Oblivion: In the Shadow of D&D
I bought the computer-RPG The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion about a week ago and have been playing it quite a bit. It has an interesting way of handling character levels. I’m not sure exactly what I think of it, but it’s an unusual—and rather fundamental—design choice.
Like in D&D and most any fantasy CRPG, you level up as you play Oblivion (as you exercise skills). Leveling increases your attributes, and your skills are also increasing as you use them. However, this doesn’t really do anything to make you more powerful: the enemies you fight—and many other challenges you face—increase in difficulty at the same time. That is, the kind of enemy you encounter corresponds to your level.
The advantage of this system is that it allows you to go anywhere in the world and attempt any quest at any time (except those that depend, plot wise, on other quests, of course). This flows from the ideal of a free experience, where you can pursue your own goals without being tied to the main plot. The disadvantages, though, are becoming more obvious.
Issue One: Balance
First there’s a side issue of exactly what leveling does for your effectiveness, and how that compares to the way enemy strengths are calculated. In short, these don’t seem to quite match—perhaps by design.
Centrally, your effectiveness and your level are not absolutely tied together: depending on how you exercise your skills, you can get larger or smaller gains for every level increase. However, enemy difficulty seems keyed solely to level, not to any other measure of effectiveness. This means that it’s possible to have very low effectiveness given your level, and thus be facing very difficulty foes. The reverse might also be possible, but it seems skewed more to the difficult side of things.
Unless you concern yourself greatly with how your character levels, the game generally becomes harder as your level increases. And since level doesn’t control what quests you can do, it’s better to avoid leveling then to aim for it.
Issue Two: Everything Else
The second issue is broader and more significant. While there is some sense of accomplishment from leveling, its effects are basically washed out by the parallel increase in enemy skill. In the end, the encounters are basically the same no matter what level you are. This seems unsatisfying.
Of course, as you’re probably thinking, this is basically how things work in any classic D&D tabletop game: the GM presents encounters that roughly match the PCs, striking a balance in difficulty to create maximum tension. Thus, leveling is also a wash in D&D. But yet, it’s not. Besides the vague sense of accomplishment one gets from increasing that number, and getting new abilities, D&D and other tabletop games have other elements that keep things interesting; elements that Oblivion generally lacks.
Tactical Variety
While some estimate of total PC effectiveness (level) may match that of the enemies (threat level, whatever), different aspects of their effectiveness change at unmatched rates. For instance, at low level I may be (relatively) good at blocking and attacking but have low health, while at high level the reverse is true (again, relative to what I’m fighting).
Thus, the dynamics of combat change as you level, and so do the tactics and thinking you need to employ. This is true to a limited extent in Oblivion, but not nearly as strongly as in most tabletop RPGs.
Color Variety
The flavor and nature of the enemies you encounter change as you level. In a typical D&D game, early encounters deal with wild animals, a few human(oid)s, and disorganized greenskins in small numbers. As you progress, enemies become increasingly (a) organized and intelligent, and (b) supernatural. You don’t fight dragons at first level, even if they’re weak, crippled, baby dragons. And, conversely, you don’t fight wild boars at high-level, even if they’re the kings of all wild boars.
These progressions create a real sense of change and discovery: there are always new things to fight, and the old things you used to fight are now pushovers. Additionally, because of the tendency towards greater organization and intelligence in high-level enemies, your tactics must also change, as above.
Again, Oblivion has these elements in small amounts. Yet I can wander into a dungeon at level 2 and fight undead just as I can at level 20. And at level 20, I can still face bandits and wild animals—plus, whoever heard of a "wild" minotaur wandering about?
Heroism
In even semi-long-lasting D&D campaigns, the scope of the adventure steadily widens as a group plays. While you begin worrying about random encounters and goblins attacking villagers, you end up embroiled in war, and defeat great, supernatural evils that threaten the entire world. You often begin focused on yourself, and end up being a part of much larger events.
Oblivion has this in its linear quest sequences—the main plot, the mage’s guild tasks, etc.—but the rest of the game does not respond simultaneously to what’s going on there: after saving the world in one quest, you may expunge bandits from a cave in the next. Oblivion also spills the beans on the wide-ranging events rather easily, since any quest can be attempted at any time. Thus, the widening of scope seen at the RPG table is found only patchily in Oblivion.
Consequences
What does all this amount to? I’m not sure.
Unlike in a D&D campaign, Oblivion has no "trial" or "build-up" period when your character deals with petty problems, thereby gaining skills to fight the greater ones: the petty problems can be utterly ignored and the earth-shaking ones attempted immediately.
In many CRPGs, one encounters a difficult fight and is forced to flee, though with plans to return later when stronger and better prepared. In Oblivion, preparedness in the form of potions is possible, but "stronger" is impossible. I was once driven from an old fort by skeletons with arrows. If I return there now, I won’t be a position to defeat them: they’ll be just as dangerous as they ever were. And in fact, because of the balance issues discussed earlier, they may even be more dangerous.
Conclusions
Are these issues going to decrease my enjoyment of the game? Probably a little…though maybe it will be increased for other, connected, reasons, such as the freedom to do as you will. I may have to play more to know (I’ve done about 20 hours so far).
Certainly, I was expecting a gradual build up toward greater things. But now I realize that those greater things were accessible all along. Perhaps the only problem with the system is that it’s too transparent: if the parallel strengthening of enemies were hidden behind new kinds of enemies, perhaps there would be less reason to question the system.
I almost think that they would have been better off with no leveling system at all. Of course, the vast body of purist gamers would have wailed and gnashed their teeth at this, always expecting the familiar. But when leveling changes so little, why include it? It would be better to instead busy one’s self with acquiring equipment and reorganizing skill points to adjust to new problem or experiment with different styles of play. There are certainly tabletop RPGs with no leveling or equivalent, but more with than without. We’re still very hung up on the D&D model, refusing to abandon it even when it doesn’t suit the design at hand.