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Oblivion Polymorph Mod
Via Kotaku, a post on the Oblivion forums on a polymorph mod for Oblivion. The Kotaku story has a video attached, showing the shapechanging in action with a rocking musical background. The mod seems awesome, but I'm not sure I agree with poster Eckhardt's commentary: "This could be just the thing for me to forget how unbearably stagnant and boring I ultimately find Oblivion to be: the ability to transmogrify into huge ogres, gigantic walking sticks and carnivorous cephalopods."
I concertedly tried to play this on two separate occasions. I agree with the sentiment - under all that gloss, Oblivion is just boring. "Shiny Onion Boring" - the deceptive type that lulls you into a feeling you've *got something here*, but still ultimately boring and unsatisfying once you peel back the layers.
No. The game IS boring. And it's got nothing to do with what you mentioned. The reason Oblivion is boring (and why I stopped playing after having put about 100 hours into sidequests alone) is that nothing. really. happens. Become arena champion? Mud crabs can still kick your butt (I'm playing that gimp of all classes, archer thief). Save children, families, farms? They briefly will mention it when you come back, but otherwise, nothing. Wipe out entire villages, restore rightful leaders to their position, save entire cities? Some characters might change what they say, but otherwise, nothing. As you get more powerful, your enemies get more powerful, which means you're just as sucky as you were 10 minutes into the game. Except you wear more shiny. And don't get me started on the leveling scheme. The more you advanced, the better you got - until the enemies caught up with you, at which point you sucked again. This was a system that actually rewarded munchkins - no, it basically made it necessary for my poor archer.
Someone likened playing Oblivion to paddling in the middle of the Ocean. You do stuff, you exert yourself, it looks like stuff is changing.... but really, nothing's changing significantly. The reason I loved Baldur's Gate, or even Skies of Arcadia, was that stuff changed. Things got wiped out. Enemies that would chew me up within seconds at the beginning would at some point fall to my attacks. There was a feeling that the world was changing based on what I did. In Oblivion.... well, sometimes guards would attack me. Sometimes they wouldn't. Other than that.... it was like reading a giant book. Where it would take 10 minutes to turn one page, and where each story would be 1.5 pages.
yeah, I plunked 100 hours into a game that I decided sucked. Unfortunately, it took that long for me to realize that the initial problem would never go away. And that the side quests did nothing to help the main problem of pacing and actual story. Yeah, there's some cool moments in there. I'd say I've seen about 30 minutes total of them. That's just too much filler to qualify as a good game.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I guess I'm just the type of person they were targeting with this game, because I absolutely love it.
I just got done with another 2 hour long session... which brings my total game-play hours up to 112! Yes, that's what it actually says on the save game loading screen... I really have played that long, just with one character... and _no_ I haven't finished the main storyline yet (in fact, I didn't start it until I was _90_ hours into the game!)
So what the hell have I been doing with my time? Mostly working my way up through the fighters guild and the mages guild (I'm a custom class WarMage)... and doing every damn side quest I can get my hands on. I've also (of course) fought through the arena. I also enjoy working on obscure skills (alchemy?) and becoming expert/master with all kinds of weapons.
I guess I just love the open-endedness of it all. If I want to run around and pick flowers for a while I can do that. If I want to go climb that mountain over there (and discover another shrine with its own quest line) I can do that too.
I know I'm probably in the minority on this... but I love being able to be a packrat. I have chests _full_ of gear (where it even takes a couple of seconds to open the chest because it's trying to load the list!) and more chests full of ingredients... and still more chests full of books and scrolls.
Sure the NPCs aren't much to talk to, but I do enjoy the fact that they have much more realistic daily routines (sleeping, waking, eating, working, eating, sleeping etc). They might not be perfect, but I believe they add just that little bit extra.
But I'm not going to convince a bunch of people on slashdot.... I just thought there should be someone to post a positive experience with the game.
If you are looking for a world to explore, and love open-ended games then you really should check this one out....
Friedmud
My god, this sounds like soviet propaganda. What kind of moron modded this insightful?
b lins) and vary with your level but are entirely random too, and there's absolutely no point in visiting new dungeons, because they contain exactly the same loot and challenges as old dungeons (which respawn after 3 days game time).
Let's see the lies:
old school - linear, simple quests, nearly no puzzles, essentially hack&slash. Yeah, old-school like Nethack.
spoonfed plot - each journal entry spoon-feds you the next step to perform, NO THINKING.
depth - things you're told to do are simply foolish!
freedom - invisible walls, non-openable doors and scripted events that make you cry from frustration as you helplessly watch some fool getting killed and can do nothing, because the game took controls away from you
craftmanship - horrible bugs, hopeless AI, shallow scenario
The sheer amount - about 1/4 of what was in the previous part, Morrowind.
