There have been many discussions about the problem of “rubberbanding” in Oblivion. The term isn’t mine but it’s what I saw being used to describe the problem.

To explain, in Oblivion the whole game shapeshifts around your character. It’s the most often perceived flaw because it permeates the whole game, not only the game design, but also the graphic. The whole world is rolled at your feet like a red carpet, you walk around and things enter the rendered range and pop-up into existence, outside this radius and they cease to exist. The NPCs continue to exist and have their own schedules, which help to give the game some consistence, but everything else in is “volatile”. “Spawned on demand” and dynamically adapted to your level.

This means that all the content is potentially accessible at level 1. Every monster is in fact calibrated on your level. A wolf is spawned if you are level 1, or a minotaur if you are level 20. These are the “levelled lists” that were already present in Morrowind. You enter a dungeon and the game will populate it to be appropriate for your level, both in mosters and loot. No matter where you go and how well you play, at level 1 you will always find poor loot, while at level 20 or above you’ll always see the best of the best everywhere, and the whole world populated by epic creatures.

It existed as a way to address different playstyles in a sandbox game. It was needed to retain a general balance and keep the game always fun, trying to solve the problems that came up with Morrowind where you could quickly become god-like and then feel bored for the rest of the game because you were too powerful. It’s a general problem with an open-ended type of game, the story is not “directed”, so it becomes increasingly hard to calibrate the difficutly. You never know if the dungeon is being entered by a level 1 character or by a level 20. The solution was to populate the game world dynamically, adapting the spawns directly on the level of your character.

The result was that the players, not surprisingly, didn’t digested this workaround so well. It’s a solution that completely removes the persistence from the game in a similar way to what happens with randomly generated content. In a world and a game that relies heavily on the immersion, the world itself becomes “virtual”, potential. Every spawn represents a “possibility”, and not a fixed state. This type of virtuality has the direct consequence of removing the history. The mobs are “replaceable”, things do not exist. The world outside becomes pretentious, faked. You know that no matter where you go, every dungeon is tailored around you. The distance and space within the world cease to exist, because the world simply “walks with you”.

Here what is broken is the discovery. In a immersive game you explore the territory, discover treasures, get to know characters and stories. Think to the original Ultima series. YOU are the one who is ported to another world, you are then asked to move, explore and learn. That word exists with or without you. The fun is in the “roleplay” as immersion. You are a stranger in a strage land. So the player experiencing the discovery through the character. Make experience of the world.

The world is an essential part of these games and its value is in its history, its objectivity. Its independent state, autonomous from your character. PvE implies the fact that your character is detached from the world he discovers. This discovery implies the fact that the two sets don’t overlap and remain separate. PvE implies an identity, and, as an identity, autonomous from the one of your character. “Identity” is the opposite of “virtuality”. Virtual defines a possibility: something else, somewhere else and in a different time. Identity defines something that cannot be modified, a state. And history is part of an identity.

These are the same concepts I analyzed when discussing the use of the instancing because all these different design strategies always revolve about possibilities and the adaptation of the content. About “virtualizing” parts of the game so that they can be reused.

At the core it is needed a balance between two extremes, because the concept of the virtuality is opposed to the identity and you cannot have one and the other. One goes against the other, it precludes the other.

In Oblivion the game feels completely unbalanced toward the virtuality, so, as I said, the world loses consistence, it’s all adapted around you and the underlying rules are too evident to not get easily recognized. The “artificial wires” that connect this world are exposed and you can kiss goodbye to the suspension of disbelief. The immersivity fades away and you are soon learning and interacting exclusively with these aritficial rules. Simply put: you know what to expect, the game becomes predictable.

You know that at the end of the dungeon there will be that creature and that type of loot because you are at that level. Before going in for the first time, you already know what’s within.

This is a rather interesting mechanic because in other games the levels are used in the exact opposite way: the creatures are at a fixed level, while your own level is the game design tool used to customize the difficulty (I’ll write about this in another moment).

“Fixing Oblivion” is a way to bring the game back within a threshold so that not all problem are fixed, but at least the suspension of disbelief is once again possible, and you can concentrate more on the immersion. This could be possible through two mods, working together and addressing the basic problems of the levelled lists.

The first can be found here (Francesco’s mod, with only the core components present in the versions before 2.3) and is already quite popular. There are various mods changing the levelled lists but they are too aggressive or don’t really fix the real problem, even if they may have nice ideas. The one I linked is the best compromise I found at the moment. The second is a simple mod that slows down the skill up rate four times.

The first mod intruduces min and max levels to the quests, so that they still adapt to you but only within a certain level range, recovering some of the missing persistence. This makes the difficulty more static at certain points, it scales the content indipendently to your character and you won’t be able to finish the arena or quest lines without reaching the appropriate level or at least moving near it. The second mod works in combo with the first, making the levelling process four time slower, so requiring you to spend more time hunting and exploring for each level (slowing down the skills four times essentially quadruples the “content”), encouraging you to take the side quests without worrying about outlevelling the main quest (which, thanks to the first mod, will adapt downward and upward to your level, but stopping outside a certain range. So Kvatch will never become impossible, floating within a smaller level range).

This gives the game and the player more breadth and even more control on the difficulty. The original game is completely shaped around your character, but the levelling process was also extremely fast. So it was easy to rack up levels quickly and then arrive at a situation where you have to fight the same epic creatures every two steps. Those two mods distribute the flow of the game more uniformly. You have more time to see low level content and explore without feeling like outpacing the rest of the game. The result is that everything should feel more natural. You may find quests that are too hard, so you have the time to go somewhere else to gain more power before you try again. Your level becomes a way from a side to still adapt the game difficulty appropriately, from the other a way to adapt yourself to the challenge. Possibly achieving that balance that was missing in the original game.

I still haven’t tested everything thoroughly but for now it seems to work and on the paper the ideas are solid. At the moment I’m waiting for the official patch to come out before I go through the game for good. Hoping that it won’t take too long.

This was mostly a digression on the design implications.