Lee's Blog

With Morrowind, Bethesda Softworks made an interesting decision. They released, free for download, The Elder Scrolls Construction Engine. This engine is certainly akin to the program they used to create the Morrowind game space and the Oblivion game space, if it isn’t the program itself. With it, users could change the game space entirely on their own, without input or permission from Bethesda.

And so users did change the game space. They wrote mods (short for modifications) to change everything that could be changed.

Don’t like the way the whole world levels up with you? Go through and change the base level and player-based level factor for every single NPC (non-player character) and random encounter in the game. A number of people did that. See, for instance, Oscuros Oblivion Overhaul. Changes like this tend to be part of overhauls that rebalance the game by changing the damage from weapons, change the effects of magic, change the characteristics of monsters … Basically they create a different game that still looks like Oblivion.

Don’t like the appearance of the buildings, the roads, the furniture? Make your own textures to replace them. The biggest of these texture replacers that I know of is Qarl’s Texture Pack, more than two gigabytes in size.

Don’t like the bland, boring NPC faces? There are more than a thousand, but that’s okay; someone has gone through and changed every last one of them.

Don’t like the bland, boring terrain? (I didn’t think it was boring until I saw what could be done with it.) There is a team working together on a project called “Unique Landscapes” that is hand-crafting interesting terrain. Instead of kind of hilly terrain with generic trees, they have redwoods or cypress trees, little streams with little bridges over them, ravines, swamps — I haven’t seen anything like all of it, and am looking forward to just wandering through it.

Does the City of Bravil, supposed to be the haunt of criminals, look just as clean and beautiful as all the other cities? No problem; there’s a German group that completely redid it. To give an idea of the new look, the mod is called “Blood and Mud”. Bravil is another place that I am looking forward to visiting.

Even little stuff: the gold coins look like grimy nickels to me. Other people hate the appearance too, so there are little mods that fix the appearance of just the gold coins, such as this.

And on, and on … if you’re like me, you can spend days looking at mods rather than actually, you know, playing the game.

I bought Oblivion when it first came out a couple of years ago, but quickly discovered that I had no computer anywhere that was capable of running it (those crummy video cards, again), so I put it aside and didn’t think about it. However, when I found that my laptop just couldn’t manage the monitors that I wanted to use (I use two when I remote-desktop into the office computer), I got the new desktop with Vista, about which I have complained mightily. It occurred to me after a while that perhaps this new computer would handle Oblivion, so I installed it and indeed it worked.

In a nutshell, the game started with your character in a jail cell. The Emperor and a few guards come through the cell, trying to escape assassins through the secret door therein. Your character tags along, but the guards are slowly killed off and then the Emperor himself is killed after giving you an amulet and charging you to take it to a person named Jauffre. At that point, you can finish the escape and go out into the wide world.

Being a literal-minded person, when I first started the game, I immediately headed for Jauffre and gave him the amulet. He charged me to go find a person named Martin (the heir to the Emperor), which I immediately did. Getting to Martin required going into Oblivion (the game equivalent of Hell, complete with lava everywhere), so I immediately did. I fought my way through Oblivion, then through the besieged town, and brought Martin out safely.

And then I stopped.

Because I had done everything immediately, as soon as I was told to do it, I had gotten no experience along the way. I was still just a first level character, the weakest I could be, and yet I had survived in Oblivion. That didn’t hardly seem right.

Furthermore, several non-player characters (NPCs) had followed me into the besieged town, and they had all gotten killed. That bothered me. I wanted to be able to protect them better.

So, I backed up to an earlier saved game and got a little experience before going to get Martin. Now I was fifth level and should have mopped the floor with the monsters in Oblivion. Except … these were different and much tougher monsters. I did make it through, we all charged into the town, and all the NPCs got killed again because although I was much stronger than the first time, the monsters were much stronger too.

Something is wrong with this picture.

So I went online and quickly discovered that there is an active Oblivion-gaming community. There is even a wiki where all your questions are answered. This helpfully informed me that in Oblivion, the world revolves around you. When you are low-level, so is everyone else. As you level-up, so does everyone else, so the level of challenge in Oblivion, for instance, will always be the same (barely survivable).

No, don’t like that at all. Some areas, like Oblivion, should be barely survivable even for high-level characters, and suicidal for low-level characters; others should be a serious challenge for a low-level character but no sweat for a high-level character. Rewards should be proportional, of course. If you’re beating up on little goblins, whose idea of combat is “scream and leap”, then you should get at most a few gold pieces off them. If you’re taking on a nest of vampires, you should get some serious treasure.

But that’s not how Oblivion works.

Or at least, that’s not how vanilla Oblivion works. At this point I discovered mods.

