The Armchair Game Designer

After a small hiatus, I now have a considerable backlog of 100 Game Challenge entries to post, so stay tuned! First up on the chopping block is Oblivion, a game notable not only for being an expansive open-world RPG but also for woefully underusing the voice talents of Patrick Stewart. Join me after the jump for the analysis proper!

Intro:

• There are almost no cinematics in this game, but the introduction serves well to prepare the player
• Sweeping intro sequence around massive capital city + Patrick Stewart’s bold timbre + catchy fantasy theme song = perfect mood to start the game before relinquishing control for good

Getting Going:

• Tutorial offers a decent range of what there is to do in the game, but is hardly perfect
• Favours teaching the player swordplay and bow-and-arrow, rather than magic
• Explains most gameplay elements well enough (such as stealth), but does a poor job teaching lockpicking
• Other incidental skills like bartering or conversation minigame taught as they come up in the game
• The sheer amount of character customization and stat allocation (from race to primary skills to birth signs, etc.) can be overwhelming for the new player (but offering premade ‘classes’ helps)… the incredible depth to this customization allows for play styles that are very unique to the individual player
• Great feature allowing you to change up everything about your character one last time before leaving the tutorial section so that you aren’t locked down to your initial choice, but give me the option to replay the tutorial with the new stat setup!

Fun:

• “Like/dislike” interaction minigame actually kind of fun, inventive, and requires real thought; though its implementation seems a bit unrealistic, realism in this case is smartly sacrificed for fun
• Easy travel once you’ve found a place for the first time; a great boon and avoids what would’ve been an obvious annoyance
• Combat works well and can accommodate a nice variety of play styles within the 1^st-person perspective
• Blocking mechanism works well and feels powerful; there’s a visceral thrill to hack-and-slash here, without it being overly complex or over-developed
• Stealth system seems woefully underdeveloped; feedback for where you’ll be sighted is non-existent and must be left to sheer trial and error or immense skillpoints in order to succeed at being stealthy, ended up being very frustrating

Visuals:

• Sense of absolute expansiveness; can run from one end of world to the other
• Characters have strangely plastic, lifeless faces
• The huge tower in the middle of the world serves as a useful guiding star in the distance

Intelligence:

• Intelligent enemy scaling: harder enemies the better you become; this helps keep combat from being too hard or too easy, but it’s very easy to see through this system after a short while and it begins to cheapen the experience… why build up a character when the enemies will simply get harder alongside you? A fixed enemy system might seem less ‘intelligent’ and might make for outmatched battles early on, but would’ve given a real sense of payoff
• Yet ironically, things like locked items/doors are static, creating a strange dichotomy of impossible doors next to defeatable enemies
• Characters have identifiable personalities and social ties and will react accordingly

Immersion:

• Expansiveness means complete freedom to tackle quests and challenges as you see fit (making this one area where the intelligent enemy scaling is a good thing)
• World seems populated by real people going about their day and their business; the world is alive with or without your interaction; while in most games, characters seem to wait around for the player’s input, the fact that these characters go about a logical daily routine and interact with one another makes the player feel like truly one part of a much larger world, and thus increases the gravity of situations where the player affects that world
• Yet same voice actors; jarring to hear two people converse with one voice

Cameras:

• Standard first person affair
• 3^rd person camera feels very ‘loose’ in its movements
• Oddly, the scale of the world seems off and the player character’s eyeline seems a bit low, as though I were controlling a dwarf (or gnome, as the case may be)

Controls:

• Walk/run distinction: was this necessary? If I’m standing I probably always want to run unless I say otherwise, and if I’m crouched and in stealth mode I probably always want to be moving slowly; what’s worse is that fatigue is restored more quickly by walking, rewarding a plodding pace and punishing those who want to get to the next encounter faster
• Most controls are easy enough to understand, hotswapping also relatively easy
• Very clean UI
• Atrocious auxiliary interface: getting to (always necessary) information is an exercise in tedium as you must select tabs and sub-tabs to finally get to the screen you were looking for… far too time consuming for how much it is used
• Lockpicking game seemed utterly broken in the PC version, and I could never get it to work past ‘Very easy’ due to its clumsy controls

Ideas:

• Immense character customization possible, and the introductory sequence lets you test out the playstyle and alter accordingly
• Leveling up skills as you use them in real time; really helps distinguish a player but allows for a sense of limitless progression if the player chooses
• While a “Wait” command is a welcome addition to make time pass, does the player really have to wait while the hours are slowly ticked away? (In retrospect, this might be technically necessary to recalculate the position of NPCs within the world)
• Fastest route always displayed on map to get to the active quest; good minimization of downtime or frustration
• Gathering minigame promotes experimentation, but potions are plentiful enough and the process can become tedious

Memory:

• Though it can be overwhelming at first, once you get a feel for the world and the way it operates Oblivion becomes engrossing and rewarding, and the goals kept me coming back for me; whether it’s the quest for riches, for amazing equipment, or just to unlock the secrets and storylines of the game, there are goals for everyone once you overcome the initial hurdle
• Changes the nature of sandbox games from being about a single identifiable protagonist amid a world of anonymous, random happenings (ala GTA), to a living world inhabited people who have names and who remember you (and what they think of you)