Much Ado About Everything

I started writing a long post and – of course – I managed to accidentally press the X button and close the window. There goes everything I typed. How appropriate. Just like after trying and finally succeeding to defeat a whole bunch of enemies without anyone dying – after 7 tries! – and then trying to save the game, I got it to crash and create a corrupted savegame.

I will update this later, and probably use an editor to type posts. Screw these text boxes in web browsers, it’s just way too easy to accidentally do something like move off the page, close the browser or whatnot. Oh wait, there is a save button. Still, I have the habit of saving after editing every sentence, which comes from using 8-bit computers in 1980′s. But I don’t have the same habit when typing in some text box in a browser. Hm.

Anyhow, the lack of balance and lack of realism where it really counts – when realism is being hammered into your head everywhere you look – took away all the fun of playing Oblivion. I can’t see why it’s getting so rave reviews. Perhaps people keep forgetting how crappy the framerates are or – more likely – they put up a review after playing a dozen hours or so. Well, guess what. The game is fun the first dozen hours or so! Then it goes sharply downhill.

I mean, have you played a game which punishes you for leveling up? In 20 years of gaming, I can only name one or two, say Radiata Stories. I was about to say Star Ocean 3, but that one simply suffers from lack of balancing; it’s not that you’re punished for leveling up, it’s that you’re expected to be playing a certain way at certain points of the game, which may not be true at all depending on how you decided to level up.

In what now seems a tradition of western RPG’s – and perhaps it’s the reason of their demise in recent years! – the game seems to provide you endless freedom, but in reality you really have to play it in certain way if you want to have any reasonable chance of finishing it without tearing your hair out. A few available character creation guides mention it – but don’t ponder on it. Well, if someone tells you that you have to know what you’re doing when you’re selecting your character or you will regret it many hours into the game (i.e. have to restart from scratch!), yet the game doesn’t actually provide any real useful info in that regard, and furthermore gives every impression – explicit, no less! – that you can play any way you want – then something is really wrong somewhere. Something is even more wrong if people are willing to brush this off as a minor issue. I am really starting to hate that Greg Kasavin guy who reviews on Gamespot, as he turns more into a fanboy than a reviewer whose views actually mean anything. I mean in the review of another game he laments that the new, easy difficulty has been added, making the game more accessible. Perhaps because it devalues his achievement of finishing it? Mister, you job is to review games, if you want to brag about finishing them then become a pro player or something. What readers want to know is how good the game is, not how cool you’ll be if you’re able to finish it. I mean, come on! Sure, on a specialized fanboy website, not on what is just about the only big review site left on the web (since other ones show up in review index, I cannot believe they are not at the very least affiliated, it’s business after all, and you wouldn’t be pointing your customers to other businesses, unless you like Miracle on 42nd Street).

Games are supposed to be fun, but these games seem to cater to a particular group of people that likes to consider themselves cool and elevated above the masses because they use numerous spreadsheets and number crunching and literally hundreds of combinations of skills, spells and items to figure out how to play the game. Should I need to know all that and/or read a walkthrough before playing the game so that I know how to create a character? Sure, if you want to play something custom, I can understand that. But if the game provides a template character and that one will not work out in reality, then it’s a major problem. About as major as it gets, short of crashing every few minites (which Oblivion sometimes comes close to).

The same was the case with Baldur Gate, in particular the Throne of Baal add-on for the second game. It was impossible to finish for anyone who was not an expert in D&D. Shouldn’t you market the game as such then? For D&D fans only? Not for general gaming public? And make sure you let it known in the review? God forbid! Because probably, you’re not cool enough to play and uderstand the game if you’re not the member of the club, so we say the game is super good and you suck. Well, sure; on your group’s review site maybe. Not on a major website for general public! Come on, and stop sucking up to developers and publishers, you’re not children any more, and you’re running a business. Provide information and ratings relevant to general gaming public, not to a very select group.

Fat chance for it though.

