Ten Years of Oblivion, y'all. Options

[Renee]

Have some cake, folks. Tomorrow shall be a celebration!

October 24, 2008 is the day (actually it was night) when I first discovered TES IV: Oblivion. Although I had seen a Bethesda game in the early 2000s; I was at a party and somebody was playing a brand-new game on the brand-new Xbox, and this game had a lot of fog in it and LOTS of room to roam around, I remained clueless about it. I have a slim memory of asking the guy who was playing "hey, what's the name of this game?" And his answer (The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind) would've been too complicated to remember. Perhaps I wrote the name down. If so, I lost that scrap of paper.

One thing which struck was the way its world seemed endless. It went on and on and on. Thinking back, now I realize the guy was roaming around the Pelagiad area at the time. Everything was sort of Dr. Seuss-looking and colorful. Another memory from that party: I kept thinking that at some point, all of this would end. The guy would accomplish some task and then a huge banner would flash across the screen...

CONGRATULATONS, YOU HAVE GAINED LEVEL 6!!!!

... and then this "world" would end and he'd be in the next one, sort of like Tomb Raider. But that never happened. There was just one world to explore, and it was huge.

I spent much of the 2000s looking for this game, unknowing that it was never released on Playstation. During my search for that game, I bought and tried plenty of others on PS and PS2, hoping I'd find the mysterious one with all the fog in it. Of course, I never did.

Fast-forward to October 24, 2008. I was bored one night. I had a bit of money saved, and began to think if there's anything worthwhile on the PS3, I'll go ahead and get a PS3 then. So I went to GameRevolution.com (my favorite gaming website at the time) and began reading their PS3 reviews, starting with the As. Assassin's Creed was not out yet. I'm pretty certain I would have just stopped at AC if it had been out. Thankfully, it was not, or was not on PS3 yet.

I moved on to the Bs. Then the Cs. The Ds. Es. F.... G ... H .. I JKLMNOPQRST.

T Okay, so a game with a complicated name caught my attention. Here is its review. Actually, I will quote its very first paragraph now.

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Like most adult geeks reared on Dungeons and Dragons, I often find myself a bit disconnected when faced with the endless waves of Japanese RPGs that have taken over the genre. Every time I find myself in the shoes of yet another spiky-haired protagonist with a mysterious past and a sword the size of a telephone pole, I wonder where all the role-playing has gone.

Not that there aren’t some excellent imports out there, but is walking my pre-designed character, his bossy, magical girlfriend, and a talking animal through a linear story in which I save the spirit of the earth, or the essence of Gaea, or whatever they’re calling it this time, really role-playing? If you’re truly playing a role, you should be able to forge your own destiny as a sneaky thief, a righteous paladin, a crude barbarian, a pretentious mage, or a vile murderer.

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That right there is what caught my eyes. Because that was ME, so far as gaming went. I felt like those two paragraphs described ME as a gamer. I had spent all these years playing linear games.... not all of them were horrible, but every one of them was linear. I'd literally go to step off some path, hoping to be able to explore some pretty underbrush, but *bonk* nope.... can't even step off the path. "A bit disconnected." ... "Pre-designed characters."... "Weapons the size of telephone poles."... Why doesn't anybody make a game which allows ME to make the character I want to make? Is such a thing even possible?

After not even reading that whole article, it took me maybe 40 minutes to jump in my crappy Corolla, drive to the nearest mall, and plunk down $400 for a PS3 and this cool new game. The next few hours were then a blur. I rolled a character named Lady Anne. She was my first! I don't even know what she looked like, I never took a picture of her. But after spending 3 hours doing the tutorial, delivering the Amulet, I decided that Lady Anne would "retire" in Chorrol, because I loved the opening experience so much, I immediately wanted to do it all over again, with some other character (whose name I have forgotten).

Anyway, that's my story. Thanks for listening. Feel free to share your stories, too.

This post has been edited by Renee: Mar 23 2023, 04:20 PM