Atrokkus
Erudite
Since AG.ru has become somewhat famous/infamous for its ill-fated preview, I decided to translate their very recent (April 4) Oblivion review. If you expect another Ubblibion lubbin, you're in for a surprise. Now, without further ado...
ELDER SCROLLS 4: OBLIVION
Review by Nomad at AG.ru, translated by metallix
AG rating: 79%
Fans rating (as per april 5): 92%
First off, we'd like to... apologize. Many of our readers expected the part 2 of our Oblivion preview. Every single week we received inquiries about the preview. Time and again, the editorship of AG.ru sought permission of Bethesda Softworks, but its PR department, in the person of vice-president Pete Hines, was impervious to our requests, completely forgetting about the promise made back in the autumn 2005, even after the flood of the first previews on english-speaking game sites. So, once again, we are sorry.
Hell Crack
Behold! The long-awaited sequel, beckoning with flashy images, is ever so inviting. The old emperor has been killed by cultists, portals to the hellish Oblivion have being spotted in the countryside, and only the chosen one can:
a. close the portals
b. kill all the baddies
c. find the heir to the vacant throne
But first you'll have to do that which we were so excited about in our ill-fated preview. That is, choosing gender, race and feebly attempting to generate something other than some mutant or freak. Faces of the elderly people are especially staggering. A quick glance at their terribly wrinkled faces is the best advertisement for the skin-cream with vitamin Q10 enzymes. Desperately clicking the "Randomize" button yields an endless sequence of cross-eyed mutants.
Following the awfully unruly FaceGen technology is the introduction (aka "Inevitable death of Uriel Septiem VII by the hands of game designers that locked user controls at the most critical point"). In half an hour you'll grasp the basics of survival in Tamriel version 2006. Dice have been banished from the melee system, and from now on the outcome of a battle is determined by your click reflexes. On the hundredth battle this idea would probably lose its novelty and your thoughts will be focused on the abscence of target lock (very hard to dodge and make bold maneouvers without it) and the chaos of crowd fights, where your retarded NPC-friends would get themselves killed in the fray. However, in the first hours of the game, hurling the rubber rag-dolled rats and goblins will amuse you immensely.
Magic has changed as well. Don't even ask why the mana recovery rate is ultra-high, making mage fights look like Stallone movies gone seriously wrong. But hey, the developers know better, right? There is certainly no need for levitation, and bipedal lizards just have to have big boobs. Who needs stirrups on a riding horse? Oh, and guess what - axes are actually blunt weapons! Enlightening, isn't it? Also, hobbits seem to secretly inhabit the gameworld, for all the caves have those neat little doors. The action aspect is evident as never before: the magic staves are machineguns, with souls of slain monsters instead of bullets.
The better stealth system is introduced for all those thieves and assassins that prefer a 6x damage modifier to a fair battle. But don't be fooled by the loading screen info-bits: the system is primitive, and pales in comparison to those of Thief: Deadly Shadows or Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. The game does take boot weight and illumination into account, but the only indicator that player sees is the eye icon, which has only two states: "visible" and "hidden", making it impossible to tell why the guard spotted the player hidden in the darkness. How much noise did he make? How reflective was the mithril helm? Can an NPC that stands near the waterfall hear the footsteps? Take a guess.
But even if the abovementioned problems were solved, you still wouldn't be able to play the roles of Garret or Fisher in Oblivion, because Bethesda has dumbed down thieving as well. For one thing, every single item, be it a loaf of bread, dagger or a horse is equipped with a RFID-chip, instantly informing the law-abiding merchants (yes, they all are) if the item is stolen. If it is, then you are left with only one option: find a shady fellow from some thief guild, because nobody else would ever buy it, no sirre. Second, the breaking news of someone's murder will reach almost every soul in the country, right at the moment it's commited. Third, you can't escape the piercing gaze of the law enforcers - they'll spot the dubious content of your backpack in an instant. "Look what we got here - a stolen teacup! What would you like: lemon tea, green tea, pay a fine, go to prison, resist arrest?"
Modders Needed
Stat grinding is now more transparent. This time, in order to reach the new level you'll have to raise 7 major skills by 10 points. 14 other skills are considered minor, they are increasing more slowly and will not trigger level-ups. Fortunately, incredibly useful perks, which you are awarded with for heavily pumping even the minor skills, can trigger the level-up. Repairing enchanted weapons and armor, reducing armor weight by 50%, even more powerful feats and spells, leap attacks -- it all makes the effort well-rewarding.
