This week on Fully Ramblomatic, Yahtzee reviewed The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered.
Transcript[]
Kind of a loaded word, that, isn't it, "remaster"? A marketers' word. It implies that mastery was involved in the creation of the original, and presumably will be applied a second time. And without wishing to show my hand too early, if Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is evidence of mastery of game design, then pitching three eggs at a stove from across the room is evidence of mastery of omelette creation. I know I reviewed the original way back roughly around the time of the Peloponnesian War, but something tells me I didn't give it a fair enough shake; I was younger and hot-headed, and Oblivion was a very impressive achievement in visuals and game design for its time. Not for the current time, of course; nowadays, it's a janky pile of shit. But hey, now you can play a version of it with nice graphics, so when all the NPCs are trying to kill you with hate-beams from their eyes during every conversation, you can enjoy every wrinkle and pore in their terrifying faces, in a lighting system that now no longer looks like every character has a fluorescent tube light lodged in their throat.
I talk shit, now and most of the time, but I played quite a lot of the Oblivion remaster last week, and not because I was engaged by the main plot much, in which our primary task is to hold the coat of the actual hero of the story so he can eventually fight the final boss for us while he experiences all his significant character growth off-screen, because they could only get Sean Bean in for the afternoon. I became engaged after I closed the first Oblivion gate and stopped for a little sleepy, and some weird Mystery of the Druids-looking motherfucker came to me in the night, saying that he was really impressed by all the murdering I was doing, so he's come to me in a private moment to discuss hiring me for the dark brotherhood, and I was like, "Okay, well, one, you are aware this is a refugee camp, and there's three very confused-looking NPCs behind you right now? And two, when the hell did I murder someone?" Oh wait, back when I was saving that town, I did accidentally fire an arrow at a dude while trying to hit the demon he was fighting, and I seem to recall someone making an offended noise; is that what we're talking about?
But then it occurred to me I probably didn't want to disappoint a murderer who knew where I slept, and I was looking for some direction in life, so fuck it; I'm in. Guess I just Mr. Beaned my way into the professional assassin career track; hail the night mother and all that. And you know what? The Dark Brotherhood seemed a personable bunch of lads, so I couldn't complain. But it was while I was out on my nice, easy induction murder, I accidentally walked into a private house and maybe picked up a pot plant that had fallen off a shelf, at which point, the town guard fucking kicked the door down and told me I had to go stand in a prison cell for twelve seconds. So I did that, and a short while afterwards, some other NPC cornered me in the streets, and after I'd finished madly rotating like a merry-go-round in greeting, they handed me a note asking me if I'd like to join the Thieves' Guild. Fucking Christ, why does this keep happening?! How am I Mr. Magooing my way into being the world's biggest professional bastard? Fuck it, again. I'm a stealth build; might as well stay in practice. I just hope it doesn't make things awkward with Sean Bean when he finds out, when I'm not helping him restore hope to the people of the land, I moonlight as a stealing murdering Satan worshipper; I picture him making that heartbreaking disappointed look he made in Game of Thrones just before the axe came down.
The ongoing theme here is jank. It's painfully obvious that the entire process of remastering consisted of applying a spritz of HD graphics to the existing skeleton of the game, and that's why it's still crippled with janker's cramp; it's Jankee Doodle Dandy, it's Jank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys. But would it really be Oblivion if it wasn't? If we weren't watching NPCs walk cycle eternally into sideboards while commenting on local politics to no one in particular? Even when working as intended, it's still the Jankchurian Candidate; I cannot comprehend the thinking that went into that fucking persuasion minigame that feels like being a psychotic A.I. trying to grasp the basics of human social interaction while trapped in a game of Simon.
So while it does spend all its time janking the monkey, with that comes a certain amount of charm; it's just when the jank creates frustration that it becomes a negative, such as when you attempt to engage with the melee combat system, which is like watching police body cam footage of someone struggling to open a broken cutlery drawer. Fortunately, through the many years of meme-based cultural osmosis I've absorbed since Oblivion's initial release, I gathered that the smart way to play is as a stealthy archer, and fucking hell, isn't it just? It stops mattering that the melee combat resembles trying to wipe your bogeys off on the side of an operating bucking bronco machine when you can get triple-damage sneak attacks at maximum draw distance, so by the time they reach you, they can't do shit but impotently poke you with the twelve arrow shafts you put in their torso before their remaining three tablespoons of blood leak out. Yes, there's also magic for ranged attacks, but it's much trickier to aim, and whenever I had to deal with those fucking will-o'-the-wisps that are basically dots immune to physical damage, I'd run out of mana and end up having to sprint across three meadows being chased by angry punctuation.
So with trusty bow in hand and most of the potential frustration with the combat out of the equation, I actually rather enjoyed myself. I went out of my way to do dungeons and Oblivion gates, 'cos there was still enough interesting challenge in trying to stay hidden and snipe dudes from afar; kind of felt like I'm making a nature documentary. "This shy lava dinosaur stalks the plains of Oblivion, hunting for a player for breakfast. It will never find one, because I've just nailed its hypothalamus to a big stone todger." Eventually, the amusement wore thin, because by the time I hit main story end, my stats were so high, there was no challenge left at all, and between the sameyness of the dungeons and the overgenerous fast-travel system making the open world so much unimportant back-to-back Windows XP default wallpapers, and the lack of connection to or incentive to appease the NPCs for story reasons, as I didn't think anything I did was going to cure whatever serious brain problems was causing them all to attempt to tunnel through walls with their noses or stand stock-still in the middle of their bedrooms for eight hours a night, like they're trying to remember how beds work.
Oblivion feels, in retrospect, like a precursor to the Ubisoft sandbox model that feels less like we're on an epic adventure of discovery and more like we're going down a checklist; a murder checklist for bastards. But it did the job of kind of making me want to go back to Skyrim now, and see if the stealth archery build fucks it over the kitchen counter with an equal lack of sensitivity. So let's leave it at that: Oblivion might be an ugly, poorly-designed mess that runs like engorged crap, with a boring story, mostly annoying combat, and a robust savings account at Barclays Jank, but on the other hand... sorry, I forgot where I was going with that.
Addenda[]
- The other one who isn't the chosen one: Yahtzee Croshaw
- I also accidentally became a vampire at one point but I think I caught it off a recently used toilet seat