4 comments

"So you're the newest member of the Mage's Guild," an inept battle-mage mumbles as he walks by near the gate to the Arcane University. "On your knees, pawn!" I bark at my widescreen LCD. The NPC stares at me as if he's never seen the ARCH-MAGE before. Not to mention the fact that I am also the Leader of the Warrior and Thieve's Guild, the Leader of the Dark Brotherhood, the Arena Champion, and Champion of Cyrodiil for Uriel's sake! Show some respect, worm! I may only be level 12, but come on? You don't recognize me?!

It's little glitches like this, that the NPC's don't register any of my "big" accomplishments in the The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, that make we want to give this game away. There are some other things too, like how my AMD FX-60 + EVGA 8800GTS Dreamteam sometimes gets bogged down in the deep swaying grasses of the Oblivion forests, especially during a thunderstorm, or when there was that big scrap outside of the Oblivion gate and all of the NPC's became slideshow material. Then there was also that time I tried to sit at a stool in a library after running an exhausting gauntlet of skeletons and ghosts, only to discover a strange glitch that kept me from sitting down to recieve a certain scroll from a certain blind librarian monk, thus rendering that quest impossible to finish. Luckily I had a few console commands up my sleeve, and was able to cheat my way to through the glitch, but come on, Bethesda, show some respect!

But they can't really be blamed too harshly for the steep requirements (I only get bogged down at 8xAA and 16xAF everything else maxed) because the game is absolutely the finest work of pc-game art that has yet been released to the public (until Alan Wake, Crysis, and UT3 I suppose). And a few bad glitches in quests is to be expected when you give the NPC's so much power to be themselves with the Radiant AI and the sheer number of possible quests. So many things could go wrong, but most of the time everything fits so well together in the Oblivion sandbox.

And I've spent WAY too much time playing this game. My girlfriend thought I was playing WOW one night as she walked by and saw an NPC speaking to me (failing to recognize the C of C no doubt), and I just went along with her belief that it was an actual person speaking to me from cyberspace somewhere. How could I tell her I was listening to a voice-actor reading a scripted response by a she-orc in silver armor? At least in WOW, it's another human being I am almost interacting with, but here, in Oblivion, its just me, the Champion of Geeks, and the bots. The horror, the horror!

Now that I've finished the all the quests, raided all the caves, seen the shrines, tried dive rock, looked for intoxicated goblins, found oversize furniture and nirnroots; completed thoroughly a very expansive RPG, what do I do? Alas, I cannot replay. Even with a completely different character, a replay is out of the question. Too repetitious. Too boring. Same-same. Sorry Bethesda, Oblivion is NOT replayable. You don't recognize me? I'm the Arch-Mage, worm!

So I'm saying that I'll never play Oblivion again? Well, let me go check the release date for Shivering Isles for the 20th time and get back to you.