No Man's Sky

I bought this game new on clearance which is how I get most of my PS4 titles. No Man’s Sky is a futuristic planetary exploration and survival crafting game. I’m not really big on survival when the word ‘horror’ doesn’t come after it but the exploration sounded novel and intriguing. This game is notorious for having a LOT of problems on launch and let me tell you… breaking news: this game has a lot of problems.

I started the game with no updates which was stupid of me. Without pretext you spawn marooned on a random planet in a random star system with your busted starship. There’s no explanation or suggestion on what to do. You’re just there. Figure it out, dipshit. Not having a real objective or half a clue in the game is equal parts mystique and shitty design. You’re in an enormous galaxy with countless star systems containing like 3-7 randomly generated planets and moons each that you can “discover.” Planets you find you can rename and upload on the internet and then when other people find them I guess it has your name and credits you for discovering it. On any given “undiscovered” planet you can find trading ports, abandoned and occupied facilities and downed spacecraft. There’s about as much air traffic in the sky as there is outside a medium sized airport. If it’s an airless or uninhabitable planet there will be robot sentinels because sentinels are EVERYWHERE, no exceptions. In space you might find a parked fleet of frigates and container ships orbiting and beyond that is the star system’s space station which every system has. You might be the first user to see this particular planet but in the game world you sure as shit didn’t DISCOVER it. It’s like if you flew to Montana and then put a flag in the ground reading ‘Commonwealth of Dickbutt’ because there were less than five people in sight.

Anyway, I’m here with no idea how the game works at all but understanding that I have critical gauges in my HUD that are slowly dropping so I need to survive and probably fixing my ship would be a good idea. I start mining rocks with my laser gun multitool to get ferrite dust which pisses off one of the ever present sentinels which starts shooting me. Annoyed, I kill the sentinel. I go back to mining and two more sentinels show up and start shooting me so I kill them. Then more came. There’s a message at the bottom of the screen sometimes that says something along the lines of “Kill sentinels before they signal for help.” That’s not a thing. That’s total fucking bullshit. Here’s how it works: You kill a sentinel, more sentinels show up. Always. Eventually you get the four legged one and then the near indestructible giant walkers which are essentially just AT-STs from Star Wars. The system is like the 1-5 star alert rating in the GTA or Just Cause games. You are trapped in an endless positive feedback loop of more and greater enemy reinforcements until you die or run away out of sight. Any time a sentinel witnesses you mining or killing an animal they will attack you. It’s never worth defending yourself because you’re just going to exacerbate the problem. It’s much easier to just continue mining and taking easily sustainable potshots from a single sentinel than it is to retaliate and start a war. This was really a shit way to start the game. I haven’t even taken inventory yet. I have no idea how anything works and I’m just instantly thrown into this fight with an infinite barrage of hostile robots. I had the misfortune of spawning with my ship atop a giant plateau formation something like Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. To escape the attack I have to jump off and run and then when it’s finally safe getting back up is a bitch and a half.

After you fix your ship you have three different components on your ship that need to be fueled for complete starship travel. Your takeoff boosters allow you to takeoff without a landing pad. Once you fly up into space you can engage your pulse engines allowing you to cruise the system at a moderate speed. Sometimes it will take you a couple of minutes to get to a far away planet. These engines run on trintium which you can get from mining asteroids which are EVERYWHERE unlike actual space. Eventually you can install an FTL warp drive in your ship which allows you to travel to other star systems but only certain systems, (usually just one) within range so you have to treat the galaxy like an enormous checkerboard which is stupid. I should be able to travel wherever the hell I want however I want.

The planets have a list of attribute variables which I guess are configured randomly to create all these planets. There’s atmosphere or none. There’s the size which actually affects the gravity, (how high you can jump with the jetpack,) which impressed me. There’s number of animal species and which species, extreme heat, cold, toxic or radioactive environments. Those all come with their own storms which quickly drain your suit’s environmental shielding. There’s of course the plants, minerals and earth formations. You reach a point where it becomes boring and you think you’ve seen it all and then you find your first mostly water planet or one with impossible floating islands or one with crazy half mile high hexagonal pillars sticking out of the ground. The game also has an in game debug mode that lets you set up perfect screenshots for whenever you see something really cool.

