 | "Oblivion" by Konstantin
(2006-04-04) |
I seem to have gotten hopelessly hooked on
Oblivion this past week, playing it to the exclusion of sleep, anime, and even /b/. I don't think I've been this absorbed in a game since World of Warcraft (at least the parts before the endgame grind), and I believe that part of it is that Oblivion plays like a really good MMORPG without the lag, queues, and idiots that are an inevitable part of that genre.
The game is extremely open-ended, with more side quests and minigames than you can shake a stick at and a main plot that can often get sidelined by all the dungeon raiding and powerleveling. It reminds me quite a bit of the Ultima series, which I still hold as the pinnacle of RPG design (or at least Ultima 4 through 7.5. The less said about 9, the better), both in its non-linearity and the painstaking detail in which its world and that world's inhabitants are rendered. You can run around glades and pick flowers (which you then turn into potions and sell at a tidy profit), contract vampirism and stalk the night (because the sun damages you faster than you can heal if you don't feed for a while), or come up with and implement spectacularly broken character builds (which make the obsessive number cruncher in me very happy). To bring some perspective, I'm more than 30 hours into the game, only about one quest into the main plot, and still haven't even been to half the cities.
Of course it doesn't hurt that the Elder Scrolls series has always allowed you to play cat people (though the Khajiit are pretty close to being dangerously furry). I've always had a soft spot for catgirls (unlike my ExCoKo alter ego), so Oblivion gets bonus mo? points from me for letting me play one (named Anya, of course). There are also lizard people, orcs, and over a half dozen races of humans and elves (though no dwarves or gnomes), so the amount of character customization is very impressive. While personally I prefer to blow through the character creation process as quickly as possible and get to the killing and money-making as soon as possible, Oblivion's still managed to keep me fixated for a good half-hour, tweaking my character's face (or is it muzzle?) to look just right.
About the only problem with the game is that it is a bit on the buggy side. While nowhere near as bad as Daggerfall was (ended up quitting that one halfway when an event mistriggered leaving me permanently stuck as a wereboar), there are still regular crashes on alt-tabbing and some trigger oddness (nothing like a character thanking you profusely for saving her husband, offering you eternal hospitality, and then threatening to call the guards on you for trespassing as soon as you leave the conversation). Still, considering how ambitious the game is in terms of both graphics and AI, and given Bethesda's previous QA track record, Oblivion is definitely an improvement, and hopefully there'll be patches in the near future to smooth things out even more.
At this point, I think Oblivion stands a pretty high chance of being my favorite game of the year. Then again, I've yet to try Disgaea 2, considering that the original has managed to consume more than 160 hours of my life. Speaking of which, the Disgaea anime is premiering tomorrow, and there's a whole new season of anime starting. Between that, the second School Rumble season, and Utawaremono, I think there'll be plenty to rant about in the coming weeks.
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