It's very important to keep in mind how imposing is the balance in TES4. Bent on eliminating the exploits that allowed to create a demigod in Morrowind, Bethesda came up with a very simple solution. The whole game world -- monsters, loot, quest rewards, shop inventory -- grows along with our humble hero. Scaling levels, though quite effective in a game like Diablo, backfired on the indolent designers: Oblivion has lost the charm of the ES series, the exploration. What's the point in pillaging hundreds of "copy/paste" dungeons, burglarizing houses, indruding the randomly-generated Oblivion areas, when all you get in return is worthless junk? Stores are cloned WalMarts, where the player is constantly monitored to prevent him from getting something overly powerful.
Enemy scaling system is utterly absurd. Suppose you spend a night in an inn, get several level-ups at once, allocate the precious stat points, and leave for the forest... only to find out that the bandits, only yesterday dressed up in rags, now are fully equipped with shiny chainmails and magic bows, and the wolves fled the forest, making way for the fearsome bears. Forget about the "Can't beat 'em? Try again later." principle from games like Baldur's Gate and Gothic. Convenient fast travel instantly takes you to any location known to you, but what's the point when both the perils and treasures are perfectly identical, and all the enemies scale up with you? There is no better way of killing the exploration urge.
Even worse, the game does not take notice of the way you develop your avatar. The transparency of the character system and the quickly-increasing non-combat skills (i.e., athletics, acrobatics, stealth) effectively eliminate diplomat character choice... unless you exploit the Achilles' heel of the game: sleep. That's right -- abandoning the cozy bed and, therefore, the level-ups, effectively stops the whole "arms race", but at the same time you retain the ability to raise your skills, indirectly doing that which Bethesda is so fond of - dumbing down everyone around you, making a story walkthrough so very pleasant and relaxing. Cheating, you say? No. It's a feature, just as the retarded "Persuade a stranger by sequentially threatening, telling jokes, flattering and bragging", or the "Auto-Attempt" button relieving you from all the trouble with lockpicking.
Rancid AI
Radiant AI -- the second largest wart on the face of Oblivion. Spectacular E3 video that featured a bookstore proprietress raising her skills and setting her beloved doggy on fire, turned out to be a PR-hoax. The illusion of life is there when you first enter the town, but it dicimates just as quickly, revealing the bare and ugly facts. Try following some NPC around and you'll see how pointless and stupid its existence is. People wander the streets aimlessly, standing in one place for hours, ignore hunger and sputter incoherent remarks to a random passer-by. The nobles readily hob-nob with beggars, thieves -- with guards. The people live quietly and peacefully, oblivious of the Oblivion invasion. My heart ached for one of the skinguardian ladies, who upon returning from her work at the vineyard, began weeding the road outside her house with a toe for 7 hours in a row. After that, she went inside her house, limped to the corner and... stood still whole night long.
The poor idiots don't do well in battle either. Time and again my faithful comrades jumped into lava, trying to kill the baddies, while wounded enemies backed up a bit and stood still, silently catching all incoming arrows. Pathetic, but compared to Morrowind, that's a huge step forward. Hey, perhaps TES 5 will at last feature group battles and mounted combat that made it into a humble Turkish RPG called Mount & Blade. By the way, unlike Oblivion, horses in M&B don't run around like three-wheeler jeeps, and don't jump into the fray when left unmanned.
Dialogs are not THAT bad this time around: the wikitalk is mostly done away with, each and every character now is well voiced. Too bad they writing is poor -- the spirit of the Wiki still lingers. Programmers that did the lipsynch should have followed Valve's example.
Light Spots
At this point, a good question would be "Is there *anything* good about Oblvion?" Strangely enough, yes. The side quests -- that's where the game really shines. The FedEx quests appear very seldom now, and even if they do, the quest conditions change in the process, transforming a seemingly boring quest into an adventure. Intriguing detective investigations, searching for missing people, big larcenies, ship capture (!), interaction with demented people, turning the vampire back to human, hunting wild animals, doing bizarre quests for the 15 Daedra lords... sometimes, with multiple endings. Those are the only reasons for installing Oblivion, really. Yeah, well, the guildmaster reward sucks (who would want a pet idiot?), but who gives a damn anyway?
