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Post by Sniffles on Nov 23, 2021 9:13:20 GMT
@emma's adoring Fan posted two images, below, that completely realigned my thinking.
Emperor Potatoface slinks into the prison with a half dozen guards, desperately trying to hide from the deadly pursuit of a small group of wackos that makes the Flat Earth Society look pedestrian normal in comparison. The crowning glory of Tamriel civilization is about to get laid low. A mighty Emperor with a huge standing army, feckless and feeble against a Charles Manson wannabee and his elite group of psychotic airheads.
We interrupt this program to bring you a special announcement. PFFFTB!! Dry the main quest line of Oblivion out and fertilize a football field. The entirety of Bethseda's developers wonderflug called Oblivion makes Harry Potter's escapades look like average teenagers at play.
Throwing out, or up, that incredibly schmaltzy trite to the max Hollywood plot crapanola,
V This. V Is. V The. V Real. V Cyrodil. V
And now, with my rant over, I'm going out into the Imperial Reserve of west Cyrodil and pick flowers with Vilja as my trusty companion and bodyguard.
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Post by chambcra on Mar 19, 2022 13:11:09 GMT
I don't get it. I'm a little thick. It's funny but I don't quite get the "realigned my thinking" and hence rant.
I'll second the bodyguard part though. In my game Vilja is so badass if a fight breaks out all I have to do is get out of the way and try not to inflict any collateral damage.
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Post by Sniffles on Mar 20, 2022 14:15:10 GMT
I don't get it. I'm a little thick. It's funny but I don't quite get the "realigned my thinking" and hence rant. I'll second the bodyguard part though. In my game Vilja is so badass if a fight breaks out all I have to do is get out of the way and try not to inflict any collateral damage. So Oblivion starts out in Cyrodil, the heart of the vast empire founded by Tiber Septim who conquered all of Tamriel. In the Imperial city, which is logically the center of the might of the empire the emperor is attacked by some assassins from a religious group more bananas than Jim Jones and Charles Manson combined. They overwhelm the all guards?? and the emperor flees into the royal prison?? with only a half dozen bodyguards?? For reasons only found in Hollywood B- movies the huge army that would be stationed in and around the city seems to be missing.
Conversely, the royal city and it's immediate environs of Cyrodil would be the safest most civilized area in all of Tamriel. Where one would find some young lady out in the nearby countryside peacefully painting a picture without care or concern. Telling of this peaceful refined center of the civilized world one would find guards stationed all over the city and along all the roads. placidly going about their business, obviously more than capable of spotting and dealing with any stray miscreant foolish enough to stray into the heart of the Septim empire. And oblivious to the apparent fact they must be the most incompetent inept guardians of the peace in the history of the world and apparently unaware their emperor has just been murdered??
Sesame Street has better plot lines.
Vilja is the perfect companion when one is out picking the abundant flowers and herbs which very artfully resemble their earth counterparts. She's usually on any potential threats before the PC becomes aware of them.
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Post by chambcra on Mar 21, 2022 9:54:21 GMT
Okay, gotcha. Thanks for explaining that. I've never understood the lore. It goes in one ear and out the other. The way so many people dwell on the lore and me not being able to understand it makes me wonder if I have some serious dementia or apathy or probably both and I'm lazy too. Your explanation makes me think maybe I haven't missed much or maybe a lore aficionado or two will come along with a different view.
For years I always had Vilja hold back with the ranged archery weapon. Then I saw a comment by Emma that she preferred Vilja as a melee fighter and I thought why not. So, I did a little beefing up and made her a ring that makes her invulnerable and this way is so much better. She casts a ranged destruct spell now and it never ceases to be a crack up every time. I lucked onto an inventory combination so she always shoots arrows without fail too and that's always good for a laugh.
