T w e n t y S i d e d

I’ve mentioned before that I think it is a bad idea to bring the D&D d20 system to a computer game.

The one in Oblivion is really just a more polished version of the same system that was used in the previous Elder Scrolls game, Morrowwind. It’s a good system in a lot of ways. I’m going to nitpick it here, but I need to start by saying that despite all my little problems with it, the system is really one of my favorites.

How it works is this: There are a bunch of skills in the game. There are skills like using bladed weapons, bartering for goods, pursuading others via speech, repairing weapons and armor, using destructive magic, using lockpicks, etc etc. There are maybe twenty or so such skills, each with a rating between 1 (totally inept) and 100 (master). The more you do something, the better you get at it. So, the more I stab people with my sword, the better I get at it and the better I am able to use a sword.

Filling up the red bar for a skill will cause you to gain a level of that particular skill.

This works really well. Since there are so many, you get rewards quite often. It’s rare that ten minutes will go by without getting another level in at least one of these skills. So these modest rewards come at a steady pace. If you’re in the wild you’re getting levels related to whatever sort of combat you might be doing. In town you are developing merchant and speechcraft. And you are always getting levels in things like athletics, which advances by simply running around. The metaphor makes sense. I mean, that’s how life really works: You get better at things by doing them.

You choose seven of these skills at the start of the game to be your “major” skills. These seven are linked to your character class. They are your defining skills. Once you get ten levels in any of your major skills, you will go up a level. So, if I’m a fighter then five levels of using a sword and five levels of heavy armor will cause me to go up in character level, which gives me more hit points and improves other aspects of my character. That’s a little confusing at first, but it still works well.

So much for the good news. Now for the bad.

The monsters in this game are spawned according to your character level. If you’re level 1, then all you’ll meet are rats and little goblins. If you’re level 20 then the world is full of Dremora lords and other massive, formidable beasts. This is the very opposite of a self-balancing system, and it is a very ugly solution to the problem of challenging the player.

The problem is that the difficulty of the game is now controlled by how well you comprehend this leveling system and how well you apply it. If you hang around town plying your speechcraft skills until you gain ten levels of speechcraft, you will gain a character level. Aside from a smattering of hitpoints, you aren’t any tougher than before, but every monster in the world is. If you decide you don’t like combat so much and focus on trade / speechcraft / alchemy / etc, then you will make a character who is great at doing “in town” stuff but who is helpless in combat. The monsters will level right past you and the game will be unbeatable. Since the stuff shopkeepers have for sale is also controlled by your level, then you can’t make up for your weakness by buying better equipment. You’re just screwed.

In fact, the game more or less punishes you for leveling. The monsters always get tougher as the game goes on, even for a well-developed character. Those rats at the start of the game go down in one hit. By level twenty, you are going to be trading blows for a while to bring down a Demora Lord, even if you have an optimized character with great equipment.

So my strategy for a while was to avoid leveling up. I just chose seven major skills that I would never use. So, as long as I never use blunt weapons, heavy armor, a shield, and a few other things, then I could stay level two forever. This worked, but it turned out to be a very dull way to play the game. Also, as the main campaign progressed, I ran into certain parts that simply required me to be a certain level to proceed. Bah.

As it stands, very few new players will want to play the game on the default difficulty. The game can be brutal and unforgiving to people who don’t plan ahead when making their character at the start of the game. The difficulty bar isn’t a “easy, medium, hard” choice, but a free-moving slider. At the default position (in the middle) I died quite a bit, and I was being careful about how I developed my character. I’m sure a newbie who just let their character evolve naturally (that is, not optimally) would have a much tougher time, and may have a hard time beating the game at all. I have no idea what the upper end of the difficulty slider is for. Who in the world would turn it up?

This is a rotten problem to solve. The problem is twofold: First, the game is freeform. In most RPG’s, you move from one area to the next, with the difficulty climbing as you proceed. But how do you handle this when the game is non-linear? The character can wander freely around the map, so where do you put the tough monsters so that they don’t stumble upon them by accident, before they are ready?

