I have sorta rediscovered the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I bought it a year ago for the PC, then my PC died, so I got the XBOX version. I played it a lot, then got back into World of Warcraft when The Burning Crusade expansion came out. I am now at a point in WoW where all of my characters are stuck on group quests that will probably never get done, so I was just kinda farming faction reputation on my level 70 hunter and helping other people with their quests.
Then the Shivering Isles expansion came out for Oblivion.
The expansion opens up a new area in the game by way of a portal, however the portal would not let me enter because my character level was too low. Well foo, I spent a couple hours downloading this thing from XBOX Live, I guess I should work on my character so I can actually play the new content. In doing so, I became familiar again with why Oblivion is such an addicting game. For one thing, the graphics are fantastic. I played the PC version on a Pentium 4 3Ghz with a high end nVidia card with a 21″ monitor, then on an XBOX 360 on a 55″ HD television. I don’t have the ability to compare them side by side, but I really like the XBOX version (maybe it’s the size of the screen and the ability to sit back with a wireless controller.) I had surround sound on both systems, so I don’t notice any real difference in sound. One thing I do miss is the ability to customize the game with add-ons: with the PC version you could download any modification that could do all kinds of weird things to the game, including new towns, new dungeons, new weapons, etc. (When I played Morrowind, I had a sword that talked.) Since XBOX Live is a closed network, you can only download additional content that is approved by Microsoft, and thus far there are very few addons available (and they charge for them! You either pay XBOX Live for the download or buy a copy of XBOX Magazine to get them on disc.)
Another thing is something that I loved in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind – there is so much to do! You can play the game for months and never go near the main quest line. There are so many games on the market that drag you along on a rail, urging you ever forward through linear levels with no flexibility at all, dictating your every move, until you get to the end in under 30 hours and then that’s it, you’re done. (Sadly, this is the type of game being marketed because of the short attention span crowd; they get bored and move on if they can’t complete a game in one sitting, or if it doesn’t have some sort of multi-player content that allows them to blow up their friends.) Morrowind and Oblivion had quests and sub-quests and factions and groups and guilds and so much content that you could be kept busy for a LONG time, and still not come close to finishing the game (in fact, if all you did was play the main quest to completion, you’ve probably only seen maybe 10% of the game.) You’re not told “you must do this now, but you can’t get to this until you do that.” You wanna work on Mage Guild quests, fine, go work on Mage Guild quests. You wanna work on Thieves Guild quests, go work on Thieves Guild quests. Then work on the main quest line for a while, if you want to… then go exploring to see what kinda cool stuff you can find.
One thing I noticed is that WoW and Oblivion have a lot of similar features, such as professions, but are implemented so differently. For example, you can create potions in each game using alchemy, or enchant weapons and armor. The more I thought about it, I came up with more things.
Alchemy allows you to pick plants and use the remains of dead critters to make potions and poisons. Potions heal or buff you, poisons are applied to weapons to do more damage to enemies. (WoW makes Alchemy one skill and Herb Gathering a second skill, whereas Oblivion makes it one skill.) In WoW, you buy vials and make things that you learned; in Oblivion you have alembics, mortar and pestle, etc, and create things. In WoW, your potions are always successful, and as you increase your skill you get access to new stuff. In Oblivion, your skill allows you to make better things, but there is no “trainer” to teach you, it’s a lot of trial and error. You can find recipes lying about, but the fun is in experimenting. Also, the things you make in Oblivion are actually useful – sure you can stand there making 25 of the same potion just to level up your skill (this is true for both games) but in Oblivion a lot of those potions are necessary. You will end up using most of the potions you make, whereas in WoW you’re not going to find much use for Potions of Rage if you’re a Priest; likewise a Mana Potion doesn’t do a lot for a Rogue. In Oblivion, another perk is that you can make any potion you need at any time. Need a Cure Disease potion? As long as you know what materials are needed, make all the Cure Disease potions you want. In WoW, you can’t make certain potions until your skill is high enough to learn them, and you have to buy vials to put them in. (I guess the vials appear out of nowhere in Oblivion.) Either way, you can make decent money selling the ones you don’t need.Enchanting is one skill where WoW has a better implementation. If you want to enchant a weapon or armor, you gather the materials and, provided you have learned how to do the enchantment and have the required enchanting rod, apply it at any time. In Oblivion, you have to capture the soul of something you killed inside a soul gem, then find an Enchanting Table (which costs money to use) and then hope the soul you captured is powerful enough to do the enchant you want. Once the enchant is done, in WoW the enchant is permanent for that item. It never depletes. You put a Fiery Weapon enchantment on a sword, that enchantment will always be there. In Oblivion, weapon enchantments need to be recharged (with gems or by paying a vendor.) One plus however is that in Oblivion, the enchant always hits – if you enchant a dagger with Frost Damage, it will always do that damage on every strike, but in WoW the enchantment gives a chance that it might hit.