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Post by Sniffles on Mar 21, 2022 14:49:22 GMT
Okay, gotcha. Thanks for explaining that. I've never understood the lore. It goes in one ear and out the other. The way so many people dwell on the lore and me not being able to understand it makes me wonder if I have some serious dementia or apathy or probably both and I'm lazy too. Your explanation makes me think maybe I haven't missed much or maybe a lore aficionado or two will come along with a different view. For years I always had Vilja hold back with the ranged archery weapon. Then I saw a comment by Emma that she preferred Vilja as a melee fighter and I thought why not. So, I did a little beefing up and made her a ring that makes her invulnerable and this way is so much better. She casts a ranged destruct spell now and it never ceases to be a crack up every time. I lucked onto an inventory combination so she always shoots arrows without fail too and that's always good for a laugh. Actually I picked up all that lore, which is a tiny tiny bit of the lore the game made available, just from playing the game. As such... - the Imperial City. That's it's name. Home of the emperor and where his throne is. - The prison, where you start out the game isn't in the city. It's isolated to the northeast on an island of sorts. - It would be a 15 minute trip, or more, for the emperor to run to the prison from his precincts where he hangs out in the city, then he has to find his way down into the prison cells area. - So the emperor gets attacked somewhere in the city. Seems logical by the time he has snuck out to the prison he would have more than a half dozen guards. More likely he would have several hundred.
- His royal quarters wasn't guarded? One yell from him or a servant or whoever and, logically and sensibly, he would find himself sequestered in a safe room and up to the rafters in guards and soldiers. - And of course the city would be put in lockdown. - And of course whether alive or dead, the people faithful to the emperor would be turning over every rock within a hundred miles to find the perpetrator. The end all, be all manhunt nobody has seen the likes of in the entire history of Tamriel. - And of note, just try stealing from a store or picking someones pocket in any city or town in Cyrodil. Guards are all over yer arse instantly like stink on a poo pile. And as a bonus, try resisting arrest with a low level PC. Reload Game. Cooperate and poof, you're in a prison cell in your underwear.
So the main quest starts out utterly ridiculous. An inane plot device to get things going and to introduce you to rats and goblins. Once you have mastered rat and goblin bonking and are armed with a decent borrowed weapon, you can actually take out an assassin or two that the entire imperial army was incapable of doing. And it goes downhill from there. No lore study required. That is spoon fed as the game progresses.
Might want to avoid giving Vilja ranged weapons. She will quite happily aim through the PC in her zealous pursuit of enemies.
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Post by chambcra on Mar 22, 2022 11:19:12 GMT
Might want to avoid giving Vilja ranged weapons. She will quite happily aim through the PC in her zealous pursuit of enemies.
Maybe that's why Emma preferred Vilja as a melee fighter. Being shot in the back 100 times is one downside to having the archery working maybe too good. And those arrows she uses sting pretty good.
So, those were just some super human clever bastard assassins and the player really has to be one hell of a super hero ( better than Tarzan even ) to be able to do what the entire royal guard, legion, army couldn't and do it while being constantly harassed by the Barney Fife guards if he accidentally clicks on a carrot in the wrong place. So the main plot is just something you have to get out of the way or ignore to start playing The. Real. Cyrodil.
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Post by Sniffles on Mar 25, 2022 12:41:21 GMT
I've got a level 12 character save. Rosethorn Hall in Skingrad stuffed to the rafters in ingredients and potions lagging the game to wander through the place, have done most of the side quests in all the cities, Got Umbra - which took about 3000 arrows, several other daedra goodies, most of the magical stones and I forget what else. Meanwhile Martin is still cooling his jets in Kvatch and hasn't heard of the death of the emperor.
I refuse to advance the main quest because the oblivion gates are ugly, my relationship with Vilja is stuck and won't advance and I love picking flowers and enjoying the scenery.
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Post by jgf on Mar 26, 2022 16:44:57 GMT
Most of these issues are endemic to every rpg I've played - the world is not dynamic ...nothing transpires until the player triggers or initiates it.
Both Morrowind and Oblivion have Thieves Guilds; whose members must be the most inept thieves imaginable. How else to explain the tons of easily obtainable loot everywhere, just waiting for the player to grab it. And the Oblivion Thieves Guild is hilarious, how do they hold their secret meetings? Carrying torches in a back yard in the middle of the night. Nothing suspicious there.
