I mean, think about tit. You are walking around and you see a dude shooting arrows at an archery target, or whacking a wooden dummy with a sword. What do you do? You go and take a whack at it yourself. Tell me you have never done this. Tell me you never fired a few arrows at one of those target things. Tell me you never swung a weapon at a training dummy or never unloaded a few rounds into a neat stack of cans/bottles in Fallout. Unfortunately it does nothing to increase your skills.

Even Fallout 3 has these things.

I was always annoyed at this. Why can’t you train using the training dummies? I mean, this is what they were meant for, no? That’s what NPC’s supposedly use them for. So why not allow the player character do the same? Why not count hits scored against the dummy as “real hits”.

I know, I know – this is probably a game balancing thing. If you could train your weapon on a dummy a lot of people would just stand there for hours and do nothing else. I mean, there are dozens of tutorials and videos out there that show you how to outwit Bethesda leveling algorithms by sneak-walking into the wall in just the right spot, or abusing the master trainers. But it wouldn’t need to be like this. You could put a limit on how much training could be done for a dummy. I can see two caps that could be relatively easily implemented even via mod of some sort:

1. Hit Counter – have a running counter that shows how many hits has the player scored on dummies (any dummy in the game is on the same counter). Once enough hits are scored, deactivate the dummy training script and notify the player via some sort of message. Any hits scored on the dummy do not train the skill, until the counter resets itself the next day.
2. Skill Level Cap – training dummies and targets are great for beginners, but they can’t really teach a seasoned veteran anything new. At some point, you need live combat experience to progress. Thus, a player can only dummy train their skill until they reach a certain level. After that, dummies become ineffective.

Thus a low level character can really get a training boost out of using the dummies, and perhaps gain a few levels quicker than expected. But eventually the dummy training will become useless at a later stage of the game.

Oh, and apparently there is an Oblivion mod for that. I would test it but I don’t have Oblivion installed at the moment. I don’t believe this mod has any training caps like the ones I described above, making it less than balanced. Hmm… Maybe I should install Oblivion and try to figure out how to use that game editor one day.

There is one exception though: achievements that have some sort of in-game effect. The perfect example here are the bobble heads from Fallout 3:

My Bobblehead Collection

As you can see above, I collected all of them. In fact, I cared about them so much, that I printed out the wiki article that listed their locations just to make sure that I didn’t miss any one. Why? Because they had a tangible in game effect. They would permanently boost one of your attributes or skills. Granted, the boost they gave you was very minor but I still didn’t want to miss out on it. Not only that, but your bobble head collection could be permanently displayed in your house (in Megaton or Tenpenny Towers) which was a very nice touch. I suspect I would probably collect all of them even if they didn’t offer the stats boost just to fill the display case. Kinda like I sort-of collect garden gnome figurines and put them all over my in-game house.

So yeah, I eschew the social aspect of the achievements (you can display them to friends) as silly but then I spend hours finding stuff to decorate my virtual house in a single player game. A house that no one else will ever actually see, unless I post a screenshot of it online or something. That’s what amuses me though, and I think sandbox RPG’s such as Oblivion and Fallout 3 should have more this type of stuff. Are you listening Bethesda? Give us more collectible crap!

A lot of games already have achievements for collecting large number of certain items, but he idea is to give these collections some-in game effect. And barring that create some sort of easy way to display the collection in the in-game house/hideout without dragging items and fighting with the physics engine. Here are some ideas:

1. Trophies – allow players to obtain trophies after killing larger in-game monsters. This would involve carrying some special item (hunting knife maybe), using it on the monsters corpse, taking it’s head/tentacle/whatever to your house and then mounting it on the wall. Obtaining trophies of all the critters of a certain type (eg. wolf, gray wolf, snow wolf, dire wolf, super wold, mega wolf, etc…) would give you some minor bonus against this type.
2. Book Collections – collecting all the books by certain author or all tomes of a long book cycle would unlock some minor skill bonus, or extra perk. The house should feature a special book shelf which would automatically sort and display the collection, and give the player idea of how many items are missing to complete each cycle. I know that all Bethesda games have skill books, that will increase certain stats when read. They also have scores of other books – and these seemingly useless ones could be converted into collectibles.
3. Beer Cans – Fallout 3 had tons of useless garbage laying around everywhere. Some common junk items were empty cans and NucaCola bottles. Allowing the player to collect some of that junk and display it on some kind of shelf would be a great touch. Bonus points if the cans could have multiple brands, and player would have to find one can of each brand to complete the collection. The perk for completing the collection could be some minor bonus resistance to alcohol effects.
4. Toys/Figurines – Fallout 3 has bobble heads, but a lot of people also collect stuff like garden gnomes, teddy bears, toy cars, NucaCola trucks and etc. In Morrowind I collected ash statues. Having nice display cases for these items would be enough – even without some in-game perk or stat boost.
5. Artifacts – my brother used to collect everything Dwemer related in his Morrowind game. Then he found out there is a Dwemer museum in Tel Vos. He visited it, and was disappointed to see that it only had few unique items that were not in his collection. Of course he stole them immediately. This is the sort of emergent game play that could be codified using armor racks and display cases where one could store precious artifacts.

I’m pretty sure you guys can come up with some other ideas for this. What sort of collectible items/scavenger quests would you like to see in sandbox games. How would you like these to be represented in the game world. Virtual displays? Stat boosts? Both?

Also, do you usually hunt for the traditional X-box style achievements, or are you like me – more motivated by something that has an impact on the actual game – like a visible display case, a special perk or stat boost?

This conversation started when I mentioned the “innovative” game play in Prince of Persia. Why is it innovative? Shamus probably explain this much better in his video:

Reset Button: Most Innovative Videogame of 2008 by Shamus Young

Prince of Persia is innovative because it removes character death from the equation. It’s simply impossible to die in the game. Each time you botch a jump, your sidekick will rescue you and drop you back on the ledge you fell from. Every time, an opponent knocks you out he regenerates some health but you get to stand up, and try again. I haven’t actually play this game yet, but to me that sounds like a grand idea. I can’t tell you how many times I gave up on a game or turned to cheat codes because it was just to frustrating to continue. The truth is that I do not play video games to be challenged. While I enjoy a reasonable challenge, I am ultimately more interested in the unfolding story. When I’m playing a FPS game I want to feel like a bad-ass action hero and do hero like stuff. I don’t want to play memory based puzzle game that forces me to memorize the position of every enemy and trap, and then perform a complex set of maneuvers with flawless timing. That doesn’t sound like fun to me at all. I require a steady stream of new stimuli to retain my attention and keep me going. Repetition bores me to death, and thus I find games built around the DIAS game play model to be needlessly frustrating and boring.

