Those of you who have played tabletop role-playing games, tell me if you've ever had an experience like this.
Player: Wow, this town guard is really pissing me off. I pull out my sword and stab him.
DM: Well, you can't.
Player: What?
DM: You can't. You can't touch him. He's really fast and strong and powerful.
Player: Dude, I haven't even rolled yet. I've got a THAC0 of four.
DM: Whatever. Roll.
Player: Ha! Natural 20.
DM: You miss.
Player: What?
DM: Okay, um, you hit, but he isn't really hurt.
Player: This is a member of the night-watch for a boring town in the middle of nowhere, and an eighteenth-level paladin can't hit him?
DM: That's right. Okay, now he hits you and you die.
Have you ever had a DM like that? Well, then, you'll find playing Elder Scrolls: Oblivion a very familiar feeling.
Oh! Oh! How about this experience?
DM, in character as some NPC: "Please don't tell anyone my terrible secret!"
Player: I say to her, "Okay, I won't." Except I'm a manipulative bastard, so I'm going to go tell her sister.
DM: You can't.
Player: Sure I can. She's just in the next room. I walk up to her and tell her.
DM: Nope. You promised not to tell, so you can't tell her.
Player, in character: "Hey, you know what your sister did?"
DM, barely in character: "LALALA I CAN'T HEEEEAR YOOOOOU!"
This is the kind of "storytelling" that Oblivion has perfected. Sure, the game is pretty. Sure, the world is huge, filled with (literally) hundreds of dungeons and ruins to explore. Sure, alchemy and spell design are addictively fun. Sure, the technology is state-of-the-art. I'm not sorry I bought it, and I've spent a lot of time playing it.
But. It really ought not to be called a role-playing game any more than, say, Diablo is a role-playing game. Every plot has exactly one solution. Every conversation has exactly one outcome. Every character of a given race is voiced by exactly the same voice actor. After playing the game a while, I realized that it didn't matter what conversation option I clicked on, since it always gave me exactly the same quests and exactly the same results. It is as mechanical and as linear as Minesweeper. (Of course, I've spent many hours playing Minesweeper too, but at least Minesweeper doesn't pretend it's an RPG.)
Here is a typical example of how the writers of Oblivion designed plots: An important NPC tells you to meet him behind a certain field at two in the morning. You have two choices: agree and take the quest, or not agree and not take the quest (thus missing out on whatever XP and treasure the quest offers). So of course you take it; you have nothing whatsoever to gain from refusing, and might miss out on some juicy loot. When you go to the meeting, the person attacks you, calling you a "gullible fool" (this is a direct quote) for believing that everything was going to turn out all right.
So the game is insulting me for taking the only option the game itself gives me? (To be fair, sometimes it does the opposite: sometimes it congratulates you for choosing the only available conversation option. I'll never forget the time I clicked on the option to take a quest -- in this case, you couldn't refuse even if you wanted to, since the only option was a "yes" -- and the quest-giver announces, "I like the way you think." To me this says, "I, the writer of this drivel, like the way I think.")
Oh, how I miss the halcyon days of well-written games like Planescape: Torment and Fallout, in which you could play your character in various different styles and have it affect the game world in a meaningful way. The writers of Planescape allowed you to lie, or bluff, or intimidate people, or sweet-talk them. You could solve quests through cleverness or brute force or stealth, and, more importantly, every time you made one of those choices, it would affect the way future encounters worked. You'd develop a reputation, which would make certain kinds of things easier to do, and others more difficult. You could meaningfully refuse to do certain things, and the refusal itself might impress people or offend them, open up new possibilities or close them off forever.
Oblivion, by contrast, bullies you through quests, reminding me of the very worst D&D DM's I've had the misfortune to game with. It tells you what you think about things: your journal entries naggily inform you whom you like and whom you don't; what was easy to do and what was hard (prewritten opinions, of course, unaffected by how you, the player, actually found the quest); which treasures you find useful and which ones you don't; what you "ought" to do and when.
Past actions almost never affect the world. After I'd already closed twenty-one oblivion gates, a local soldier saw fit to give me instructions on how to do it (though he admitted that he'd never closed any himself). Not only was I deprived of the option to tell him to save his breath, but my character dutifully wrote his instructions down in her journal, along with an editorial comment about how I hoped I could do it right. The game is so rigid, in other words, that it doesn't even bother to check whether I've already closed an oblivion gate (much less 21) when I talk to a soldier who wants me to close one.
There is a reputation score, but so far as I am aware, it never closes off quests to you or changes future conversation options with NPC's. All reputation does is decide whether you're "too evil" to get cures from the gods when you are diseased, and occasionally changes the repetitive observations about you that PC's mumble to themselves as you walk by. And don't even get me started about how hopelessly pointless the quests themselves are -- just FedExing items and saving the lives of suicidal characters with critically bad pathfinding AI.
I don't think anyone would enjoy a D&D game run by a DM who arbitrarily declares certain NPC's unkillable; or who reads his NPCs' speeches off of a piece of paper, changing nothing no matter what you say in response; or who gives you the answer to one of his own puzzles then congratulates you on "finding" it; or who forgets everything you do in his game as soon as you've done it; or who refuses to acknowledge any approach to a problem that isn't the single one that he himself came up with. But people tolerate that sort of behaviour in computer RPG's for some reason. I have never understood why. I do understand that it's impossible to account for every idea your players come up with -- but is TWO too much to ask for? Even a Choose Your Own Adventure novel can do better than Oblivion in this regard.
There is much to enjoy in this game. But "role-playing" is not it. That bothers me, because it means that people are satisfied with pretty pictures, and that they have no interest in narrative or character development or decision-making. Has the gaming public really become this passive and glassy-eyed?
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