T w e n t y S i d e d

I have a love-hate relationship with this game. It’s wonderful, but also deeply flawed and unfinished.

A while back I mentioned a user-made patch to fix the graphics problems so that the game will actually run as promised. Now here is another user-made mod that fixes the countless broken quests, AI flukes, misplaced objects, missing objects, and other bugs and annoyances with the game. Look at that list of bug fixes. It’s shockingly huge.

I wouldn’t mind a few broken quests. This game world is complex and the AI is ambitious. The game is so huge that a dedicated team of beta testers couldn’t hope to play all of the possible quests in every possible way, looking for unforseen effects and outcomes. To a certain extent, you need this game to go out to the masses before you can find all the problems.

What makes me mad is that the current official patch is marked as “final” and they do not plan on any further updates. Given the sheer volume of issues, that is just shameful. This game is not done, and these guys should do the right thing and finish the job.

Again, kudos to the mod community for tracking down and fixing these bugs. Seriously, Bethesda should send them a cut of the earnings.

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.

The best quest so far is the “Paranoia” quest in the town of Skingrad. It’s a true freeform quest. It doesn’t have much in the way of a story, but there are many outcomes and I played through it several times trying out all the different permutations. Spoilers follow.

A Wood Elf (the annoying shorty elves, as opposed to the tall and snooty High Elves) walks up to you and pleads with you to meet him behind the church at midnight. He has a proposition for you, but he wants to meet in secret.

Unlike other missions in the game, this one has a lot of possible outcomes besides “do it” and “don’t do it”. If you agree to help Glarthir, he will give you a job: He will task you with following one of the people who have been watching him, and seeing what they do when they are not spying on him. He wants to know who they are working for and who they report to. There are three people total, and each time you report back on the activities of one of them he’ll assign you the next.

The voice acting is hilarious. Glarthir takes himself and his struggle very seriously. The facial expression system in Oblivion is good, but it isn’t up to the task of keeping up with the voice actor’s performance here. He plays Glarthir with a manic enthusiasm that make these little conversations a lot of fun.

Following these people around for an entire day can be a bit time consuming (I’ve never bothered to clock it, but I’m betting a day in the game is 24 minutes long) and dull. These people are not watching him. They are harmless people who are unluckly enough to be neighbors with this nut. Their lives are simple and routine. They get up, go to work, have a bite to eat, talk with other people in town, and generally fail to be secretive or sinister in any way.

Each night you meet him behind the church and report on the activities of the day’s target. You can either lie and say they were watching him, or tell him the truth and say that they aren’t. Either way, he pays you a nice chunk of cash for your efforts. It should also be noted that you don’t need to follow these people at all. You can just show up at midnight and tell him whatever you like.

So far I’ve found several outcomes:

1. Refuse to help him. The first time I met him I told him to get lost, and a few days later I heard people in town gossiping about how he went nuts and killed a bunch of people with an axe before the guards put him down. I assume he killed the three “spies”.
2. Agree to help him, and then report the truth. If you tell him that nobody is following him, then he realizes with horror that you must be in on it as well! He then attacks you and you are obliged to kill him. (Or run to the town guards and let them kill him.)
3. Lie to him. If you agree to help and then tell him that all or some of the people on his list are in fact following him, then he will give you one last task: He will ask you to kill all of the people who you identified as spies. I don’t know what happens if you refuse this task, but if you accept he puts the job in writing along with the names of the intended victims.
4. Do the killing. You can then kill these people on his list, and he will pay you $1,000. Early in the game, that is quite a chunk of cash. Enough that it may well be worth offing these characters if you have the mindset for such a job.
5. Show the list to the town guards. You can show the list to the town watch. It is helpfully titled “people to kill” and has all of the names of the victims on it, so it’s a pretty solid piece of evidence that he’s gone off the deep end. If you do this, then they will go after Glarthir. He will resist arrest, and then the guards will kill him.

Hilarious. I wonder if there are any other outcomes I didn’t find?

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.

I’ve hurried though Oblivion and reached the ending. The main campaign was actually quite short. I did it in bit and pieces between other quests, real life, and work, so I don’t have a solid picture of just how long it took. My guess is that it took around five hours to go through the core story. For a game with ~200 hours of gameplay, that’s a pretty small slice. The main campaign is a bit mundane, so I’m glad they didn’t stretch it out with a bunch of filler quests. (Morrowwind had this problem. The part where you got named Hortator of all of the great houses was a huge recursive mess of pointless sub-sub-sub quests.)

The story was nothing special, and the big bad guy wasn’t very interesting, although he could have been. For the curious, I came up with a rough summary. You don’t need to read this unless you’re curious. Just skip the boxed text to see my comments on the ending.

Fine. Whatever. The Elder Scolls pantheon and mythos never really captured my attention. It’s big, complex, and hard to follow. It’s like reading the cliff notes from the Sillmarillion without Lord of the Rings to back it up. I’ve never learned more than I needed in order to make out the plot of whatever game I’m playing.

Anyway…

I finally reach Mankar Cameron so I can put a stop to his plans. I was really looking forward to talking to this guy. In Morrowwind, you get to have a nice long chat with the main bad guy at the end, and it ranks as one of the most satifying conversations I’ve ever had in a video game. Not so with Oblivion. Mankar Cameron monlogues for a while and explains most of the stuff I outlined above, but you never get that chance to sit down and chat with him. He never really tries to pursuade you or explain his cause to you. You just wait for him to shut up and then make with the fighting.

This could have been the highlight of the game. Once you meet Cameron you find him to be sadistic, a little crazy, and overconfident. It would have been far better if he’d given his reasons for what he was doing, and explained what he thought was going to happen if his plans worked out. It would have been great if – like the villian in Morrowwind – he had turned around and asked the player a few questions about what was motivating them to oppose him. He could have been deep and interesting, and instead he was just another cardboard bastard you have to put down on your way to the end of the game. More than all the technology flaws and bugs and gamebalance issues, this is my biggest lament about the game, because this is where the game could have really stood out as something interesting.

I’ve seen a mod for Oblivion that removes the main quest: No martin, no amulet, no Oblivion gates. You just appear in one of the coastal towns as a traveler and are free to enjoy the rest of the game. This actually sounds pretty fun, although the fact that someone saw a need for it at all illustrates how weak the campaign is compared to the rest of the game.

Ah well. At least it’s short.

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.