The other problem is that the character development system is so flexible and so varied that my level ten character is going to be very, very different in power from someone else’s. The difference between the expert who plans his character’s development from the start and the casual player who just lets it all happen is pretty big. This is good, because of the freedom it gives the player, but bad, because the game has no idea what sorts of monsters you can really handle.

So the game gets out of balance and the player is expected to go in and nudge the difficulty slider up and down as they go.

I might have another post that attempts to solve this without taking away the freedom of the game. I’m still thinking about it.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This is, more or less, what Oblivion is supposed to look like:

Spooky!

And this is what Oblivion looked like for me, right out of the box:

You’re kidding me, right?

Outdoors was even worse. The ground was made of checkerboard tiles of stone and grass, making it look like a big quilt. You couldn’t even see the roads. Fog didn’t work. Shadows didn’t work. The ground was flat shaded, ugly, and brightly lit at all times. Hanging moss and cobwebs didn’t blend right, so instead of a little whisp of white hanging in the air I would see a big black billboard with a picture of moss or cobwebs on it. The distant terrain mesh didn’t render properly, and would interfere with the nearby terrain. This would result in very large flat-color surfaces sticking out of the ground which were non-solid, but would block my view.

I applied the patch. I updated my drivers. Made sure Direct X was up to date. I uninstalled, re-installed, and repeated all of the previous steps, and still the world was totally messed up. No matter what I did with the settings, I couldn’t get it to work. For all of this uglyness, the game ran painfully slow.

The game has torches you can carry. Spells that create light. Spells that give you “night vision”. I never needed any of it.

My graphics card is on the low end of the system requirements (GeForce FX 5500) but it isn’t even at the bottom. As far as I’m concerned, if the lighting doesn’t work, your entire graphics engine is a waste. Lighting is the most important thing a graphics engine needs to do. For it to fail on such a fundamental level for a machine which is fully up-to-date is inexcusable. They should have made the game work on FX cards or raised the system requirements. Note that the current patch is the “final” patch. They have no plans for any more updates, and people in my position are just stuck.

Enter Oldblivion, a user-made mod that replaces the shaders in the game with ones that work, or work better, or faster. I installed this mod and the game started working right. It’s a brilliant little piece of software. It has adaptive settings that will adjust the LOD and view distance based on framerate. It turns off the specular shader (the one that causes the largest performance hit) if the game gets choppy. It fixes all sorts of visual bugs and glitches that made the game annoying or ugly. Bethesda ought to send these guys a cut of the $50 I paid for this game. Seriously.

It used to be that developers wrote software, finished it, and then sold it. Then we got to the point where they wrote software, sold it, and then finished it. Now we’re to the point were they write software, sell it, and wait for end-users to finish it.

I imagine the next step is that devlopers will sell us their design document for $50 and let us write the game ourselves.

Shameful.

Later (March 17 2007): Dear kids. Make sure you read this before you go making a fool of yourself in the comments.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Imagine you get a sports car. It’s beautiful. And fast. And safe. Good mileage.

But once you get it home you notice there are things about it that bug you that were not apparent in the showroom. Maybe the leather seats have a strange smell that won’t go away. Imagine the horn makes a clownish Harpo Marx style honking. When you turn on the radio it’s always set to spanish talk radio at full volume. The vanity mirror on the back of the sun visor is convex. To turn on the headlights, you always have to press the on button twice.

None of these issues make the car undriveable. It’s still a great car. But every time one of these annoyances pop up you will wonder why the designers made the car this way. These problems didn’t make the car cheaper or easier to design. They are just oddities that have no purpose other than to keep this from being the perfect car.

This is Oblivion in a nutshell. The game is a wonderful thing, except for the many little issues that mar the experience and make you wonder how things got to be this way.

