Hello, all you Elder Scrolls fans. A friend just directed my attention to the recently closed topic about a new article in the Danish PC games magazine >pcplayer. Being the editor of the magazine as well as the author of the article, I got my share of good laughs over the general quality of internet debating when I read the thread(s) concerning my preview of the game and my apparent mental condition (which is fine and stable by the way, thank you very much).
Please allow me to clear up a few misunderstandings in connection with said article - and please feel free to ask me questions in this topic if anything is still unclear regarding what I (presumedly) wrote in my article. I won't have the article by hand until tomorrow, so you will have to do without direct translations for now.
First of all, I am not an Elder Scrolls n00b. I've been playing the games since Daggerfall, and I developed quite an obsession with Morrowind, despite the game's numerous flaws.
Second, I am an avid fan of role-playing games - obviously, I would not have taken on the task of previewing Oblivion to begin with if I did not like the genre at all.
Third, yes - I have been playing World of Warcraft for quite some time, and yes - there are a few comparisons in the article to Blizzard's game, some of them positive and some of them negative for Oblivion. It would make no sense to discuss the potential of a game anticipated as much as Oblivion without mentioning the most popular online RPG out there, really.
Fourth, my article was *not* a review, but a preview. That means that I am not writing any kind of 'final' judgment of the game whatsoever, but mainly a discussion of its strengths and weaknesses, as well as explanations about 'how it feels like to play the game' and so on. We had an approximately 4 hour long playing window, and obviously no serious media would base an RPG review on such short playing time. Fifth, we were playing preview code and not the final version of the game. One thing that I did not mention in the preview, for example, was that the PC version I played lacked all the shaders that make the game look *really* beautiful, so it 'merely' looked nice. But in the next room, people were playing the Xbox 360 version which looked absolutely stunning, so I chose to assume that the final PC version would look equally amazing.
I think that quite a few of my points from the game preview got lost in translation (as well as in subsequent interpretation and wild speculation) so let me try to clear the fog a bit.
To begin with, my impressions from Oblivion were basically very, very positive. The game is a mastodon, quite possibly the greatest offline RPG ever to grace the PC (we're talking Fallout class here), but I would not want to write an 8-page article with blind praise of the game since that would be uninteresting fanboyism which you could just find plenty of on the internet. Therefore, I basically spent a major amount of my playing time 'testing' the game in order to see if it actually lived up to the almost ridiculous amount of hype it has been getting (from my perspective, Oblivion is just as hyped as WoW was when that game was still in development).
That included my breaking into a house in one of the cities and looking around a bit. Pete Hines let us start playing without a long-winded presentation, but he was constantly available to take questions - and personally, I find that to be the very best strategy for game presentations. That meant that I was not aware of the new 'stolen items awareness' system in Oblivion when I decided to see if this game had the same loot flaw as Morrowind, where you could steal almost everything that was not bolted to the floor. As you have found out, Bethesda have remedied that weakness by making it much more difficult to carry around stolen goods, and I am quite sure that my article makes it clear in no uncertain terms that this is a very good design decision since it focuses the player more towards playing the game rather than just looting stuff. For detailed information about excatly how this 'loot awareness' mechanic works, you will have to ask the developers.
My poor catburglary skills resulted in the owner of the house discovering me 'admiring' a silver plate ('admiring' involving eager hands stuffing it into a bag, obviously - I was not arrested for merely looking at something). He then called in a city guard who confronted me with a jail sentence or a fight, and since I had originally set out to test the game's limitations I chose the dark side and killed the guard. And the owner of the house. And the entire guard squard, a few civilians and, yes, an innkeeper (the innkeeper died because I was fighting a guard right next to her, and my sword accidentially hit her - entirely my own mistake). So the decision to basically f*** up everything was entirely intended since I wanted to see how the game would 'reward' players not just going for the goody-little-twoshoes career, as well as which consequences would hit me.
