Extra Nate: Oblivion is Mid
Welcome Moon and Star. I have provided a place for you. This week we’re talking about Morrowind’s Inferior Sequel’s book: Oblivion. But why is Oblivion the inferior sequel? Also let’s address another question: why is Oblivion an inferior prequel? Yes that’s right. There are 3 Elder Scrolls games in the mainline series that are worth talking about and Oblivion is the weakest of them all. With the re-release of Oblivion, it’s now the weakest of all four games, being soundly beaten by its own remake. I’ll tell you my experiences with the Elder Scrolls games so you can decide for yourself that my opinion is the correct one and that I am a God.
Oblivion
I first played Oblivion in 2007. Actually I’ll rewind a year just to dunk on someone. I first saw Oblivion in 2006 when my friend got it, played it for about an hour, and decided the game was no good. He then promptly returned it, like a moron. Anyway, like I said, I played it in 2007. This was after I had only owned Nintendo consoles and the original Xbox. My computer was shit for gaming and struggled to play anything more graphically advanced than Starcraft. So when I tell you this blew my fucking mind, you can see where I’m coming from. From today’s perspective Oblivion looks like asscheeks. The NPCs all have weird potato faces and the everything else just kind of looks low quality and fake. But at the time being able to look up at the stars and feel like they are real-ish stars or viewing the Nibenay Bay as going on forever all the way to the horizon was novel and I remember thinking that such graphics were obviously the future of gaming.
How about the gameplay? Well you can kill anyone* and get in trouble with the law. You can rob NPCs. The thing I had to compare it to was Bauldur’s Gate 1 where you could also murder people and rob them and it felt that you could do that to any NPC (albeit with a guard coming in and TPKing your ass). Again, I couldn’t cut a villager in half in Zelda… no matter how hard I tried. So this felt like a novel step in the right direction.
What else can I say about the gameplay? Oh yeah, the leveling system. It fucking sucked. Even at the time I think we agreed it sucked. See, enemies leveled up with you. Something that I read even a developer who worked on it realized was a bad idea. You could also fuck up and not get enough skill points per level, so the enemies got stronger at a faster rate than you did. It lead to this problem where the game started spawning mountain lions as the wilderness enemy. They were fast and they hit me like a truck. I would summon an honest-to-God daedric lord… who would be unable to protect me as the mountain lion hit me 6 times in sucesssion, staggering me each time, and lopping my health down to nothing. It wasn’t until like 10 levels later that the mountain lions were replaced with slower-but-stronger bears that I was able to snipe them with my fire magic.
I cannot overstate how much it sucked to have to run and hide on top of a rock so that I could throw dinky loser fireballs at a mountain lion until it died. All your gear was also level dependent so I hope you didn’t complete XYZ quest before it was time, otherwise you got a shit version of the magic weapon. Might as well just not.
Also the game was very floaty. Nothing seemed ot have weight or impact. I hit a man 500 times with a sword and I might as well have swung at the air for how it felt (and for how much damage I did). I also jumped around like I was on the moon after leveling up my jumping ability.
The story? Well in the expansion you become a God. You mantle Sheogorath and become the God of madness which is pretty sweet even if the story missions itself were kind of lame. The main quest? Well Martin Septim is the bastard son of the dead Emperor and the only thing keeping the barrier between Oblivion and our world up. Evidently we are in a plain of Oblivion and have been the entire time… but I didn’t know that the first time because when you finally meet the Big Bad Mankor Cameron he doesn’t really say it to you in dialogue (he kinda shouts it to you when you’re in his domain) and instead you just fight and kill him like he’s a bitch. Remember this because I’ll juxtapose it with my talk of Morrowind later. Anyway the problem with the story is that I’m not the main character. I’m just the hired muscle who goes and gets shit for the real main character: Martin. Yeah Martin is the bastard son who saves the day with a heroic sacrific and he reads the book to learn how to defeat Mankor Cameron. I just grunt a lot and kill demons. Then die to a mountain lion attack. Overall… eh.
*You actually CAN’T kill everybody. essential characters just take a knee and it’s super disappointing
Skyrim vs. Oblivion
Skyrim is great. I install a bunch of mods so that I have to eat and stay warm and dry off. The scenery and the music are better than Oblivion in my mind. The combat feels better. The leveling system is better with skill trees added in the mix. I’ve played Skyrim about 4 times through and never beat the game ever. The Thieves Guild storyline sucks and makes no sense. The main quest didn’t interest me. But two-handed slaughtering people and then building myself a house? That’s where it’s at.
There is still some aspect of the world leveling with you if I”m not mistaken but its less noticeable because you can’t really over level the world and screw yourself over. I never ran into the woods and got trapped on a big rock by a mountain lion.
Plus the graphics. Look I’m not a graphics guy by any means but I do prefer snowy scenery and cold environments to anything else. Skyrim is beautiful and if you disagree you are objectively wrong. Go away.
I also recall that many quests seemed to be given more naturally. There were conversations between NPCs that felt like actual conversations. I know it’s probably sacrilige to say this and I’m going to get flak from people who read this blog (which is just Ben, so maybe not) but I like the Skyrim dungeons and quests better than Oblivion. Yeah, you heard me. Oblivion quests, having replayed them recently, can suck egg rocks.
You still had essential NPCs that couldn’t be killed. Which was especially annoying when Maven Blackbriar comes up to you, in the streets, unprovoked, and tells you to watch yourself because she owns the thieves guild and knows people in the Dark Brotherhood. Then she calls you a bitch and spits on you. This is despite the fact that, at this point, I am the Dark Brotherhood. But sure okay. I then install mods that take away her essential status. I kill her, her sons, and then go to her estate and kill everyone there. Mods really make Skyrim a much better experience.