Oblivion is an open-ended sandbox world. You start out as just some regular person, but fate places you in a position where you can save the world. But you don’t have to. When someone gives me a quest to travel to some city and deliver a message to so-and-so as part of the ongoing campaign against the evil that is threatening the world, I say, “Sure, I’ll do it” and then wander off and start goofing around. I’ve been exploring the endless miles of countryside, diving into all the little dungeons I find. I’ve been collecting armloads of rare plants and herbs growing everywhere so I can work on my alchemy. I’ve been looking for rare or interesting books to add to the collection I’ve started. I kill bandits when I encounter them in the wilderness. I bought a house and furnishings. I joined the theives guild, which lets me fence stolen property. I sneak around at night, breaking into homes and swiping anything that isn’t nailed down. I slay monsters. I go swimming to work out my athletic skills, practice magic spells, or do minor sidequests for random strangers. I play the little mini-games. I play dress-up with my character and try to come up with an outfit that is functional but still looks cool.

Then as I’m wandering around I encounter some guy and I see I have a dialog option, “I have an urgent message for you!” Oh right. I was supposed to give this guy the message. I can go back to the main quest anytime I like. I can wander off again if I feel like doing something else, or if I think it would help to obtain some equipment before proceeding. This causes a bit of a break in realisim, but it makes the game much more fun. There is always something to do, and when you get tired of that there is always something else.

Become a paid assasin. Join the Mage’s Guild, the Fighter’s Guild, the Thieves Guld, or one of the other major factions in the game. All of them have a long and complex series of quests that will (I think) culminate with you becoming the head of that particular guild. Acquire property in all of the major towns in the game. Invest in shops. Hunt animals (deer, wolf, bear, etc) in the wilderness for their meat and pelts, or just for sport. Craft magical weapons and armor. Make up your own spells. Hunt vampires. Hunt rare artifacts for some of the various collectors in the game, or start your own collection. Just explore the land and try to fill in the entire map. (Good luck doing that, it will take forever.) I’m sure there is a lot more than this that I haven’t even heard of yet.

Collecting books is interesting. The game has seemingly hundreds of “books”, which look like books in the world but which contain poems, amusing short stories, history & backstory, or subtle in-game hints. This isn’t any big technological accomplishment, but someone did sit down and write all these things. It really adds a nice touch of authenticity.

The thieving in this game is in some ways better than in the game Thief, because there is a real running day / night cycle. The streets are busy during the day. People get up, leave their homes, go to work (which is usually in a shop). When evening comes, they close up shop, go to the tavern for a bite, and then head home. Everyone has a slightly different schedule, so you can’t count on anyone going to asleep at exactly 10:00pm, or waking up exactly at 6:00am. Like in real life, their schedules vary a bit. So, you need to pay attention to what your mark is doing, and you need to keep your eyes on the clock. Unlike the sunless, ever-night world of Thief, you need to worry about people waking up in the morning. Also, some people have dogs, which complicates things a bit. People have locks on their doors and chests, and unlike in Theif there are locks you cannot open until you have enough skill. However, people tend to lock up things that they value, not things which you might value, or – more importantly – your fence might value. So you never know if that maximum difficulty chest in the corner is full of gold and jewels, or sentimental baubles. You don’t just charge into the house, open the most difficult container, and leave with the best stuff. The best stuff might be sitting on a table. Or in the basement. Or in the bedroom. Or locked up. Or they might not have any single items of value. You don’t know for sure, so you have to search the place. Unlike in Theif, these places are highly, highly detailed. There are a lot of barrels, bags, boxes, chests, desks, bookshelves, cupboards, dressers, tables and cabinets to search. These things are dense with clutter and loose items, and the valuables you’re looking for might be hidden anywhere, or not there at all.

Oh yeah: All that clutter introduces a new problem, which is that lots of stuff can be knocked over. You have to be careful when sifting through objects, because the game has a very nice physics engine. If you bump into loose items or knock things over while searching for loot, you’re going to make noise. Which is bad.

As an aside: I seem to really enjoy games where I can steal stuff. Why is that? I’m quite honest in real life. I never steal, and I’m always careful to honor copyrights even when the holder(s) of those copyrights are complete jerks. However, once I get in a game I cannot resist swiping everything that isn’t nailed down, even when I’m playing an otherwise “good” character.

I’m sure I’ll have more later. I’m making an effort not to enumerate the various flaws I talked about earlier. They are many, but for the most part they have been covered elsewhere.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.