Oblivion Playthrough Part 2

In Skingrad there’s a guy that solicits you to stalk three people on three separate days that he suspects of spying on him. They’re all just regular people going about their lives and minding their own business. So now I’ve seen a quest where a group of crazy people incorrectly think one guy is conspiring against them and a quest where one guy incorrectly thinks a group of people is conspiring against him. I actually remember this quest from when I tried to play Oblivion the first time. You report to him three times that no one is watching him which convinces him that you’re part of the conspiracy and he attacks you. This time however when watching the second mark as he worked in a field I accidentally drew enemies from a nearby Oblivion gate when I went over to map it. The enemies came over and killed the guy. I told the other guy he was dead and he just assumed I had to off him. That seemed to be the factor which convinced him I was trustworthy so he never attacked me. When he gave me the name of the third mark I remembered reading the name previously and thought oh shit, I think that guy died fighting enemies outside the castle too. This happens a lot. Enemies follow me and everyone I pass along the way gets involved thinking they can punch a troll to death and then they become a casualty unless I decide to turn around and save them but sometimes I can’t. The entrance to Skingrad is littered with the bodies of enemies that I unintentionally lured there and then the guards took them out. I don’t intentionally get NPCs killed but whenever someone dies I take anything of worth off of them which is usually just their house key and then I go rob their house. Anyway, I’d already robbed this guy’s house but it was actually his brother who I previously got killed and took his key. They live in the same house.

On another quest I was asked to go investigate an argonian’s missing daughter who recently traveled to a small town called Hackdirt on business with her horse. When you get there everyone wants you to leave and then you find a secret cave system where there is a cult that has captured the girl. Originally I assumed she had been captured by slave traders but she’s actually to be sacrificed. Argonians are always getting enslaved or sacrificed. So I free her and then she has to get her best buddy horse and then we begin the slowest escort quest ever back to the city. The horse trots slower than you walk to the bathroom at night in the dark in a room full of coffee tables and she steers it right past bears and an Oblivion gate and then she has to get off and fight instead of just running away. You’re on a damn horse, woman. Act like it.

Another overall main quest is to get military support from all the surrounding cities to protect Bruma during the final assault. You talk to the resident count or countess and they tell you they can’t spare men while there’s an Oblivion gate open right outside the city walls. Every single place has the same story. Most of the time there is just one obvious gate that’s really close but at Skingrad there were FIVE open gates in the immediate vicinity of the city showing up on the map and that’s just the ones I’ve mapped. There may be more. I’ve never seen so many in one place. They have a serious problem. I went into the one specified Oblivion gate and shut it like the guy asked. Well, guy, your gate problem is all taken care of. How about them fighters? You should probably send them like right now while I’m talking to you without thinking or looking out the window.

Equipment in this game is so damn fragile. It only takes maybe three or four fights with moderately powerful enemies to send your smaller armor pieces nosediving to zero durability. Effectiveness of everything goes down with the durability so it’s not like you can just ignore it till it’s broken. It starts having consequences on your battle performance almost immediately. My sword becomes useless so fast I should be duel wielding a repair hammer with it to fix it in between strikes. I go into these Oblivion hellholes where there is nowhere to rest or buy supplies or repair things so I have to make sure I have a lot or repair hammers. The only thing I do more than repair is heal and that is so incredibly ineffective because I mostly have to use magic to do it and I’m not a magic guy. It takes forever because I have to restore my magika with potions or sitting on my ass and waiting. I have to conserve my healing potions for big fights because they’re expensive or I can’t find them or I don’t have the ingredients to make them because I don’t even know what the ingredients are because alchemy has no sort of documented recipe book. It’s just you picking up random shit from plants, tossing it in a mortar and reading what it does and it’s usually something worthless. I end up making it anyway for the alchemy experience and what the hell else am I going to do with 35 spittle sticks and scamp skin or whatever?

