The Gamer's Quarter - Issue #6 - TextFiles.com

(or spayed) like Deus Ex, an ambitious
world followed up by a weak and flawed
title that failed to capture the spirit of
the original.
PC games have always been hit-ormiss
affairs due to a lack of standards.
With certain companies, especially
those who took technological chances,
problems were part of the cost of entry
into their worlds. Origin did its best to
make sure each title it released was
more complicated and expansive than
the last; running them now is even more
difficult in many cases. The golden age
of the 1990s created the world to come,
in which the term “dumbing down”
would be used to describe any move
from perceived complexity to perceived
accessibility. Ultima VIII was Xboxifaction
before the Xbox—the closing of a larger
world in favor of something quite more
linear. 1
Dual-platform development does
create significant hurdles. It also gives a
company the opportunity to hook a whole
slew of new customers. Morrowind’s
adaptation to the Xbox created an
entirely new fanbase for a game, one
worlds away from its console brethren.
The Japanese RPG model that dominates
does not allow meandering away from
the plot beyond sub-quests and item
collection. It certainly doesn’t entertain
such blasphemy as ignoring the central
plot entirely; after all, there are fathers
to hate, giant robots to drive, orphanage
alumni reunions, and, more to the
point, God ain’t gonna kill himself. The
chance to write your own story is a rare
thing in the console world—but all the
manic teenagers on the internet, foibles
notwithstanding, are generally going to
do a better job than the cookie-cutter
geniuses at Square-Enix. You own the
story; you have deep directorial control
over what happens next. Even if what’s
“next” just means climbing more guild
hierarchies or rearranging the contents
of an adopted home. Earlier installments
featured hooks like Daggerfall’s banks
and real-estate market, as well as a slew
of dress-up opportunities—the rise of
personal webpages saw public demonstrations
of virtual finery and fine living
that later installments have not yet come
close to matching (though a project to
create unique textures for all of the books
in Oblivion is a nice start).
But depth is a tricky thing, and so
“dumbing down” gets another turn on
the whipping post. Oblivion features
fast travel, quest markers and for-pay
plugins. Ugly or not, some of these
changes make for a faster and more
streamlined experience; it may be dumb,
but some of us have to go to work, pay
bills, and generally get on with life. If
being able to drop back in and out of
the world and accomplish some quests
without having to take detailed notes is
stupid, so be it.
And what a strange notion that really
is, at the bottom of the spittle and
vinegar. Tying intelligence to play, no
matter how complex, is a good way to
crush the fun out of something.
And What about That
Whole Oblivion Thing?
You Know, the Game?
Voice acting is a difficult thing to do correctly.
Some folks know how to do it well,
but most are lost in a mysterious world of
ham and cheese; “so bad it’s good” has
been destroyed by “so bad it’s hard to
ignore” and the occasional “Eli, Eli, lama
sabachthani!” Morrowind was no great
champion in this regard, using far too few
actors, none of whom posessed anything
resembling range. Oblivion uses many of
the same people but expands the amount
of spoken lines to cover nearly every
bit of text in the game. It is absolutely
maddening to have to listen to dialogue
that was generally not very interesting
as text; hearing the same stories about
mudcrabs from dozens of bystanders
holding their own plastic conversations
just plain breaks your spine.
But the game itself? It is streamlined,
but it is also not a betrayal. Combat
is now engaging all the time, and not
just for the first twenty levels until you
become a walking tank. Its technical
flaws are few, especially considering the
lineage from which it emerged. Out of
more than eighty hours, perhaps twenty
were spent on the main quest—the rest
went into doing the same things one does
in an Elder Scrolls title, seeing just what
you can get away with.
Don’t listen to the crazed jackals,
for they are too absorbed in their own
image—reflected from the pit of the
glitch that spawned them—to understand
they stagger about in someone
else’s dream.
1 Ultima IX was more of a debacle than an offering, because it was so broken, technically and spiritually.
By the time it was fixed, no one cared what it had to say at the closing of what had become the
most ambitious series to ever grace a computer screen.
88 The Gamer’s Quarter Issue #6
Worship the Glitch
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