I really get no enjoyment from “mastering” a level or learning how to flawlessly clear some area. I get more of a kick out of beating my enemies by flying by the seat of my pants, and improvising on the fly. If I die, I slightly adjust my strategy and try again. If I die 50 times in a row making only minimal progress in each iteration, I’m hitting up the internet for cheat codes or quitting the game. So a death free game sounds like a great idea to me.

My brother on the other hand is totally opposite. He seems to get off on challenge, and when he heard about Prince of Persia gameplay he could not believe someone would actually pay to play that game. He was surprised and appalled that someone would take out the all the “fun and challenge” out of a game only to “cash in on the casual gaming hype”. This is a strikingly different approach from mine, and I’m actually amazed that we actually like a lot of the same games.

He is more of an RTS person though. Just the other day I saw him re-play the exact same skirmish battle in Medieval Total War over and over again. When I asked him about it, he explained that he tries to learn good strategies against the Mongol horde. So he would sit there and play skirmish after skirmish just to brush up his tactical skills. And it’s not like he was stuck, and needed this training to proceed in the story mode. He admitted that his armies were winning most of their battles but with considerable casualties. He was just trying to discover a the best way to mercilessly pwn the computer with minimal losses. He would invest time and effort in training his skill and work his way through all these scenarios slowly ramping up the difficulty along the way. Why? Because he was getting a kick out of overcoming the challenge. It was not about winning – it was about the way he won, and the road that led him there.

I found this interesting because you would never catch me doing something like this. This actually sounds like work, and a major time investment. I have precious little time to allot for my video game hobby. I want to be able to fire up the game play for two hours and actually make some progress. I don’t want to spend days training and mastering new techniques. I want just enough challenge to keep things exciting, but not enough to actually force me to stop completing quests and achieving objectives. I want to experience the story.

I want to be Gordon Freeman and pretend I’m actually having conversations with Alyx and that I actually understand what the hell is going on in the Half Life universe. I love games like Morrowind and Oblivion which allow me to play my own, morally ambiguous, demented character and write my own stories. I like to sneak into a cavern full of bandits wearing Fin Gleam helmet (permanent night eye) and kill them off one by one by sniping at them from a distance with my magical bow not because the combat element is particularly fun an exciting. I like it because of the story I’m creating there – I’m a magically powered assassin hiding in the shadows, killing without ever being seen.

Most people I talked too enjoyed the original FarCry. I played it on an off for a while because initially it was fun in small doses. I never finished it though because it just kept increasing the difficulty, while using a rather unforgiving checkpoint based save system. Not only that, but it also featured a character I completely did not relate to. I just didn’t like him and I could not buy into the idea of one dude slowly exterminating hordes upon hordes of of trained soldiers and mutated monsters.

I love playing Gordon Freeman because he is a fucking MIT PHD! Not only that, he has no personality to speak off – his personality is mine to define as I’m playing the game. Is Gordon a stuck up jerk? Is he a genuinely nice guy? Is he soft spoken guy, or a brash loudmouth? Does he sound like a PHD – expressing himself in precise scientific manner, or is he blurting out cliche one liners every time he shoots a guy? Does he use the HEV Suit binoculars to zoom in on Alyx’s ass? I think I enjoy imagining my personalized version of Gordon Freeman interacting with the game world in his own quirky way much more than actually paying the pitched battles. When I actually like the characters, I find it easier to suspend my disbelief.

My favorite HL2 moments are the emotionally charged scripted events. I found the huge battle with the Strides at the end of Episode Two inexplicably boring. On the other hand scene in which you fight with the hunters for the first time was the sheer moment of awesomeness. You know what I’m talking about, right? It’s when you and Alyx are stuck in a building and you can hear and see the damn things rampaging outside. As you duck for cover behind crates and tables and Alyx tells you she is scared. IMHO it was one of the most memorable video game moments ever.

My brother thinks that if I’m into the plot and story so much, I should just stick to movies. But that is not the point here, is it? Movies are by their very nature not interactive. What I enjoy in a game is the ability to influence plot. I like games that stimulate my imagination and provide immersive experience. This is why can completely lose myself in open-ended sandbox games such as Oblivion and Morrowind but don’t particularly care for the GTA series. Oblivion has a difficulty slider I can move at any time to adjust the game to my needs and lets me create the type of character I can identify with. GTA games are needlessly difficult, usually force me to play some unlikeable thug, and make an excessive use of the DIAS game play mechanic. To this day I have never fully unlocked any of the GTA cities – the games are just too frustrating.

For me, the challenge in a video game is an optional component. It just something that makes the action more exciting – a sense of danger applied during particularly shocking plot twists adds another dimension to the experience. It is a means to an end. However when it is used as an end in and of itself, it becomes pointless and boring to me.

What do you enjoy in video games the most? Do you get a kick out of overcoming difficult challenges like my brother? Or do you enjoy participating in, and creating interactive stories? Do you enjoy immersion? Do you like PVP? Let me know in the comments.

Better Lockpicking

I previously ranted at length about how much I dislike the recent trend of replacing skill checks with pointless mini games. Fortunately oblivion provides an easy workaround that replaces the game with a skill check, in the form of Skeleton Key. This magic item is the reward for the Nocturnal Shrine quest and it takes form of an unbreakable lock pick. In effect it allows you to simply spam the Auto-Attempt button at the lock picking screen until you succeed. Failure no longer removes scarce and expensive lock picks from your inventory.

To me this is a must have item. You can find Nocturnal Shrine here. It requires no offering, but unfortunately you have to be at least level 10 to attempt the quest.

Ultimate Weapon

Here is how to make an ultimate weapon that will let you kill most of the enemies in the game with 1-2 swings. You must gain access to an enchanting altar, and learn couple of spells. One of them must be Drain Health spell.