I spend probably more time recuperating from battle as I do actually playing in these areas and it’s not like you even know where you’re going when you enter an Oblivion gate. The objective is always to get to the top of a tower and grab a sigil which closes the gate and transports you back but every gate is different. They can have five or six towers in them with traps and switches and hallways leading to other towers. You don’t know which tower it’s in or precisely how to get there and it’s just a big pain in the ass all around. Eventually I realized that I don’t HAVE to engage the enemies. Hell, I chose The Stallion as my birth sign which is plus 20 to speed and I’ve been leveling up speed to be my dominant stat. I’m the fastest thing on two legs in the game. All I really need is that stupid sigil at the top of the correct tower. Once I stopped treating Oblivion gates like coliseum battles and more like American Ninja Warrior or the Aggro Crag from Nickelodeon Guts they became a lot more fun. The downside is you miss out on the loot but Deadra shit is so heavy anyway you can pick up maybe one sword and a scroll before you’re over encumbered,

One of my main abilities is security which is basically your ability to pick locks. Even if you’re not planning on being a thief there are still plenty of legitimate, legal domain instances where chests in a dungeon are locked or you need to get in or out of somewhere and don’t have a key. It’s a very common occurrence. Picking locks requires you to have a lockpick. When you access a lock a little minigame screen comes up with an interior shot of the lock and its number of pins depending on the lock difficulty. I pretty much never see anything below three pins (or medium.)  I know how this minigame believes it should work but as far as I can tell it’s fucking impossible. You need to manipulate the pick with the mouse to get all pins up and then click to unlock before they come back down. The problem is that the pick is so ridiculously slow and unresponsive that by the time you get one pin up and move over to the next the first one is already back down. It’s physically impossible to do more than a single pin. The only option is the auto try button which is basically a roll of the dice based on your skills to see if it unlocks. You just keep pressing till you succeed but every time you fail you break a lockpick. You could get it on your first try or you could go through twenty picks if you even have that many. After playing this game for sixty hours I can conclude that there is no reliable place to get lockpicks. There is no store. I’ve not discovered any black market that sells illicit items. You just have to find them around and they are not common items. It’s super annoying because I never have any. When I do it’s not enough to unlock anything. I just have to leave every locked chest. I also basically can’t level up this skill which means my character will in turn level slower.

Two of the main quests are to get mystic armor and a grand welkynd stone from a couple of dungeons that are predominantly occupied by obnoxious ethereal enemies. As you might guess conventional weapons do nothing against them. You need destruction magic spells, magic weapons or silver weapons. My destruction magic skills are virtually non existent and can’t be sustained for very long by my tiny magika meter. I have magical weapons but they have a lower base damage than my regular weapons. The magical charges wear down so quick and cost a small fortune to recharge so I never recharge them. Luckily they still do the base damage to the ghosts just minus the magical effects. The other thing is I can’t fix damaged magical equipment because I’m not a journeyman level armorer. Not to mention that it’s really difficult to get far enough away from unseen enemies to actually be allowed to repair. So I have weak magical weapons which get even weaker as I use them and I can’t fix them. It’s not like Diablo where I can just use a scroll of town portal to pop back into town at a moment’s notice so I have to run all the way back out of the dungeon and fast travel to a city where I probably have to wait for the armorer to open so they can repair my weapons and then run all the way back to where I was in the dungeon. My other solution is to use the pricier silver arrows with my nice regular bow which I can fix but then I eventually run out of arrows so I have to run all the way back out of the dungeon and fast travel to a city where I probably have to wait for the armorer to open so they can sell me what I can afford of silver arrows after selling loot from the dungeon and then run all the way back to where I was in the dungeon. It sucks. I guess I should be glad that there’s fast travel at all. In Morrowind it was just walking, levitating or riding an enormous flea.

Speaking of Morrowind, is it just me or is Cyrodiil a lot smaller than Morrowind. In Morrowind there seemed to be a lot more variety. There was more water. There was lava and volcanoes. There were robots and people in floating houses and people living in mushrooms. There were tons of little islands. It just seemed in general to be bigger and more fantastic than Cyrodiil. In Oblivion there’s just a handful of edifices and geographical features that you’re going to encounter on any trip and they’re all pretty standard fantasy fare and if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all so adventuring is less enticing. In Morrowind you could set off into the woods with the prospect of a mushroom village or a city in a giant pyramid or a goddess shrine with a massive statue being over the next hill and that would effectively keep you from accomplishing your main quest in the best way possible.

