Matt Peckham writes for some magazine, has had a copy of Oblivion for some time before release and spent a good amount of time trying to break things in the game (broken toys! Is it not what we all love to do?). I really like how he writes and exemplifies arguments. If I could, I would recruit him in the mmorpg blog world. Or better.

Some quotes that say a lot more about the game than every review you’ll read:

Okay, since it’s out now, a few bones of contention. YMMV.

– The interface has been officially hijacked by NTSC. It’s not awful or anything. It’s actually pretty and clean and easy to read. But at 1680×1050, I want to see more, more, more damn you, more! Instead of scaling, everything just gets…bigger. Thank you Xbox 360, I love you kiss kiss.

– No pop-up tooltips on buttons. I mean, duh.

– No alt-tabbing. Crashy-crashy big time.

– Walking/running animations = stick-up-ye-olde-ass. Improved, yes, but I’m still waiting for a decent side-to-side ankle/foot animation, and running up/down steep inclines deserves at least a minor animation tweak. It looks really gamey when you’re in third person running laterally along 70-degree grades.

– The weather FX are a sliver worse than Morrowind. I had a pre-release beta copy of Morrowind back in ’01 and recall pointing out to Bethesda that the rain fell right through building awnings and such. Retail release, problem solved. Oblivion puts it back. Maybe it’s Kitty Pryde rain.

– No kids. Why not?

– Windows in buildings are always…blue. And bright. Doesn’t matter time of day. How hard would it have been to include a simple dimming trigger on the effect mapped to day/night cycles? The same holds for times NPCs are in the house and an option to see “lit windows” exterior to a building. Why should we have to check for locked status, or break in just to see if someone’s home?

– A.I. glitches. These were inevitable, and I can name twice as many cool things as I can weird ones. But for instance, last night a guard suddenly snapped and went on an attack rampage, no explanation…assaulted everything in sight, including a fellow apparently masochistic guard (just kept walking until his health dropped to near-zero, at which point he ran). Steal a horse successfully, ride it up to a guard, get off, then get back on, will get you a sudden “you thief!” The A.I.’s still triggering primarily off scripted actions/events/behaviors, in other words, not contextual information. A.I. “friendly fire” (not from you) can cause it to attack its peers incorrectly at times as well.

– Voiceovers are well-done in that adolescent boy’s fantasy kind of way (that’s a compliment), but we still have the occasional female that drops a male-voiced line (Oblivion’s nod to trans-gender?) or canned lines spoken through ‘rumors’ in an “okay, it’s a male generic response, it sounds close enough” way by many of the filler NPCs. Conversation topicality itself’s a mixed bag. It gets repetitious quickly, but in 30+ hours of play so far, every time I think I’ve heard it all, someone says something new that’s related to something I did and resets my impatience ticker. It’s vastly improved over Morrowind’s talking signposts.

Graphics schmafficks, I think the outdoors look great and I’m not put off by the low-res distance issues (though I’d be a bit grumpy were it to turn out the 360 was once again responsible). Nothing else, Planetside, Farcry, whatever, has tried to give you this kind of three or four mile spread (Farcry comes closest, but I could cut across a “level” in Farcry in a tenth the time it takes to navigate LOD in Oblivion). I can handle for now the bits of texture goofiness in trade for the landscape the same way I accepted (without admiring) the way roads in Arena zigged and zagged randomly to nowhere.

Qualifier one: I love RPGs. My favorite genre, a smidgen up from war and strategy games.
Qualifier two: I’m generally adoring Oblivion, don’t get me wrong. Just tough loving it here and there.

Okay, positives.

– The stat system feeds the physics engine in a way that’s difficulty to convey without experiencing it. Every single stat has some gradient relationship to how you *are* in the world, how you move, jump, shoot, fall down, etc. It makes the entire experience feel like an honest-to-goodness tiny-piece-of-world-simulation. You can really mess with the Havok-derived system in all sorts of crazy, genuinely interesting ways.

– Jeremy Soule’s score is better here than in Morrowind. I always disliked the trudgy main theme and the “trebley” incidental string effects. Oblivion’s still signature Soule, but classed up, imo.

– The A.I. will do things like leave a city on the east side of Cyrodiil and literally walk all the way to the other side of the province without breaking. It’ll take on critters along the way, it’ll grab meat (and who knows what else) from what it kills, and it navigates verticals and horizontals with fair aptness. You can send an NPC off to a dungeon or a house or whatever, and show up yourself days later to see the results of battles or encounters…or you can go with the NPC and see them actually play out. It’s Gothic’s behavioral system considerably trussed up and expanded.

– NPCs and beasties will follow you *anywhere*. Run through doors, into houses, up stairs and 2-3 more doors, and they’ll be right behind you. It’s much more difficult to snow the A.I. in general.

– I’ve mentioned it before, but the sound design’s a big step up as well. Different types of armor make different sounds altogether, for instance, and according to the literature, affect your stealth capabilities.