Enchant your weapon with Drain Health 100 for 1 second and some basic damage spell – like fire damage for 1 sec. Put in as many points of damage into it as possible. The effect is devastating. When hit, the enemy will have 100 points of health drained, an will suffer the additional damage on top of that. This is enough to kill most lower level enemies who usually tend to have less than 100 of health.

Additionally, if you are able to swing your weapon fast enough the drain life effects will stack which means enemies with 200-250 health will go down in mere two blows. Interesting side effect of this is that your blade skill will grow much more slowly since you will be swinging your blade less often.

Sigil Stone Lottery

Sigil stones found in Oblivion gates give you access to some pretty good enhancements. Unfortunately, if you start closing the gates at lower level, you will get crappy, low powered stones. It is best to wait until you are around level 20, since then the gates start yielding Transcendent stones that have most powerful enhancements such as +12 bonus to one of your attributes.

The problem is that there is no way of knowing what kind of stone you will get until you actually grab it. Good news is that the stone is randomly generated the moment you pick it up and it is not tied to the Oblivion Gate instance. Why is it good news? Because it gives you some degree of control over what kind of stone you end up with. Do the following:

1. Save your game just prior picking up the stone
2. Pick up the stone
3. The stone will change shape, size and then will vanish
4. At that point you should see a message saying it was added to your inventory
5. As soon as you see that message, hit Tab to enter inventory screen
6. Check what kind of stone you got
7. If you don’t like the stone, reload the game and try again
8. Repeat this until you get a good stone

This is possible because there is a few second animated explosion that takes place after you pick the stone up, and which culminates with you being ejected from the gate. It gives you plenty of time to open your inventory, and reload the game if needed.

Best Horse in the Game

The best horse in the game is Shadowmere. You get her as a reward in the Dark Brotherhood quest line. She is as fast as a black horse, has more health, better attacks and is considered an essential NPC. This means she will never die – she can be only knocked unconscious. Getting this horse is one of the best perks of doing the Dark Brotherhood quests.

Ultimate Adventuring Helmet

By far, one of the most useful items in the game is Fin Gleam – a glass helmet which gives you constant effect Night Eye, Detect Life for 20 feet and water breathing. You probably won’t want to wear it all the time, but I find it indispensable in most dungeons.

Unfortunately this item is nearly impossible to find. It is located deep underwater, on the west coast of the small island west of Anvil. You can see it’s location on the map here. You will probably need a spell of water breathing or two to locate it. The best tip I can give you is to position yourself west of the small island. There is a big protruding boulder on the shore – you want to align yourself with it and then swim out couple of feet into the sea. Then go directly down. There is a big rock formation on the bottom with a skeleton next to it. You should be able to see the helmet right to the skeleton.

Once you get Fin Gleam you never again have to worry about the breath meter while swimming, and you no longer need to carry any torches or use Night Eye/Light spells. I personally think it is worth spending some time to locate it. As far as I know, there are no quests related to this item so it is more of an Easter Egg than anything else.

Ultimate Mage Staff

When you join the Mages Guild and get accepted to the Arcane University you will be allowed to design your own Mage Staff. In my experience, the best effect is that of Paralyze which makes you almost unstoppable in one-on-one combat. The staff will have short paralyze duration, but it still gives you plenty of time to switch to your main damage dealing weapon, and get in few hits. If you obtain this staff, most of the Arena battles become a cakewalk – all you need to do is to zap the enemy as they are getting close, and then wail on them while they are on the ground. If you can’t kill them outright, just back away as they get up, switch back to the staff and zap them again.

You could theoretically enchant a weapon with a paralyze spell, too but the staff can be used at a distance minimizing the risk of getting hit.

Changing Your Appearance

One of the tings that annoyed me about Oblivion character creation is that while you design your character, his/her face is lit by a flickering torch light. As soon as you leave the Imperial City sewers however you will often find that the meticulously picked skin tone and highlights look like crap in full light. But at that point it is already to late to change anything without reloading the game.

Or, you can be like me – you may discover a cool appearance mod that adds new custom hair styles, or faces into the game around the same time as your character dings level 20. Starting a new character just to try out new hair is pretty much self defeating at that point. Fortunately, the PC version of the game makes it possible to change your race/appearance at any time in the game using the following command:

ShowRaceMenu

This command will display the character creation menu you used at the beginning of the game. Before you jump on it though, please keep in mind that using this dialog will reset all your skills back to their default values from the start of the game. Your level will remain the same but you will lose all the progress you made cultivating advanced skills. There is a trick to avoid this though:

1. When you call up the character menu, do not close the console
2. Modify your appearance but do not hit the Return button when you are done
3. Instead, save the game while the character dialog is still on the screen and console is still open
4. Immediately after you save, load that save

This will return you back to the game, with all the changes you made via the Character Creation dialog in effect, but will not reset your characteristics. Please note that I only tested it for changing general appearance (ie. facial features, hair, skin tone and etc). I have no clue what will happen when you actually change your race using this trick. Your characteristics and/or attributes may be reset despite using the technique above.

This trick works with all the official patches and the Unofficial Oblivion Patch applied.

Console Cheats

Every once in a while, you run into situations which are lame, annoying or destroy your enjoyment of the game. When this happens, you can either stop playing, suck it up and keep playing the game until it starts being fun, or use some innocent non-game-breaking cheats. Here are couple of useful console commands that can save you when you get yourself in trouble.

When strapped for cash, you can add 100 gold using:

player.addItem f 100

I mentioned this before, but I’ll include it here for completeness. To add 5 lockpicks use:

player.addItem a 5

Give yourself 5 armorer hammers:

player.addItem c 5

Give yourself a healing potion (this one is a life saver on lower levels when you have neither cash nor alchemy skill to create these):

player.addItem 98496 1

I just wanted to mention that the magic weapons in Oblivion are irrevocably broken. I much preferred the Morrowind system where the charges would gradually regenerate over time. Halfway through my game I noticed that I was pretty much hoarding all my magic weapons, saving them for a special occasion. Yes, I’m a pack-rat. I never, ever use scarce items – that’s also why I tend to have 50 thousand scrolls in my inventory. I just can’t stand the thought of using them up for trivial missions. Recharging magic weapons is extremely expensive and Varla Stones are extremely rare making charges on your weapons and staffs a precious commodity. This is where this next cheat comes in. Do this whenever you deplete most of the items in your inventory to get 1 free Varla stone you can get to recharge all your stuff:

player.addItem 194 1

Well, while we are at it, I might as well include the cheat for getting a single Welkynd stone added to your inventory:

player.addItem 191 1

You may find this useful if you are using Umbra (or another weapon that casts Soul Trap on strike) and you don’t have Azura’s Star or it is currently occupied. If you find yourself out of soul containers just give yourself an empty grad soul gem:

player.addItem 15B8E 1

Did this ever happen to you? You have an idea for a great enchantment, you picked out the right weapon/armor/trinket, you get to the Arcane University, you access the enchanting altar and you realize you have no filled soul gems in your inventory. How bad is that? Well, don’t fret – just give yourself a grand soul gem with a grand soul in it and you are good to go:

player.addItem 382DF 1

The console lets you do pretty much anything you want – you can even raise your attributes or skills and create a godlike character with all stats maxed out. But that sort of thing usually takes the fun out of the game. So I won’t show these things here. But if you are interested, you can learn about all the console commands here.

What are your favorite Oblivion tips and/or tricks? Did I miss any must-have items, or useful tips? Let me know in the comments!

Other Posts in my Oblivion cycle:

Today I wanted to revisit Oblivion Mods. I know I mentioned this subject once before but that was when I was just starting my adventure with the game. Since then, I got a good feel for how the thing plays, and what it lacks and was able to come up with a new list of interesting and worthwhile mods for you. One or two of these might have been mentioned in the other threads, but I’m including them here for sake of completeness.

All the mods mentioned here are compatible with each other and also with the mods I described in the previous post (excluding Open Cities which I haven’t tested again after it bugged out on me) unless noted otherwise.

1. Harvesting flora

   In vanilla oblivion when you pick up a mushroom or a flower it stays in place – you just can’t click it anymore, until it grows back few weeks later. From afar there is virtually no difference between a plant that was harvested and one that was not. You pretty much have to try clicking on it to see if it regenerated or not. Harvesting flora fixes this problem, and changes the appearance of plants you harvest so you can see at a glance whether or not you picked them up already or not. No clue why this feature was not in vanilla. Must have – especially if you want to play with Alchemy.

2. Ren’s Beauty Pack

   Default hair in Oblivion kinda sucks – especially when you are trying to play a female character. There is just no variety, and the existing hair styles are either plain, ugly or badly rendered. Ren’s Beauty pack fixes this by adding some nice, distinctive hair styles. It also ships with a custom race Mystic Elves or something like that which I really don’t care for. Fortunately the hair mod can be downloaded separately so if you don’t need to bother with the race stuff if you don’t want to.

3. Natural Faces

   I don’t know what is it with Oblivion and the wrinkle generation algorithm – it’s atrocious. Some of the NPC’s in the game look like they just crawled out of Uncanny Valley. The Emperror for example looks like a fleshy prune. This mod tries to smooth over the overly wrinkled faces and make them look more “human” like.

4. Female Eye Candy Body Replacer

   This mod might not be for everyone – it replaces the female body model in the game with a one that is more proportional, and removes the permanent underwear condition. So, for example if you want to go skinny dipping in a river, or streaking through the streets of Imperial City you totally can. Personally, I like it cause it makes the game a bit more realistic, but it really depends on ones tastes. I figured I put it up here just in case someone would want to try it out. Apparently this mod only replaces the female model so dudes still wear perma-underpants.

5. The NPC’s Revamped

   This is one of my favorite mods, and one that had stunning amount of work put into it. It replaces faces of few hundred of more prominent NPC’s who previously had generic features with very distinctive, hand crafted new visages. I especially like what these folks did with Khajit and Aragornian faces. It always bothered me that there are only like 2-3 facial models for each of the beast races, making all the NPC’s look exactly the same. Same goes for Orcs – their generic faces were very similar to each other. As a result, you could hardly tell two Orcs or Khajit apart. TNR changes that and includes some very memorable faces among these races. For example S’Krivva from the Thieves Guild now looks more like a house cat. It also makes the prominent NPC vampires (like the count of Skingrad) look less ugly. It really livens up the game and adds flavor to it. I’m considering this a must-have mod.

6. Chameleon NoRefraction

   Removes the refraction effect from the Chameleon spell which makes it virtually impossible to see your weapon and shield during combat. I always found it very annoying, since it made it incredibly difficult to figure out whether or not you are in range and forced me to remove the Chameleon effect each time I got into close combat. The mod makes it work the way it used to in Morrowind – instead of being invisible, you become partially see-through making close combat while under Chameleon effect more practical

7. Magic Tweaks

   Magic in Oblivion is a bit unbalanced. Most of the buff spells you can buy or learn have almost no duration. For example, let’s say you want to cast Night Eye, Shield and Resist Frost on yourself – something that you could potentially need in a tough dungeon fight or Oblivion Gate. Sad part is that by the time you cast the last spell, your first buff is over. Not to mention that most of the standard buff effects end before you can even run up to you opponent and hit them. This makes buffing virtually useless in combat – you cant do it before the fight, because the effects are to short. You should not do it during a fight because you will likely get hit while casting. This mod tries to re-balance magic by extending the durations of most buff spells and making some other small tweaks. For example it makes Heal Minor/Major Woulds spell add health over time (5 sec?) and cost more magicka. This means you no longer have to spam 20 minor heals in a row to replenish your health bar – now it takes only 3-4, but the magicka usage is roughly the same.

   This is by far the most conservative magic re-balancing mod. Most of the other ones added new spells, new disciplines and a whole slew of new crazy stuff, which is not exactly what I wanted. This mod seemed a perfect fit. So far I haven’t really noticed to many problems with it but keep in mind that it does change duration, costs and energy requirements of some common spells.

This is all I have for now. Please feel free to add your favorite mods in the comments. I think we have covered a pretty decent range between this and previous mod post. I might have another Oblivion related post next week, and then another one much further down the road. Tomorrow, I’ll be talking about an entirely different game, so quit whining.

Let me give you an example. Early on in my Oblivion game, I was put in a difficult situation. My character (a fledgling thief) run out of money, lock picks and stuff to sell. I was going to earn some money by doing missions for the Thieve’s Guild but that required use of lock picks which I did not have. I could not buy them, because I was broke. I could not earn money through burglary because, again, that required picking locks. So what was I supposed to do? My only choice was to find another way to earn quick cash either by becoming a gladiator in the Arena or joining the Warrior’s Guild or go adventuring and raiding the small dungeons outside the cities. Some people would say that this is what makes the game interesting. But, alas this was not the kind of stuff I wanted to do at the moment.