I made a point to close all necessary gates to appease the rulers and gather a big team to defend Bruma. I hadn’t noticed it but one of the towns that still needed assistance was Kvatch which was the first Oblivion gate I’d closed with the help of the local guards as part of the story quest. It was sort of an early tutorial on Oblivion. The portal here appeared within the city and the whole place was completely devastated. It’s burned to the ground and I don’t think a single person was spared. Anyway, I closed that gate and thought everything was done so I left and followed the story quest. It wasn’t until pretty much the end of the game that I came back to see what help they could offer and realized that the city was still under siege by daedra and those guards I’d helped had just been there waiting for me to come back so they could oust the demonic forces and check on the count. One look at the town will clue you in on how the count fared. All the guards with me got annihilated because the enemies in the city have now been scaled to my level and there’s like ten of them attacking us at once. This is actually the hardest part in the game and it’s all because I didn’t do it when I was supposed to. All these guys with me are doomed anyway and once they’re dead I’ll get swamped with an insurmountable number of powerful daedra so I just ran through. Spoiler alert: the count is dead.

The new emperor who’s been telling me what plays to run the whole game tells me we have to let the cult open a super Oblivion gate outside of Bruma. This is the gate meant to let out the massive daedra doomsday tank weapon into our world. This is where the soldiers you’ve been collecting are supposed to defend you and the city while the smaller gates open up. When the big gate opens and you step inside alone, you see the device and get a quest update. Grab the sigil in 13 minutes or game over. YES! This is the 13 minutes I’ve been training for. The only two curveballs you get here are a switch you need to hit and a sigil keeper that you have to kill to get a key to progress. You get the sigil and the gate closes on the machine destroying it but we’re not done. Now I have to enter a portal made by the emperor to go to Paradise, assassinate the cult leader and bring back the Amulet of Kings. You can’t leave Paradise until you succeed so pack your bags and pace yourselves. I avoid fights in all possible instances because all my gear but my sword is magical now, I can’t fix anything else and I need it in good condition for the boss fight. This guy is a powerful caster who can summon infinite minions. You fight him in a throne room that has stairs leading to an upper tier ledge on either side. I am so damn fast and can jump so high that his minions can’t even lay a hand on me. I equip my bow and go up high and the second anyone reaches me I leap to the ledge on the other side of the room and they’re back to square one. I get the amulet back and escort the emperor to to the Imperial City where… more portals open up. The city is under a massive attack. The enormous Mehrunes Dagon is now in the city and it looks like all is lost. In a last ditch effort the emperor uses the power of the amulet to transform into a huge dragon to destroy the monster. He then turns to stone becoming an imposing monument to himself right in the middle of the city. Wow. I did it. I finished it.

Oblivion Playthrough Part 1

Every once in a while I reinstall an Elder Scrolls game on my computer and make a concerted effort to try and play it to completion. I have Morrowind with all the expansions and Oblivion. Prior to this I’ve attempted three or four playthroughs between the two games and they always end inconclusively for me. In Morrowind there is a story quest pretty early in the game where you’re supposed to find some tiny-ass object in a large dimly lit Dwemer ruins dungeon. I have read walkthroughs. I have searched that place top to bottom in two or three separate playthroughs. I can not find that fucking quest item. This is for all intents and purposes the end of the story for me. I leave. I continue playing. I explore. I steal stuff. I do sidequests and level up. I have fun but I have no ultimate goal and eventually I stop. I don’t really remember what happened with Oblivion. I guess I just got distracted and lost my place. Think of this as a blog post and review hybrid.

So this is Oblivion. You know how it goes. You start on the make a character screen like “I’m gonna make a badass looking mofo!” Twenty minutes of adjusting slider bars and you’re like “Maybe I’ll just make a regular guy.” Another twenty minutes of slider bars and you’re settling for “How about someone who looks human.” Another five minutes of making changes undetectable to the human eye and you’re ready to start your adventure with the lovechild of Steve Buscemi and Ron Perlman.

