Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

[A Black Falcon]

TES shows how you make a big world: It's the same way Grand Theft Auto does it. You do it by carefully limiting what the player can do to a few simple things... so in GTA you can go all over the place, but only "interact" by killing people or beating them up and stealing their vehicles. TES is more complex than that, but still, character interaction is at a minimum -- it's mostly all the same canned lines that tell you how to get places or where quests are -- and the world is mostly about looking or killing things. I don't think stores actually keep hours (close at night, etc), right? The people in the towns don't actually act like they live there... you cannot really converse with them beyond "where is a job" or "where is the smithy" (the latter being a massive menu tree of places to be pointed towards that dominates the conversation tree)... the 'story' is similarly simple, and would fit a much more linear game just fine. The open-endedness? It's just the illusion of choice... as I've said before, you can do anywhere, and kill anyone, but what is there to actually DO? Hack the wildlife... don't expect good quests, Bethesda has never exactly been great at story or great quests (oh, they're far from awful, and produce a huge VOLUME (with a massive backstory worthy of a D&D-inspired fantasy world), but quality? Much more average.)... but darnit, you can go to dozens of towns (or hundreds, in the first two games) and hundreds of dungeons of various sizes (a few big ones, and many small ones), and kill stuff until you fall asleep from boredom! It must be a good game, right?

... okay, there is something to that design. It is fun to run around for a while getting items, exploring the world, and fighting the monsters... but it just feels like something is missing... interaction, the feeling that this world actually has a reason for my being there (a STORY, told decently, with CHARACTERS)... I know that there are great RPGs with minimal stories, but they are usually focused titles in which you spend your time adventuring through a dungeon fighting a sequence of encounters and doing puzzles... TES instead tries to be an entire D&D world in a box (I'm pretty sure Tamriel started as a D&D campaign they made up years back.), and as a result they stretch themselves beyond the breaking point trying to provide volume of content, while necessarially sacrificing true choice and quality...

Still, they provide an interesting style of game, and one that no one else really makes, so they have value, but every time I play one I notice all the ways in which providing scale forced compromises, often serious ones, and it makes me like the games less... but still, I have to admit to being drawn in by Arena for a while, despite its extreme repetitiveness, so... (though I did then quit before getting too far)

(Oh yes, and is it really necessary to have such stupid combat in these games? This is a PC RPG, darnit! Give it PC RPG combat! And by that I don't mean Diablo...)