In WoW, you choose a character class during the creation of your character. You can be a mage, paladin, warrior, rogue, hunter, priest, shaman, warlock, or druid. The race you decide to be will affect what class you can choose (such as only Night Elves and Tauren can be Druids due to their close relationship with the land and its spirits.) In Oblivion, there are really only three classes – magic, fighter, or thief – but there are combinations of the three (BattleMage is a hybrid) and your character can be any or all of them to varying degrees. You cannot change the race you chose at the beginning – once a Breton always a Breton – but you don’t have to rely on one class alone. In WoW, mages are powerful damage dealers at range, but cannot wear anything but cloth armor and suck in close combat. Warriors can beat you down at close range and can take a lot of punishment due to their ability to wear plate armor, but cannot cast any spells and don’t do decent ranged damage. In Oblivion, you can pick up any armor and any weapon at any time and the more you use it the better you get with it. Pick up a bow and arrow and go out deer hunting for a while, and eventually you’ll get proficient at it. A mage in WoW can never even equip a bow. A fighter or a rogue can, but will never be as proficient with it as a hunter, which is a ranged class.
Of course the reason for all that is simple -WoW is a multi-player game, where people can rely on each other to fill in the gaps. No one character can do everything. A mage can’t heal, so pair off with a priest, then add a warrior if you’re both tired of being chewed to ribbons. While it is certainly possible to play completely on your own in WoW, the experience is limited. There will be a lot of places you can’t go because you will need additional people to back each other up. Oblivion is a single player game, so naturally there is no one else to rely on; your character has to be able to do all things.
However, there are times when it seems like you are REQUIRED to do all things in Oblivion. You can’t play a character that is just a fighter with all points put into using tank armor and carrying trees around to smack people with. It just is not possible. You go into a cave and come across a locked door, you can’t open it without a key, a lockpick, or a spell/scroll to open it. In some cases there is a key that drops when you kill something (or you have to pick their pocket, which requires Sneak, which requires Agility.) If there is no key, then you need to use a lockpick, which requires a lockpicking skill, which relies on Agility. Oops, you weren’t putting any points into Agility, so increasing your skill in lockpicking is going to be tougher. There are spells available to open the lock, but you weren’t spending any time on spells. Even if you went out and bought an Open Easy Lock spell, you have no skill in it, so you can’t cast it without casting Open Very Easy Lock a couple of hundred times. You don’t have any Open Lock scrolls, and I am not aware of a “bash” skill to bust the door down with your head… so you’re SOL.