The game suggests a character class based on the few skills you hone during the introductory dungeon. It pegged me as an assassin but all I did was use the scant amount of equipment it gave me as it gave it to me. How could I not be an assassin? You do get to ultimately choose but I just went with the suggestion because I knew I could immediately start training in that class because I already had the proper equipment. So I'm a Nord Assassin. Another important piece of information is that I have no manual for this game. I bought it a decade ago as in PC two pack bundled with Bioshock and there's no manual for either game in the box. I have to learn everything in game or piece it together based on my experiences in Morrowind.

When I got out of the sewers after being released from my prison cell and the game proper started I went to the nearby Imperial City to sell the junk I’d hoarded. The first quest I found had to do with investigating a suspicious local merchant with absurdly low prices that was dinging the sales of the other merchants. I was supposed to tail him after he closed his shop so I did. I followed him all night. He went two places before going back to his shop in the morning. Here’s what I learned about him. He enjoys talking about the same boring shit that all the other NPCs like to talk about and he never sleeps. Thanks for wasting my time with this bullshit. Not exactly a good hook for the game.

I forgot about that and picked up the main quest which involved delivering the emperor’s amulet which he entrusted to me moments before his death. I eventually find the son of the emperor, whom this is all news to, and convince him that he's the guy all of Cyrodiil needs as a savior lest we be destroyed by Oblivion. Turns out the emperor was assassinated by members of the Mystic Dawn cult which is a doomsday cult that keeps opening up Oblivion gates all over the place and releasing all manner of demons into our world. So I escort this guy to safety. Some things happen and dammit, the cult steals the the Amulet of Kings which is a critical tool in stopping them.

On one of my earlier successful side quests I spoke to a woman who told me her husband had been tricked and robbed by two ladies of the evening. He was too embarrassed to tell the guard so they wanted to solicit a decoy John to get his stuff back. She told me to talk to her husband in their house. Their house turned out to be locked in the afternoon. Not really knowing what to do I picked the lock and went in. I spoke to him and he told me when and where I could find the two women. I left out the door and AAAAAAAAHHHH!

These damn guards. They have some kind of shining sense and know when a lock is picked within city limits and will just spontaneously appear before you, highjacking the camera with an extreme closeup and a booming voice giving you a heart attack. It's like watching some kind of screamer. When you get caught doing something illegal other than assault you get the option of paying a fine and losing any stolen goods, going to prison and losing experience and your stolen goods or resisting arrest. Has anybody ever picked pay a fine or go to fucking prison? Maybe if you're a monk or something and need to stay virtuous when you go on pilgrimages and you can't recall what you did and when. But otherwise you're obviously just going to reload the game and try again or pick resist arrest and run away. Resisting doesn't even raise your bounty as long as you don't fight them. And while we're on the subject of guards with bullshit magical powers you can't talk to them or they will call you on your stolen shit. How can they tell? My stuff is in large concealed. Do they have x-ray vision? Do you just submit to a voluntary strip search when you speak to a guard? What's the difference between a stolen carrot and a legally obtained one… which I also stole from someone's garden? By the end of the game I had two gifted signet rings in my inventory from different people. If anything THAT should raise red flags because it makes it look like I've been stealing from nobles or I’m a con artist or something. Luckily you in large don’t need to talk to guards so it’s not usually a problem.

So I went to the tavern and made a date with the would be whores, (I guess they’re just thieves?) to meet at their secluded cottage at night. I went in, told them it was a sting, they jumped me and two guards burst in through the door to help me who were none other than the supposed couple I’d gotten the quest from. So it was a double sting. Apparently they needed an unknown face from out of town to play a john to bring down these thieves. Okay… well why in the hell did I get in trouble for picking the lock on the house that a guard told me to go to to meet another guard to do a quest where I help the guards?

At some point I had to ask a goddess statue for Insight on what to do next. Before it speaks to you the nearby followers tell you you have to make an offering of glow dust. What the fuck is glow dust? It comes from will o wisps which are conveniently nearby. I suddenly had a PTSD flashback to the first and last time I saw one of these in my previous playthrough attempt. I made the mistake of attacking one while exploring in the woods not knowing they're deceptively powerful and impervious to all non magical physical attacks… and they heal themselves and they are invisible 80% of the time. I quickly realized that I was outmatched and ran but I could not shake the damn thing. Eventually I came across a mounted guard who assisted me. I stopped to watch but I should have used that time to run because it killed him and the horse he rode in on. I kept running all the way to the Imperial City leaving a trail of corpses behind but it followed me the whole way. I passed the stables where guards and ignorant serfs alike were having at this unstoppable scourge. They were all slaughtered. I ran inside the city gate. It could not pass through doors and thank fuck because I'm fairly certain the city could have been laid to waste by a single stupid glowy nebula. But even after I more or less escaped it it was still camped right there outside the city likely murdering every hapless person wandering by making everyone rue the day I tried to hit it with a sword.

