#whereas in Skyrim you can't do that at all

[hostess-of-horror]

Having played Oblivion for the first time, I have realized how vastly similar it is to Skyrim yet at the same time very different.

To put it simply:

Skyrim is a massive LARPing session where everyone tries their damnedest to make their roleplay very "serious" and "gritty".

Oblivion is a neverending Renaissance Faire that was created by a bunch of theatre kids.

[blogberthday]

Chapter 7 - Sense of Humor

Click here to read the previous chapter! -> Chapter 6 - Frostbite and Flames

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"Even with a couple of healing potions and a visit from a priest of Mara, it took me a few weeks to get back on my feet," Lorelai said, running her hand along her left shin. "My nose never really healed right and I still have some pain in my foot, but I got to keep my leg. Thank Kynareth for that."

She was careful to leave the amulet out of her story. It was tucked safely under her armour, but she would have to find somewhere safe to keep it while they travelled together.

Lorelai looked out towards Lake Ilinalta. The rain had slowed, and the clouds were beginning to clear.

"Nobody in Dawnstar recognized the name of the ship, and, not having any coin, I wasn't able to afford passage back to High Rock. I've been working as a courier since then, trying to save up the fare.

"You don't remember anything else? Your name, your family? Any memories of who you were?"

"No. Just the bit before the ship went down and a few glimpses here and there. There's a big gap between getting hit by the boom and waking up at Thardan and Hargi's hut a couple days later, too - not that I really want to remember the rest of that night, even if I could."

Taliesin smiled sadly, letting out a chuckle. Clearly the gods enjoyed a little irony. He wished that they would focus more on being merciful.

Hearing his laughter, Lorelai scowled at him. "What? Is that so funny to you? A little bit of concussion humor?"

"Oh! No, I didn't mean it that way. It's just… Ironic. You can't remember who you are, your family, or where you come from, and wish that you could. Whereas I…" He looked away, as though he had said something he shouldn't have.

She wanted to press further, but Taliesin stood up and put a hand out from under the overhang.

"The rain has stopped. We'd best be headed to Falkreath if we want to make it there before nightfall." He moved to the other Justiciar's body and, sitting it up, began to peel off the agent's robes.

"What are you doing?!" Lorelai looked away, scandalized.

"Agent Sanyon died of a blow to the head. My robes are ruined, but his are only a little bloodied. We might have use for them in the future. Him," Taliesin looked down at Sanyon's corpse, "Not so much."

He finished his work and stuffed the rain-soaked and bloodied robes into the now-empty knapsack Lorelai had found. "We left our horses down near the main path. You can take Sanyon's."

. . .

"She's beautiful." Lorelai stroked the horse's nose. "What's her name?" "Sanyon called her 'Peaches', after the fruit. They grow in Cyrodiil, mostly, and in the southern parts of High Rock."

"Peaches…" Lorelai repeated. "It suits you," She said to the horse. "Sweet and fuzzy."

Peaches whinnied, pushing her nose towards Lorelai. Lorelai continued to stroke the horse, gently scratching the top of her head. "And your horse?" She looked to Taliesin, who was standing next to a beautiful stark white mare.

"This lovely creature," Taliesin put his hand on his horse's saddle, "Is called Naomi." He looked over to Lorelai, watching for her reaction.

Lorelai snorted, then covered her mouth with her hands, laughing. "I'm so sorry," she wheezed, "it's just. Naomi?" She giggled again. "I didn't expect a Thalmor Justiciar to have a sense of humor like that."

"I'm one of a kind." He smiled. He had been waiting for someone to appreciate that pun for years - since he'd arrived in Skyrim.

Perhaps being presumed dead wouldn't be so bad after all.

[nbstevonnie]

so when elder scrolls online first came out however many years ago it was i was very much like 'liked skyrim but don't think this is for me'. my best friends both love it though and we've been looking for games we could play together so i agreed to get a copy and it took me barely twenty minutes of play to realise i was right. i can't put my finger on exactly why but it genuinely feels so soulless :/

i realise that most games are 'talk to someone, go somewhere, pick something up, return to person' but this game makes me feel that's what i'm doing, whereas i LOVE doing quests in say, fallout new vegas, where it feels like i'm actually finding things out and impacting the world.

i think it's a combination of things ultimately, and my guess would be at least the following:

no (or very few) branching options - i click all the dialogue options and get given all the information at once. the few times there are branching options, i don't ever feel like i feel the weight of it - go be queen or don't be queen... i'm never going to see you again.

no (or very little) sense of character for the player - no 'mean' options within dialogue and very few mean actions to take. i don't even take these options!! but their lack feels like i'm not making a choice to be a nice person in game, just following the rote steps.

no (or very little) sense of character for the npcs - they tell you all the information very straightforwardly. no sense that someone is lying or possibly manipulating you.

all the quests so far seem very localised - there's very little 'go to this new place miles and miles away (and discover things on the way) to finish the quest', much 'pop next door and pick up the thing/talk to the person there'.

anyway, kinda sucks cause i don't look forward to playing this game and i'm now locked in to playing it every monday night 🙃

[anheliotrope]

A while ago I said that Deus Ex was a very personal experience. Morrowind is too, but in a more literal way.

