. If you chose "guard" as your class/profession, maybe your immediate goal was to go get hired by someone to guard... something. If you were a "gladiator," your goal upon breaking out of prison would be to gladiate things. The story could have unfolded from underneath those basic, relate-able goals. For instance... maybe, as a thief, your basic personal goal is to steal the "Amulet of Kings" from the castle vault, where King Captain Ahab meets you and instead of stealing the amulet, he gives it to you as you, being a master of unlocking, should be able to protect it. Or, as a gladiator, you need to win a tournament to be granted an audience with King Ebeneezer Scrooge and he determines that as the winner of the contest, you would be the best person to protect the amulet from the Mythic Dawn, as his personal body guards tend to suck and let him get killed on occasion. The point being, is there were so many more interesting possibilities that would have set up the narrative in a much more personal way that tied in to who your character was as a person. Thankfully, BioWare, through their Dragon Age title gave us a decent (far from perfect) example of how this is possible.
When you start to analyze the mechanics of the game itself, things get even more crazy. [strong]Attention game designers[/strong], unless you design the entire game around it, melee first-person combat will suck. It's not something you can hide underneath other game elements like exploration or magic use. If you intend to give your player the ability to use a sword, you had better make them feel like they're using a sword in a logical, non-robotic way. Honestly though in melee combat's defense, nothing in the game moved well. Walking/running felt floaty and stiff at the same time; combat overall, melee or ranged, felt cheap and robotic... the entire game felt like your character was stuck in molasses and not at all as proficient as you were supposed to be given the fact that you were supposed to be able to beat up vampires and save the world. The whole game felt like it was designed in the 90's and then polished up to an unbelievable shine.
I will say this, for its day, few games looked prettier. The environments were unparalleled in their scope and lushness; so regardless of how inept you felt when you were there, at least the game did a good job of making you feel like you were there. Everything shimmered (for better or worse) as if it just came out of the dishwasher in a late 1980's dishwasher soap commercial; and while this may for the first few times make you feel as though your character has some sort of eye condition or was just birthed every time the sun came up, eventually you got used to it and understood that sh*t just glows. The actual textures were astonishing in some places and completely horrific in others... like people's faces. Seriously, it was like a person from a game from the late 90's was wearing the armor ripped out of Crysis; you can definitely tell where the design team spent their effort. If someone had stepped in from a project management position and said, "Dave, maybe instead of spending so much time making an armor texture where all 2,281 scales were perfectly drawn, we can work on a skin texture so we don't have to use the one from Morrowind?" then the experience of zooming in on someone's obnoxiously ugly face every time you spoke with them wouldn't have been quite so jarring.
Speaking of which, if you're going to have a game where in every character you meet has something verbal and voice acted to say, hire more than six voice actors; and if you can't, make sure each actor can do more than one or two voices. Hell, Seth McFarlane does about 12-15 indistinguishable voices between his two main shows (Family Guy & American Dad), you should at least be able to have your actors change it up a bit and not rely on people's hideous faces to help the player remember who they're talking to and if they've talked to them before. At no point in a voice acted RPG should a player get stopped by a peasant in the streets and say to themselves, "wait, didn't you just arrest me a second ago? Weren't you wearing armor? Why are you white now?" With as much development time and budget that they had for this game, these kinds of shortcomings are inexcusable. If you were walking around Cyrodiil (because all fantasy worlds require extra unnecessary consonants or vowels) and were blind, you'd be truly screwed as you'd never be able to tell who you were talking to. However, if you were blind, you'd be able to enjoy the fantastic musical score by composer Jeremy Soule who has scored more games you have played than you know (including a favorite of mine The Secret of Evermore).
All of this, everything I've written here, does not matter (as usual) as this game seems to get an overwhelming pass from the gaming community as a whole. There are people who still play it to this day citing the obnoxiously expansive AI as a reason to keep coming back. They all tell me the same thing "Oh, the main quest, that doesn't really matter; it's sort of meh." So let that be a lesson future "RPG" designers, main quest? Doesn't matter... just give people the opportunity to run around in a big shiny world and make up what's happening in their own head. Don't waste time and money on writers to craft a clever twisting narrative that spins through the world you create... just make a good AI system, give it some wild parameters and let the game do weird sh*t on its own.
[sub]SavingPrincess is a consistently disagreed-with, late-to-the-party game editorial author who fails to see the purpose of character level progression when the enemies level up right along side of you and thinks that would be like a car race where the harder you pressed the gas pedal, the faster the other cars would go. He also did about 90% of those Patrick Stewart references from memory.[/sub]
[hr]
[HEADING=1]Other Articles from SavingPrincess[/HEADING]
- [sub]A Princess Worth Saving: Earthbound [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.176800]
A Princess Worth Saving: Crystal Defenders [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.189221]
A Princess Worth Saving: Blood Omen - Legacy of Kain [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.188067]
A Princess Worth Saving: Suikoden (I & II) [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.189268]
A Princess Worth Saving: Castlevania [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.183883]
A Princess Worth Saving: Eternal Darkness [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.176643]
A Princess Worth Saving: Myst [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.176708]
A Princess Worth Saving: The World Ends with You [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.178049]
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A Princess Worth Saving: Xenogears [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.176672]
A Princess Worth Saving: Shadow of the Colossus [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.182337]
A Princess Worth Saving: Mirror's Edge [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.176636]
A Princess Worth Saving: Heavy Rain (No Spoilers) [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.182291]
A Princess Worth Saving: The Second Dimension [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.176653]
A Princess Worth Saving: Final Fantasy Story Mechanics [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/9.181071]
A Princess Worth Saving: Phantasy Star [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.186357]
A Princess Worth Saving: Marvel Vs. CAPCOM 2 - New Age of Heroes (10th Anniversary Edition) [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.186115]
A Princess Worth Saving: Resident Evil [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.184382]
A Princess Worth Saving: Hot Shots Golf [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.182525]
Hey Dragon, You Can Have Her: Mortal Kombat [ http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.190299]
Hey Dragon, You Can Have Her: Final Fantasy VIII [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.180899]
Hey Dragon, You Can Have Her: Halo - Combat Evolved [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.183686]
Hey Dragon, You Can Have Her: World of Warcraft [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.187830]
Hey Dragon, You Can Have Her: Call of Duty - Modern Warfare 2 [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/326.182551]
In Another Castle: The "Twilight" Effect in Video Games [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/9.188430]
In Another Castle: Labels, Dollars and the Rise of he Zyngas [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/9.187635]
In Another Castle: Gender Portrayal in Video Games, Part II [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/9.187580]
In Another Castle: Gender Portrayal in Video Games [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/9.182804]
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Smashing Brothers: Sex V. Violence [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/9.178178]
Smashing Brothers: Music Games - East V. West [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/9.182962]
BONUS: Ten (Plus) Lessons Video Games Have Taught Us [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.189488]
Secret Link [http://www.savingprincess.com][/sub]