– The persuasion system/game’s much improved, essentially a little four-way mini-game that feels about right. Any more complex or involved and persuasion would be a gamey chore.

What makes Oblivion fun, at least for me so far, has been the way you can just sort of stumble into everything from everyday gossip quests or Sherlockian whodunit mysteries, to crazy cabalistic conspiracies and genuinely hilarious spoof-quests. Oblivion is much closer than Morrowind to being a sandbox simulation of a “slice of world,” but that’s not ultimately what makes it fun to play. It’s the individual quests and stories this time–and the voice acting and dynamic feedback help enormously–that keep me loading the game after dozens of hours pushing and pulling every game design switch and lever I can think of.

EDIT: Personally, I recommend walking everywhere and just pretending “fast travel” doesn’t exist. What I’ve seen of the main story’s been lots of fun, but for instance, I was near a city up in the mountains and happened to walk in for a peek. Someone approached me proactively and dropped a hint or asked for help or whatever about some issue or another. Ten hours later (no kidding), I’m 2-3 quests along and still hanging out in and around this city. It’s that kind of game, where the individual stories and personalities you happen upon are riveting enough to completely derail any “plans” you’ve made. That’s the core of cool in my book.

I think the idea in Oblivion is that you’re supposed to treat it quasi-realistically. In RL, you want to know what someone’s doing, you shadow them. Half the shadowing I’ve done’s revealed fairly mundane schedules (importantly with variability–they rarely do the same thing in the same order or at the exact same time), but the other half’s revealed some pretty cool sandboxy stuff, hidden agendas or activities, and sometimes just cool little “yeah, that’s pretty natural and makes sense and it’s unique to this particular character’s personality and current wants/needs” stuff.

(about NPCs)
They seem more like individuals, but not much moreso than in the Gothic series. They have agendas, schedules, wants, aversions, and much more specific conversational attributes. That said, they’re still area-general topic-wise, and you’ll get similar responses (though rarely the same) from multiple characters in the same city when you click ‘rumors’. The upside is, as the game world evolves, those rumor updates change to reflect what’s going on, so you have a sense–where in Morrowind this was practically impossible–that NPCs are paying attention to what’s happening, even if trivally so. Suspension of disbelief is still very much necessary.

(about quests)
Far more interesting. Most quests here are highly organic with half a dozen (or dozens) of stopping points along the way. Intrigue, backstabbing, optional ways of doing things (as in two or three or five), taking sides with one party or another, etc. Easily on par with Gothic’s in a good way.

(about the collector edition)
The coin’s pure novelty. The guide’s good if you care, else the writing quality’s a bit…on the lower end. Not as good as the old Origin Ultima guides (though much denser).

For example:

“At last, recognizing the original’s multitudinous anachronisms…” and on the very next page “Imperial scribes of the original Guide ignored this totality for multitudinous reasons…”

Or:

“…there exists a different understanding of how this world came to be…it defines us, this belief in where we came from…”

The DVD’s worth it, probably, though I wish it could’ve been another hour or two. They didn’t spend nearly enough time talking about the A.I. and procedural forests. I’d totally dork out to get the inside track on the creative processes behind some of those bits, not just the PR-approved gloss.

And from Charles, who has interesting observation even if he hasn’t played the game directly:

I watched Kasavin playing for an hour or so last night, and nothing there really said “quality experience”.

In that time I saw:

-about 50 little kobold like enemies that only shoot fire arrows (50 is not an exaggeration, I don’t think). Other than these, there was only one other enemy type, which appeared 3 times.
-NPCs running in to walls without moving.
-NPCs running off to who knows where for whatever reason
-Easily failable escort quests
-lack of friction for physics objects on surfaces (nothing breaks immersion like watching a ragdoll slide down a slight incline!)
-invisible walls (well, didn’t *see*, but saw kasavin trying to get on top of rocks, and there was obviously something blocking him)
-lack of facial expressions to match the emotion in voiced dialog
-the odd long load (but this may be console only issue)
-horrible looking inventory UI (I sure hope it’s completely different on PC)

On the positive side, combat does look like it gives a lot more feedback. Which is nice.

But overall, I’m still taking a ‘wait and see’ approach, while waiting to play it before buying.

edit: And just to toss in my favorite moment, it was a kasavin interaction with an NPC, that went like this:

NPC: “We lost everything! It was horrible!”

GK (out of game): “Oh, so I guess that means you don’t have anything for sale.” *picks merchant option*

NPC (cheerily): “We have many fine wares for sale!”

GK: “Hey wait a minute, I thought you said you lost everything!”

And back to Matt Pekham:

BobJustBob:
I’m impressed by this thread. It took months for the Morrowind backlash to begin. For Oblivion, mere hours.

Matt Pekham:
On the national cynic’s curve, we’ve all progressed mightily since 2001. And I think we’re also (all of us) just a little gun-shy these days about saying “I, uh, kinda liked it?” Hyperbole! Hyperbole! Did you just hear what he just said? HYPERBOLE! Nyah nyah nyah nyah!