An RPG by its nature is not a game where you should be pressing the quickload button very often. In a Square Enix game, you die maybe 10 times during the 40-80 hours that you will put into it. Ok, so it’s not as action oriented as this one. Regardless, having to save after every killed enemy (actually, quite often several times during a battle with the same enemy, meaning every time you believe you did some major damage) and having to load on average eery few minutes (unless you’re just wandering through a safe town street) – this is not a hallmark of an RPG, it’s a hallmark of a modern first-person shooter. Even in a shooter it’s only the norm because the framerates are so bad nowdays and the enemies are cheating so badly that it becomes mandatory to play it this way. Unless you have a SLI gaming machine or are a god of gaming, the enemies in modern games are very challenging, yet you’re expected to dispose of them as if they were predictable beasts of yesteryear. Circle strafing doesn’t get you very far these days, it’s all about pure luck – you get killed the second you pop up from the cover, which you must do sooner or later, no? If somehow the enemy misses, then you pray that your bullet will hit and you won’t before you duck for cover again. And repeat this many times for a single enemy, since of course enemy bullets are about 10 times as powerful as your own.

Well, Oblivion suffers from all that. All enemies have the similar, cheating attack pattern of reading your moves as you’re pressing the keys to perform the action – rather than observing and reaction to the action itself – and using it to avoid your attacks, in particular power attacks. They can perform their own attacks very fast, not giving you any chance to avoid. Well, you can try, if you have a weapon with very long reach and keep using backwards power attack (only once you’re expert with the weapon, skill of 75 or more!). That will make a battle last 5 minutes, if you’re super skilled. Most likely, the enemy will get you once in a while at which point they’ll in most cases knock you down – regardless of your block skill, perhaps it is some other stupid skill that governs the knocback, but then what the hell is the block skill for anyway?

Oh, yes, the enemy will knock you down. A goblin that weighs less than your huge 64-pound two-handed sword will attack you, who have a very high stat of 100 encumberance that governs the skill of block, he will attack you with a dagger. Yeah, you read it right, a dagger. And one out of three times, which is like once every two seconds – he will be knocking you, bigger than him and wearing 100 pounds of armor, he will knock you down on the ground with his dagger attack. Even if you’re blocking. Oh yes. Think I’m joking? Wish I were! It’s not only goblins, it’s mountain cats and lions too. Ok, they are heavy and they can jump, but when you’re level 20 and blocking with a big shield, not to mention slashing at them with a huge sword, as long as they are? You gotta be joking me!

Oh and of course, when they attack, you will recoil. Not every time. But just about.

And when you attack, they will only recoil if you have expert skills, are doing backwards power attack, and maybe one in 7-8 times. And of course, even if you’re just a friggin’ split second late – or maybe even if you’re not late – their own attacks always have priority over yours. They can and will interrupt your attacks. You will never, ever, ever manage to interrupt theirs. If they are starting to attack, if you’re already moving, you might be lucky to slide out of the reach. Of course their reach is longer than yours when using the same weapon, or at least it seems so. This is the same problem that made Quake 4 on hard difficulty so, well, difficult (for the record, I’m playing Oblivion on normal difficulty). The combat there was down to pure luck, meaning “I hope to poke out and put a bullet in you before you single-shot kill me, and then duck back to cover and repeat 20 times before you die”. That is no fun and no challenge, just plain frustration. Utter stupidity on the account of game developers and designers. In this case it’s a pretty big deal as they ruined a game that would otherwise be awesome. I’m sorry but I have better things to do in my life than restart a game 40 hours into it or face losing my savegames because I have to use save/load more than the idiot designers have foreseen it. When it comes to a game that is so difficult that requires constant save/load, then any otherwise “minor” instability or performance deficiency becomes a major pain.

And believe me you’ll be playing a lot to get to skill level 75+ with your weapon, or anything else. About 30 hours to be exact. Which is fair enough, except that you’ll be very sorry when you do, instead of being happy. Because seemingly for each level you gain, your enemy gains two. Unless you know the tricks – meaning have read the walkthrough or did a lot of trial and error – on how and what to skill up so that you can attribute up faster. The game won’t tell you that. But unlike other games where this know-how will provide you a bonus – perhaps a big bonus, but certainly not a penalty, in this game leveling up is something you might want to actually avoid whenever you can.