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Friday 8 February, 2008
GAMEPLAY #2:
Once I was out of the sewers the game play style changed drastically. Oblivion became completely open ended. At first I forgot what I was supposed to do for a short while but the game's quest tracking system made it easy for me to get back on course. Now that I was out in the open world there were more interesting fights as well. I fought a pack of wolves on my way to a bandit hideout and during this got a feel for the game's loot and inventory system which is very well done.
My first dungeon experience in this game was a lot of fun. The lighting gave it a feeling that was both ominous and exciting. There were also some minor puzzles to solve and some fights that were actually challenging because, from what I have seen, the AI in the game is of decent quality even though the enemy units don't always cooperate very well.
DESIGN:
The combat of this game was supposed to be revolutionary and it was. The problem was that it wasn't really involved apart from the melee. The spell system is very unintuitive. You can only have one spell out at a time which is hindering if you try and make your character a spell caster.
The character development system is very intricate and a lot of fun. I love how you level up skills by using them. It allows for someone to build their character the way that they like it without locking people into a class based system. The only problem I found with it was that once leveled up you couldn't assign experience to skills in a different category which early on isn't a problem but after playing through a large portion of the game trying a new school of magic or different weapon style would be near impossible because of how ineffective it would be.
The game world provides an unrivaled interactive experience and lots of things to do. My gripe though is it's size. For a role playing game it feels rather small but most of my role playing game experience comes from massively multiplayer games which, characteristically, are very large. During the two game play sessions that I had I didn't run out of content in this manner but by looking at the size of the map I could tell that later on it would be a problem. One of the things that I liked the most about the game was the scenery and a small world limits that factor.
I could see game world exhaustion in Oblivion taking almost hundreds of hours as there is so much to do. Apart form the game's main story there are tons of things to do. Mainly the guilds in the world which provide their own quest lines to the player. Even though this game log is complete I look forward to being able to play this game more and realize that I should have started a long time ago.
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