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Why are you so committed to looking like a magazine, but "on the web"? Your text is very very small, and when I try to size it up, it all flies out the sides of your fixed size DHTML rectangles. Hint: your layout interferes with my ability to read your content even more than Wired (back in the day, of course). Cut it out already!
Does it continue to hold up? Short answer: yes.
It's interesting to see the discussion on the forums where the true hard-core "I like to play Nethack with one save game because it's PURE, man" nerdpolitik-crowd are busy using the mod functionality to do things like slow down leveling, require 6-8 hours of sleep and/or food during the daily cycles, get rid of the quest markers on the compass & map, and otherwise add back in all of the tedium of hyperrealistic simulation that -- for them -- is a big part of the appeal for this kind of role-player.
This kind of Simulationist approach is interesting, but not my own cup of tea. In fact, we've been going through a fair degree of soul-searching in our pen&paper weekly role playing sessions, figuring out where on that GNS tripod our interests lie. Myself, I find I'm interested in the "Narrativist" stance -- I'm growing more and more interested in finding out how a character will react in a situation, and in how a situation leads to a story. I want a sandbox that inspires me to think about the story and motivations behind the face. I find that I'll make versions of characters in The Sims 2 just to play them through "a day in the life" to find out things about them I never knew before.
What's intriguing to me about Oblivion is that I get the same feel out of it. Now, from a gameplay balance standpoint, the mechanic of "use a skill to get better at it" is rife for exploit. Want to become the best level 30 fireball mage in all the land without ever once leaving your quarters in the Mage's Guild? Easy -- just hit the fireball key over and over again for hours on end. What's interesting, though, is that the game tries to level content to match your own character's level. Enter a dungeon at level 5 and it's substantially easier than the same dungeon at level 20. (Again, a topic of much discussion by the simulationist ur-nerds who demand a fixed & predictable world.)
This has a number of implications. First, there's no actual need to "hit level 10 before you can go fight the Lich King of Pickleville." Leveling for the sake of leveling is an almost pointless endeavor. Leveling remains interesting, since your little killing machine toy gets more and more fancy. But really what's going on is that your character ends up reflecting your idea of how you want to play. I have an idea of how I want to play (fireballs, stealth, clever talk), and my little avatar is growing more and more to reflect the fantasy story I've got going on in my head. And, in return, the simulation is throwing events at me that help prompt the story in my head.
Second, I can explore the world narratively instead of from a level-oriented perspective. World of Warcraft controls my progression through the world's lore by making me incapable of surviving in the harsher mid- and end-game content. Oblivion doesn't bother -- I progress through the world as my own story takes me, and the world gets harder to match me. I want to discount the main plot line and get involved with the politics of the Mage's Guild for a couple of game months? No problem. I want to circle around the province and get to know the folks in all of the major towns, instead of haring off into the countryside or delving into dungeons? No problem.
(Although I have done a little bit of haring off into the countryside and delving into the dungeons, and everytime I do, I keep finding a rich set of options to keep my story going there, too.)
As an aside, the NPC AI, while still not capable of sustaining the illusion, still tries really hard, and tries hard enough to let me suspend my own disbelief. The quasi-random bits of NPC conversation designed to deliver rumors to me actually feel immersive, and leaves me with a feeling of personality for the different towns. I'm actually finding myself seriously considering which town I want to dump a load of gold into to buy a house! The schedules the NPCs maintain also add a feeling of life -- it creates an environment where serendipity can occur. And there's enough quests to make me feel busy, so I actually don't have the urge to break into every house and talk to every NPC to make sure I've gotten everything I can. Instead, I follow the big arcs -- the main plot, and the mages guild (and, presumably, the thieves' guild, fighters' guild, and the assassins' guild) -- and in the course of my explorations, doing "normal things" in the towns, I find no end of other side quests to keep me busy.
And did I mention the graphics are incredibly pretty?
Oblivion is making for a nice distraction from the politics and recreational management aspects of WoW. Like WoW, it's almost impossible to play in small chunks. Still, it's got a limited shelf life for me, and I acknowledge that. I've gone through my obsessive spurt of exploring the landside, and now I'll almost certainly settle down to finishing off the mage's guild & main line quests in smaller spurts of time, and probably set it aside. It's got legs, though -- the next time I'm feeling the yen for a single player dungeon delve, I'll probably fire it back up and pick up one of the other guild lines, or just find a random dungeon to loot. Has it slain WoW for me, though? Nah. This is reading a great interactive adventure novel. WoW is playing in a community orchestra -- ultimately, the gameplay itself retains more depth and stands up better to repetition. Yeah, I'm doomed.
The code that has been gnawing at me for the past week is finally in, so now I feel comfortable taking a few moments to discuss Bethesda's at-long-last fulfillment of all of their promise: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
I came "late" to the series -- I started with TES2: Daggerfall, and proceeded to play Battlespire, Redguard, and Morrowind. Yeah -- that's right -- I played Battlespire. Probably got about halfway through it, too. Every one of these games showed a hint of a world that these passionate, passionate guys wanted you to dig deep into. They had a vision, and by god, they weren't going to compromise that vision, even if they still weren't quite sure how to make it all work.
Well, my friends, I'm here to tell you that they figured it out.
