Oblivion

So I haven't been blogging lately, because Oblivion doesn't have that feature. On the plus side, though, I've been leveling completely out of control because I was stupid enough to have Athletics as one of my primary skills.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, consider yourself lucky. As in, your luck attribute is maxed at 100. Because the game is so damned addictive that when you're not playing, you wind up looking outside and thinking "man, that lighting model is really realistic!" before you remember you're not actually playing at that particular moment. And then you get all bummed, because you're not playing Oblivion.

Oblivion is the latest in a series of very long games called "The Elder Scrolls", from Bethesda. It's a single-player first-person RPG, or "Role-Playing Game" for those of you who've lived under a rock for the past 30 years. RPGs are a genre defined by its immersively intense realism. For instance, when you're hurling fireballs at vampires, you can hardly tell them apart from real fireballs and vampires.

Bethesda called this latest incarnation "Oblivion" because it sounded better than "core dump" or "segmentation fault", but it has the same basic connotations. "Oblivion" is where the game sends your Windows sessions, at least if you're unfortunate enough to be running the game on any computer manufactured before the year 2017.

Crashes? *gasp* -- I bet you'll never guess what programming language it's written in.

Anyhoo, the frequent crashes are tolerable, because the game lets you save anywhere you want, and you can tell when it's getting ready to crash by watching the frame rate, which goes from frames per second to seconds per frame. The game also has a nice autosave feature, so that when a mountain lion rips your throat out, and you're lying on your back trying to subdue the lion by spurting blood all over it, the game reassures you with: "Autosave successful."

For those of you who played Morrowind, you'll find Oblivion to be comfortingly similar. There are a few differences, of course. One is that Oblivion's countryside is beautiful, whereas Morrowind was a hideous island dominated by volcanoes and disease storms and mud flats and rotting undead zombies, much like a C++ users convention.

In fact, walking around in Oblivion is one of the most appealing aspects of the game. You get so caught up admiring the beautiful flowers and trees and birds and ancient ruins and whatnot that you usually fail to notice the lightning bolt from the imp behind you until it fries the back of your head. Fortunately, you can always revert back to that autosave with the lion.

On the other hand, while Oblivion's scenery has grown breathtakingly lovely, the increased realism hasn't been so kind to the NPCs (Non-Player Characters, for you Rock People) in the game. The graphics have improved to the point where you can now see every last throbbing vein and clogged pore in their wrinkled, hung-over faces. And they all have a nasty habit of standing too close to you when they talk, so you also get an insider's view of their nostrils. Why did they have to make everyone so ugly? It's like the soap-opera director said of Moe the Bartender: "I wanted Mary-Ann-on-Gilligan's-Island ugly, not ugly ugly!"

Plus, in order to achieve the realistic facial expressions during conversations, they evidently had to make all the characters look vaguely alike, as if they all had one parent in common. So they're worse than merely ugly: they're ugly relatives. The game's supposed to be an escape from reality, but at times it feels more like an escape to Arkansas.

But it's cool that they have such realistic facial expressions when they talk to you, so I suppose it's worth it. The NPCs' expressions generally change to match what they're saying. And, just like in real life, the characters will often seem to be staring fixedly at a zit in the middle of your forehead, because yes, you guessed it: you're ugly too. That is, unless you spent a long time customizing your character's face before you started playing, as I did. My wife and I spent well over an hour agonizing over every last detail of my (female) character's face, and she turned out pretty cute. But most of the in-game characters are just plain old fugly.

In addition to painfully realistic characters, the game also has extensive voice acting. Every single interaction with every character in the game is voice-acted, which is truly amazing, at least at first. Eventually it becomes a little annoying because there are only a few voice actors, and you quickly start recognizing their voices. "Oh, it's Mr. Rogers again." "Oh, there's Boris from Snatch again."

