Rockers Delight

Guest Post: Why I Put 210 Hours into Oblivion (or Why Ash Should Really Give This Game Another Chance!)

Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 9:06 am in Guest Posts · Comments

Two hundred and ten hours, just think about that for a second. That’s nearly nine full days, or twelve thousand, six hundred minutes, spent running around the fields and dungeons of Cyrodiil. And I loved every second of it! The full extent of my addiction to Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion didn’t quite sink home with me until several months ago when I downloaded the Shivering Isles expansion and put the game disc back into my 360, ready to blow the dust off my enchanted daedric sword and strap on my armour once more like some returning hero of legend, which, let’s face it, to the local populace I was.

I hadn’t been playing very long at all when that familiar plink of an incoming Xbox Live message brought me back to the real world. It was from someone on my friends list who I really didn’t know, so expecting the usual ‘don’t delete me I’ve gone for my tea’ crap that I always seem to get these days, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a message of awe and wonder that I was showing online as playing Oblivion at level 49! Feeling pleased with myself I exchanged a couple of messages and got back to (rather embarrassingly given the subject matter of my Oblivion skills) trying to find out how the hell you access the damn Shivering Isles! Some minutes later and I get yet another message, this one along the same lines, from a lowly level 1 player asking me how long it took for me to get so powerful. I quickly glanced at my last saved game to check the hours played. And then it hit me just how much of my life this game had taken.

The real start to my Elder Scrolls addiction came in the late 1990’s with the release of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. A few friends and I were instantly hooked with the freedom and sheer size of the game, and would spend, literally, days at our PC’s scouring Tamriel. If you think that Oblivion is big (approximately 16 square miles of landscape) then Daggerfall’s size was mind-boggling, around 60,000 square miles, although most of this was randomly generated and fairly featureless unlike the detailed environments of Oblivion. My friend coined a term to describe the effects of these marathon gaming sessions, namely the Daggerfall Syndrome; you’d start playing at, say, 9am, and the next minute you’d look at the clock and discover 8 hours have passed, you’re freezing cold, your body has seized up, and you’ve forgotten to eat! I never did complete Daggerfall, thanks to an annoying glitch involving one of the main quests and the frustrating habit of occasionally falling through the floor in a dungeon, usually while going up stairs, and somehow ending up outside the game!

The next iteration of the game, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, can lay claim to be the game that brought me to Xbox. I borrowed a friend’s console and a copy of Morrowind and eagerly sat down to play, with a good several hours of free time ahead of me. However, back then, just as now, the dreaded red lights appeared to taunt me. When I finally got to grips with the game on my own console I was thoroughly disappointed. The loading times were crippling, and the game seemed to have taken on a distinctly brown look. I mean, seriously, the developers must have invented whole new shades of brown especially for the Xbox version of Morrowind. The controls and game play also seemed clunky, a far cry from what I fondly remembered from PC Daggerfall, and as I plodded around the dreary landscape I realised I was having no fun. One mission involved an NPC stood waist high in a river in some town or other. Wading out to talk to him I discovered he’d had his pants stolen (I’m not making this up) and he asked me get them back. After ten minutes or so of more plodding I’d bought the trousers (brown by the way) back from the thief, returned to the stranded man, and eagerly awaited my reward… that turned out to be some entirely useless item with a resale value significantly less than the cost of the sodding trousers. The final straw came about an hour later during another trek across some murky field somewhere; I found myself cowering on my knees in a puddle avoiding the ravages of some kind of avian fiend when I just thought to myself ‘what the hell are you doing?’ I hit the power button and never darkened my Xbox with Morrowind again.

And so it was with some trepidation that I greeted the news of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on the Xbox 360. It was getting rave reviews and I dared to hope that my Daggerfall days could be equalled. But it was almost not to be. I don’t know whether anyone else does this, but the first thing I do on a game like Oblivion is mess about with the options. This done, I plunged into Cyrodiil, marvelling at the graphical majesty, cooing at the voice talent (Patrick Stewart), and getting excited at the wealth of customisation with character creation. With my shiny new hero created I was off, following Patrick Stewart out of my prison cell to glory and ultimate destiny. Or as it turned out, to be ignominiously butchered by a rat. Strange, I thought, as I reloaded, only to be killed again by said rat. The next try saw me win through but only just, and I wondered to myself if Bethesda had taken pity on lowly vermin. I made it out of the sewers with a combination of luck and cowardice, only to spend the next couple of hours in a constant battle for my life. At one point I was running in sheer terror to the welcoming safety of a nearby town followed by an assortment of wolves and bears, before thankfully the local villagers ran out and took care of them for me (with their fists!) while I stood around looking sheepish. It finally culminated in an attack by a bandit in which I ran until I bumped into a patrolling legionnaire and crouched cowering behind his horse while he finished the would be robber for me. I despaired; I’d so wanted to love this game, what was I doing wrong? It was then I noticed I’d managed to somehow bash the difficulty slider from its recommended setting in the middle to the top of the bar…

The rest, as they say, is history. 210 hours later and I still wasn’t bored, and it remains today one of my all time favourite games. On top of its sublime game play and graphical excellence the sheer number of possibilities Oblivion offers (or any of the Elder Scrolls games) is almost mind-boggling. In fact I think it needs a completely different approach to any other game out there, as you have to put aside the ‘go everywhere do everything’ mentality that sees you through most games in favour of a more exploratory viewpoint, unrestricted not only in terms of where you go, but what you do when you get there and how exactly you go about doing it. Follow the main plot, or ignore it completely? Talk to the locals and follow their clues, or strike out into the wilderness to see what you can find? It certainly is the closest a game has come to pure freedom of choice and the feeling that your destiny really is in your own hands.

This is a guest post written by Loud78.

Tags: Bethesda, Daggerfall, Elder Scrolls, Morrowind, Oblivion, RPG, Shivering Isles