The Oblivion Imperial guards are a sorry lot. Two dozen of them cannot win a battle til the player appears to save their butts. And how often do you run across a dead guard laying in the road ...killed by inept bandits who do not even rob the corpse or take the horse. Logically a couple such instances would have guards out in force seeking those responsible. And apparently the guards never win these encounters as I don't recall ever finding a dead bandit in the road.
An NPC gets killed, their house remains empty the rest of the game. You plunder a guild hall for all valuables, nothing gets replaced, the shelves remain empty forever. There are ports in Oblivion and Morrowind, but the same ships sit at the same docks the entire game, there is no coming and going, no signs of trade, transportation, activity.
Oblivion gave us horseback riding, but it was only that - riding. Were the devs completely unaware of history? That for centuries people have used axes, spears, swords, bows and arrows, guns, from horseback? In Oblivion you cannot even cast a spell, which only requires one hand, from horseback. If attacked while on horseback you must gallop away, dismount, and return to do battle on foot; or dismount there while being attacked.
The height of implausibility - the active glass mine inside the Ghost Fence in Morrowind. Guards and miners there; how did they get food and other supplies? How did they ship out the product? Did Dagoth UR allow a weekly truce for wagon trains back and forth? And speaking of Mr. Ur, given how easily he is dispatched by the player (what an anti-climax after all this time in game), why hasn't Vivec or Almalexia sauntered up to Red Mountain already, done in the old boy, and returned home to be an even greater hero to their people. In the same vein of anti-climax, what of the vaunted Moon-and-Star ring, which turns out to be a trinket any third rate enchanter could make for you.
The Oblivion gates *are* hideous, especially after destroyed. And, for me, were one of the weakest parts of the game; nothing but little fps sideshows which you must attend for a quick hack-and-slash run to grab a sigil stone; after which their smoking remains sit there as a blight on the landscape forever. (I used a mod which gave some control over this; at one extreme you could have just the few gates, eight I think, required by the plot, finish those and you never have to deal with them again; at the other end you could have dozens on the map simultaneously and they all respawned.) I wanted a mod which would have the destroyed gates overgrown, if not completely removed, by nature a few days later, but was told this was impossible (I still don't understand why, you never enter them again).
But the biggest conundrum with Cyrodiil is that according to official maps and lore it shares a continent with Morrowind, shares a border, ruled by the same emperor ... yet Morrowind is a world of alien flora and fauna, two moons, wizards living in giant mushrooms; while Cyrodiil is midieval earth, with walled towns, oak trees, pine trees, horses, sheep, deer ...even creatures from earth mythology - minotaurs and unicorns. That's tantamount to North Carolina and South Carolina, adjacent on the same continent, having distinctly different animals, plants, architecture, etc., with no migration of anything from one to the other.
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Post by Sniffles on Apr 13, 2022 5:34:55 GMT
"Oblivion gave us horseback riding, but it was only that - riding."
Errrm... my brother's stallion with a belly full of oats in a pasture filled with mares in season was easier to operate that the Oblivion sorry excuse for horse game mechanics
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Post by jgf on Apr 13, 2022 18:44:51 GMT
The only thing Oblivion horses were good for was clambering around in the mountains; ridiculous that a horse could travel up a mountainside where a person on foot could not.
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Post by wotan on Apr 13, 2022 19:26:25 GMT
The only thing Oblivion horses were good for was clambering around in the mountains; ridiculous that a horse could travel up a mountainside where a person on foot could not. It's the shoes. Horses wear four of them. Maybe if people had hooves like mountain goats they wouldn't need to wear shoes. |
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Post by Sniffles on Apr 14, 2022 10:21:48 GMT
The only thing Oblivion horses were good for was clambering around in the mountains; ridiculous that a horse could travel up a mountainside where a person on foot could not. It's the shoes. Horses wear four of them. Maybe if people had hooves like mountain goats they wouldn't need to wear shoes. But in Oblivion they aren't shod.  |
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