You are right and wrong: (well since its an opinion/rant it cant really be wrong but since I agree with you on this… I have also seen the light to why we just cant have it our way)

I love having fully interactive environments and being able to go in any door in any house etc. I think the game that really pulls this off is oblivion and fable, but by doing this… you greatly expand the space needed in the game, and the game production time and everything else… it really detracts from the game. Look at fable… the graphics are not the greatest by any means… especially for an x-box game… they could have been better but I assume that since they had to use all that space and time for all those houses that don’t mean anything to me… I had to have a not so great looking game.

A game like oblivion is a huge game… its like what 3-4 gigs large? Larger? So yeah, while I love the idea of it… I would rather them just make a lot of the doors “Permi Locked” where it seems like your interacting with an actual room, but its just locked and you cannot get in.

What I really hate though.. is when you enter a room and it takes you to a static location.

Pirates of the Burning Sea does this:

You have to kill someone in this room, so you go in.. and its the same room as half the other rooms you enter. Its static. It feels cheap, and I hate having to load just entering a room, I think the room should be loaded with the rest of the current section of the building I am in.

I am in the process of writing a blog about how much I hate MMOs that do not allow you to take part in the economy… you should check out my blog by sunday it should be up.

This is “ubercool” (to paraphrase Cartman in South Park). Thanks for the tip.

Oh, I’m simply supporting the Globally Unique Avatars (aka. Gravatars). To get one you have to visit gravatar.com, sign up for an account and upload a picture. It will become associated with your email address.

Whenever someone posts here, I have a plugin which polls gravatar.com for an avatar image with whatever they placed in the “email” field of the comment box. So if you have an account, your pic will show up.

Added bonus is that it will work on any site which supports them – and quite a few blogs out there do these days. In fact, I think the recent WordPress releases support them out of the box without a plugin. :)

Oh, and I forgot to say that it is “illusion magic” (like invisibility).

By the way, completely off topic, but how do you manage to have these nice little avatars near your answer on this blog? I mean, not you, Luke (that’s obvious) but the others?

Believe me, Chameleon is the only spell which is absolutely necessary for this game (though there are a couple of water spells like levitation, water breathing and water walking that are really useful too).

Ah, the Chamelion spell. I totally suck ass at magic right now, but I might as well sell couple of Assasin armors and train the shit out of whatever discipline requires that. ;)

Well, that’s a part I patched: I used the no-assassin patch to reduce the chance of the Dark Bortherhood attacking you more than once to 5 or 10%. It kind of unbreaks the game. They are way too easy to kill…

Also, a tip to pickpocket at lower level (around 45 to 55%): chameleon spell. It helps massively for pick pocketting (unlike invisibility). It’s not 100% fool proof by far, but it increases your changes enough to make it worth.

Yep, even when I play as warrior or a wizard in Morrowind I usually loot houses that I visit if an opportunity is there. :P You just have to remember not to sell the stuff you stole, to the person you stole it from because they usually catch on.

Now that I started playing a Thief I started experimenting with pick-pocketing. It’s pretty useless though at lower skill levels. You have to have your Sneak well above 80 to even have remote chance of succeeding. And even at close to 90 you still fail 4 out of 5 times. :(

Arguably, the best source of income in initial stages of Morrowind (for any character) are the Dark Brotherhood assassins from the Tribunal expansion. That is if you can take them on. Their armor is insanely expensive and rather light. If you haul it all the way to the Mudcrab Merchant you get a clean 3k of gold for a full Dark Brotherhood armor suit.

I usually collect these armors, then drop everything sans my ring of recall and visit the crab for ~10k of clean profit. And yes, it is total exploit but if you want to gain few levels quickly to beef up your character just do this once or twice and then spend on the cash training your major and minor skills. :)

Above the level 20-30 they start ganging up on you so that is a good time to call them off and trigger the Tribunal quest.

You said it, man, that’s exactly the problem. I love playing dodgy characters and that’s a lot more difficult with Oblivion. The game favors brute fighters and buying skills indeed. All in all, I find Oblivion generally harder to play.

This said, to be fair, the Security skill (yes, it is called the same) measures both how good you are and how often you break lock picks. The same with lock picks quality (it measures mainly how easily they break). I am not saying that it is completely unrealistic, but it is soooo frustrating that it soon becomes a serious annoyance.

Oh man… That actually kinda sucks. Let me guess – the Security skill (or whatever is the equivalent in Oblivion) measures how often you break lock picks rather than how good you actually are at opening locks, no? So to be able to semi-reliably use the picks you pretty much have to find a master trainer and raise your skill as high as you possibly can.

Really limits your options when you are playing a Thief and your primary means of earning money early in the game is actually stealing shit. :(

My current Morrowind character totally sucks in combat but I have really high Sneak and Security skills so I essentially walk into people’s houses and rob them blind when they turn around. :P