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.
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.
