Oblivion: a reflection more than a review

For a sandbox game to have such a profound influence on my life is something to laud. In writing this review, while sitting in a seafront cafe on the evening prior to a race, I wonder to exactly whom am I writing? I do not intend my reviews to be thorough things when PC Gamer (for one) provides that for us. I do not even intend for them to be raucously funny - James Rolfe at www.cinemassacre.com and Yatzhee at Zero Punctuation do that brilliantly.

Instead I intend to write my reviews from the perspective of a professional who has a limited amount of time to dedicate to hobbies (which are hugely necessary to live a life of moderation.) A Teacher Gamer, I think, should be anyone who:

a) Reflects on things in how they impact on daily life (not just in their abstract mediums), such as the most dynamic digital medium today - computer games!
b) Doesn’t have much time to dedicate to hobbies.
c) From the above, they will want their games to allow them to both (or either...) be pick-up-and-play or immersively rewarding.

Oblivion is the latter.



Purchasing it from Steam, it was the first game I had played for five years. The games I could remember purchasing, and playing, were CIV 3 and Empire Earth. And Severance. I had, also, worked at Game for a time while at university (which I enjoyed immensely. My boss had wanted to be a DJ outside his day job and there was pleasing banter all the way through the department store of which we were a franchise booth.) I can’t quite remember why I hadn’t gamed for the previous time, but I think that:

a) I played a lot of chess.
b) I couldn’t afford a decent computer.
c) Computer games seemed to be universally £30+, and I only had £30 disposable income a week in those days.
d) At university, I remember playing CIV 3 at the expense, sometimes, of doing other stuff that I really should have been doing.

So why would I pick it up and play after so long? After my first year in my new school in Scarborough, my housemate (an acquaintance from York) had managed to convince his Wakefield girlfriend to apply for a job in Scarborough. Having managed to secure a job, this compelled my housemate and me to move out our 7-roomed sea-view apartment (all for only £475 a month... I know!) into separate digs.

Whilst waiting for everything to be moved out the flat, and for everything to defrost in our fridge, I felt at a bit of a loose end. Having worked 70 hour weeks, my social circles still largely remained in my university towns of York and Hull. I decided, on one reckess evening, to see if I might purchase a game on Steam. I went to metacritic, and decided to purchase the best one available.

Cirius, a long-standing friend, had recommended Oblivion a long-time back. With that in mind, I clicked my purchase and went away.

The first thing that struck me (in retrospect) was how linear such a non-linear experience seemed to be. That’ll be the radiant-storytelling, I hear you say. For those who don’t know, radiant storytelling is the ambitious AI that pieces together dialogue and plot to create a seemless and immersive living game experience. It is something that I have quietly raved about to the NATE (English teaching) ICT (Information Technology) committee, although it is still its infancy. Such radiancy reflects (mostly) the fact that the populance of even the most distant villages are aware of your exploits in the deepest dungeons, even though there was no-one around to have witnessed what you’ve done.

The effect of this experience, for me, was to meander around beautiful countryside for about ten minutes which, like real-life, was enough for me to hanker after the direction of city-life. Fortunately you start (unlike, in my experience, Morrowind) close enough to a city to get straight stuck in.

This being-able-to-head-anywhere lark was certainly enjoyable in the large part. Yes, the main quest beckons, but being able to complete quests that (unlike WoW) largely avoided ceaseless grinding kept me playing while boxes remained unpacked, and bedframes remained standing. I must admit, after two days of sitting in a near-bare house with a (now) defrosted fridge, I felt an escapism from the grind of my job (and the tempting space of a week’s holiday) begin to grip me.

In my excitement I roasted a leg of lamb unwanted by my housemate. On one day it provided all my nourishment.

That fitted perfectly with the experience I was having. Having discovered the ‘strange door’, and not quite understanding how to select quests (which, brilliantly for a man with a limit on time, are compassed in Oblivion, unlike Morrowind) I decided to take a little break in this side-quest.

What I didn’t realise, though, was that this was an entire expansion pack.

As a result, I spent the next two whole days (10 hours each?) playing through it. Testament to the game design I kept thinking that the next task would clock it. Get to the Gatekeeper? Clocked. Get past the Gatekeeper? Clocked. Get to the palace? Clocked. Realise you haven’t even started? No problems.

I remember that it was at this point that while my temporary diet of roasted lamb was good enough for my digital alter-ego, for me it wasn’t so good. Unlike the man of moderation you read before you now, I suffered greatly from a lack of varied nutrition and, perhaps, hydration. It was perhaps apt that I was also playing through one of the (only) fiddly parts of the game; battling through a fell-dew induced hallucination. Unfortunately, my character’s health was being constantly reduced throughout this section, and I couldn’t quite see how to find my way out. When I did, I decided to celebrate by ordering a (only slightly more) nutritious meal of an Indian takeaway - not least because I was having to live without a fridge whilst living arrangements were made.

Unlike the above, most sections to the game are pick-up-and-play. In particular, the side-quest of fighting in the arena was brilliant. If only because it was straightforward. As you fight in a Colosseum of ever-increasingly potent foes, you are forced to devise even more diabolical tactics. My favourite, which was soon adopted (up to and including defeating the Arena Champion) was to summon several powerful creatures (having been granted the ability by completing the Shivering Isle expansion) and then run in a circle around the edge of the arena floor.

The scene was akin to the python sketch where the gladiator is chasing after the Christian. Three minotaurs would chase after my character whilst a giant stitched zombie would bash them as they ran past. However, as with all great games (like Deus Ex), the absurdity of this gameplay didn’t detract from its experience (such as when Deus Ex’s guards stop moving when you log onto a terminal to activate cannons to take them out).

There are issues with the game that (thanks to an immense modding community) can be avoided. The levelling is unbalanced, especially for a Teacher Gamer. Simply put, the better your character, the harder the monsters. The result is that my character of 60+ hours encounters spawned bandits with the hardest armour and weapons in the game. Now, to a Teacher Gamer, it is expected that as your character grows more powerful, you should be able to dispatch with ease those enemies which once troubled you greatly. One effect of this is that I failed to entirely finish one early section of the game. When I returned, the handful of lower-level creatures were replaced by (literally) dozens of the hardest monsters possible. I was forced to use every magical item I had accrued up to that point just to survive. That wasn’t fun when I found of about this bizarre levelling glitch.

Writing this, though, makes me realise that to start as a lower-level character is not so bad. And that now I have played through once already, I should start again. The truth be told, there are too many great games that require me to play them through once too. And that’s not to mention the much anticipated release of the next in this series, Skyrim. It’ll be interesting to see how the quest design works on that.

Should you purchase this game? I played it through on a work-based laptop that had a resolution as low as shark excrement and a framerate as intermittent as Scarborough’s seaside sun, and it looked and felt incredible. Even now I occasionally load the game just to walk its rendered landscape. Yes, the genre has plenty of scope to advance, and the lack of NPC party experience in the style of Warband is sorely missed. But as the game that made me a Teacher Gamer, I feel proud that this is what did it.

And not COD.