Thursday 11 January, 2007

I continued on my Fighter's Guild quest line, but the next step in the series was an odd quest. I had to collect five ectoplasm for a person in Leyawiin so that she would employ the other Fighter's Guild members in that city. This was the first time I was given a quest that did not guide me to the place I needed to go. I knew I needed to find ghosts because they drop ectoplasm, but I did not know where to find any ghosts. I had only encountered about three in my entire experience with this game so far. Thus, I did what any lost gamer would do (besides flip out and kill his computer). I turned to the internet. It told me that in the city of Anvil, there were a couple quests that would provide me with more than enough ectoplasm. I ventured there and talked to a few people on the streets. I discovered that a man was selling a house for "cheap". Unfortunately, cheap meant 5000 gold coins, of which I only had 7800, so I grudgingly paid him the sum, since the title of the quest had something to do with spirits. I figured I could kill some ghosts, get some ectoplasm, and be out of there. Little did I know, the ghosts in the house appear three at once after you sleep in the bed. I was completely unable to kill them all, so I had to run around and close them behind doors in order to single them out to kill them. It was extremely arduous, time consuming, and not a fruitful use of my time. Next time, I intend to research each quest and the level required to complete it before embarking on such an adventure. Sadly, I believe there is no way to judge the difficulty of quests in-game. I foresee a windowed Oblivion in my future.

In a way thats part of what I liked about Oblivion though. Because it was so unpredictable it somehow felt a little more real. Although the Oblivion UI has to go. Just reeks of "We made this on Xbox and ported to PC as an afterthought."

If you were on the design team, though, how would you change the quest system? Perhaps something like warnings from people like "By the way, the last 4 people we sent are dead" or the like. Though...I think they tried to do that sometimes...but seemed to be no corrolation between the warnings people gave you and the actual risk involved.

I remember that Anvil house quest though. Personally, I thought it was kind of fun owning a haunted house. I'd stash all my daedric parephenilia around the kitchen and just sort of ignore the bed. Well, until I got annoyed and finished the quest. *shrug* Good times.