The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is an open-world RPG developed by Bethesda Softworks and released in May of 2006, to uproarious applause from the gaming community. It won the Game of the Year award that year from virtually every video game publication from here to Polaris and sold a pretty impressive amount of copies. It's also fucking awful. So awful, in fact, I've decided to divide up my review of it into several chapters. A lot of the issues I'm going to address are inevitably things that plague a lot of open-world RPG's; games I can assure I also hate and have chosen to ignore because everyone doesn't speak so highly of them all the damn time.
The premise of the game is pretty solid: take 2002's genuinely good game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and move it to a new province in the same world, while modernizing it to compete with other titles being released around the same time. Hell, just reading that, it seems like a pretty good game to me already. The lore is rich and cerebral, and just begs to be fleshed out. Hell, I love reading the in-game books and learning about the wonderfully intriguing fantasy universe Bethesda has cooked up. But evidently, the formula for Morrowind's success was a very finely tuned algorithm that its creators were not actually prepared to alter. The focus on modernization brought us a gross oversimplification of the basic mechanics that made Morrowind great, while keeping all the faults, most of which may have been negligible in 2002 but desperately needed to be updated.
Most people, including the two or three people who read this review, see it as a landmark title with a wide open world in which you are free to do as you please. It's a crazy thing, how people have used the volume of this game to support it. I mean, one hundred gallons of refuse is still refuse. Yes, there is a hell of a lot to do in this game. Yes, you can log hours in Oblivion towards the triple digits without ever touching the main storyline, but it just is beyond me why anyone would ever want to. Sure, the concepts are all pretty cool - the Oblivion gates themselves especially - but the execution is so poor that all you find at the end of these promising subplot rainbows are dog turds. However, like a bird who has never seen the forest, the masses have embraced this plastic wood-grain painted perch as if it were a great oak.
For the first entry in this series, I've decided to focus on the lengthy dungeons that litter the game-world, which all conform to one of eight or so templates. Clearing dungeons in this game is like leveling up in World of Warcraft or Runescape. It's a menial task that gets so boring so fast that it's the type of thing you could probably get paid to do if you find a client with that kind of expendable budget. A video game made specifically for pleasure becomes pain, becomes grind, becomes "I guess I have to do this now." Indeed, the dungeon design itself is reminiscent of an MMO: you go in, you kill everyone, get your loot, and get the fuck out. It's like they didn't even realize they were designing a single player game which can have cinematic moments and unique motivations for your actions.
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| I CAN'T WAIT TO KILL ALL THOSE BANDITS |
You'll clear caverns full of enemies with no real identity, for no real purpose, with the exception of a few fetch quests sprinkled among them here and there. Often, the dungeons have no discernible boss monster, and I'm usually pretty unclear on my motivation to clear these places in the first place other than the abstract notion that I'll be rewarded for purging them of life. It's action without proper motivation; essentially a twisted Michael Bay-esque vision of dungeoneering. Truly, there are few saving graces here, and any dungeon that an NPC didn't send you into to retrieve a conveniently local item of great importance can usually be bypassed, since nothing of any note will happen to you there. This is a problem with a lot of modern RPG's (I MEAN IT'S A ROLE PLAYING GAME I WANT TO GET INTO CHARACTER AND BE MOTIVATED TO DO THE THINGS I DO WHAT THE FUCK), but it is especially prevalent in Oblivion.
Seeing an undiscovered dungeon on your mini-map while traveling between any two settlements is a pretty common occurrence, and will undoubtedly happen several times during any journey. At first the fact that there is so much exploring to do might even excite you, but soon after venturing in one or two of these places, it begins to take its toll on your very being. An inner dialogue which goes something like this is inevitable:
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| "Ayleid ruins. It must have been pretty hard to make something so cool so fucking boring" ?? |
"Hm. Another Ayleid ruin. An ancient city, lost to time. Could be cool. Maybe it won't be exactly like all the other ones. It probably is though. Man fuck that, I'm gonna keep walking. Wait, what if there is some powerful-ass item in there? Shit, I guess I have to go clear it now. Man, fuck this."
Let's take the Oblivion Gates for example, possibly the most repetitive dungeon ever conceived. Suddenly, portals to another dimension full of evil demon-like spirits and creatures open up all over the game-world of Tamriel, and it's up to you to travel to each one, cross the white fog, and destroy the mechanisms anchoring the gates to our world. At first glance, these Gates shine as a beacon of hope; they are dungeons which I have actual motivation to enter and clear. Something I can get excited about and feel like a real hero for delving into. The concept is rad, admittedly, and the first time you find one of the torture towers behind a gate, or explore one of the procedurally generated caves beneath the Oblivion lava wastes, or climb to the top of a Sigil Stone keep and cut the tie that binds the gate to Tamriel, you are pretty pumped. You fight evil creatures surrounded by hellfire as you ascend dark spires that are very much reminiscent of Sauron's tower in Peter Jackson's film adaptations of the Lord of the Rings novels. As you exit the realm, having experienced this new wonder, and loaded up with your new enchanted items, you feel like you just had a pretty great adventure.
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| What the fuck is this thing? How do you know what to do with it? UNIMPORTANT DETAILS |
Then comes the second gate... and the third... and the fourth... and so on. In total there are sixteen gates in the game, and all of them are practically identical. The format is much like the other dungeon types of the game - each has a few neat set pieces which are semi-randomly plopped throughout a procedurally generated hole where your happiness goes to die. The emotional climax of the Oblivion gate concept was reached at the end of your first gate, and there are fifteen left in the game. It didn't have to be that way, but it is. The mythical Plane of Oblivion has been reduced to another tired dungeon template - something you will see so much of in this game you'll start to feel like it's a chore.
It's the same damn story with all of the dungeon types. It's like, you have all these dungeons full of enemies to clear with neat items, but what's the point? So I can use those neat items to go clear more dungeons with the same set pieces and eerily similar corridors full of the same tired enemies? Where's the pizazz? Sure, it would have been a pretty big task to have a game this large with dungeons that are all exciting and neat - and that's a big part of why I think this game shouldn't have been so big. After clearing the hundredth cave full of bandits (also, it's a little odd that the bandit population in Cyrodil is exponentially larger than the population of NPC's you can actually speak to), this magical sword of whatever no longer appeals to me. Why should I care about getting new shit if all I am going to use it for is to kill more bandits in the one hundred and first cave? I mean, it'd be one thing if the combat in this game was any good, but it's not. The engine is complete shit and - bleh, I don't want to get ahead of myself here, I'll get to that in due time.
The lighting engine in the caves is pretty neat though.
Next week, Chapter 2: How to Praise Pagan Gods Further from the Road
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