The First Thing You Felt About Oblivion (or Morrowind), ... When you were a Newbie. Options

[ureniashtram]

Title says it all. What was the first thing you felt about Oblivion(or Morrowind) after playing for the first time? For me, I was lost and amazed. The view, forests, lakes.. It was simply amazing that I broke 20 hours in my first playthrough.

Also made a couple of mistakes.

First, I mistook the Roxey Inn, THE ROXEY INN, for the goddamned Fighters Guild. Probably because there was a Legionnaire and the Breton and his crew. The Innkeeper giving out the bounty for the necromancer's head just about made a fool out of me.

AND, mistaking Bruma for Bravil. Ha! I also took the Atronach birtsign for an Orc, 'cuz it looked cool and all that stuff. Got turned into a vampire the second I entered Barren Cave.
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How about you guys? What sort of newbie mischief did you make when playing OB or MW for the first time? List 'em all!

[Destri Melarg]

The first things I've felt about Oblivion: I was blown away. Just amazed. Unlike Kiln up above, I had no preconceptions about what to expect, and maybe that's a good thing.

I've told this story before many times over at Beth's forums, but never here.

I was bored one night: a recovering drug addict who had been into some rather heavy compassion. Those of us in 'recovery' need to keep our minds occupied; that's one of the ways we stay clean. Anyways, I'm bored, and I was also bored of all my PS and PS2 games at the time, so I started thinking about the "next gen" system.

...This was back in October 2008; I think the PS3 had only been out for a year. I said to myself that if the PS3 has any decent games (RPG-type games with adventure and magic and hand-weapons, like all the classics I grew up with) I'm gonna buy a PS3. One of the best things about quitting drugs is I had all this money saved all the sudden.

I went online to www.gamerevolution.com which is a site I've used in the past. I literally went thru the whole alphabet, reading reviews on various games at the time. I started with the letter A. Assassin's Creed was not out on PS3 (I don't think) at the time, and maybe that's a good thing, so I moved on to the letter B.

B...C...D....E...F....G...H...I....J...K..L....M....N...O....P....Q...R....S....

....NOTHING....nothing for any of those letters (not back then, anyways). Then I got to the letter T.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. What a weird title! GameRevolution gave this RPG an A or an A+, and I never finished reading the review that night. About half way through, I grabbed my keys & wallet, got in my car, and DROVE as fast as I could to my nearby GameStop, BOUGHT Oblivion AND a PS3 on the spot, drove home and hooked it all up! 10:24 PM is when I started my first character.

My first character was Lady Anne. To be honest, I don't remember much about her or my first playthrough. I was so blown away by it all! ...All the RPGs and "RPGs" I had tried beforehand railroaded the PC through invisible barriers, and offered very little exploration, if any. See that pretty path going through the bushes? Well you can't walk on it....it's just there to look pretty. That sort of thing.

Well in Oblivion, I could walk on that pretty path. See where it goes. That blew me away just as much as seeing Cyrodiil's atmosphere for the first time!

After Lady Anne delivered the Amulet, I totally scrapped her game. I started all over again with a brand-new character (whose name i've forgotten). I enjoyed that entire process so much (meeting the Emperor, leaving the Sewers, etc.) I started all over again, basically.

Phew.....

This is a great story, Saga (or is it Renee? Which do you prefer?)! Thank you for sharing it with us.

Like Kiln I started with Morrowind. I too was drawn in by the openness and the alien quality of the world. I spent hours doing nothing but roaming. I saw houses inside of mushrooms, cities built almost entirely underground to cope with the ash storms, and Vivec’s cantons with the floating Ministry of Truth. The Ghostfence was this incredibly majestic and intimidating thing to me for the longest time.

But even more than that was the fact that this world had a long and vibrant history to it. Too many times in RPGs it seems like the world is just thrown in as a stage for all the magic and sword-play. How often do we hear:

“It was a few years after the great war between man and elves in the land of _____...”

The smartest thing that I believe the developers did in this series was to include all of the in-game reading material. The books gave Tamriel a palpable history that could be quantified. You could read about a particular Dwarven stronghold, then pack up and go visit that stronghold. That just blew me away!

I remember the guard that recommended that I take the Silt Strider the first time I left Seyda Neen. I had no idea what the hell a ‘Silt Strider’ was. I didn’t find out that it was the gigantic insect parked outside the city until I hit Balmora. Once in Balmora I had a job to do... find some guy named Caius Cosades. The game didn’t hold your hand and tell you how to do this, it was up to you. That really made me feel like a stranger in this world, which is exactly what I was supposed to be. I wandered around until I found the South Wall Corner Club where a helpful proprietor steered me towards Cosades house. Inside I was greeted by a shirtless, balding wreck of a man with a crack pipe laying under the bed (It wasn’t until later that later learned about skooma). This guy turned out to be the Grandmaster of the Blades in Vvardenfell! Needless to say, I was even more hooked!

It doesn’t matter if you have an interesting world filled with unique architecture and fauna, if there aren’t great characters inhabiting this world things will still get old fast. That is where I believe that Morrowind succeeds over the other entries in the franchise. In addition to Caius, you also had Sugar-Lips Habasi, Aengoth the Jeweler, Persius Mercius, Big Helende, Gentleman Jim Stacy and Crazy Legs Aratamo, Master Aryon, Mistress Therana, Divayth Fyr, and Balades Demnevanni. Not to mention the likes of Mehra Milo, Nibani Maesa, and Sul Matuul . And who can forget the first time they met Uncle Crassius?!

i honestly think that your favourite ES game is your first , because you get something unique , something raw , from that which you can never have again

I think there's a lot of truth to this.