What I wanted was to play a sneaky and stealthy thief, not a big brutal warrior. And yet, here was the game telling me I totally need to do some combat missions in order to finance my career as a petty thief. It was silly. I mean, have you ever seen a thief who signs for gladiatorial combat, becomes a mercenary or apprentice in Mages guild so that he can afford to buy lockpicks? I never had that issue in Morrowind because lockpicks were plentiful, cheap and easy to buy. Oblivion made them into a very scarce resource that tends to be really easy to blow through (you can waste 20-30 lock picks per Average or Hard lock if you are really bad at the mini-game or you are just hitting Auto Attempt) and very hard to replenish unless you have a lot of money. For me the game was somewhat broken in this aspect.

What did I do? I decided to screw the combat based missions and continue my game by giving myself some lock picks via console hack:

player.addItem a 50

This gave me 50 of them to play with, which was enough to pass the mission, and do some side burglaries and restore my budget to a normal level and allow me to go on with my game. Because I cheated I was able to enjoy my game on my own terms and pursue the aspects of it that made if fun, instead of “grinding” for cash. Yes, I guess I cheated but I did it to circumvent a game design flaw that caused me to run into this issue in the first place.

Of course, I could have went on a long quest to get the Skeleton Key which would solve my lockpick problem. But I bet I would need some lock picks for that mission. And besides, obtaining a unique legendary item in order to pass low level Thieves Guild missions that required burglarizing some houses was as silly plot wise as becoming a gladiator.

I really appreciate that Bethsheda leaves the quake style console in their games. It is really a tool for testers – one that allows you to easily modify your character and the surrounding game world via scripting commands. You can do stuff like give yourself items, levels, skill point, complete quests, teleport yourself around the map and anything else a tester would need to reproduce a tricky bug inducing scenario. Most developers these days remove tools like that prior to the release to prevent people from “cheating”. Bethseda ships their games with a fully enabled console and an editor to allow modders to easily test their creations. The side effect is that players like me can use it to bail themselves out of tricky situations.

I wish everyone did that! I really wish that every single player game shipped with a Bethsheda style console environment that would allow people to tweak their game play experience, spawn very hard to get items or undo game-breaking mistakes. Some of you may disagree but here is the thing: you do not need to use it!

Seriously, why do you care how I play the game? If you think that cheating is wrong, and it destroys the challenge and diminishes the fun of the game, all you have to do is to resist the temptation to go online, learn the console syntax and then look up appropriate commands. Yup, that’s right – all you need to do is ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING. If I want to make my game easier/more fun I will need to do some extra research – and that’s fine with me.

There is a lot of discussion out there about how difficult games ought to be. It is incredibly difficult to make a game that will appeal both to a hard-core challenge addict, and someone who plays for the story or who likes to explore the game world without dying every minute. Here is my solution – leave a cheat console in your game. The same one you give to your testers so that they don’t have to play the damn thing straight through for 6 hours to reproduce some funky bug. People struggling with the game can use the console to adjust the difficulty, give themselves more health packs, ammo or that missing key they needed.

And if you are a greedy bastard, and you think that leaving that aspect in and allowing players to skip super-annoying puzzles will diminish sales of player guide books then you need to die and rot in hell. Also, you can just put the console tricks in that said guide book and people will still buy it. But, yeah – die in fire.

How about you guys? How do you feel about cheating? Do you use non-game breaking cheats? I’m not talking about god mode + infinite ammo type of thing. I’m saying giving yourself few extra health packs, or skipping super tedious puzzle by invoking some command or simply looking up the answer in a online walkthrough instead of ripping all your hair out and then throwing the game out the window and setting it on fire in a fit of rage? What was the last time you “cheated” in a game, and did it improve your experience or diminish it? Let me know!

The problem is simple: we have a sandbox game (Morrowind, Oblivion, GTA, etc..) with a bounded game play area that has distinct “edges” or boundaries. We want to keep the players within the boundaries without actually using invisible walls or impassable terrain features to block them off. What I want to do is try to come up with more interesting ways of making the player stay within the bounds of the in-game world. I have a few ideas of my own, but I’d love to hear yours.

The Magical Leash

The simplest way to force player to stay in some area is to use the good old magical leash trick. At the beginning of the game a wizard puts a curse on you, which will be removed after you finish The Main Quest™ he assigns to you. If you try to leave the country/province and you stray too far away from the wizard’s tower you will die. Or if you are playing in a SF setting, replace the curse with a small remotely detonated explosive lodged deep within your brain. Removing it would involve a complicated and expensive surgery.

Instead of bouncing into an invisible wall or a “you can’t go that way” dialog your character would instead have a very real, and pressing reason to stay inside the borders. Crossing the border wouldn’t necessarily mean instant death – that could be annoying. You could for example start loosing health – at a slow rate at first. The farther you go, the faster you lose health. Or, the thing would work on a timer. You cross the border and you hear an audible alert or a countdown urging you to step back.

This method preserves the illusion that there is a huge world outside the game play area, and also gives the player a compelling reason not to attempt to explore it.

Isolated Island

The magical leash doesn’t always work plot-wise. For example, you wouldn’t want to put such a curse on the Chosen One™ who is destined to save the world, universe and all the other stuff around it. Next best thing is to use a natural boundary that is not stupid.

I mentioned this method before, but I will bring it up again, because it is possibly the best one out there. Make the game take place on an isolated island. Tell the player that getting to the mainland involves a many-month ship voyage. If he tries to go swimming, simply procedurally generate ocean around him. Just an empty water, with a flat, clear sandy bottom. Nothing to see or explore. Sooner or later the player will get the idea, and swim back to the island. This is guaranteed to work, and it doesn’t force you to modify the plot in any way.

You can play around with this ides a bit. For example, instead of an island, use an oasis in a middle of a desert. Or a colony on an arid, desolate planet. It will work well, as long as you can justify putting a huge swat of nothing between the game area, and the rest of the world.

Another interesting variation on this idea is the flying island. You put the player on a magical chunk of rock that is floating in mid air. If they want to walk off the edge, let them. Then give them a nice, cinematic view of the underside of the island followed by the loading screen.

