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More thoughts on 'Oblivion'
Oct. 11th, 2006 10:15 amI can't deny that this game is compelling, but it's also really, really bad in some ways.
Firstly, the artificial intelligence. It's dire. As I might have mentioned before, prior to release of this game the developers tried to talk up their product by releasing videos of their "Radiant AI", and giving interviews about it, most of which are horribly exaggerated or actually turned out to be plain false.
For example, the stealth and awareness stuff is really poor. One interview said, "Emil Pagliarulo, who worked on the Thief series, has been working [on sneaking] and its much more realistic, using light and shadow and how you are moving." In actual fact, it's almost entirely arbitrary. Some characters somehow hear you 50m away when occluded by 2 walls and you're sneaking in fur boots on soft grass. Beyond making a noise to show that they can hear you, there is virtually no other feedback on this feature. Anyone who's played Thief, or presumably any other stealth game, will see that the Oblivion sneaking feature is much less enjoyable.
Take also the example where you shoot an enemy who hasn't detected you yet - your arrow or spell hits them, then they immediately run towards your position to attack. They will run right past anybody else hacking massive chunks out of them to get to you. They will run straight towards you even if you were sneaking, or if you're totally out of sight for some other reason, and they will always magically know exactly where the attack came from and how to get to you. And, they come straight for your position even if they cannot reach you. (Yes, this is the same sort of 'AI' we saw in Doom, back in 1993, designed to run on a 386DX 25MHz processor.) All this means you can jump on top of a big rock, shoot an opponent, and they will just run to the base of the rock, milling around while you pick them off with your cheapest attack spell. This is my standard approach to defeating most of the monsters in the game because they're so stupid.
Surely such a tactic makes the game more boring? Yes, it does, but there seems to be little practical alternative since the game deliberately gets harder as you get better, scaling opponents up to 'match' your level. This really annoyed the hell out of me last night. I was doing the Mouth of the Panther quest a week ago where I had to clear out a haunted ship; I killed a few ghosts but the last enemy was a wraith that was much too strong for me. So I abandoned that, went off and did some other quests while I accumulated more skills and equipment. Last night I went back to that quest, but now all the enemies have changed to something harder. The quest is now pretty much impossible for me, unless in the future they get changed to something even harder which I happen through chance to have a secret weapon against. This mis-feature is supposedly to keep the game challenging, but all it does is make it quite clear that improving my character's skills is almost a complete waste of time. In fact it's likely to get worse, as my actual ability improvement rate apparently diverges from my expected ability improvement rate - I now routinely get slaughtered when approaching Oblivion Gates, for example. Very, very frustrating.
So, all in all, this game has piss-poor AI and scalable difficulty that punishes you for playing. Great! Time I wrote an RPG. None of these issues are at all difficult to fix.
Firstly, the artificial intelligence. It's dire. As I might have mentioned before, prior to release of this game the developers tried to talk up their product by releasing videos of their "Radiant AI", and giving interviews about it, most of which are horribly exaggerated or actually turned out to be plain false.
For example, the stealth and awareness stuff is really poor. One interview said, "Emil Pagliarulo, who worked on the Thief series, has been working [on sneaking] and its much more realistic, using light and shadow and how you are moving." In actual fact, it's almost entirely arbitrary. Some characters somehow hear you 50m away when occluded by 2 walls and you're sneaking in fur boots on soft grass. Beyond making a noise to show that they can hear you, there is virtually no other feedback on this feature. Anyone who's played Thief, or presumably any other stealth game, will see that the Oblivion sneaking feature is much less enjoyable.
Take also the example where you shoot an enemy who hasn't detected you yet - your arrow or spell hits them, then they immediately run towards your position to attack. They will run right past anybody else hacking massive chunks out of them to get to you. They will run straight towards you even if you were sneaking, or if you're totally out of sight for some other reason, and they will always magically know exactly where the attack came from and how to get to you. And, they come straight for your position even if they cannot reach you. (Yes, this is the same sort of 'AI' we saw in Doom, back in 1993, designed to run on a 386DX 25MHz processor.) All this means you can jump on top of a big rock, shoot an opponent, and they will just run to the base of the rock, milling around while you pick them off with your cheapest attack spell. This is my standard approach to defeating most of the monsters in the game because they're so stupid.
Surely such a tactic makes the game more boring? Yes, it does, but there seems to be little practical alternative since the game deliberately gets harder as you get better, scaling opponents up to 'match' your level. This really annoyed the hell out of me last night. I was doing the Mouth of the Panther quest a week ago where I had to clear out a haunted ship; I killed a few ghosts but the last enemy was a wraith that was much too strong for me. So I abandoned that, went off and did some other quests while I accumulated more skills and equipment. Last night I went back to that quest, but now all the enemies have changed to something harder. The quest is now pretty much impossible for me, unless in the future they get changed to something even harder which I happen through chance to have a secret weapon against. This mis-feature is supposedly to keep the game challenging, but all it does is make it quite clear that improving my character's skills is almost a complete waste of time. In fact it's likely to get worse, as my actual ability improvement rate apparently diverges from my expected ability improvement rate - I now routinely get slaughtered when approaching Oblivion Gates, for example. Very, very frustrating.
So, all in all, this game has piss-poor AI and scalable difficulty that punishes you for playing. Great! Time I wrote an RPG. None of these issues are at all difficult to fix.
