Well, I wanted to post something the last two days, since I wanted to get three posts a week on your standard Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, but I've been busy. Thankfully my spring break started yesterday so I should have 10 days free to maybe start up a back-log. Now on to the important stuff.
As you may or may not be aware (if you have your head under a rock or just don't follow gaming news) Bethesda is coming out with the fifth installment in their popular Elder Scrolls game series. So far, there's not much out about it but I'll give you what I know and what I think about it tomorrow. But first, it's back story time. As with Dragon Age II I feel it's important to understanding where I'm coming from before hearing my opinion on the game. However this will take a little bit longer than Dragon Age: Origins did, plus I'm actually playing Oblivion at the moment so I can rant much more effectively on it.
Of course, I have to take another step back first. I started playing The Elder Scrolls with Morrowind. That was fun, but it took a while to find something I could actually play. I started out with a mage, but the fact that your magicka didn't replenish on its own kinda killed that for me. I then tried a stealth approach, but that bombed as I was a little too sucky at the start and didn't have the patience to work my way all the way up to master thief. So instead I went through a long list of mixed and matched characters until I had the first couple hours of gameplay memorized. Eventually though I finally started up a heavy armor/long blade fighter and actually got around to playing through the game. Of course, once I actually got into the game I still had to periodically forget that I was in a sandbox and just buckle down to doing something.
Oblivion came out and they made a few changes, some good some bad. They condensed some skills, removed others, added blocking and manipulation of your surroundings, simplified enchanting (though made it a pain to get to), made enemies scale with your character, and had magicka regenerate. With the exception of the first and last items on the list, I'm not sure I like most of the changes. Enchanting especially irks me. While they did fix “on strike” enchantments on bows and made constant effects more accessible they also greatly limited what was possible. No longer could you create a ring to let you shoot fireballs or walk on air (technically that's a removed spell, but I still miss it). You can only create "On Strike" weapons and "Constant Effect" armors/clothing and the constant effect list is much shorter. This removes a lot of options like my armbands of regeneration I was fond of in Morrowind and does nothing to fix the 100% chameleon trick which still pretty much breaks the game.
Anyway I’m still working my way through Oblivion as for a good year I couldn’t find a character and a play style to suit me. You see, Oblivion’s scaling enemies presents a bit of a problem. As you become more powerful you have to contend with more powerful creatures. You can circumvent this however if you level the right way. Unfortunately that way is very tedious. So it’s a balance between cash, level, and combat ability. Do I want to/can I find a combination that lets me just play straight and see what happens? Or try to get around the level scaling by grinding to death. Currently I’m trying the former, again, but I’ve managed to set something up that’s not TOO bad. Helps that I can abuse the crap out of invisibility spells. So far stealth is the only thing I can stand. Straight up fighting is far too messy, requiring too many health potions or healing spells (blocking only reduces damage rather than actually preventing it) and magic just tends to add Magicka and current spell to the list of crap you need to keep track of which means either opening your menu a lot or hoping hotkeys work (I’m playing on the 360 and I’ve decided it was a bad decision as the control is slugish and I get four reliable hotkeys and four that are much less so). So I’m left with stealth, which seems fairly effective for dealing with most everything now that I’ve reached a significant level with the right skills (and spells).
One of the big issues is that magic is both overpowered and underpowered at the same time. It can do just about anything with enough Magicka behind it and is insanely easy to train. However, on the other hand you need to get enough to then support all those spells you need to use. Morrowind solved this problem with the use of the Enchant skill and enchanted items. You could put pretty much any spell as an enchantment and cast it from there. This would circumvent any problems you had from being a fighter or thief as long as you could soul trap (which was pretty easy to shove onto a weapon or on another enchanted item). This could get very expensive as enchanting items yourself was fairly risky business. However, Morrowind once again had a solution: it allowed you to bundle purchases and sales together so you could trade with merchants and get the full amount for your items (if they only had 1k gold you sell a 5k item and buy 4k worth of merchandise, you could then come back tomorrow and another 1k back to them, repeat till you don’t have anything to sell). Oblivion, however, uses an instant sell/buy function so at best you’re getting 2k gold (the best merchants in the game have 1k gold and you can add 1k to their available gold at 100 Mercantilism) for items worth several times that. Of course they’ll still charge you full price for that enchanted necklace worth 8k gold when they bought it off of you for only 1k or 2k gold.
Another problem I’ve run across in Oblivion is a combination of the level scaling an quick travel options. From the very start of the game you can instantly travel from one side of Cyrodiil to the other. To me this is a problem, as one of the big draws of the game is the beautiful landscapes and the opportunity to explore them. However, why should I bother when I can instantly warp wherever I like? Admittedly you often have to do some exploring to find most of the quest locations and you can’t warp to places outside of a city or town until you’ve found them. I just can’t shake the feeling that Cyrodiil is smaller than Vvardenfell, despite claims to the contrary. Maybe it has something to do with the rocky, volcanic, and alien qualities of the latter, but I think the work involved also had a big effect on it. As they say: The journey is just as important as the destination. Oblivion just doesn’t give you much incentive to actually make that journey. In fact, with the new horses it’s almost discouraged. It takes approximately 2 seconds to get on and off of a horse and while you’re riding across the country you’ll encounter quite a number of creatures that want to kill you for one reason or another. Unless you’ve got some mad perception or a lot of detect life enchantments equipped you’re likely to be caught either on your horse or in mid dismount. Which is plenty of time for your new friend to rip a few holes in your hide before you can reciprocate the gesture. So you’re options are: travel manually by horse and take some additional damage while dismounting, travel by foot and take even longer to get somewhere, or fast travel and miss everything.