Virtual Treadmill

Then again, it would be pretty boring if all games took place on isolated islands. Sometimes you want it to appear as if other settlements, towns or cities were close by. For example, you want to have sprawling vistas with an outline of some impressive city or ruins in the distance. You don’t want the player to go there, but you want them to see it from various vantage points. You may even want to have roads that lead to that city appear in the game.

How do we accomplish that? Let’s think about this. How does the player know he is actually moving in and FPS or a 3d person game with a camera trailing behind him? He figures it out by observing the nearby objects as he passes them. If there are no objects, he can tell by observing the textures on the ground. Imagine putting your avatar on a perfectly flat, featureless green surface with no texture, sheen or granularity to it. It is just a sheet of green that extends in all directions. In such environment there would be almost no way to tell whether or not this avatar is actually “covering distance” or running in place. Since there are no observable features on the ground both actions would appear exactly the same.

Let’s exploit that! When the player reaches the invisible wall, don’t make him stop and bounce off of it. Simply stop moving him in space, but continue “advancing” the terrain textures around him. You can probably even put these textures on a loop. For example, if the player is following a road, just make the painted traffic lines scroll past him as he is running in place.

The player can continue in that direction, but the city on the horizon will never appear any closer. He is essentially on a virtual treadmill!

For added realism, use a timer to keep track track on how long player was on the treadmill. Then when he turns around, delay actually releasing him by the same amount of time. This would give him an illusion that he really covered a lot of ground while off the map. It might get a little bit tricky if they go off the road, and try to skirt around at diagonal angles, but you can still figure it out. Maybe instead of a timer use a pedometer type thing – count the steps he make, and adjust for the direction. There might be a little of vector math involved here, but it’s nothing that can’t be implemented efficiently.

Spherical or Toroidal Wraparound World

Finally, how about making the game world have no borders at all. Have the map wrap around itself, so you can’t actually walk of the edge. It would simulate living on a sphere – say a small planetoid of sorts. The actual implemented shape of the world would likely be torus because spherical geography can be difficult to work with. For one, it can’t be nicely flattened out into a 2d map – ask real world cartographers. It screws up all the angles. Not to mention that giving the player access to a whole sphere would probably do weird things to in-game compass.

Torus on the other hand maps beautifully into a square map and allows you to create a 3D world that may appear like a sphere from the FPS/3rd person perspective but really isn’t. When the player walks off the edge of the map, he enters the opposite edge – the world effectively wraps around in a very intuitive way. You don’t actually tell the player he is walking on a surface of a doughnut – make him think it is an actual sphere.

If you design your game play area this way, you can’t really pretend that there is more stuff out there. If the world wraps around, it means that there is nothing more that lies beyond which puts some design constraints on you. For example, the players may want to know how this tiny word sustains it’s population if there are only 3 small farms on the whole planet. In the comments last week Lars mentioned that he would rather have an invisible wall than an incredibly tiny self contained world that didn’t even pretend to be self sufficient. The notion that there is more to the in-game universe was important to him – as it is important to other players.

So making toroidal world only works in some cases. It wouldn’t work for games such as Oblivion, unless… Unless you assume that this world is only a small part of a galaxy of other toroidal worlds. This could be a unique part of your game world’s charm.

Imagine a fantasy setting in which you have an unrealistically dense solar system full of habitable planetoids. The player would see other planets rolling by in the sky – hell, perhaps even be able to make out major cities on their surface. Establish that there is an efficient magical way of traveling between these worlds, and an established trade which explains abundance of food on a world with scantly any farms and no edible plant life. To make things even more interesting, give the player access not to one but two or three small toroidal maps to give him an idea how this world is networked and how these planets vary in size.

If you are creating a SF universe you can make your toroidal worlds to be small, terraformed moons and captured asteroid satellites that orbit some bigger planet. As population blooms, it is unlikely that inhabitants of a planet would migrate towards the big orbiting rocks around it. And if you have super-efficient transforming technology, you can totally capture an asteroid in a stable orbit and turn it into a beautiful urban center, a suburban sprawl or a mining colony with a nice school district. Most of these colonies would naturally be dependent on trade with the main planet for food supplies, fuel and energy.

You could then allow the player to move between several of these orbital colonies, but keep him off the main planet. How? Make something up. Maybe you need a visa to get there. Maybe you need to be a citizen or be invited by a citizen. Maybe the folks down there don’t take kindly to people with criminal records and the player has a prior conviction that got him banished to the Orbital Village in the first place. There could be lots of made up reasons to prevent him from going down there – up to and including exuberant ticket price.

What do you think? Can you give me other interesting ways of constructing virtual game worlds in a way that would limit invisible walls without introducing rivers of lava all around the game play area?

I’m not saying all mini games are bad. For example, I totally didn’t mind the Pazaak card game included in Knights of the Old Republic games. I consider it an exception to the rule, mainly due to the fact it was optional. You actually never had to play it in order to advance the plot. The game designers did not shove it down your throat forcing you to master it. If you were not into it (like me) you were free to ignore all the Pazaak dens and politely refuse all offers to play a game from NPC’s.

Not only that – the game also had a nice collectible element to it, which allowed you to build up your deck by finding or buying new cards. It added a new layer to an already excellent role playing game. Personally, I was more interested in the unfolding story to waste my time playing it, but I enjoyed the fact that it was there.

I remember that Final Fantasy VIII (the only FF title that I played btw) had a very similar collectible card game going on, and I totally didn’t mind it either. I have nothing against optional mini games that you don’t actually have to play if you don’t want to.

On the other hand, I abhor mandatory mini games. Some RPG’s such attempt to use them in lieu of skill checks which I find silly. For example, Oblivion has the lock picking game you must play every fucking time you want to… Well, pick a lock.

This is not really a puzzle game. It is more of a skill based, reflex building game. To open the lock, you need to push the tumblers up and lock them in place. You get visual and audible clues as to when you should lock a tumbler, and if you attempt to lock it at the wrong time, you will break your lock pick, and more tumblers you already cleared will fall down. You have to actually learn how do do it in real life by trial, error and lot’s of practice. Your character has a security attribute that can be used for lock picking but this game makes it irrelevant. Some people get so good at this mini game they can pick hard locks with level 1 characters:

Why does the game even have that security skill? In Morrowind (Oblivion’s predecessor) lock picking was based directly on your security skill. If your skill was low, you would only be able to open low level locks and you would fail a lot As your skill increased, you would get better and better. If you spent a lot of time and money training that skill you eventually became ultimate lock picker. For example, one of my characters was able to pick the lock on Vivec’s chamber in a single try.