Another reason for using up 5 GB of space -- visuals. Gamebryo, along with the built-in SpeedTree, render some seriously astonishing panoramas... *but*! Entering the max. values in the in-game graphics settings screen will present you with... blurry mess instead of textures, without even the likeness of grass, pixelized water reflections, background fog and distant objects appearing out of the thin air. In order to achieve the visual quality of the screenshots in our gallery, plus 1600x1200, HDR lighting and 20 FPS min., you'll have to edit Oblivion.ini. However, before furiously maxing out all the settings, be sure to have a computer equivalent to that which was used by AG.ru:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (San Diego) @2.4 GHz
Mainboard: ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
RAM: 2 Гб PC3200 (Patriot 2-3-2-5)
Video card: ATI Radeon X1800XT 512 MB (GeCube)
Sound card: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum
Hard drive: Western Digital WD200JB 200 GB
Display: 23'' BenQ FP231W
Operational system: Windows XP SP2
Promise that the engine will be scalable and fully customizeable turned out to be PR bluff. What if you don't have a high-end rig? Curse Bethesda and lags, mercilessly cut down the viewing distance, watch buildings appear out of thin air right in front of you and shudder at the thought of actually engaging in combat... or cough up and buy some expensive gear.
Interface, however, is hardly cureable at all, except only with fan mods or patches. Scarcity of hotkeys. HUGE console fonts a la Pirates of the Corribean. Inventory list with mere 6 lines. Only 1 custom mapnote. Bizarre 1-8 button customization screen, which makes you really strain your brain over which of the three bows is hotkeyed with "5". The reason is simple: developers didn't even try to adjust the console design to PC, as promised. Apparently, not only PR-department keeps on forgetting things.
Next-Gen Boredom
Was Bethesda successful in creating the RPG of the Next Generation, as proclaimed by Todd Howard in his message to the fans? Was it possible to live "another life, in another world"? I'm afraid not. Yes, Oblivion is stunningly beautiful. Yes, the 4 guilds quests are indeed fun, making you scour the dull tombs, listening to the standart music score by Jeremy Soule, hacking through legions of tough baddies. But then comes the satiety, the emptiness and dissatisfaction.
Farewell, Cyrodil, and good riddance.
ELDER SCROLLS 4: OBLIVION
Review by Nomad at AG.ru, translated by metallix
AG rating: 79%
Fans rating (as per april 5): 92%
First off, we'd like to... apologize. Many of our readers expected the part 2 of our Oblivion preview. Every single week we received inquiries about the preview. Time and again, the editorship of AG.ru sought permission of Bethesda Softworks, but its PR department, in the person of vice-president Pete Hines, was impervious to our requests, completely forgetting about the promise made back in the autumn 2005, even after the flood of the first previews on english-speaking game sites. So, once again, we are sorry.
Hell Crack
Behold! The long-awaited sequel, beckoning with flashy images, is ever so inviting. The old emperor has been killed by cultists, portals to the hellish Oblivion have being spotted in the countryside, and only the chosen one can:
a. close the portals
b. kill all the baddies
c. find the heir to the vacant throne
But first you'll have to do that which we were so excited about in our ill-fated preview. That is, choosing gender, race and feebly attempting to generate something other than some mutant or freak. Faces of the elderly people are especially staggering. A quick glance at their terribly wrinkled faces is the best advertisement for the skin-cream with vitamin Q10 enzymes. Desperately clicking the "Randomize" button yields an endless sequence of cross-eyed mutants.
Following the awfully unruly FaceGen technology is the introduction (aka "Inevitable death of Uriel Septiem VII by the hands of game designers that locked user controls at the most critical point"). In half an hour you'll grasp the basics of survival in Tamriel version 2006. Dice have been banished from the melee system, and from now on the outcome of a battle is determined by your click reflexes. On the hundredth battle this idea would probably lose its novelty and your thoughts will be focused on the abscence of target lock (very hard to dodge and make bold maneouvers without it) and the chaos of crowd fights, where your retarded NPC-friends would get themselves killed in the fray. However, in the first hours of the game, hurling the rubber rag-dolled rats and goblins will amuse you immensely.
