tangentalizingly delicious

Tuesday March 21, 2006

On Saturday, my dad unexpectedly dropped by. He had needed to go to Rona, a national hardware chain with a store just around the corner from our place. He had also seen a Best Buy flyer, with an ad for Oblivion for $10 off the list price. He was also going to be (and in fact is) out of town this week, for work.

So, since he was nearby, and he wanted the game, and he likes discounts, and he would miss the sale, he popped in to ask if I could pick it up for him and gave me some cash with which to do so.

So tonight, after work, I will hit Best Buy and pick up a copy of Oblivion.

I hadn’t expected to play Oblivion, at least not any time soon, and so had intentionally kept myself a little bit in the dark about it. I didn’t get deeply into Morrowind or any other game in The Elder Scrolls series and so know almost nothing about the universe or the game itself, beyond the fact that it’s a very open-ended RPG with a lot of freedom and characters and such.

Since Saturday though, knowing that there would be a copy happily sitting in my house, I’ve pretty much known that I would end up installing it. How could I not? I made sure I did some work last night on my latest sort-of freelance project so I could be free to play a little bit tonight without any residual “I should be working guilt” and this afternoon when I’ve had the chance, I’ve been sniffing around Wikipedia for information.

My friend Mike, who has been encouraging me for months to play Oblivion, got his copy yesterday and has been providing me with tantalizing bits and pieces of information, including the especially complimentary “It’s what I hoped Ultima 9 would be.”

For the past couple of years, the dominant style of game I’ve played has been MMOG. City of Heros and World of Warcraft both occupied some large amount of my headspace, and sometime this afternoon I realised from the descriptions I’ve heard that Oblivion could be very similar to current MMOGs, but without all those annoying people running around and probably with significantly stronger narrative elements.

So now I am all excited about the game. I have been somewhat disappointed by the lack of character creation information available on the Bethesda Software web site. This is the sort of data they could have been publishing for weeks. There is of course some information about races and skills, but only a very slight amount. If there had been specific information available and easy to find, with whatever level of detail is available in-game, I would have gotten significantly less work done this afternoon. As it is I managed to dig up a small amount of information about racial starting skill points and decided upon playing a wood elf (I am terrible at remembering the in-game race name) with a focus on the speed and personality traits and their related skills, but really I have no idea what any of that means.

I’ve had a similar gripe about MMOGs for a while. Character creation, moreso for CoH than for WoW, is an important lure into the game. Some time back I think Cryptic released their character editor as a stand-alone tool which is great, but I think letting people play with different builds and spec out their characters outside of the game but in a manner that is readily accessible in-game (ie, expose the skill tree on a website and let players reference it when they next level up) is a great way to keep the game in the players’ head even when they aren’t actively playing.

It seems to me that this is one place where online games especially fall down. They focus on only one method by which the game experience can be delivered, and as a result the attraction the game holds over players weakens when they aren’t actively playing, which means it’s easier for them to say “hey, I haven’t had a chance to load the game for a month, I’m going to cancel my subscription” as opposed to “man, I’ve been tweaking my outfit for days now! I can’t wait until I can get back and show it off.”