i really hate those people who are like, “omg oblvnion was the best, i like rpgs guys, that makes me cool and gives me gamer cred right.” i think i generally dislike people who say rpg is their favorite genre.
half the time what they actually mean is jrpg. those games aren’t actual rpgs. they’re turn-based combat with stats. stats don’t make an rpg. rpg does not stand for ‘stat maximizing dreariness.’ that would be smd. as in suck my dick
you can have a perfectly good rpg without stats, it’s just not really done much because stats are convenient. they give you an objective representation of your character so your subjective choices are constrained by at least some form of invented reality where everything about a person can be distilled to a handful of ability scores and a morality meter.
the thing is that in order to facilitate interesting roleplaying the stats have to be malleable, they have to allow for growth over time. as you play a character he undergoes changes physically and mentally which need to be reflected within the objective system of the game. that’s why leveling was invented. as your character grows, so does the scope of challenges that he has to face in order for them to be meaningful. you fight rats at level 1 and dragons at level 20. whatever. fight the dragon at level 1 and you die instantly. fight a hundred rats at level 20 and you win anyway.
the stupid thing about oiblvion is that it doesn’t allow for growth like that. scaling enemy levels to match the player’s is retarded in about a billion ways. here’s two.
1. you never really feel like your character is growing if you can go anywhere in the world from the very beginning without having to worry about what’s there that might be stronger than you. it just WON’T be stronger than you. neither can you go back later in the game and beat up on monsters that kicked your ass early on, because they’ll have been replaced with like, greater demons of hell, or something.
2. the entire story stops making any sense. what in the world does anyone need you for. by the time you’re level 20, all the guards in the entire world are running around in full enchanted ebony armor with magical vorpal swords of dire fuck-your-shit-up. why don’t they just go stop this demon guy. if the entire empire is being threatened by satan, who would you send, the guy that was literally led by the nose out of prison and dicked around in the woods for 80 hours before remembering there was a plot, or the entire army of guys who could individually kick that guy’s ass. hmm.
there’s other dumb shit besides the level scaling, too. the lockpicking is just actually retarded. remember how the only reason stats exist are to provide an objective grounding for characters? if so, why do they leave lockpicking up to a minigame decided by player skill. ugh. i know you can’t attempt to pick some locks without a requisite skill level but it’s still stupid because a player who is good at that minigame will always lose less picks than someone who just sucks at the game, even if their character is supposed to be really good at lockpicking. it just circumvents the entire point of having stats at all.
the combat is just kind of boring. i expected this because i played a lot of morronwid, and to be fair it’s more interesting than that. but that isn’t setting your sights high. in moaroweing you would just stand toe-to-toe with the enemy and you’d both attack and the die would roll and you hoped you came up better more than he did. player skill had zip all to do with it, it was all stats.
i appreciate that kind of thing in games where you control a party. what you lose in the kinetic detail of controlling the fight directly you gain in supervising the tactical ability use and focus-firing of all of your guys. but in mnoriwnd you’re just one guy, and if you’re attacking you’re not using abilities, so it’s really pretty lame.
so it’s good that oblnbinon made it so if you hit the other guy, it was a hit, no matter what. it made combat feel a bit more kinetic. but it also felt bad, unpolished. everything’s kinda slow and clunky, battles against mobs just blow, and npcs get like way the fuck up in your grill, to the point where it’s like hey, when you’re done skewering me, you wanna get coffee sometime
the missions are just terrible and there is no reason to ever do them unless fast travel excites you. oh, i should also mention that fast travel is for losers. there, i said it. developers, if your world is too fucking boring for me to want to ride through it at the speed of horse, then either shrink the world or make it more interesting. if the travel in your game bores me out of my mind, the solution isn’t to let me skip it. just like if the combat in your game bores me out of my mind, the solution isn’t to let me skip it. this is like, basic logic stuff.
i still don’t really quite get what everyone sees in this game. it just isn’t that good from any objective standpoint. to be honest i think they like the plot. ugh. liking an rpg for the plot is like liking a racing game for the car licensing. it doesn’t mean anything if the gameplay isn’t good. i hope one day people realize that