Magic has changed as well. Don't even ask why the mana recovery rate is ultra-high, making mage fights look like Stallone movies gone seriously wrong. But hey, the developers know better, right? There is certainly no need for levitation, and bipedal lizards just have to have big boobs. Who needs stirrups on a riding horse? Oh, and guess what - axes are actually blunt weapons! Enlightening, isn't it? Also, hobbits seem to secretly inhabit the gameworld, for all the caves have those neat little doors. The action aspect is evident as never before: the magic staves are machineguns, with souls of slain monsters instead of bullets.
The better stealth system is introduced for all those thieves and assassins that prefer a 6x damage modifier to a fair battle. But don't be fooled by the loading screen info-bits: the system is primitive, and pales in comparison to those of Thief: Deadly Shadows or Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. The game does take boot weight and illumination into account, but the only indicator that player sees is the eye icon, which has only two states: "visible" and "hidden", making it impossible to tell why the guard spotted the player hidden in the darkness. How much noise did he make? How reflective was the mithril helm? Can an NPC that stands near the waterfall hear the footsteps? Take a guess.
But even if the abovementioned problems were solved, you still wouldn't be able to play the roles of Garret or Fisher in Oblivion, because Bethesda has dumbed down thieving as well. For one thing, every single item, be it a loaf of bread, dagger or a horse is equipped with a RFID-chip, instantly informing the law-abiding merchants (yes, they all are) if the item is stolen. If it is, then you are left with only one option: find a shady fellow from some thief guild, because nobody else would ever buy it, no sirre. Second, the breaking news of someone's murder will reach almost every soul in the country, right at the moment it's commited. Third, you can't escape the piercing gaze of the law enforcers - they'll spot the dubious content of your backpack in an instant. "Look what we got here - a stolen teacup! What would you like: lemon tea, green tea, pay a fine, go to prison, resist arrest?"
Modders Needed
Stat grinding is now more transparent. This time, in order to reach the new level you'll have to raise 7 major skills by 10 points. 14 other skills are considered minor, they are increasing more slowly and will not trigger level-ups. Fortunately, incredibly useful perks, which you are awarded with for heavily pumping even the minor skills, can trigger the level-up. Repairing enchanted weapons and armor, reducing armor weight by 50%, even more powerful feats and spells, leap attacks -- it all makes the effort well-rewarding.
It's very important to keep in mind how imposing is the balance in TES4. Bent on eliminating the exploits that allowed to create a demigod in Morrowind, Bethesda came up with a very simple solution. The whole game world -- monsters, loot, quest rewards, shop inventory -- grows along with our humble hero. Scaling levels, though quite effective in a game like Diablo, backfired on the indolent designers: Oblivion has lost the charm of the ES series, the exploration. What's the point in pillaging hundreds of "copy/paste" dungeons, burglarizing houses, indruding the randomly-generated Oblivion areas, when all you get in return is worthless junk? Stores are cloned WalMarts, where the player is constantly monitored to prevent him from getting something overly powerful.
Enemy scaling system is utterly absurd. Suppose you spend a night in an inn, get several level-ups at once, allocate the precious stat points, and leave for the forest... only to find out that the bandits, only yesterday dressed up in rags, now are fully equipped with shiny chainmails and magic bows, and the wolves fled the forest, making way for the fearsome bears. Forget about the "Can't beat 'em? Try again later." principle from games like Baldur's Gate and Gothic. Convenient fast travel instantly takes you to any location known to you, but what's the point when both the perils and treasures are perfectly identical, and all the enemies scale up with you? There is no better way of killing the exploration urge.
Even worse, the game does not take notice of the way you develop your avatar. The transparency of the character system and the quickly-increasing non-combat skills (i.e., athletics, acrobatics, stealth) effectively eliminate diplomat character choice... unless you exploit the Achilles' heel of the game: sleep. That's right -- abandoning the cozy bed and, therefore, the level-ups, effectively stops the whole "arms race", but at the same time you retain the ability to raise your skills, indirectly doing that which Bethesda is so fond of - dumbing down everyone around you, making a story walkthrough so very pleasant and relaxing. Cheating, you say? No. It's a feature, just as the retarded "Persuade a stranger by sequentially threatening, telling jokes, flattering and bragging", or the "Auto-Attempt" button relieving you from all the trouble with lockpicking.