On planets there are rocks, plants, animals and precious metal deposits all of which you can mine for materials. Everything has a primary substance that it’s composed of that feeds into your inventory as you whittle down the object’s lifebar with your laser. Some items have a secondary substance that you only get a little bit of once you destroy the object. The game plays pretty fast and loose with elements and compounds. A lot of them are real, a lot of them aren’t. It almost doesn’t seem to matter or make sense a lot of times what stuff recharges or makes what. It just does. Some things will accept 2-3 different things as recharging fuel with varying degrees of efficiency. Carbon recharges your laser multitool. Whatever. Sodium charges your personal environmental shield. Oxygen recharges your life support. Frost crystals can make glass? But also platinum can make glass? Refining ferrite makes refined ferrite. Refined refined ferrite becomes magnetized ferrite. Refined magnetized ferrite becomes… just regular ferrite again but a lot less of it since much has been lost during the refinement process. You can craft antimatter? That’s kind of scary. Refining gold makes pyrite… great. So you can literally turn actual gold into fool’s gold which is doubly mystifying since they share no elemental makeup. Refining pyrite makes ferrite which I haven’t mentioned can be found anywhere and is near worthless. So if you want to make gold into playground gravel, this is how you do it.

Wherever you go you can set up bases. These bases can be as simple as just a base computer (which costs 40 chromatic metal to craft) to a building as big and complex as you wish to make it with flags, starship landing pads, exocraft pads, hydroponic systems, various discipline terminals where you can hire other beings to work. These workers will essentially give you quests that get you items or help you learn how to make new products and technology. Eventually I built one of my bases big and complex enough to accomodate all the important components needed to enrich my abilities to the max. I used the modular pieces to build  because it was easier and I hadn’t done much building before. There seems to be no erase or demolish button except for deleting the whole base via the base computer. So as you add on to your base having no Idea what spaces you’ll need next or where the best place to put them is you’re eventually going to build something less than ideal and you’re just going to have to accept that your base looks fucking stupid now or doesn’t work very well. I had one part of my base where a glass geodesic dome was stacked atop two modular square rooms because it conserved space and minimized necessary building materials. The only feasible way to be able to access all those spaces is with a ladder so I have two doors on the first floor to get in, a ladder going up through the center of the ceiling inside to the second floor and then a continuation of the ladder to go up to the third floor dome. The problem is the game has no way for your character to get off of a ladder unless you are at the top or bottom. Since these two ladders are seen as one you are forced to climb past the second floor to get to either the top or the bottom of the ladder. This means the second floor is virtually inaccessible and there’s nothing I can do about it. Because there’s no such thing as modular style stairs in the build menu that I could put on the exterior. I eventually just put a door in the second floor which I could fly through from the outside with the jetpack.

There are things called “journey milestones” where the game keeps track of how far you’ve walked, how many sentinels you’ve destroyed, aliens met etc. and it tells you every time you make the next increment. However I’m dubious of its ability to keep track of days spent on hostile worlds. I spent 80 hours playing this game and I only have a two star rating out of ten. The all animals discovered on planets function is just plain broken. I’ve purposefully scanned all animals on a couple of planets, got a little check mark message and it still shows me at zero.