To be continued …

This is an image from Oblivion. I have no idea what the skeleton is doing there. It does not move and my character can’t seem to interact with it. I’m guessing the local medical students put the skeleton there as a prank. That thing in its right hand is a beer bottle. The bright orange stuff at the top left is the flame of the torch I am using to illuminate it. Note the detail on the wall.

This is why one might want to just wander around. There are just interesting things to find around every corner.

Between Daggerfall and Oblivion was Morrowind. I have it, but I never got around to playing it. Part of the reason is that I never had a computer capable of doing a good job with it. I buy computers for raw power (lots of RAM, fast multiple processors, big hard drives), but not for gaming. Thus, my computers tend to have whatever video card is handy, and no sound card at all. “Whatever video card is handy” has gotten increasingly powerful, which is why my mere laptop can handle Daggerfall without breaking a sweat, but whatever I had when I bought Morrowind was not good enough.

The frame rate for Morrowind was painfully low, so low as to make me physically nauseated from the jerkiness. Furthermore, it was not “fantasy medieval”, as best I could tell. It was fantasy, all right, but not medieval. The animals weren’t recognizable; the cities were totally unlike medieval cities; even the clothes were wrong. Which is fine, if you want to play in an alien environment, but not if you like running around in a fantasy medieval setting.

Thus, I never played Morrowind. I have read comments about it that suggest that perhaps I should give it a second chance.

Daggerfall was in one sense much smaller than Arena — the action was limited to a corner of Arena’s world — but in another sense larger. Arena’s world was simpler and less individualized, as was necessary given the less powerful computers when Arena came out. Daggerfall had much, much more complex dungeons; some cities were individualized; there were non-player characters (NPCs) that you could interact with in a somewhat more natural fashion. The tasks were still fed to you, but you could pretty much ignore them, and I did.

Instead, I would simply wander around, enjoying the scenery and the weather, simply looking at the cities, buying clothes to dress up my character in different ways, trying to acquire matched sets of different kinds of armor, trying to work out how to use the rules as I had in Arena. The result is that I had some extremely powerful characters, capable of brushing aside all enemies as in Arena, but I never actually got around to winning the game.

I played with Daggerfall off and on for years. Every few months, I would get frustrated at work, and I would come home and fire up Daggerfall, wander for a while, and feel better. Unfortunately, as my computers became more powerful, they also became incompatible with Daggerfall. I had to keep one old computer around for the sole purpose of playing Daggerfall. I left it behind when I came to New York, so couldn’t get my occasional Daggerfall fix.

Fortunately there are a lot of clever people out there, and through Amazon I found a company that had written a special DOS box that enables old programs like Daggerfall to run. I have not tried it on the Vista machine, but my laptop, while too pitiful to use for any other purpose, works just fine for Daggerfall. I’m not the only one who still plays it; Bethesda SoftWorks has forums for people to comment on their games, and the last post about Daggerfall was yesterday.

And I still haven’t won the game. Given that I have Oblivion now, I don’t think I ever will.

Of the three games in the previous post, the only game I ever “won” was Arena. It had a series of tasks that were fed to you in sequence, so although there were plenty of other things you could do, including just hanging out watching the sun set, you did know what to do next to advance the game. As is my wont, I spent a lot of time exploring the rules of the game — what you could and could not do with magic, what objects were available to help you — with the result that I worked out how to make the ultimately powerful character.

As I progressed through the required tasks, my character got stronger and stronger, until he would simply walk in, brush all the enemies aside, and explore the area until he found whatever he was supposed to be looking for. I enjoyed the exploring part much more than the fighting part, so it was fine with me that my character had become so powerful that fights were no threat.

Finally, my character walked into another building for another task, brushed aside all the enemies, explored for a while, and — oops, game over, we just found the ultimate goal. But wait! Wasn’t there supposed to be a major bad guy around here? So I reloaded a saved game, went back in, checked out each enemy before flattening it, and … oh, here he is. My character was so powerful that he had just wiped the major bad guy out without noticing him.

So that implied, perhaps, that the game was a bit unbalanced. If I could win it …

My secret vice (not secret anymore!) is that I like certain selected computer games. Only certain ones; most of them make me bored and impatient. In the past decade or more, in fact, there have been only three: Arena, Daggerfall, and now Oblivion.

All three are fantasy-medieval role-playing games, all set in the same world, in fact. They all feature sword-and-sorcery action, but they also all have landscapes that you can wander around in, weather like snow and thunderstorms, night skies … just another world to explore.

So since this is my blog and I can do whatever I want (and it’s basically talking to myself anyway), I will talk for a while about computer games.