This was great. I felt that there was a gradual progression there and my character became more powerful over time. In Oblivion you don’t get that feeling. When you first start playing the game, you suck at it you waste most of your lock picks. Eventually you get a hang of it, and you can usually open even the hardest locks with a single lockpick. Oblivion ties lock picking to player skill rather to the character skill.

This brings up an interesting issue. What is more satisfying: mastering a difficult skill yourself, or watching your character master it and observing the results? A lot of people will probably pick the former, but I actually get more kick out of the latter. Why? I really suck at eye-hand coordination things. I find them silly, annoying and distracting. That’s why I usually pick RPG games over arcade button mashers, platformers and reflex based stuff.

I get a kick out of the story, the plot and interacting with the in-game world. I like to see the sights, talk to people, read the little bullshit books and immerse myself in the fluff. I like the combat aspect too, but games such as Oblivion give me so many choices when it comes to that. I can be a brutal warrior with a big War Hammer, a stealthy Rogue who will sneak attack people in the back, a ranger type guy shooting people full of arrows while running backwards, a mage pumping enemies full of fireballs or a summoner guy having skeletons and daemons fighting for me. Besides, combat is largely based on the skills and equipment my character is proficient with.

That lock picking thing though? I don’t feel like learning it. Why do they make me actually train this pointless, absolutely irrelevant, useless skill? That’s not fun. That’s work! The only satisfaction I get from mastering the lock-picking game is the fact that I can finally move on and enjoy other parts of Oblivion without agonizing over wasting the precious, hard to get lock-picks.

Fortunately, Bethesda figured out that there are people like me out there, and created the Auto Attempt button which will try to pick the lock based on your security skill. The only problem with it is that it wastes a lot of lockpicks. And I mean, a lot. More than I would waste doing it the normal way. So you either suffer through the minigame and learn it, or you walk around perpetually broke because you are spending 200-300 gold for lockpicks every few hours.

To make matters worse, the persuasion mini game in Oblivion has no auto attempt button:

Granted, this one is somewhat easier to master, but it doesn’t change the fact that I would just prefer to push a button and see if my character was able to rise the disposition of the NPC based on a speachcraft skill check. Again, I get very little sense of accomplishment from beating that little game. What’s worse, the game robs me out of feeling like I’m playing a really smooth talking character because the speachcraft skill is virtually useless.

For me, RPG games should stay RPG games. Designers should resist the urge to replace traditional skill checks with mini games. Lockpicking should be a skill check. Persuasion should be a skill check. Repair and modification of items should be a skill check. Any form of hacking or computer security operation should be a skill check. If you are a game designer, and you think you could add some flavor to your product by replacing an in game skill check by forcing the player to play some reflex/memorization based puzzle you should stop what your doing right now. You are doing it wrong!

Take that idea for a really awesome hacking/lockpicking game and make something like Pazaak instead. An optional game that just adds flavor to the game world, and allows players who don’t particularly enjoy it to skip it altogether. At least that’s my take on it.

What do you think? Do you enjoy mini games that replace skill checks? Do you find Oblivion’s mini games appealing? Or do you find them annoying like me?

I’m telling you, nothing breaks immersion more painfully than bouncing into an invisible wall. Insurmountable waist high fences are bad, but at least they provide you with some visual clue as to where you can or cannot go. But sometimes game developers just
put an arbitrary border around the game world and simply prevent you from going further. We all know that borders are necessary. You cannot have an infinite game world. There have to be explicit bounds that players cannot cross around the game play area. But clever design can mask them. Take my favorite Morrowind for example: the game surely was bound by some arbitrary borders, but I have never seen one. In fact, I never felt compelled to find one. The game took place on an island surrounded by sea on all sides. To actually find the invisible wall, one would have to swim really into the open sea. But there was never any incentive to do so. All the interesting stuff such as shipwrecks, small islands, and sea flora were close to the shore. Open sea was empty and barren. It was a natural barrier that I did not feel compelled to cross.

Some other games are less subtle about this, and they bound the game play area using other geographical features such as deep chasms, tall mountains, rivers of lava and etc. Oblivion however does none of that. I actually bounced into the invisible wall by an accident. When I got my first horse in the game I went on a crazy ride across the wilderness. Since horses are awesome at scaling steep terrain, I kept climbing all the bigger and smaller hills just to see what was behind them. I actually found some interesting stuff on my way: bandits, some ancient ruins, couple of random chests with a little bit of gold, and some cheap items and etc. That was until I hit the in game border.

click to enlarge

As you can see above, there is nothing there that would stop me from proceeding. There is more generated terrain beyond the invisible wall, I just can’t go that way. This, ladies and gentlemen is not only wrong, but just lazy. Why didn’t they put a chasm or a mountain here? It’s probably because mountains or chasms are not supposed to be there. Bethsheda fell into a classic world-building trap. Anyone who either designed imaginary worlds and drew intricate maps for them, or adopted existing maps for already made worlds and tried to use them in some narrative knows this feeling. Sooner or later your story, adventure scenario or plot requires the characters to visit a swamp or a forest of some sort, and then you realize that the closest one is hundreds of miles away.

This is the downside of using pre-made worlds. Oblivion takes place in the world of Tamriel – the same imaginary world as Morrowind, Daggerfal, Arena and Redguard games. Bethsheda already drew and published the maps for the whole continent, despite the fact that each of it’s takes place in a different province. The playable area of Oblivion is the province of Cyrodiil which lies smack dab in the middle of this huge map:

click to enlarge

This is not the most accurate map. There are maps out there that include topographical detail such as major rivers, mountain chains and etc. Cyrodiil just doesn’t have high hills, impassable chasms or rivers of lava along most of it’s borders. The consistency of the world with previously published materials prohibited Bethsheda from building these artificial barriers. So instead they went for illusion of continuity. As long as you don’t actually bump into the invisible wall, you can see the terrain stretch away into the distance.

