Eccentric Flower:201012/Dense Gaming

Well, I didn't go buy a soldering iron. All day long (in fact, it's still going, rattling the window near me as I write this) it's been the kind of gray rain that saps you of the will to do anything but go back to bed and pull the covers over your head. Or play computer games all day, which is basically what I did (although I did do laundry and I do intend to pay some bills so I can mail them in the morning, and I did wash my hair, so I can't claim to have been completely useless all day, even if I didn't shave).

Oblivion is what you might call an information-dense game. My frequent online gaming companion Mel (although we are sort of on hiatus now because there is not a single online game I'm at all interested in playing at this time, and I miss her) complains about the density of some of the games we've tried to play, most notably Dungeons and Dragons Online, because she did not grow up playing D&D, and if you didn't learn that language and metaphors at a tender age, the information overload in DDO is considerable. Well, Mel, I don't know how you'd feel about Oblivion. The play mechanic is quite simple, but the world is full of things to do and see and is very large (Bethesda is legendary for creating virtual spaces in their games which are absolutely enormous) and utterly open-ended, and it's the kind of thing where you have to take notes just to remember all the interesting things you passed by and didn't explore because you were already on your way to try to do seven other things.

I played it pretty much all day yesterday and pretty much all day today, and I was still level 1 until about an hour ago (granted, that's because levels in this game are only loosely connected to your actual skill increases - in fact some people deliberately do not level because of the broken difficulty-scaling mechanism - but even so) and I have explored two towns and some of the small stretch of territory between them. I figure, judging from the size of the overall game map, that I have travelled through about one-twelfth of the game's overall area. Travelled through. Not "thoroughly explored." Not "cleaned out." Just travelled through.

I can't tell you how much better it is playing this game now that someone else has done the legwork. I figure I've spent one quarter of every play hour consulting the wiki just so I can find things and not make any stupid missteps (like going too far in the main quest so that the game becomes intolerable before I'm ready, which is the main thing that put me off last time I tried to play this).

I don't know if Oblivion is a good game in the normal sense of the word. Strangely, for someone as plot-driven as I am, the plot-driven aspect of this game is its weakest point. If I played the game with the "and what happens next?" method I usually do, racing to proceed through the main storyline because I'm dying to know What Happens Next, I would be very frustrated. The main storyline gets nasty and tedious very fast, with hellgates popping up in random places getting in the way of your questing, and Agents of Darkness materializing and attacking you at all times without warning, usually when you're trying to do something else delicate or you're in the shower or something, and I'm simply not in the mood for that. I just want to wander around the countryside, exploring ruins and caves and killing things and finding treasure and becoming famous. Spare me the weak-ass old story about gateways to hell opening and spewing demons all over the land which only The Chosen Stranger (that'd be me) can close. Been there, done that. That storyline can wait. Right now, just show me the nearest abandoned mine full of goblins.

Now I need to go pay bills so I can get back to playing. Tomorrow is Monday and I have to get up early so I can shave and attend a useless meeting. I will then have nothing else much to do for the rest of the day (next week will basically be dead for me), but unfortunately I can't play Oblivion at work and staying home is not an option. So I must play while I can!

The good news for you is that it means tomorrow you'll finally get a real entry again. (I warn you, all the rest of the weekends this month are going to be like this as well. There's a reason I normally don't update more than once a week or so.)