The immediate differences between MW and Oblivion...
A couple of weeks back I splashed out $50 for a copy of Oblivion. So far, I’ve been playing it with no mods, except for a free house yclept ‘Assassin’s Abode’ and the difficulty slider set to the easy side of medium. So, it bears some comparison with Morrowind…
The first thing I did was create my first character: She-Sees-Promise, an Argonian assassin, but obviously not a good one, or why would she be in the pokey? I managed to avoid most of the facial feature sliders that way, although later experiments with Dunmer and Bosmer characters showed just how involved and frustrating they could be. And believe me, you can get some bizarre mugs out of them sliders.
Obviously, this is radically different to Morrowind’s simpler choice of head models, sex and hairstyle.
So, after that, you kick your heels and play with the Havok engine, tossing bones and manacles around until the Emperor and his Blades appear, do a little bit of scene-setting, and off you go dungeon-crawling. I don’t mind dungeon-crawling, but after offing a goblin or two, playing archery practice with a bucket and such, you want to get on with it, not drag on through a goblin nest and so forth until the final end of the Emperor. Ah, but wait! There’s one more sewer-dungeon to crawl through before finalising your choices and heading out into the big bad world of Cyrodiil.
Tutorial: Overly long. Recommend a permanent saving of your game before the final sewer door when you first play in order to start new characters quickly.
She-Sees-Promise, being an assassin, prefers stealth and archery to close combat. The Morrowind method of threat detection — pressing T and seeing if you get a warning — works much the same in Oblivion, except that you get a dialog box warning if you’re trespassing as well.
Stealth is a toggle this time, so instead of having to hold down the CTRL key, you just tap to start and again to stop. Which is convenient, and having the stealth indicator in the centre of your view is very nice indeed.
Even nicer is the fact that your skills are apparently broken into ranges of expertise, so you get bonuses as you progress. These incentives to advancement come in quite handy, especially if your magical weapons are becoming too blunt halfway through shutting down an Oblivion gate.
Skills: Bonuses make a nice incentive to improve one’s skills, much more so than just raising the numbers.
Combat is a trifle tricky. Unlike vanilla Morrowind, you can actively block, which is actually necessary given the ferocity with which some enemies can attack. The time taken to switch weapons means that you either need to have selected your tools well in advance, or softened them up with a well-placed arrow or spell. Actually this isn’t significantly different from Morrowind.
Combat: Feels much like Morrowind with Combat Enhanced and Blocking Enhanced installed.
Something else tricky is making money. The rule is that merchants don’t like you very much if small amounts of dough change hands; I’m not sure where the cutoff is, but I believe it might be around the 100-Septim mark. As in vanilla Morrowind, weapons and armor are ridiculously cheap, and indeed there are some objects that are unsaleable if you have a low Mercantile skill.
Speechcraft is a more complicated affair than Morrowind’s selection of dialogue choices; it’s a race against time to click appropriate quadrants of a circle to boost disposition. Which brings me to talking to people.
Listen to the NPCs talking, and you’ll be disappointed in how they stiltedly sputter their set phrases, almost exactly the same information they’ll tell you. They also often seem to converse in non sequiturs! It sounds as artificial as the scenery looks gorgeous.
Also, I suspect that topics affect NPC disposition. Touchy subjects make NPCs dislike you, ones close to their interest like you more. Unfortunately the interface (and the damnable full voice acting!) limits the merits of interaction. Frankly, some investment in text-to-speech software and DSP would have freed up space for more in-world content and possibly given Bethseda something patentable… not to mention making modding easier.
NPC Interaction: Far more limited than Morrowind, especially in terms of conversation topics. Learning to use Speechcraft cheesewheel speedwise doubleplusgood Kemosabe. Oh, and making new responses for custom quests now requires not only good grammar and spelling, but lots of experience with digital signal processing and speech synthesis, or some good friends who can impersonate the original voice actors reasonably well, oh joy.
So… once you’ve gotten over running around the place like a lunatic, whacking anything that attacks you and getting lightly battered upside the head in turn, time for quests!
