Played a bit more Oblivion this evening and I'm once again being reminded of how much I missed out on by playing it in an "achievement whore" style when it first came out. The game is infinitely more enjoyable if you just let it unfold organically and see what happens — you'll stumble across quests, dungeons, treasure and all sorts of things, and you'll inevitably get yourself into situations where something as simple as ensuring you have enough money to stock up on resources is an adventure in itself.
This evening I did a quest I've never seen before, which involves a mage who had been experimenting with a magical amulet that would allow him to explore his own dreams. Unfortunately, he messed something up somewhere, meaning he got stuck in his dream. Naturally, it's up to you to go and sort things out, because what could possibly go wrong.
What then unfolds is a completely unique dungeon with a series of interesting puzzles and challenges quite unlike anything else in the rest of the game. You have a "Test of Perception", where you need to avoid traps that are hidden in plain sight; a "Test of Patience" where you need to decipher a scroll written in runes in order to solve some puzzles; a "Test of Courage" that involves diving deep into a seemingly endless pit of water; and a "Test of Resolve" that is a straightforward battle against a couple of beasties.
It occurred to me while playing through this section that, while The Elder Scrolls is most certainly a triple-A series, the way it's put together is the polar opposite to a lot of other triple-A games. What I mean by this is that a lot of modern triple-A games take great pains to ensure that you see everything in one way or another — they either do this by adopting a linear "interactive movie" format, or in the case of open world titles, littering your map with markers right from the outset so you can see exactly where you need to go to see everything.
The reason for this is simple: triple-A games are expensive to make, and the creators of those games want to ensure that the budget wasn't wasted. What's the point in spending a bajillion dollars on a lovingly rendered scene if no-one ever sees it?
Oblivion takes the exact opposite approach to this. It buries cool stuff in the middle of nowhere, makes it dependent on you talking to one of its many generic NPCs at the right time, and often makes it challenging to get through if you haven't prepared accordingly. The parts where it gets a bit weird and experimental are by far its best bits — and you can easily miss them. One might argue that the entirety of Shivering Isles falls into this category, since you can quite easily forget about the mysterious door that leads you to the expansion for several hundred hours of gameplay.
And Shivering Isles is genuinely awesome; even in the depths of my "I don't like Bethesda games" feelings, I still thought Shivering Isles was great. But I feel like that's a story for another time… I still have plenty to do in Cyrodiil, from the looks of things!
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