My Weekend in Oblivion with Chris

“Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion” (2K Games)

I spent a good chunk of the weekend hunched in front of my Xbox 360 playing Oblivion. Most of Saturday and a goodly chunk of yesterday. I got up in the afternoon to go over to our friends’ place to have some BBQ and loaded my save game onto my memory card and picked up right where I left off on Chris’ couch. While waiting for the coals to heat up on the barbeque I found the location of and slaughtered the contents of a main quest item and continued moving the plot forward. I’m approaching 30 hours into the game and making fairly steady progress on the main plot.

But there’s so much more left to do!

This is the first time I’ve really gotten engrossed in a single player game in a long time. I’m thoroughly enjoying it. The pacing is excellent, requiring some fairly long, quiet periods of study, searching through cities and countryside and then segments of frenetic battle and suspense. There are so many side quests that I think you could play the game twice and have a totally different experience. I will test this when I attempt to play the game as a thief after my current battle wizard guy (he’s a “Spell Sword”).

What I really found interesting last night was watching Chris play. I’ve been playing about a fairly even mix of side quests and main plot. Chris plays the game entirely differently. He’s a GTA guy and has spent countless hours playing the various versions of that on his original Xbox. He plays Oblivion in exactly the same way he played GTA: with all the helpful shit turned off. In GTA, Chris found that if you turned off the HUD it improved the game performance somewhat. This became some form of gaming masochism for him that has apparently transferred to Elder Scrolls. Also, like in GTA, Chris plays in 3rd person. He’s playing a thief and as a result, he sneaks. Everywhere.

Oh, and he’s turned off the music. Players of Oblivion know that when the music changes, there’s something around that means to do them harm. Not Chris! When something wants to hurt him, it usually pounces on him from off screen, ripping into his health and usually eliciting a howl of fear. What follows is invariably a bit of running while Chris fumbles with his bow and begins towing the creature while filling it with arrows.

We had a good laugh watching him play. He doesn’t seem to do many quests. The ones he does are of the “I need 10 nirn roots” variety. Oh, and another quirk. He only keeps 1 save file. For Chris, there is no going back. Only forward. He considers multiple saves to be a kind of cheating. He got burned by this when he got arrested for stealing something (he can’t tell when he’s stealing, because he’s in 3rd person, remember? The cursor doesn’t show in that mode so he doesn’t get the warnings a normal person gets). Whether because of a bug in the game or because he’d stolen everything in his inventory, he lost it all. His magical armor and weapons. Gone. But there was no going back, because the auto-save wrote right over his last auto-save. And he’d deleted his save game.

Is he retarded? Possibly. But he seems to be having a great deal of fun anyway. I find it impressive that he can take this game and completely ignore the plot / quests, play it in a totally different way, and still have a lot of fun. That is a mark of a great game. There’s something in there for everyone.

PS, Sneak up on mushrooms and herbs to increase your chances of harvesting them.
(I offer no empirical evidence of proof, only Chris’ confused world-view)

PPS, This would be an awesome Penny Arcade like comic.

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