You can get space freighters which allow you to store stuff and amass a fleet of different space frigates which you can send out on missions similarly to Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. You want to make sure the ships you send have appropriate collective stats to the mission or they come back with more damaged components which have to to be repaired and that is super annoying because YOU are the only person in your entire fleet that can fix anything. The missions run in real world time using the console’s clock till completion so when it says 28 hours it means your ships are gone until tomorrow. You have to build a command center in your freighter for every mission you want to take simultaneously. So I built three which means I could have three missions going at once. This is fucking stupid. It’s like if you had to buy one computer for every internet browser tab you want to have open. When ships come back they gain experience, you get paid and you get a payload of items gathered depending on the type and duration of the mission. My Freighter’s inventory is really small so I found myself having to bus a bunch of shit out of my freighter inventory to sell at the store or into secondary storage to have enough room so I could complete a mission and receive the items. You can build storage rooms into your freighter but they’re not part of the regular inventory and have only half the item stacking capacity. I built eight containers but the containers are all individual units which occupy eight separate rooms and only have five slots each so if I’m trying to find a specific item or empty spot I have to walk to one, open it up, exit out and walk to the next one however many times that takes. Why can’t I just upgrade my freighter inventory like I do my exosuit inventory? This system is so cumbersome.

When I get a rare item I hoard it in storage as many as will fit in one slot and then I sell whatever surplus I get. Eventually I just end up with a ton of money that has no purpose other than to continue snowballing into a larger amount of money as I make bigger investments and expand my fleet and rare items and materials that 75% of the time have no reason to exist whatsoever. One of them might be used in some esoteric starship weapon upgrade you don’t care enough about to craft or it might be some item with a vague description that means nothing to you so you don’t even know what you do with it. I’ve had main missions where I’m supposed to craft a critical item and then it gives you the recipe which says to make it out of two other crafted items which you don’t have the recipes for and it doesn’t tell you where you can get them so you’re just up shit creek.

I saved a freighter from a pirate attack that was the size of a freaking star destroyer. The captain offered it to me which I would have loved to take because my freighter is the smallest they come and I’d been having inventory space issues for forever. I didn’t take the ship. After playing this jankey ass game for sixty hours I knew dollars to doughnuts they fucked this up and if I switched freighters I’d lose all modifications to my previous freighter which I guess is realistic but I’d also lose everything in my freighter inventory and containers. I looked it up on the internet and sure enough that’s exactly what would have happened.

There are three main alien races: Klingon, Slippy Toads and Daft Punk. They have three different languages which you can theoretically learn one word at a time via finding devices, shrines, knowledge stones or asking for help from native speakers. Each time you access one of these items you’ll learn one random word from one of the languages which means in dialog boxes the word will show up translated in English. This is a big fucking waste of time because you’ll never learn enough relevant words to slap together a coherent translation because when you learn a word it could be practically any word in the entire dictionary which includes words rarely or never used in the game like ‘phlegmatic’ or ‘corduroy’ or ‘disingenuous.’ Really? I ask you for help with the language and you teach me the word for disingenuous? Don’t you think the word for ‘food’ or ‘help’ or ‘the’ would have been more useful?

One of the worst problems this game has is not knowing where the hell you’re going. You can build portals in this game which makes traveling easier but the more portals you build and the more space stations you discover the harder it is to know where each of these gobbledygook names on the expanding list takes you. You can tell what is a base and what is a space station and where your missions are to a degree even though it will only be as specific as which star system and not which portal in that system is closest. If it’s a different interest like that one planet you found with the uranium or tons of gravitino balls growing everywhere or your base with the big refiner in it then you’d better rename the planets and bases after those things so you can remember or you’re going to be spending a lot of time watching the portal loading screen. (I mean watching it once is more than long enough.) And another thing, the game catalogs the names of these planets you discover and what star systems they’re in but it says nothing else about these planets which really sucks. If you need to mine a lot of a specific thing to make something, you can’t just look at your list of planets, see which one has what you’re looking for and then go there to get it. You just have to go into space and fly around scanning planets until you find one that works for you and in all likelihood the thing you need is only found in trace amounts there and will take forever to mine because if you’re having to go on an interplanetary voyage to get it it’s probably not common.

Now this is great. I booted up this game again over a month later just to take some more screenshots for this post. There has been at least one update since then. In the twenty minutes of play I noticed:

 The inventory screen now gives you an extremely general explanation of what items can be used for, which is a step in the right direction.