Well, here Ob’ is much like Vvardenfell. Your first quest in the main sequence is a “fedex” (i.e. take X to Y), and then you’re off to Kvatch to meet your first Plane of Oblivion, departing Kvatch as soon as you get your increasingly encumbered backside up to that Sigil Stone. Time to dump some of those Daedric maces, no?
So in quick order, you Take-This, Kill-Them, and Escort-Me: three of the four staple quest types (the fourth is Fetch) we all know and more or less love from Morrowind. Some of the other quests (e.g. ‘The Lonely Watchman’ at Bravil) are variants on this theme, but you get the idea.
Quests: Pretty much the same as in Morrowind, deep down.
Of course, quests involve exploration, and here the map raises its head. The world map, right from the start, allows you to travel to major cities in Cyrodiil, which you could argue is actually realistic, since everyone knows where the big smoke is. What’s somewhat un-realistic is that travelling “in world” gets you waylaid, but clicking on the map gets you there in one piece.
Points of interest, such as landmarks, caves etc. get added to your map, which is rather nice when you’ve got a cache of loot to retrieve. Despite this, use of the map is entirely at your discretion… or lack of patience.
Exploration: In many cases, as time-consuming as ever, but being able to teleport — ahem, “fast travel” to previously visited locations helps reduce the repetitious nature of looting dungeons, and you don’t need Mark and Recall at all. Unless you’re deep in a dungeon and have to escape real fast.
Horse-riding is quicker, but the payoff, rather like Doom 3’s flashlight, is that you’re defenseless until you dismount. And once you have a horse, you automatically saddle up when you fast travel.
There are houses for sale, but as well as being able to stump up the cash, you need to put in the hard yards to become sufficiently famed and respectable to be considered a worthy holder of even the most wretched hovel.
TAB brings up your stats and such, which are now integrated into a tabbed window. This is cleaner in that you no longer have four menus cluttering up your screen, just one, along with a close-up picture of your character while the scenery turns sepia. While it’s certainly neat, and not having your alchemy gear and ingredients classified as miscellaneous is very nice, it’s still cumbersome and rather large.
Interface: Some say Morrowind was a PC game ported to console, and Oblivion the other way around. They may be right.
The big question is how easy Oblivion will be to make mods for… and I have to say, “it’s hard.” The new model for handling and routing cells is driving me crazy, and all I want to do is make a house! I pity any poor soul trying to add meshes or quests to the game.
The construction set interface is, mercifully, similar to that of Morrowind’s, and the tree hierarchy for sorting objects is a boon over MW’s flat list. The general complaint I’ve heard though is that people are crying out for a NIF format mesh exporter that is compatible with Oblivion; I don’t know if that’s been resolved yet.
Editor: A separate download, and while the basics of object placement and manipulation haven’t changed, there’s still plenty of new wrinkles once you get below the surface that you’re effectively relearning a lot of stuff.
Like Morrowind, Oblivion has its grinding. Trucking to, through, and back from one Oblivion gate after another gets dull quickly, but there are sewers, caves and ruins for a change of scenery. But eventually all RPGs hit such a plateau and the challenge is to keep interest up.
As I finish off this draft, She-Sees-Promise has become an expert sneaker, landing critical shots with her range of enchanted bows. Practicing on booty has made her an apprentice armorer, and she has become well-liked in Skingrad after closing a particularly threatening Oblivion gate. Her current quest is to find a Daedric artefact for Martin Septim, but first she will have a look into some crazy Bosmer’s allegations.
Overall: This isn’t Morrowind, but an entirely different game, so assuming Ob’ is MW with better graphics will disappoint you very quickly. Extra abilities as you increase your skills, for one thing, and the Speechcraft and Security mini-games are significant wrinkles. The absence of spears, medium armor, and the human-style legs on the beast races will disappoint Morrowind fans. Despite this, it’s still a good game in its own right.
Posted in Games and Toys (Review,) by R Cruickshank 21/07/07 01:06 PM Tags: comparison, morrowind, oblivion, opinion
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