Well, my Xbox 360 got the red rings of death, and that means no more Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for me. I suppose it had to happen eventually. After all, Microsoft didn’t make this product to last; they made it to break down and thus make people miserable, to create the illusion that they lost lots of money making good on broken Xboxes, and ultimately just to get people to buy more than one of these things, which is what I’ll have to do if I ever want to visit the world of Oblivion again. Since cash is tight, as always, it will be a while before that happens.
I don’t have much time for gaming. Oblivion, in that regard, was both a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because it killed all other games for me. To me – and I’m not knocking anyone who loves these other games – it made GTA IV and Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed and Halo 3 look just plain silly by comparison. It was a blessing in that it killed those other games for me and a curse in that I never tired of playing it. Oblivion isn’t a game really, it’s what they advertised it to be – a chance to live another life in another world.
Now, that other life is quite a lonely life. The game is single player, so it’s a lonely experience unless you’ve chained someone to a chair and are forcing them to watch you play. You can’t really talk to anyone in the game, either, as despite the fact that these NPCs are supposed to have some kind of Radiant AI running their lives, the truth is they don’t have much to say. You can’t get those NPCs out of their routines really, can’t converse with them about anything that isn’t in their personal little dialogue sub-routines. Basically, once a quest line related to a given NPC is finished, they aren’t worth much of anything anymore. So it is lonely – other than some folks who are basically just signs to point you in the next direction, and lots and lots of people and creatures to kill, you’re kinda the only person on Earth, or Nirn to be more exact. That’s kind of sad, because you can do and accomplish a lot of amazing things inside the game world that it would be nice to be able to share. And it’s those things – the little things you can do – that make playing Oblivion so amazing.
My roommate is a case in point. He’s essentially a home decorator in Oblivion. He goes out into the world primarily for the purpose of collecting things to put in his house, from skulls and animal pelts to gemstones and longswords. He creates displays of weapons, armor, and potion components in every corner of Battlehorn Castle, his favorite home away from home. He and I even placed all ten Ayleid statues on the the second floor railing of that castle so that you could see them up there, all in a row, as soon as you walked in the front door. Sadly, those Ayleid statues, like many staves and other quest items (some welkynd stones too) proved a bit glitchy. They move about, victims of the Oblivion poltergeist, and in this case sank through the railing and would have continued moving through space and other objects, utlimately disappearing into the earth itself, if we hadn’t grabbed them up and shoved them in a crate. Oh, well. Yeah, he loves decorating, and loves concocting new potions, too. He truly is an insane home-decorating alchemist.
I’m pretty much the same, although not to the same extent. I prefer to decorate my house with significant mementos of quests and magical items and weapons with names, such that moving around the house is a way of reliving the character’s greatest adventures. I don’t get much pleasure out of lining the walkway leading to the house with a row of duped Varla stones … that’s a bit much for me.
I played Oblivion as a purist – I never duplicated items, nor did I make use of the glitch that lets you make items of magical jewlery permanent. After a while, I didn’t even enjoy creating my own spells or magic items at the spellmaking and enhanting altars, because I seemed to be too good at it – I could too easily make myself invincible, and I enjoyed a challenge. I would very ceremoniously put on display any items of spell-reflection or damage reflection that came my way, as these seemed way overpowered.
I think what I loved most about Oblivion was not the combat or the treasure finding. It was just walking around outdoors. I live in Hanoi, Vietnam, and it can seem kind of gloomy in the city. To me, travelling about in Oblivion was really similar to traipsing around the European countryside – albeit without mosquitoes, which is a good thing. It was nice to watch sunsets and sunrises, to run in the rain, to frolic mostly naked under attractive waterfalls. It was great the way the world just waited for you – no matter how many quests you had going on, no matter how many life and death situations you were smack in the middle of, everything just stopped and waited for you if you decided to swim around in the ocean for a while, or just wanted to spend a few hours standing on Dive Rock looking at the scenery and listening to the ubiquitous Oblivion music, music that became the soundtrack of so many hours of my life … for as long as the Xbox lasted.
Of course, when the music would change, indicating that something that wanted to eat me or steal my stuff was lurking about and getting closer, I’d always feel happy. I loved the sound effect that accompanied drawing a sword, loved the motion the character would make when casting a spell and the illuminated mystic smoke that accompanied it, and loved laying the smack down on whatever it was that made the mistake of attacking me.
I never stopped feeling like the makers of Oblivion had found my list of the 1,000 coolest things I’d program into a fantasy RPG (if I knew how), left out about 5, and added another 1,000 of their own I’d never thought of. That’s what this game was, a romp through 1,995 of the coolest things about fantasy worlds that anyone could think of. I’m not sure if it’s sad, ludicrous, or perfectly normal that one of the reasons I’d never even think of killing myself, no matter how bad life might get, is that I’d lose the chance to see Elder Scrolls V.
What to put in “V?” Well, that’s a big question. I addressed it a bit in a previous post here, and may address it again someday in a later post. What’s more important is to try to get some faith. You see, I repeatedly call the creators of Oblivion – the whole creative team – geniuses. The game is purely inspired genius. Absolutely staggering in its brilliance. Oblivion takes computer RPG design to new levels that are just light-years beyond anything that came before it. So I know I should just believe in these guys, and trust that V will be everything IV was, and even more. Still though, I’m a man of little faith.
You see, Oblivion was just about perfect. The only things I’d really want out of ESV would be daggers to throw, staves to swing in combat, more monsters in a greater diversity of shapes and sizes than IV had, and a new continent to explore with new mansions and towers and castles to … decorate. It would be nice if you could get married, have a child, and then go back into the character design engine to design a new character based on that child, who could pop out at first level as the inheritor of everything his father or mother had accumulated, but with new quests to go on. Silly stuff, right? That’s the problem. I’m just looking for another Shivering Isles, another Knights of the Nine. They should do one a month, like comic books. If they did, and if my X-box wasn’t Rrod’d, I’d just keep playing. But none of that’s going to happen. ESV will be different … I’ll just have to trust in these geniuses and believe that as different as it will be, it will still be every bit as immersing and compelling.
And maybe, just maybe, I’ll play ESV on a computer instead of an Xbox.
