“Toutius Sextius, do you know him?” – The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

**The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion** (Bethesda, Xbox 360, 2006)

I had saved the town of Kvatch from falling completely to the demons of Doom-world (alright, ‘Oblivion’), but it wasn’t that simple. Death and damage had already been dealt before the arrival of my plucky young magical Breton. Victory wasn’t enough to make things easy for the remaining Kvatchians. As I returned to the camp set up outside town, I heard one merchant’s plaintive cry as I walked by her stall: “I’m just tired. I can’t face it. I have to start over, from nothing.” It was a lovely organic moment that worked as an effective way of humanising the stakes in the epic fantasy battle, without going into forced melodrama. Then I took a few further steps and her colleague started speaking. “I’m just tired.” she said. “I can’t face it. I have to start over, from nothing”.

That moment, from touching to broken in seconds, felt emblematic of my first experience of Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls in general: an ambitious, deep, sometimes beautiful world where the joins are frequently visible. Despite spending longer playing it than any new-to-me game in Super Chart Island so far, I could also tell there was a lot more that I just hadn’t got to yet. Being a time sink isn’t quite the primary appeal of the game, but it’s certainly quite a prominent side product of its methods.

In Oblivion, you play a prisoner suddenly blasted out of their cell by the emperor of Cyrodiil and entrusted with securing his legacy right before he is killed. Many further details of your character are up to you, as indeed is the centrality or otherwise of the plot. Saving the world by ensuring the continuance of hereditary rule was not a very appealing prospect to me, so the abundance of alternatives was welcome. You can sign up to various guilds, with morality ranging from dubious to highly dubious, and do tasks for them. You can trade stuff. You can just wander around being nosy, chatting away, breaking into people’s houses to read their books and finding the juiciest bits censored by the church.

The abundance of possibility is initially rather overwhelming, but I settled into loosely heading where the main quest suggested while stopping for any passing curiosity. Somehow the first two sidequests I took on both involved people suspicious of their neighbours. I spent several in-game days following one guy’s requests to track various people and reporting back that they were doing nothing suspicious, at which point he turned on me. When the Fighters Guild then assigned me a quest to help out a woman paranoid about her author neighbour sabotaging her pet rats, it came as somewhat of an extra surprise when she was proved right. The juxtaposition was all the more charming for being largely coincidental.

You can talk to anyone you see, with the same mechanics each time. You get a hugely unflattering zoom-in on their face and a few line options, including asking them about rumours. For Bethesda, balancing the need to give the player important information, wanting to keep their options open, and resource constraints must have been a tough one. That is presumably why different people sometimes say identical things, in dialogue as well as in incidental speech like the weary Kvatchian merchants. It can make them feel mechanical, even more than sometimes stilted lines or robotic movement patterns. But it does make the occasional emergent gem work even better.

The same openness, and sometime accompanying ricketyness, goes right through Oblivion. Everything is visibly built on systems and details. Steal stuff and there is a system behind who might buy it, or what might happen if you get seen and arrested. Items are complex too. Every item has a value (though it is haggle-able as dictated by one more system) and a weight, and juggling inventory when over-encumbered is a frequent necessity. You can carry into battle more armour, swords, scrolls, assorted fruit, and small tools for winning ontological arguments than anyone would reasonably be able to, but hit a limit and suddenly it’s too much and you need to drop stuff where you stand. At its worst, I felt like I was right back in 1985 playing Fairlight and marvelling at the technical ability to pile things up without feeling any compelling reason behind it.

But putting bounds in place is a necessary step in making freedom work, and it generally comes off. For combat you can use a combination of blocks, spells and attacks, with abilities levelling up according to what you do most. Or, as I did at one point, you can hide behind a big rock, jump up and down and slowly wear enemies down with fireballs. Why not, says Oblivion, it’s your story. The pile of systems on systems is recognisable to me from other RPG experiences. I talked about some of the most joyful moments in Final Fantasy VII’s combat arriving from just that kind of approach. Oblivion just applies it with a much broader brush to everything you do, for better or worse.

The other thing that Oblivion applies that works throughout is to reward patience and contemplation. Its big world and the low speed of travel, especially when you can’t afford a horse yet, means it takes a long time to get anywhere, and that’s very much built in. Any rush feels futile, and just like in The Wind Waker some of my favourite moments were in the slow travelling.

I stopped to watch sunsets and sunrises. I watched gambolling deer as trees cast gently swaying shadows on the path. Oblivion’s beauty is mostly not that flashy, but it gets positively idyllic at moments. I looked down from the mountains across the land to the Imperial City and its tower, even more impressive than up close. And also, I let a wolf give chase across miles of road until running into an unfortunate merchant who offered it a better target, at which point I just kept running. I killed a giant rat which attacked me and then walked behind it as its carcass rolled downhill in a hilariously ungainly way. The game is what happens when you’re on the way to other plans.

BONUS ADDITIONAL CONTENT!

Outside of its monumental status among big open-world western RPGs, Oblivion has another place in history. It was one of the first flashpoints in an epic battle which would span decades. Just in case the words ‘horse armour’ don’t mean anything to you, let’s explain. Among the online additions of the Xbox 360 console was something new called microtransactions, or downloadable content: DLC for short. You could use your money to buy store points in awkwardly large batches, and then use those points to buy additional stuff for your games.

To quote an analyst from a Wired article a year earlier on the key benefits of this new technology: “We believe that an online marketplace will provide varying high-margin incremental revenue opportunities for all of the major video-game publishers with the [Xbox 360] over the next five years.” In Bethesda’s case, their opening salvo in the field of high-margin incremental revenue opportunities was letting you spend your genuine dollarbucks on armour for your horse in Oblivion. Fans and games media ridiculed this, protested it, and ultimately accepted it as the way things would now be done.

In the interests of historical investigation, I loaded up the Xbox marketplace, still functioning fifteen years later, and found the horse armour pack. I then parted with £1.69 (nice) to make it mine, and waited the couple of seconds it took to download the necessary megabytes of content. Once I went back into the game it showed me a notice in the same form as all other quest information, telling me that Snak gra-Bura of the Chestnut Hardy stables was offering to outfit a horse with armour for free. One long ride back to the Imperial City and a bit of horse-parking confusion later, I had my horse kitted out in one of the two armour designs on offer.

If I wanted to see the other armour design, or equip either on another horse, it would still cost me a decent sized wodge of in-game cash. This gesture to realism regarding the commerce of Cyrodiil felt pretty telling regarding the bind of DLC in general. I had paid to make myself an exception, a lucky winner of a free voucher. In the game, this was the latest input which the variety of systems were trying to roll with in the same manner as previous ones like my stealing a (different) horse. But much of the game and its promise of immersion relies on the player feeling like they aren’t an exception. Trying to break that in a limited and specific way without bringing the whole thing down is quite the tightrope to walk.

I rode out and watched the evening sunlight glinting off the metal.