Archive for June, 2008

I’m not at all thrilled to say that I quite stronlgy dissagree with Yahtzee’s views in this one: I’m sorry he may turn away people who might genuinely enjoy this experience. I for one still find it the best game I’ve played in the last two years, and strangely enough it’s exactly because of the reason he criticised so much: immersion. I think the trouble is in his point about spinning plates: I believe that they have tried to do big things, sure, they may not have come out as polished as if they had tried little things, but I would love to have big attempts any day of the week rather than very polished shallow ones.  Yes, sure the landscape is repetitive, and sure I would have loved it if each single place was uniquely crafted by a large team of tallented modellers, but that would have probably been prohibitively expensive. So what do you do when you want to create something big but you don’t have 1000 good artists at your disposal? Well, they resorted to reusing assets: sure, it wasn’t great seeing the same cave walls/elements in every cave, sure I would have liked completelly different ruins… BUT, within those limitations of asset reuse I have seen some trully brilliant design decisions and settings. Take for example the haunted mansion scene: yes, it looked like a zillion other houses in many ways, and instead of the ghost(s) being moving and unique they looked and acted the same as many others i had seen, but the story was movign and the moment was strong. Similarly, even with similar architecture, some ancient ruins were trully fascinatingly designed.
About the teleport system: for the sake of exactly the immersion I chose to not use it. Thus the world for me was bigger in a more real sense and i had to think more of where i’m going and what i’m doing there.
In short, I’m opposed to the views expressed here and I am so very happy they made Oblivion, even with it’s repetitions: it showed that big dreams can exist, it raised the bar and it dared put something I find unique out there.

PS: after many hours of play the music did get a bit repetitious… but I make my own fun where i see it worthwhile: you can use your own music… so for me oblivion became the most fun and immersive music player ever. It really puts the similar looking cities in a different mood when each time you enter one you may be treated to a classical masterpiece, or a fight could surprise you with the soundtrack of a energetic punk tune.

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