T w e n t y S i d e d

One thing that makes Oblivion so interesting is the sheer number and variety of quests. You never know what’s coming next. In a lot of ways, you can view each sidequest as an episode of the overall story of your character. Some are gruesome, some are funny, some are facinating, and a few are just stupid.

Anyway, the typical RPG quest is simple:

1. Go kill X, or:
2. Go acquire object Y

Games can’t do much beyond these two, but some games do a good job of pretending they are working on a deeper level. For example, in Oblivion you might be given a quest to “Convince the Earl of Esquire to make peace with the Duke of Ted”. On the surface it sounds pretty elaborate. I mean, “convince” implies negotiations. But when you get there the Earl is just going to say, “I cannot agree to peace because my people have need X. So, unless you could acquire object Y for me, we have no choice but to go to war.” So now this is just the same old Quest type #2, although with a few extra steps to dress it up.

And so for modern games the real challenge is to to disguse these same two quests, and to make them seem like more than they are. Oblivion is great at this. (Sometimes.)

One example is the quest “The Siren’s Deception”, which you get in the city of Anvil.

You start off meeting a woman in town who tells you she needs your help. It seems that her husband was drinking at the local tavern and was taken in by a pair of women who lured him out to their cabin with the implied promise of sex. Once he was undressed, they robbed him and sent him back into town in his skivvies. The women made off with his ring, which was a family heirloom, and the wife would very much like you to recover this ring. The husband is too humiliated to go to the guards, and there isn’t a whole lot they can do in this case anyway. Apparently these women have been doing this for a while, but nobody will come forward because they are too ashamed.

These are the girls your mother shouldn’t need to warn you about unless you’re a senseless dolt.

So I go to the tavern and in the evening the two women show up. If I was a male character, I’m sure they would have invited me to their cabin like their other victims. Since my character was female, they invited me to join their gang.

The ringleader explains their MO: They target married men (who will want to keep the whole thing to themselves, to keep their wives from finding out) who have been drinking. This is actually a pretty clever plan. A drunken middle-aged man is going to have a hard time resisting the chance for a ménage à  trois with a couple of fetching young girls. Once the trap is sprung, the men are unlikely to win a fight while outnumbered, naked, and drunk. So far the girls have been able to bring in a nice bit of cash without hurting anyone.

Did I say fetching? Erm. In Oblivion, the sexy women are the ones who don’t look entirely like men.
It’s probably just my crappy GFX card, but I could swear she has a 5 o’clock shadow.

Either way, the player is invited to the cabin. Now, if this were a truly freeform game, then you could choose to fall for their ruse (as a male) or join the gang (as a female), but there are limits on how much freedom you can give the player if you hope to ship your game this decade. So, once you get there conflict is inevitable. You can’t talk the girls into giving up or handing over the ring. You can’t leave without resolving the situation. You have to fight your way out.

Climbing up the hill towards the cabin at dusk. How I wish the grass would render for me. Still, this looks pretty good.

So, even though the dialog is clever and the story is amusing and unexpected, this is – at the heart of it – a “go kill the monster” quest in a fancy disguise. In this case, the “monster” is a couple of homewrecker bandits with no common sense.

I say they have no sense because no matter who you are they will still invite you up to their cabin, even if you’re a little old lady or a hulking Orc. When a huge guy strides in wearing Daedric plate mail and carrying a flaming axe the size of a ship’s rudder, these girls should have the sense to let him alone and look for an easier mark. Still, this was an amusing quest and I really enjoyed 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.

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.