After soliciting a lot of scholarly help in deciphering four rare banned books I located the hideout of the doomsday cult and entered under the false pretense of becoming a new initiate. I did everything they told me to including handing over all my stuff and making a blood sacrifice. The cult leader I was after left through a portal with the amulet which left me alone with his tribe of weirdos and his sacred portal making book which I’m supposed to take for a backup plan. The second you take that book at least two dozen cultists are going to try to kill you and I have nothing on me but a robe and the sacrificial dagger. You can’t sneak steal the book. You can’t even invisible steal it. Super lame. The guy who showed you in and has all your stuff follows you around like a Best Buy worker expecting you to start stealing shit. I need to kill this guy to get my stuff but I can’t do it very fast without my stuff and the longer it takes the more assholes show up to kill you. I ended up nudging him off of the edge of the upper tier in the big chamber about four or five times which killed him without triggering a fight. Then I took my stuff, grabbed the book and ran. You know I was kind of disappointed that Mystic Dawn doesn't show up in the list of factions you belong to. Technically I completed the initiation so I should be in it. Maybe they kicked me out.

Alchemy is one of my primary skills. I guess the idea is that assassins make their own poisons. I like alchemy. I always try to do alchemy no matter what class I choose. Every time I see a new plant I pick as much of it as I can wondering what kind of potions I can make with it. It's usually crap. You're pretty limited until you're a higher level and your character can comprehend more of the effects of different ingredients. Every ingredient has four potential effects good and bad. You're supposed to match ingredients with like effects to produce a potion with those desired results. The potency is dictated by the quality of the equipment you have and I don't know, probably your training. All of that makes sense until you see the actual product. Potions in this game are ridiculous. Everything about them is unintelligible. You can drink one to increase your luck by five points for fifteen seconds. Yeah, modify the most nebulous stat in videogames for an inconsequential amount of time. Great. My inventory is cluttered with small groups of potions that do the exact same thing but with a one second difference in the duration so they don't stack together.

There are even potions that do the exact same thing like “cure disease” but one weighs more and has a higher sell value. How? Why? What's the point? And just as weird there are potions that do things like resist paralysis by 14% for 30 seconds. It’s such a tiny difference for such a short period it wouldn’t even make a difference ultimately. And I don’t even know any enemies where I’m certain that they cause paralysis where I would buff accordingly to fight them. Hell, I don’t even know what paralysis looks like in Oblivion. Is it when you’re fighting those anthropomorphic spiders and you just suddenly keel over helpless for a bit? That effect doesn’t even last long enough for me to care about digging out a cure paralysis potion from my inventory. You’d have to be completely neurotic to want to micromanage such a pedantic string of fights and largely insignificant tweaks to variables.

Scrolls do basically the same thing but have an even wider assortment of magical effects. What the hell does “absorb skill: marksman” or “absorb skill: alchemy” do? Does it make you level up that stat quicker when using that skill? No it doesn’t because it’s something that you cast on a target and it has an “X points over X seconds” description. So does it take from the target’s skills to buff yours? How do you know which targets even have those skills to rob? How does it work? Skills are not quantified by points, they’re quantified by levels. Why in the flying fuck would you want to buff your alchemy skills in a fight? Who wasted their time concepting this scroll? After experimenting with the scrolls I discovered that the spells which are cast on touch make a lightning tether from the target to you which Presumably lowers their stat while buffing yours. If you check your stats it will show the skill is higher IN LEVEL not in points because that isn’t a thing. It then wears off off after 10 seconds. Once again, who the fuck cares? Especially the alchemy one? YOU CAN’T EVEN DO ALCHEMY AROUND ENEMIES. IT IS 100% USELESS.