Luckily, I soon found out that my questionable actions were met with considerable consequences - not least that my threat level in the game world more or less exceeded that of Oblivion and its demons. Also, I was contacted during a night's sleep by a shady person from a dark brotherhood of assassins who had "heard about my skills", and that lead to an entirely new series of quests and events. Awesome stuff, basically, and although I only played rampage-style for about two hours, my impression is that the game contains all the kind of freedom you would want - and expect from an offline game, and even moreso than your typical MMORPG (I used WoW as an example here). After this, I spent the rest of my playing time following a more conventional hero approach - which will also be what we do when we eventually get around to reviewing the game.
I was never very fond of combat in Morrowind; I do acknowledge that it was intended to be skill and reflex-based, but it was flawed in many ways - and the combat system was the primary object of my scepticism in connection with Oblivion (another reason why I chose to, ahem, test it quite thoroughly).
Basically, you fight by moving around with WSAD/the arrow buttons, left-clicking the mouse in order to attack and right-clicking in order to parry. Magical attacks are controlled via hotkeys - I never got around to using these much, since they seemed to work as intended and basically did not present any problems, interface-wise.
The combat system works as intended, and combos are possible (however, I never learned to use them properly, since I did not have a manual available). But the combos are not the point here - my major gripe about the combat system in Oblivion is the same as with Morrowind: I do not get the amount of control or variation I would want. Realizing that this might be entirely a matter of taste and preference, I made a comparison in my article to the 'locked' combat system in a game like WoW where I find combat to work a whole lot better - since this game is basically much more geared towards combat than Oblivion is (that said, WoW's combat system has got a whole set of other flaws and shortcomings). You are obviously entitled to disagree with me completely on this - but do bear in mind that sharing a subjective, experience-based opinion is fairly normal in game-related articles, and that this is not a review conclusion.
I played the game on normal difficulty, and I had no problems taking out single guards (perhaps because I had looted a lot of decent gear?); most of the time, it was just a matter of timing my blocks to their swings - or I could just repeatedly swing my huge sword at them and overpower them completely. With more opponents, things got ugly, however, and I eventually had to flee the city with 4-5 guards on my tail since it is very difficuly fighting more enemies simultaneously (at least for me - but by the sound of it, this forum has quite a lot of extremely skillful players who might be able to single-handedly take down entire armies [/sarcasm]). The guard AI was very aggressive, and they would basically just zerg you and bash you up unless you maneuvred around a bit and mucked up their pathfinding so they couldn't get past each other (computer AI is, after all, just computer AI).
Well. I sort of lost track of all the questions and comments in the other 11-page thread, but feel free to ask me additional questions in this one since I am of course very intent upon having my article understood correctly - that's the problem with not just writing in English (and while I do approve of the attempts to translate my words, it is probably best done by myself).
As someone else stated in the other thread, it is basically illegal to scan a magazine article and put it on the web, and you will harm both my magazine, Bethesda and their publisher 2K Games by doing it, so please don't. Instead, ask me for more impressions (if you care for them) or read the other previews that will eventually appear on the web or in various other magazines.
Bear in mind that I have no particular interest in promoting neither WoW nor Oblivion, nor do I have any interest in doing the opposite to any of those games. I might have a lot of WoW playing time behind me, but I could dish out an impressive amount of criticism of that game (and I believe I have done so in my magazine as well). I merely choose to keep playing it since I do not see any other games yielding the same entertainment value for me.
Ultimately, let me say that I normally refrain from posting on official game forums. I believe that most of the discussions taking place in these places are basically meaningless since they tend to stem primarily from speculations and enthusiasm alone (just take a look at the official WoW forums - they are a cesspit of neverending stupidity). I was not too impressed with the first thread about my Oblivion preview - which prompted this lengthy response, so I suppose it worked as intended - and I do hope that this explaining effort will be met with sober, intelligent and relevant feedback, and not just mindless flaming. Just like the majority of you guys, I would love to see Oblivion become a great success since the gaming world is severely lacking in the offline RPG department (not least because the guys working on this game are eventually going to work on Fallout 3, which is hopefully going to be even greater), and I do believe the game has got huge potential, even though I do not lavish praise on its name in every single sentence in my article. smile.gif
Just my two cents.
Morten Skovgaard,
Editor-in-Chief, >pcplayer
(PS: I will post some quotes from the preview one of the following days, and please excuse me if some of the above is babble - it is quite late at night here in Denmark right now)