Bah, now I want to stop playing Oblivion and pick Morrowind back up, but I need to finish the thing sometime before November and the sooner the better. Tomorrow I will take a look at Skyrim. Hopefully I’ll have it up earlier too.
Wolfgang out.
Of course, I have to take another step back first. I started playing The Elder Scrolls with Morrowind. That was fun, but it took a while to find something I could actually play. I started out with a mage, but the fact that your magicka didn't replenish on its own kinda killed that for me. I then tried a stealth approach, but that bombed as I was a little too sucky at the start and didn't have the patience to work my way all the way up to master thief. So instead I went through a long list of mixed and matched characters until I had the first couple hours of gameplay memorized. Eventually though I finally started up a heavy armor/long blade fighter and actually got around to playing through the game. Of course, once I actually got into the game I still had to periodically forget that I was in a sandbox and just buckle down to doing something.
Oblivion came out and they made a few changes, some good some bad. They condensed some skills, removed others, added blocking and manipulation of your surroundings, simplified enchanting (though made it a pain to get to), made enemies scale with your character, and had magicka regenerate. With the exception of the first and last items on the list, I'm not sure I like most of the changes. Enchanting especially irks me. While they did fix “on strike” enchantments on bows and made constant effects more accessible they also greatly limited what was possible. No longer could you create a ring to let you shoot fireballs or walk on air (technically that's a removed spell, but I still miss it). You can only create "On Strike" weapons and "Constant Effect" armors/clothing and the constant effect list is much shorter. This removes a lot of options like my armbands of regeneration I was fond of in Morrowind and does nothing to fix the 100% chameleon trick which still pretty much breaks the game.
Anyway I’m still working my way through Oblivion as for a good year I couldn’t find a character and a play style to suit me. You see, Oblivion’s scaling enemies presents a bit of a problem. As you become more powerful you have to contend with more powerful creatures. You can circumvent this however if you level the right way. Unfortunately that way is very tedious. So it’s a balance between cash, level, and combat ability. Do I want to/can I find a combination that lets me just play straight and see what happens? Or try to get around the level scaling by grinding to death. Currently I’m trying the former, again, but I’ve managed to set something up that’s not TOO bad. Helps that I can abuse the crap out of invisibility spells. So far stealth is the only thing I can stand. Straight up fighting is far too messy, requiring too many health potions or healing spells (blocking only reduces damage rather than actually preventing it) and magic just tends to add Magicka and current spell to the list of crap you need to keep track of which means either opening your menu a lot or hoping hotkeys work (I’m playing on the 360 and I’ve decided it was a bad decision as the control is slugish and I get four reliable hotkeys and four that are much less so). So I’m left with stealth, which seems fairly effective for dealing with most everything now that I’ve reached a significant level with the right skills (and spells).
One of the big issues is that magic is both overpowered and underpowered at the same time. It can do just about anything with enough Magicka behind it and is insanely easy to train. However, on the other hand you need to get enough to then support all those spells you need to use. Morrowind solved this problem with the use of the Enchant skill and enchanted items. You could put pretty much any spell as an enchantment and cast it from there. This would circumvent any problems you had from being a fighter or thief as long as you could soul trap (which was pretty easy to shove onto a weapon or on another enchanted item). This could get very expensive as enchanting items yourself was fairly risky business. However, Morrowind once again had a solution: it allowed you to bundle purchases and sales together so you could trade with merchants and get the full amount for your items (if they only had 1k gold you sell a 5k item and buy 4k worth of merchandise, you could then come back tomorrow and another 1k back to them, repeat till you don’t have anything to sell). Oblivion, however, uses an instant sell/buy function so at best you’re getting 2k gold (the best merchants in the game have 1k gold and you can add 1k to their available gold at 100 Mercantilism) for items worth several times that. Of course they’ll still charge you full price for that enchanted necklace worth 8k gold when they bought it off of you for only 1k or 2k gold.
Another problem I’ve run across in Oblivion is a combination of the level scaling an quick travel options. From the very start of the game you can instantly travel from one side of Cyrodiil to the other. To me this is a problem, as one of the big draws of the game is the beautiful landscapes and the opportunity to explore them. However, why should I bother when I can instantly warp wherever I like? Admittedly you often have to do some exploring to find most of the quest locations and you can’t warp to places outside of a city or town until you’ve found them. I just can’t shake the feeling that Cyrodiil is smaller than Vvardenfell, despite claims to the contrary. Maybe it has something to do with the rocky, volcanic, and alien qualities of the latter, but I think the work involved also had a big effect on it. As they say: The journey is just as important as the destination. Oblivion just doesn’t give you much incentive to actually make that journey. In fact, with the new horses it’s almost discouraged. It takes approximately 2 seconds to get on and off of a horse and while you’re riding across the country you’ll encounter quite a number of creatures that want to kill you for one reason or another. Unless you’ve got some mad perception or a lot of detect life enchantments equipped you’re likely to be caught either on your horse or in mid dismount. Which is plenty of time for your new friend to rip a few holes in your hide before you can reciprocate the gesture. So you’re options are: travel manually by horse and take some additional damage while dismounting, travel by foot and take even longer to get somewhere, or fast travel and miss everything.
Bah, now I want to stop playing Oblivion and pick Morrowind back up, but I need to finish the thing sometime before November and the sooner the better. Tomorrow I will take a look at Skyrim. Hopefully I’ll have it up earlier too.
Wolfgang out.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
-Albert Einstein
-Albert Einstein
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