Everyone in this game is a person!

They have a name, a profession and a specific place in the world. You will almost never encounter generic bandits. They all have names and their location has some sort of purpose.

It might be a smuggling operation or they might just actually live in this cave here with their bandit pals. Or maybe they're rogue wizards that are doing research in private. If it's a bandit cave, sometimes you can deduce whether they're skooma smugglers, dwemer artifact smugglers, or just regular robbers. You can deduce most of these things by the environment, they're never told to you, which is nice, because I hate being told things.

It's also interesting to see locations that are lived in, despite being functionally another bandit cave. They'll have a hammock, a book or two, candles, bottles, plates, a place to keep their stuff in.

All of this makes me so much more eager to run around and explore than Skyrim.

Even random plantations in the Ascadian Isles have interesting information. The amount of slave labor used for example. The ratio of big plantation owners to small farm owners.

I think that Oblivion and Skyrim fundamentally cannot pull this off with friendly NPCs due to one of the bigger sins in open world RPGs -- voice acting.

You can't have non-generic NPCs that don't have their lines voice acted.

If they're generic and voice acted, it becomes stilted and super obvious that this person is 95% similar to the other 10 people you met. Voice acting is more sensorially intrusive than text and much slower. You can't skim over things quickly. This can lead to the infamous levels of comedy Oblivion has in its NPC interactions.

More often developers will end up doing a smaller quantity of NPCs in a higher quality way. But this often ends up failing to establish the scale of the game. Regardless of actual dimensions, all subsequent TES games feel smaller to me than Morrowind.

As for hostile NPCs... I don't even know. There was nothing stopping Skyrim from making more connected locations instead of 30 generic Nordic tombs. Morrowind has generic Dunmer tombs too, but they are mercifully short and establish more interesting lore about local traditions. They are a much much smaller part of the game, whereas Skyrim places important word walls to get your dragon shouts in these insanely boring dungeons, most of which feel like they have no connection to the world they exist in.

[lesvegas]

anon who just started oblivion here again, it actually made stealth fun, which is very hard to do in a lot of games for me. like normally i hate when i can't kill enemies and have to stealth through but the thieves guild questline was so fucking good that i didn't mind it at all so i'm gonna do dark brotherhood next and make a second character for a warrior build. like with how open the opening is to interpretation (unlike "YOU'RE THE CHOSEN DRAGONBRON OOOO" skyrim) i'm gonna have him get sent to the arena after being in prison for a crime he didn't commit, and my thieves guild character is the one who managed to get him sent there instead of rotting in the prison or sent to death.

in oblivion to pretend your characters are in the same universe as each other you just need to be like "oh yeah this one was in the cell with the emperor but escaped, and after he left they threw in a different character but they found the secret passage on their own" whereas you need to do some real mental gymnastics in skyrim to have the same effect

Oh you're gonna LOVE the Dark Brotherhood questline, each quest is just as if not more unique than each Thieves Guild quest. But YEAH you can actually like... roleplay in it pretty well without mods. Hard to do in Skyrim imo. Anyway please get back to me as soon as you finish the Dark Brotherhood questline, I wanna hear ur thoughts on it :)

[onyxofborg]

The Meaning of Life

I stopped believing in a "point" to life a long time ago. Bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people, and I've come to believe that the only meaning in any of it is the meaning we give it. It's like reading a story and finding all this symbolism in it that the author may or may not even have intentionally put there.

And honestly, I don't know why the thought that everything is pointless scares people. Because to me, if there's no end goal, you can't screw up or fail. It's like playing the Sims instead of something more goal oriented like Mario or Mortal Kombat. Yeah you can have someone pee themselves because you forgot to tell them to pee, you can have them cheat on their spouse or drown their neighbors in the swimming pool or whatever, and even though it may make them miserable, it doesn't mean you've lost the game. Whereas on Mario if you just can't jump over that lava pit the right way, you're pretty much screwed and you end up embarrassed to tell your friends how bad you suck at the game.

But even though I don't think there's really a "point" to existence, what can it hurt to try to learn things and experience things? Not necessarily for self improvement, although that's a nice ideal. But more because self improvement allows you to try to make life better for others. To use another video game metaphor, it's like how if you always stay on level 1, you'll never be able to do all those sidequests for people because all the monsters will eat you.

And yeah, I'm one of those people that when I play games like Skyrim, I put off the main quest as long as possible in hopes of doing as many sidequests as I can. That and alchemy. Because if I'm in such a rush to finish the game that I don't bother to look around and see all the amazing little things hidden within it, what's even the point?