All-in-all Skyrim was much better visually (as it should be given the time it was made in), had better skill progression, fun skill trees, and was an overall more enjoyable experience. The quests were also better. I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them.
Morrowind vs. Oblivion
I didn’t play Morrowind until 2021. I did have to install the unofficial patch to fix some of the base-game issues. If that disqualifies my opinion on Morrowind then you are welcome to stop reading this right now and conclude that I am correct in all things. I went into Morrowind entirely blind except for the knowledge that there is a bad guy in a volcano, there is no level scaling, and you can miss attacks that you obviously hit visually.
Okay let’s get the gameplay out of the way. If I fire an arrow at a rat, I must first aim and hit the rat. That’s just like in Oblivion and Morrowind. Unlike those games, Morrowind then does a To Hit roll. If I shot the rat and then failed the roll, it missed. That is kind of bad. You get used to it, but I can understand people not liking it.
Thus when I started the game, running into a rat was scary. I wasted almost all my arrows trying to kill ONE of the little fury bastards. I had to really break in my sneak skill to avoid combat as much as possible.
The game also is very ugly by today’s standards. I would argue that the character models aren’t uglier than Oblivion’s, but they’re still ugly in their own way. There are also limited voicelines. All this to say, Oblivion was a step-up from Morrowind in a lot of ways, and it should have been. It was 4 years older than Morrowind and on a whole new console generation too (for the poor bastard who played these on consoles…).
What’s better? The atmosphere and the vibe. The feeling that you can’t just go anywhere like you could in Oblivion, because there is no level scaling. I’ll highlight this with two early stories. I had to go visit a tribe at the far northern end of the island. This terrified me because the last city I could buy fast-travel passage to was about half or two-thirds up the island. That meant a lot of movement over open ground. Exposed to whatever dangers of the island. I snuck slowly and carefully the whole way, because I didn’t know if I was yet strong enough to fight whatever enemy came my way. I came upon a Daedric shrine on my way to the tribe. In Oblivion, I’d just charge into them and hit them with my sword (for about 10 minutes). In Skyrim I’d pick them all off silently from the shadows. In Morrowind I plotted a path around them. When I couldn’t get any further from them and had to go through them, I was super careful to not get seen. I wanted no part of that. It was a tense feeling taht I never got in Skyrim and only got with mountain lions in Oblivion (and I don’t think the devs intended that).
Another instance was many levels later I was givne the task to assault a Sixth House base. This was another moment of truth. I was full of anticipation. This would be my first fight with the main enemies of the game. The game also built it up really well: a legion went in there and only one guy came out. He was so disfigured with disease that he died almost immediately. The base itself had a lot of monsters stronger than I. I did win and kill the priest, but I did have to evade some of the creatures within.
It isn’t always like that though. The beauty of the system of not scaling your levels is that if you know what you’re doing and you’re strong enough, you can break the game. I appreciate that. This game will kick your ass with a rat or a cliff racer when you first see them. At the end of the game, you’ll laugh in the face of Ash Vampires as they try and fail to harm you before you slaughter them.
No NPC is off limits either. You can kill the King if you want. If you kill an essential NPC the game tells you that you fucked up and should reload a save but you’re under no obligation to do so. Maven Blackbriar can’t call you a piece of shit and not face some revenge in this game, sucka!
The story? Well you’re the goddamn hero this time around. I remember just doing the story out of obligation. I figured I’d get bored of it. What’s this “Nevarine cult” and this “Sixth house”? I thought they were one in the same and then it suddenly clicked in my brain… I’m the Nevarine. Suddenly I had a stake in this. People started to come up to me on the streets, telling me the dreamer has awakened and that I should see their master at Red Mountain. As I learned more about events that took place thousands of years ago, it turns out that I was betrayed by the Gods of the Dunmer (and that in itself has many conflicting stories) and it’s all building up to the final showdown at Red Mountain with a super charming Mad God: Dagoth Ur. There’s even a part of the game where you have to go and get named Hortator by the Great Houses and by the Ashlander tribes and I was excited to do that. I’ve never been excited to do those bullshit copy-paste quests before. This was new.
So that’s Morrowind. It’s got jank, but you can out-jank the game. There are all kinds of guides for getting Godly stats and equipment. You can fly. It felt like a strange magical world (did I forget to mention Morrowind has all kinds of weird shit? Like mushroom houses and humongous flying jellyfish that made me shit my pants the first time I saw one?) that you could do anything in. It has a more engaging story than Oblivion, one where you are the main character learning deep secrets of the ancient past. It has better gameplay in a lot of respects (and some not-so-great things, to be fair). Oblivion feels like a minor step up to me in things like graphics and NPC behavior (they have schedules and react to things, in Morrowind they feel like scenery) but it doesn’t feel like the big leap forward that Skyrim felt like and Oblivion sacrificed too many of the good things from Morrowind (level scaling and essential NPCs suck) that I can’t say Oblivion is a better game.
Oblivion vs. Oblivion
Yeah so the remake is just better Oblivion. It fixes a lot of the jank of Oblivion while still preserving a lot of the janky-ass original game. It feels better (less floaty, Ben, you floaty-floaty man). The ugly-ass potato faces are gone. In fact Manimarco no longer looks like a generic high elf old man that I kill instantly. Now he looks like a menacing old man that I kill instantly. Also you can’t accidentally level yourself out of being viable. I never once died to a mountain lion in the new Oblivion. A much better experience.
Anyway, maybe the Elderscrolls book shoudln’t have been about Oblivion? That’s not what the point of this blog is, but I needed to end it and so I’m ending it here. Oblivion was the red-headed step-child of the games. And I don’t mean a hot girl redhead. I mean the boy kind. Gross.