Invisible walls are bad, but in this case they are somewhat excused by Cyrodiil’s geography. How could they make the game play area finite without them though? The geography of the area does not really depict any high mountain chains, chasms, canyons or other natural barriers across most borders, so these are out. The neighboring provinces are not desolate wastelands, but more or less heavily populated areas. This means that procedural terrain generation is out of question as well. In some games where the playable area is bordered by sea or wastelands you could get away with generating random terrain devoid of anything interesting into all directions. This way a player could wander off the map and continue walking as long as he wanted, but it would never find anything. This works especially well for islands. Procedurally generate empty sea all around and allow players swim out as far as they want.

Still, that wouldn’t work for Oblivion either. Randomly generated emptiness all around it would totally mess up the scale and create an illusion that Cyrodiil is the only populated province on the continent, which it’s not. Still, simply telling the player he “cannot go that way” is wrong, because it immediately begs a question of why.

Why cant I go there?

What is there?

As Steve Yegge noticed, the answer to this question is problematic to say the least. If you try to think like the character in the game, you won’t be able to figure it out. The question makes no sense. The wall is the end of the universe, and what lies beyond is incomprehensible.

It is something other than the game world. It is undefined! But you don’t want the player to think this way. Thinking about the end end of a playable area break immersion. You want them to think that there is stuff out there there. Real stuff like more of the game world – but it’s just inaccessible at the moment. In Morriowind players knew that there is a vast empire of Tamriel just beyond the ocean. But they also knew they could not get there by swimming. It was logical – you can’t swim across the ocean in real life, so they wouldn’t try it in the game either.

Could we conceive a similar logical, life-like barrier for Oblivion? I was thinking about a magical barrier. Cyrodiil is the imperial province, right? We could say that one of the paranoid emperors in the past, ordered to erect a magical barrier along the borders of the province to protect it from raids, and keep outsiders at bay. Something like Ghost Fence from Morrowind, but larger in scale. It’s not perfect, and little bit shaky fluff-wise, considering that the the upkeep of Ghost Fence tied up most of the combined power of the Tribunal. Still, something like that could have been better than an invisible wall. The player would consider the wall an in-world obstacle, rather than an abstract game mechanic.

How would you solve this issue? How would you avoid the invisible walls around Cyrodiil, without invalidating existing maps, and contradicting the existing lore?

That said, I wanted to talk about mods. A while ago I sat down and compiled a list of the best Morrowind mods out there. I wanted to do something like that for Oblivion. The only problem is that I don’t know the game that well yet. So here are couple of the mods that I have found worthwhile.

1. Unofficial Oblivion Patch – fixes over a thousand bugs left in the game after the last official patch. It fixes broken quests, weird side effects, graphical glitches and all sort of other issues. I didn’t actually encounter any of the problems it fixes, but I don’t want to. Note that this mod did not fix the foliage flicker bug I mentioned yesterday. That one has probably something to do with my video card.
2. Oblivion Mod Manager – A mod manager. I initially did not think I’m going to need one, but some Oblivion mods are distributed as .omod files which require this tool. Once I installed I found it quite useful. It makes managing the tricky mods easier, and it even has a utility which detects potential conflicts between the installed mods. It is good idea to get this if you are planning to install any mods other than the Unofficial Patch.
3. DarNified UI – A UI redesign. I mentioned that I hated the console driven Oblivion UI. This mod tries to fix it introducing quite a few changes. It improves the hood repositioning some of it’s elements. It makes the inventory panels bigger and the fonts smaller so that you can actually see more than 4 items at the same time. It makes the map and journal windows much larger allowing you to see more. The UI is still deeply nested and broken up into components but it is roughly 60% less annoying. I recommend it. Alternatively you can try the more conservative BTmod which was used as a base for DarNified UI.

I complained about the self contained Oblivion cities last week and it turns out that there is a mod that fixes that. It is aptly named Open Cities and it does exactly what the name suggests. It removes the loading screens at the city gates, and makes them work like regular doors. It does it without any major impact on the FPS or slowdowns. It just works, which makes me wonder why the hell Bethsheda did not do this in the first place.

Unfortunately it has a pretty serious flaw – it conflicts with the Unofficial Patch mod. I don’t know why, and how but it does. The mod worked flawlessly for about half an hour, and after that it reverted back to normal. All the cities started to have double sets of gates, and once you entered them you could not leave. I was forced to disable the mod, and re-load from an earlier save. If it wasn’t for the Oblivion Mod Manager I wouldn’t know what has caused this issue. But apparently some of the fixes and scripting in the Unofficial Patch overrides the stuff in Open Cities.

In the end I opted to keep the Unofficial Patch rather than the City mod fearing broken quests, and game breaking bugs. I might experiment with it some more, at some later time. If you are not using the Unofficial Patch, I highly recommend it.

I also know that Oblivion has a fucked up leveling system. I haven’t been playing the game too long to notice it yet but I’m sure I will need a leveling mod soon. I hear that the Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul is one of the better ones out there, although I haven’t tried it. Any recommendations?

I also wanted to mention a weird bug I discovered that was not fixed by any of the patches. It happens mostly in or around the Imperial Isle City but I’m not sure it is tied to that location, or if it just happens there because that’s where I tend to hang out there a lot. It never happened to me anywhere else. It works like this: I’m walking around the city minding my own business and the game suddenly freezes up for few seconds. It goes to a black screen, it appears as if it was crashing back to Windows Desktop. But it doesn’t actually crash – it just shows me the desktop (at a very low resolution) for a split second then flickers back to black and resumes the game normally. Once it’s over, I can continue playing as normal. The only difference is that I can sometimes see my Windows taskbar icons flickering in and out in the upper right corner of the screen. Everything else is fine. When I exit the game my Windows resolution is reset to it’s lowest setting at 800×600 and stays like that until I change it. If I manage to play for few hours without this happening, and then quit the game my resolution is fine.

This doesn’t seem to be tied to how long I play. Sometimes it happened 5 minutes into the game. Other times I would play for hours, then visit Imperial City and have this crash. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. I noticed that avoiding wandering through the streets of the Imperial City and looking around to much helps me to avoid the bug. If I keep my trips short, use fast travel, and look at the road while I’m walking it doesn’t happen as often.

Anyone seen this before, or did I discover some unique combination of hardware and settings that crashes the game in a brand new way?