Rancid AI
Radiant AI -- the second largest wart on the face of Oblivion. Spectacular E3 video that featured a bookstore proprietress raising her skills and setting her beloved doggy on fire, turned out to be a PR-hoax. The illusion of life is there when you first enter the town, but it dicimates just as quickly, revealing the bare and ugly facts. Try following some NPC around and you'll see how pointless and stupid its existence is. People wander the streets aimlessly, standing in one place for hours, ignore hunger and sputter incoherent remarks to a random passer-by. The nobles readily hob-nob with beggars, thieves -- with guards. The people live quietly and peacefully, oblivious of the Oblivion invasion. My heart ached for one of the skinguardian ladies, who upon returning from her work at the vineyard, began weeding the road outside her house with a toe for 7 hours in a row. After that, she went inside her house, limped to the corner and... stood still whole night long.
The poor idiots don't do well in battle either. Time and again my faithful comrades jumped into lava, trying to kill the baddies, while wounded enemies backed up a bit and stood still, silently catching all incoming arrows. Pathetic, but compared to Morrowind, that's a huge step forward. Hey, perhaps TES 5 will at last feature group battles and mounted combat that made it into a humble Turkish RPG called Mount & Blade. By the way, unlike Oblivion, horses in M&B don't run around like three-wheeler jeeps, and don't jump into the fray when left unmanned.
Dialogs are not THAT bad this time around: the wikitalk is mostly done away with, each and every character now is well voiced. Too bad they writing is poor -- the spirit of the Wiki still lingers. Programmers that did the lipsynch should have followed Valve's example.
Light Spots
At this point, a good question would be "Is there *anything* good about Oblvion?" Strangely enough, yes. The side quests -- that's where the game really shines. The FedEx quests appear very seldom now, and even if they do, the quest conditions change in the process, transforming a seemingly boring quest into an adventure. Intriguing detective investigations, searching for missing people, big larcenies, ship capture (!), interaction with demented people, turning the vampire back to human, hunting wild animals, doing bizarre quests for the 15 Daedra lords... sometimes, with multiple endings. Those are the only reasons for installing Oblivion, really. Yeah, well, the guildmaster reward sucks (who would want a pet idiot?), but who gives a damn anyway?
Another reason for using up 5 GB of space -- visuals. Gamebryo, along with the built-in SpeedTree, render some seriously astonishing panoramas... *but*! Entering the max. values in the in-game graphics settings screen will present you with... blurry mess instead of textures, without even the likeness of grass, pixelized water reflections, background fog and distant objects appearing out of the thin air. In order to achieve the visual quality of the screenshots in our gallery, plus 1600x1200, HDR lighting and 20 FPS min., you'll have to edit Oblivion.ini. However, before furiously maxing out all the settings, be sure to have a computer equivalent to that which was used by AG.ru:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (San Diego) @2.4 GHz
Mainboard: ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
RAM: 2 Гб PC3200 (Patriot 2-3-2-5)
Video card: ATI Radeon X1800XT 512 MB (GeCube)
Sound card: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum
Hard drive: Western Digital WD200JB 200 GB
Display: 23'' BenQ FP231W
Operational system: Windows XP SP2
Promise that the engine will be scalable and fully customizeable turned out to be PR bluff. What if you don't have a high-end rig? Curse Bethesda and lags, mercilessly cut down the viewing distance, watch buildings appear out of thin air right in front of you and shudder at the thought of actually engaging in combat... or cough up and buy some expensive gear.
Interface, however, is hardly cureable at all, except only with fan mods or patches. Scarcity of hotkeys. HUGE console fonts a la Pirates of the Corribean. Inventory list with mere 6 lines. Only 1 custom mapnote. Bizarre 1-8 button customization screen, which makes you really strain your brain over which of the three bows is hotkeyed with "5". The reason is simple: developers didn't even try to adjust the console design to PC, as promised. Apparently, not only PR-department keeps on forgetting things.
Next-Gen Boredom
Was Bethesda successful in creating the RPG of the Next Generation, as proclaimed by Todd Howard in his message to the fans? Was it possible to live "another life, in another world"? I'm afraid not. Yes, Oblivion is stunningly beautiful. Yes, the 4 guilds quests are indeed fun, making you scour the dull tombs, listening to the standart music score by Jeremy Soule, hacking through legions of tough baddies. But then comes the satiety, the emptiness and dissatisfaction.
Farewell, Cyrodil, and good riddance.