One big difference, and this is going to hold true with ANY multi-player vs single player comparison, is the ability to affect the world. There are tons of quests in World of Warcraft that ask you to go kill some guy, or blow something up, or in some way change the world. So you go off and do the quest, say kill Edwin VanCleef in the Deadmines. You get to the end, and you kill him, and you drag his head to the guy in Westfall who says three cheers for you! You are the savior! You feel great! Until a few minutes later when the guy says the same thing about someone else who also has VanCleef’s head. Wait, the guy has two heads? Each player who gets that quest has to go kill the same guy. Over and over and over. The guy is never truly gone. You haven’t changed a thing. Everyone gets the same quest rewards, so that really cool weapon you just got has been owned and sold by thousands of other players. There is no concept of a “unique” item – if it dropped for you, it dropped for a lot of other people. As items go up in their power (grey, white, green, blue, purple, and orange) the rarity of that item increases so there will be less people carrying it. (I think orange items are “unique” to a server – only one player will ever have it – but I could be wrong.) My favorite example is the “escort” quest – you find some guy who is trapped, and needs you to protect him so he can get home. You run the guy through the area, he says thank you, and disappears. Go back to the place where you found him, and he’s RIGHT BACK WHERE HE STARTED. So why did you do it if he’s stupid enough to get recaptured?
Since Oblivion is all about you, you affect everything in the world in some way or another. You kill someone, they stay dead. You close an Oblivion Gate, it stays closed. You go off to kill some big badass guy, you can be sure that the guy will be there when you arrive, not like in WoW where half a dozen people stand around waiting for one guy to appear and then it’s a mad contest to see who can hit the guy first (usually regardless of who has been waiting the longest.) That guy is waiting for you to kill him, and he’s not going anywhere. However, there’s an odd side to that. You get a quest from someone, and are told how important it is that you do this quickly. In reality there is no time limit on most things. You are asked to do something by someone, walk away for a few weeks worth of game time, and then go back to the guy, and he acts like no time has passed at all. There are a few quests that do need to be done immediately (such as the “track the guy down before he leaves the area” type of quest) or you have to protect someone from dying so if you walk away they die and you have to reload your game, but for the most part you can start a quest, go off and do something else for a while, and then go back to the first quest much later with no penalty. The world will wait for you – quite literally. As part of the main quest, you are constantly told how imperative it is that you do things fast, or something really terrible is going to happen. That something terrible will never ever happen if you don’t do the quests leading up to it. Martin tells you to prepare for battle, and meet him back at the Chapel when you are ready. He’ll be waiting at that Chapel for hours, days, weeks, months, until you decide you’re ready for battle. I did exactly that – everyone is standing around waiting for me to go get reinforcements from other towns so they can defend the town against this approaching army, but if I decide to go off and do quests for the Dark Brotherhood for a while, that colossal world-changing battle is never going to take place. There is no real sense of urgency, regardless of what the NPC’s keep saying.
In WoW, quests don’t change in difficulty. If you can’t do a quest, you go off and do other things to raise in level, then go back later to clear the quest. (I didn’t like Dungeons and Dragons Online enough to play it much, but from what I remember the quests in that game scale with your character’s level.) It’s easier now because your character is more powerful, has better weapons, better spells, whatever. Another option that is gaining in popularity is to pay off a high level character to run you through an area so you don’t even have to work to gain the rewards. Granted you don’t get as much experience points for it at that point, but usually for those people it’s not about XP, it’s about the stuff you get as rewards or the loot you pick up to sell. In Oblivion, there is no such thing as “I’ll do that later when I get more powerful.” The quest scales in difficulty to meet your abilities. One of the first big fights is trying to close the Oblivion Gate in Kvatch, and I kept getting killed. So I left to do other things, figuring when I get better armor and weapons it will be easier. Problem was, I waited too long – by the time I went back, I did have great armor and a flame-enchanted sword that was able to kill a lot of things with one swipe, but I guess the critters in Kvatch had time to bring in some friends. The Gate was guarded by more powerful creatures, and there were more of them. This was not like some level 70 mage walking into Deadmines and blowing up 12 miners with one spell – I was swarmed by heavy hitters that matched my level; that sword was my only saving grace.
Oblivion doesn’t require a lot of planning. I can pick up and play any time the television is not in use and pick up where I left off. I don’t have to coordinate with others, and then wait a week only to have something else come up preventing the run from happening. Onion other hand, there’s no one else to talk to. When people in my guild in WoW do log on, it’s a conversation even if we can’t knock stuff off quest lists. Sometimes ya just gotta have other people. 🙂