And for some reason many of the voice actors, particularly the men, apparently think they're sounding dramatic when they randomly and violently modulate their intonation. In practice, however, when a voice ACTOR does this!?, with UPs and doooowns and lows and *sudden* -HIGHS-, it sounds more like he or she has a choke-chain tied around his or her testicles, and he or she keeps tripping on it.

But really... aside from the frequent crashes and frightfully ugly characters and comical voice acting, the game is just awesome. They do all kinds of things I've never seen in a video game before, and you probably haven't either.

For one thing, the monster AI is exceptionally good. Enemies use all sorts of evasion tactics and generally fight almost as well as human opponents. And they no longer stay in their areas: they'll chase your ass right out of the dungeon and all the way into town. I know this because my character is a "light armor" specialist, which means I get frigging pounded (and I mean *hard*) by everything in the game, including sewer rats. I honestly don't think there would be any detectable difference if I took off all my armor and fought with the nude mod applied. So I specialize in fighting while running backwards at top speed, which generally moves us into a new area where I can attract even more monsters.

The cool thing is that when monsters run outside, they'll fight pretty much anything that moves. If an Imperial Guard is riding by, or some random townsperson, or even another monster, chances are pretty good that the monsters chasing you will suddenly be chasing them. I've even stopped my horse to watch an Imperial Guard romp on a troll. I'd have offered to help, but... you know... I had this, um, excuse.

For the record, Trolls in Oblivion are just green apes. They evidently went through the whole Zoo (I've encountered rats, wolves, bears, and mountain lions outdoors so far), and then at the last minute they decided that trolls are cooler than apes, so they turned 'em green and that was that. It's sort of a sad take on Tolkien, if you ask me. Or Norweigian trolls, which are even further removed from their Oblivious counterparts.

Anyway, as you can clearly see, this is one of my it's-Friday hence let's-get-hammered rants, so I didn't really have much of a point, except to say that if you're not playing Oblivion, then I highly, nay strongly recommend that you don't start, or you'll suddenly develop an aversion to Real Life, and who knows how long it'll last. Probably until you're fired, I'm guessing, at which point Real Life will become at least passingly interesting again, although not in any happy way.

Oblivion is... what can you say? It's a great game. A great, big game. A big, crashy game. Yes. Oblivion is a crashy game. It's a case study in why the world shouldn't be using C++. But in spite of that, they did a great job. As is always the case in the game industry, they spent too much time on the graphics and not enough time on the gameplay — I still think I'll ultimately log far more hours in Nethack than any Bethesda game — but it's still very cool, and I'm having fun with it.

It's not their fault, of course: they have to impress critics in a very short time, during the first conference where the game is demoed. So everyone spends their time making the game look realistic. Fortunately, there really is a game behind Oblivion, and it's a fun one: graphics can't carry a game on their own, no matter what the 12-year-olds might claim on the newsgroups.

You'd think single-player games are on the decline, but MMORPGs haven't figured out that the vast majority of their potential market hates subscriptions, and yet would gladly pay their life savings for cheats and hints and ways to differentiate themselves in the mass of unwashed players. Someday they'll get this, maybe, and the massivey-multiplayer game industry will be based off advertisements and micropayments, the way everything else on the internet is these days. Someday. Maybe.

But also don't forget: single-player games have the distinct advantage that they're, well... single-player. They're all about you. Like my friend Brunson says: when you hear an NPC talking about the exploits of some hero, you know it's about you. You don't have to deal with all the assholes you run into in multiplayer games, and believe you me, I don't use the term "asshole" lightly. MMORPGs bring out the worst in 12-year-olds, or perhaps they bring out the 12-year-old in adults. Whatever. The point is that when you play a single-player game it can have a plot, and you don't have to compete for resources with anyone but yourself, and there are definite plusses there.

I wonder if someday someone will figure out how to combine the best of single-player with the best of (massively) multi-player. Who knows.

Anyway, um, if you don't hear from me for a while, you know where I'll be. Working for my employer on stuff I'm being paid for, of course! Jeez!

Only two more working days 'til Monday... I think I'll go clean out some goblin caves. Know what I mean?