I’ve never gone into my freighter and seen this weird bloom effect clipping through the hull. Is that part of the update?

I found a new type of quest and went to the HUD quest marker which was on the nearest planet. Then I found the marker was for this building which is cantilevered in the air off the top of a big hill. Not only that but I had significant trouble finding the door because the door is blocked by the ground so I can’t even get inside unless I use the terrain manipulator. Then once I do get inside there’s all this other terrain clipping through the structure. The game is like “Oh, good! You’re back! I have a surprise for you. Hold on. Wait for it… IT’S SHIT!”

There are so many little things that I could go on and on about like the paradox of specifically using my laser to mine material to recharge my laser or the ubiquitous multitude of near worthless upgrades you can install in everything and various other gizmos and compounds that claim to have a purpose but don’t. What the hell is quicksilver? There’s the fact that there are basically only four missions ad infinitum available at the missions board and HUD markers being wishy washy about if they’ll show up when you do a scan on your surroundings. There’s the pedantic randomness of what materials and how much of them you need to fix which random broken parts on your frigates and the frustrating walk back to your starship and the flight to wherever and back to procure said materials but let’s just wrap it up with the ending. Should you choose to follow the story it’s basically just a bunch of go here and talk to x and go there and activate y and then have a few 2001: A Space Odyssey existential crises. I don’t think I’ve ever played an open world game where the actual story didn’t feel like a giant hassle whenever you finally took a break from your own self directed fun, sighed heavily and went over to that mission marker because it was so close. Here come the spoilers… I guess. That’s kind of a misleading statement because In order to spoil something it implies that the object in question was substantial or worthwhile at some point and believe me when I say that the ending of No Man’s Sky is not. Anyway you find out that this universe is a simulation and what you’re doing is going to reset it. There’s lots of psychobabble to read and then you think maybe you’re about to witness something incredible. The game lets you choose one of four new galaxies to go to and then you go there and then it starts you marooned on a planet with your current ship and all of its components broken. There’s no cutscene. There’s no event. You just begin unceremoniously in the new galaxy the same way you began in the old one. This is bullshit. My ship had a dozen different upgrades installed in it and now they all have to be repaired or trashed. My bases and everything I’ve discovered are all inaccessible because they’re… I don’t know… erased or just in a different plane of existence. I still have my fleet somehow. Now in accordance with my understanding of the story I was prepared to sacrifice everything I had and everything I’d done but I expected to be compensated with a stimulating reveal or resolution but instead I got something that was no different from just going to a new star system and landing on a random planet which I’d already done a hundred times before except this is worse because my ship is trashed and my bases are gone. I understand that the whole idea behind the game is like the meaning of life is an endless journey but I came away from it with a message more of nihilism. I had fun in between all the bullshit but when I got to the end it left me empty. The game Journey I felt had a similar intended message but executed it much better and with zero dialogue. This was such a missed opportunity.

Conker's Bad Fur Day Soundtrack

YEAH! Who won the lottery? I DID!

What did I actually win? I won a drawing for the a Conker's Bad Fur Day LP soundtrack (2 records) I don't have a record player and I haven't played the game but I WON IT! 

The drawing was held by a podcast I actually keep up on called Ultra 64 that reviews every single N64 game and then ranks them. I'm still waiting for them to get to Mario 64, OoT, Jet Force Gemini, Banjo Tooie, Nightmare Creatures and Shadow Man. Anyway, after they did the Conker's Bad Fur Day episode they had a drawing for the game's OST on vinyl. One of the ways you could enter was to send in potential t-shirt art so I did that.

The significance of the type and colors is of course drawn from the box art for Mario 64, one of the N64's launch titles and arguably most iconic game. I added little headphones over the 64 to indicate that this is something you listen to. Technically I won because of the drawing and not my graphic design skills but they did say they love it so there's that.

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.