Oblivious

I've been playing Oblivion lately on my 360 (as you may have noticed if you paid a visit to my 360 Voice Blog, an utterly silly but somewhat amusing thingymagig) after hearing a myriad things about it, ranging from lavish praise to accusations of being the worst game ever.

The truth for me, shockingly, is somewhere in-between. It's definitely a highly accomplished game from a technical point of view, especially given its age. It sports a gameworld that is absolutely huge, there's a bazillion of quests to be finished, and some of them don't even suck! Especially the Thief Guild/Dark Brotherhood ones. Though the selling point for most people was the fact that it feels like an offline MMORPG, by offering a huge world that you're free to explore, without having any Alliance/Horde douchebags dance on your corpse every five seconds.

Yet at the same point, that's also its biggest failing. It shares a lot of the most common tedious aspects of an MMORPG, namely myriads of NPC's that lack any sort of personality, a storyline that has no real depth, repetitive locations (honestly, if you've seen one cave in this game, you've seen them all) and objectives, not to mention that the gameplay can be a little grindy. Grinding which of course is as fun as shoving diamond-tipped forks in your eyes.

However, quite amusingly, Oblivion's biggest failing is what has been called its biggest success. It's an offline MMORPG, without any other real people than yourself. And it's this lack of fellow people that, in my eyes at least, hurts the game more than its peculiar leveling system or its repetitive nature.

Y'see, people (myself included) are usually pretty quick to overlook said repetitiveness in MMOG's when they have other people to speak about the game and its failings, ask for hints or just plain boast and show off to. Because, let's face it, the most important part in any RPG is to make your character so badass and pimp that you can brag about it to your friends, be they real-life or otherwise.

But killing the same wolves/boars/brigands over and over, with the only reward being some ugly-looking piece of armor that you can't even show to a friend in the middle of Shattrath? That's just not right.

I do not mean to say that Oblivion is a bad game. Naw, that'd be too harsh. There is some fun to be had here, but to me it feels too much like the typical Western RPG with clanky PC-style combat. Not that I mind Western RPG's, I actually like the ability to shape my own character -usually by stealing everything and being a prick to everybody. Or at least the people I (arbitrarily) decide not to like. In contrast, the completely linear nature and narrative of Japanese RPG's is something I can't stomach anymore.

The only real problem I have with this kind of games (long sentence ahead, take a deep breath), and especially massively open-ended ones like Oblivion, is that since there are so many things one can do and steal, I find myself playing them for such lengthy sessions at a time that they leave me with a feeling of self-discontent for spending so much time on a game by the time they end. Which is also why I rarely play these games, I guess.

I'm rapidly reaching Mental Diarrhea territory at this point, so I'll stop here before the smell becomes overwhelming. Until tomorrow*, then.

TL;DR version:

George tries a 2-year old Massively Singleplayer Offline Roleplaying Game, gets addicted for a short while, feels guilty for not spending all that time on Geometry Wars instead. Hey, high scores don't make themselves, you know!

*Tomorrow in this context meaning "any time in the following 300 years."