Now, most people will get in your face about the graphics of this most recent installment, and get me not wrong: the graphics are awe-inspiring. And I'm saying that from the perspective of not even having the latest & greatest video card -- my "creaky" HL2-capable box is still making me swoon with the medium-grade graphics option. And the physics engine? Non-gimmicky. Watching that rat fly backwards after the very first fireball leaves your virginal adventurer's fingertips -- well, that's money, baby. That's money and it doesn't even know it.
But I started playing with Daggerfall, baby. I'm old school. I'm thrilled about the graphics -- but that's not why I'm here to gush at you today.
Remember all the things you liked about the previous games but at the same time were tearing your hair out about? Remember the awkward dialogue system? Remember how, in the end, you just learned some stupid no-mana fireball spell and camped out in the mage's guild, putting your character through a weeks long regimen of fireball until you drop just so you could level up destruction? Remember loving how big the world was, and then quickly feeling like you hit the weird, random, far-too-hard spot?
FIXT, my friends. FIXT.
Let's start with the hallmark of the series: the idea that you level up by doing the things you're good at. In every single game, your class is defined by a set of skills that are core to it. And you level those skills by using them. And you level up by leveling the important skills. It's a great, great idea. And eventually, you wonder why the hell you can't fight the rattly old skeleton and whether you've made a huge mistake, because you're LEVEL EIGHT but can't cast more than two fireballs before you fall over. And then you spend four hours casting a training spell over and over again, because it's easier to do that than trying to train up in the dungeons.
Well, so far at least, I'm actually leveling up my skills by adventuring. I haven't hit the Irritating Bastards of Doom despite several hours of play. My mana actually recharges (!!!) without having to sleep, so playing a fire-slinging spellcaster feels actually viable. The combat system feels more visceral -- targeting that oncoming guy and casting maaaagic miiiiisle makes me feel like a wielder of Dread Powers, not some shmoe. It's hard to quantify -- but it's there, and it's great.
NPC interaction? Well, there's still the reaction score and the keywords you'll remember from previous games. Influencing the reaction score is more of a mini-game now, though, and I don't mean that in a bad way. It's just enough meat to it to make it interesting to play, and not so much that it feels like it supercedes your actual speechcraft attribute. And, unlike Morrowind, it doesn't feel like you immediately get into a "reactions are so bad I can't possibly ever fix it" state. The keywords are back, too, but you don't immediately get into having 50 keywords to click through for an NPC, and things like rumors seem to only change daily. It's enough restraint to actually make the characters seem more interesting.
What's even better about NPCs, though, is that they actually have schedules. This seems gimmicky, but it turns out not to be. The schedules are well done, and you can get hints about them from talking to other players, so it actually feels like something you can plan around and make educated guesses about. This, in turn, adds to the immersion. They'll even go through doors into other zones, and be there on the other side when you follow them.
Another nice feature is that when NPCs meet in the street -- they'll talk. This is a really slick way of introducing quest leads and world rumors. You just sidle on up to the conversation and make careful note of interesting plot points. If you don't care -- you can move on.
The quest log is also nice. It actually tracks completed vs current quests, and allows you to make a particular quest the "active" one, which means laying out all of the stuff that has transpired in it, and affecting what waypoints show up on your map.
Quests are so far pretty interesting, too. I quickly ran up against a quest where two people wanted me to do two different things. I was interested in satisfying both, so I gave the macguffin to A, let B chew me out about getting it back, waited for A to unlock the macguffin, and then stole it back and gave it to B. Wooo!
Basically, playing this game FEELS like playing what my rose-colored glasses tell me playing Daggerfall was like, and what I wanted playing Morrowind to be like. Hell, throw in the fairly cool if non-accelerated FPS-action of Battlespire. I'm loving it. If you liked the series at all at any point, you'll love it too.
Battlestar Galactica: small dip, but still the right direction. Keep on space truckin'!
Bradamant: I just finished this audiobook, which was a small ensemble reading of a book that was, in turn, a modern adaptation of a part of the whole medieval Roland cycle. It was very strange. It fairly accurately nails what we probably all -- if we stop to think of it -- have as a picture of "the age of chivalry." And reveals just how completely nonsensical our picture of it is -- kings constantly wandering off to do single battle, multi-year quests that take the lone hero off from all human contact, etc etc. It was very strange. The voice acting was eh. The audio mixing was lousy -- background noises frequently overwhelmed the dialogue. And yet, as it proceeded, I got sucked in enough to finish it. Probably just OCD on my part.
Star Wars: Dark Lord: Yes, my Star Wars hooring proceeds apace. Only twenty minutes in, but it turns out that if you add the John Williams score and a cooler hand on the mixing panel, the high space opera adventure of Star Wars shines in the audiobook form. Fingers crossed that Anakin's grimness will shine in the absence of George Lucas's direction.
Oscars: John Stewart is at his best when he introduces video clips of Steven Colbert. Dumbest thing they ever did was splitting those two up. Why can't I quit you, Oscars?
Showtime Arrested Development Talks Confirmed -- yes, the Bluths may very well be coming to Showtime. Yeah!
Also, Battlestar Galactica, I'm glad you took my note seriously. Last Friday's episode was exactly why I watch your show. Let's keep that hustle up!