Almost every quest is an engaging and entertaining narrative - except of these boring stuffers. Most of quests are "kill X" or "fetch X". You go save some Jumbo Potatoes kidnapped by evil ogre or find 5 parts of machinery in 5 bandit camps scattered in the wilderness to gain access to moons' powers.
gameplay - it's all about killing monsters and NPCs. The environment is interesting and the quests try to tell some story from time to time, but it always boils down to killing someone to pick some McGuffin and bring it to the quest giver.
new dungeons and shirnes - sorry, but they differ only in layout. All loot is random, the enemies are location-specific (fairy creatures|undead|bandits|necromancers|vampires|go
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Oblivion, Oblivion. I uninstalled Nero so that I could play Oblivion without it crashing every 30 minutes. And it's a game that needs about 10 mods installed in order to be fun.
I'm still not sure if I love the game or hate it.
On the negative side:
1) Levelling system is one of the worst ever. Your early endurance score matters more than your endurance late in the game, so you have to be careful to crank it up in each of your early levels. Which entails sitting still and letting monsters hit you for half an hour each time you want to level. Ridiculous. Fortunately there's a mod that solves it, by incrementally levelling your stats as you skill up.
2) Combat system is tedious at best. Monsters scale with your level... and since spell damage goes up slower than spell costs, your spells actually do less and less damage as you get higher in level. OOO is a mod that fixes the most major of the scaling problems, and retweaks some things a little bit to make it better.
3) Magic item creation is pretty bad. Most of the options are terrible. Why yes, I'd like to damage myself over time! How thoughtful! Or you can either put a Feather (greater carrying capacity) on an item, or you can put +Strength on an item and get carrying capacity as well as a host of other benefits. And I thoroughly detest charged magic items. I don't care, tone down weapons or whatever, but I really hate the idea of burning through a stack of gold every time I whack a skeleton with my weapon. So I never use magical weapons unless the combat is way over the top. I haven't found a mod yet that makes all magic weapons permanent.
4) Combats are too easy and too similar. Pretty much anything can be beaten by left clicking over and over, mixed up with taps of healing spells on yourself. If you have potions, you essentially have an infinite life bar and infinite mana. How can you lose? The new combat behavior mod helps a little here, though it usually just involves monsters learning to dodge your 5 MPH fireballs...
5) Stealth is ridiculous. You can run a mile away from a monster and hide in a dark cubbyhole but he still can track you down and kill you. I found a mod which lets you re-hide if you break line of sight for 20 seconds, and have been enjoying using that. Also, a mod to do away with the bloody telepathic guards also helps a great deal if you play a rogue type in the game.
6) It's as crashy, if not crashier than any Bethesda game since pre-patch Daggerfall. And I only tip the hat to Daggerfall, since it wouldn't run at all on my Cyrix procesor until about 19 patches out.
On the positive side:
1) It's pretty
2) Okay/decent storyline
3) Has Jean-Luc Picard, the only bright spot in the terrible multiple-personality disaster voice acting for the NPCs (they use MULTIPLE voices on the same NPCs, it sounds like they're crazy).
4) But... best of all... the game is just barely flexible enough that you can do some really cool things with the chaos that ensues. Pickpocket an NPC villan. Stab him. He runs over to a nearby place and picks up a weapon. The owner of the weapons call the guards, who then beat the living daylight out of him. I think my version of the world has a lot more larcenous NPCs than in my girlfriend's... I find dead bodies of NPCs caught stealing all over the place, and from time to time I'll see a thieves guild member run screaming by chased by the guards, but my girlfriend hasn't seen it yet. I saw the guards blow away a guy once for stealing lettuce. Or I delayed completing an escort quest and ended up taking the NPCs I was "escorting" through the Oblivion gates. They come back to life if killed, so they make excellent party members as they fan out and take on the dremoras while I sneak up from behind for the backstab.
I like it... but I'm still looking for more patches to further improve the gameplay. The game design, as a whole, was terribly flawed at release.
But is that really any different from tabletop RPGs ? While I've never played them, I have read quite a few rulebooks, guides and pre-made adventurers - they are quite interesting on their own right, and I especially liked "Deities & Demigods". The common factor in every one of them seems to be: "How to stop the players from doing anything you don't want them to, thereby sending events into an unexpected direction." My personal favorite was how you stop someone who has the "Wish" spell from using it to solve a puzzle:
"I wish I could solve this puzzle."
"Okay, you now feel capable of solving the puzzle."
Based on these guides, it seems to me that the term "Dungeon Master" is quite fitting, since the basis for the job seems to be keeping the players from leaving their predefined path.
If a human being with knowledge and understanding of both real and the game world as well as human imagination can't roll with the changes and adapt to them, then surely it is unreasonable to expect a computer program that has none of these to be able to do so.
Can any actual Pen-and-Paper RPG player comment on this ? How much freedom does playing with a human arbitrator allow, compared to a computer ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.