In the summer of 2008, CJ sent me a handful of games for the PC, after I’d reformatted my old desktop machine. Most of these were old Star Wars games, such as the X-Wing and TIE Fighter flight simulators (very difficult games too, I might add), but one of them was a curious addition, which I knew nothing about. It was called The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and, based on what was on the back of the box, it looked like a swords ’n’ sorcery first-person slash-‘em-up. Not knowing what to expect, I installed the game and attempted to play it, only to find that my PC was incapable of supporting it (I imagine because of the absence of a decent graphics card). For the next few months, especially when I went back to university for my final year that September, I more-or-less forgot about Oblivion.
However, when I went down to Kent for Christmas with my mother and my sister, I remembered the game and decided to take it with me, to try it out on my mother’s PC--a pretty poorly put together machine, by most measures, but nevertheless better equipped to support graphically demanding games than my own. I was pleased to find that not only did Oblivion work, but it was a far better game than I had ever anticipated. It wasn’t long before I was hooked, and I spent most of the ten days I was down in Kent playing it. On one day at least, I sat playing Oblivion from not long after breakfast until I went to bed in the wee small hours of the morning, only taking breaks for lunch and dinner and to visit the bathroom--I was enjoying it that much! After the New Year of 2009, when I returned to Stirling, I missed the game a lot. I bought the previous title in the series, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and, even though it worked on my old PC well enough, I just couldn’t get into it the same way I’d gotten into Oblivion. And that, my friends, is the single reason I bought myself an Xbox 360 in January 2009--so I could play Oblivion again, without ever having to worry about compatibility issues. That’s how much I loved this game.
I still love Oblivion, though my obsession with it has dwindled lately in favour of other games (which is just as well, since I’d hate to have bought a new console only to ever play one game on it). However, as with everything discussed in this series, there are a few things in Oblivion that bug me and I’m going to discuss them here.
Levelling Up: “Micro-management is hard...”
Oblivion may look like a first-person slash-‘em-up at a glance, but it’s really a lot more complicated. It is, in fact, an RPG that simply uses first-person game mechanics (though you can toggle to a third person view, if you like, but this is largely useless in combat). You create a character, picking from one of ten fantasy races, including Elves, Men, Orcs, and even some animal-like creatures, whose facial appearance you can customise to your heart’s content. As you play through the game’s tutorial, you are given opportunities to choose your character’s class and special abilities and attributes, choosing skills from three general schools, which include combat, stealth, and magic. Naturally, as with most RPG’s, your character gains experience points as you play and levels up periodically, gradually becoming more and more powerful as you play through the game. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with levelling up; it makes RPG’s a more rewarding gaming experience and it can be incredibly fun as you unlock new abilities. Oblivion even allows you to postpone levelling up as long as you wish; since levelling up requires you to find a safe place to sleep (a bed in an inn, a guild hall, a house, or a camp somewhere in the wild--provided you’ve taken care of any nearby enemies first), you can avoid levelling up just by avoiding sleeping. If you do this long enough, you’ll have racked up so much XP that you’ll be able to level up at will for a while. But, while this can be useful in Oblivion, the levelling system is otherwise mind-numbingly complicated.
In some RPG’s (notably those made by Bioware), when you level up, you get so many points you can spend unlocking new skills. To the strategic gamer or a gamer who wants to unlock that supremely powerful spell, this makes it a lot easier to create the kind of character you want to play as. However, this is not how things work in Oblivion. No, in Oblivion, individual skills can’t be increased by dumping points into them every time you level up; you do this with your character's attributes (things like Strength, Speed, Intelligence, etc.) and these govern your skills, but the actual skills themselves level up through use. So, if you want a Marksman skill of 100 (something I’ve attained only once to date), then you need to literally train with your bow for hours. And although there are bails of hay and dummies you can use for target practice, your Marksman skill will only level up when your arrows successfully strike a living target--and the same applies for Destruction magic, Hand-to-Hand, Blade, and Blunt weapon skills. While going on quests and dungeon crawls is usually guaranteed to give you some chances to train, I’ve found that the quickest way to level these skills up is to increase the game’s difficulty level (which makes enemies take more hits to kill, but also substantially weakens the player character), obtain a cheap summoning spell, and use your summoned creature for target practice. For every other kind of skill, it’s a question of using it as often as possible. For some skills, like Sneak and Alteration, levelling up is relatively easy. For others, like the offensive skills listed above, plus Restoration magic (an extremely useful skill that saves you a lot of money and inventory space on healing potions), levelling up takes ages. You can reach your character’s maximum level (which is not fixed and is determined by your race and class) without some of your skills even reaching the Journeyman level of 50. For the first-time player, this can lead to creating a character with skills they’ll barely use and, thus, possibly never level up. Only experienced players, or those who consult online guides like the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Page, will have the knowledge needed to truly work Oblivion’s complicated skills system and, even then, it’s a lot of work, which can really detract from the enjoyment of the game.
Fortunately, it seems Bethesda realised this. In Fallout 3, which uses the same game engine as Oblivion and is very similar in terms of gameplay, the levelling system is much simpler. When you level up, you get so many points, which you can distribute amongst whichever skills you choose, making it much easier to increase the skills you want than in Oblivion. Although it’s impossible to raise every skill to 100, you can get more of them that high a lot more easily than in Oblivion. You can’t postpone levelling up, since it happens automatically when you gain enough XP, but I found I didn’t miss this when I recently played through Fallout 3. I expect the upcoming sequel to Oblivion, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to use a levelling system more closely resembling that of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas when it’s released later this year.
In the next instalment, I'll discuss an issue I have with some of the dungeons in Oblivion.
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