The Richter Scale^®

My wife tells me that I get a bit obsessive about things, and certainly console video games are part of that obsession. However, with most video games, I stop playing individual games after a short while and move on to the next game.

That’s because I either finish the games in question (occasionally), get bored with them (frequently), or (rarely) get stuck to the point where I just can’t get further because the boss I need to kill keeps kicking my butt (the final boss in MechAssault 2 is a classic example).

The one thing most of these console games I have stopped playing have in common is that they end, one way or another, at least in the “Mission” or “Campaign” modes. Sure, there are multiplayer death matches and the such, and those will keep me coming back on occasion, but the whole linear story/path concept is a bit stale and repetitive.

Games with “open worlds” where one can travel most anywhere and encounter a variety of things, and where one gets tasks and quests that need to be fulfilled for advancement and reward (spiritual more than monetary) have been around for a couple of decades, starting with, as I recall, the Ultima series from Lord British. However, these too can get stale after a while if they don’t provide a rich and diverse experience. You can only kill so many rats, kobolds, goblins, and spiders, after all.

On going evolution in the capability of computer hardware has improved the breadth of such games by increasing the size of the virtual world one travels in, and thus the number of random encounters, special locations, quests, and characters one encounters. And further expanding such worlds are gaming features such as character interaction, artificial intelligence (of a sort), and the making or crafting of special items, giving the game play a unique experience for each player (if they so choose to proceed).

A few more adventurous game developers have been able to capitalize on the open world concept in a multi-player, on-line form, known by the genre moniker MMORPG - Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, with Everquest, City of Heroes (and its counterpart, City of Villains), Final Fantasy XI, and World of Warcraft among the best known and most popular of such titles.

MMORPG gaming can be greatly addictive, as the people you play with or against add whole new levels of diversity to the gaming experience, and there are people I have met whose sole social activity in life is playing such games, going as far as to even have face-to-face meets with other players they have met in their favorite virtual gaming world.

However, such MMORPG gaming requires commitment and a schedule if you want to play with the same band of fellow adventurers on a regular basis. Kind of like bowling league night, except that it happens every night, takes a lot longer, and is less repetitive than bowling. At least it’s less likely one will succumb to chili-cheese drenched french fries during an Everquest evening than during bowling.

MMORPG gaming on consoles, however, while it exists and is popular, is far from ideal. In order to play well you need to add a USB keyboard , and juggle that with a two handed game controller, or at least become a prodify at navigating cumbersome communications menus. Playing MMORPG games on PCs is generally a lot more effective because you use native interfaces (like the keyboard).

But that’s beside the point - as I said, MMORPG gaming requires a lot of time and commitment, both to yourself and others. If one works a regular job, that’s fine, but in today’s ever more hectic world, fixed schedules are getting less common (at least from my perspective).

So what is one to do if one wants a virtual world type of game with diversity but not a fixed, scheduled commitment?

In my household, the answer has been found in Bethesda Softwork’s Elder Scrolls titles. First there was The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, on the Xbox (I had to have my wife hide the disc on me so I would stop playing), and now there’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on the Xbox 360.

Simply said, Oblivion is addictive, and non-temporal, by which I mean that I can save the game at any point and time, and resume from that point at any other future time, and the entire world I have been playing in will be just as I left it. And while not playing with or against any other human players is something of a drawback, the developers of Oblivions have put in so many quests, caves, campsites, characters, Oblivion gates, and crafting features into the game that I have yet to tire from playing it.

My Argonian Assassin (who has yet to assassinate anyone) is 22nd level, and a member of the mages and fighters guilds, and has about a dozen and a half quests in backlog. He is also very good at making potions, and has just starting enchanting his own weapons and armor. He even owns a couple of homes in two different cities where he can store his loot and relax when he wants.

The only real troublesome thing is that with all the saving of games that I’ve been doing I may soon run out of hard disk space - each save game takes over a megabyte of hard disk space, and I’m somewhere around my 400th save. The save game feature also tells you how long you’ve been playing in real time - I’ve logged over 65 hours of play time on this game alone in the last 8 weeks (four weeks of which I was on the road and not home to play). Scary.

And worse yet, my 9 year son and his 11 year old best friend are now both Oblivion addicts too. This household Oblivion addiction has gotten so bad that I had to buy Prima’s Official Game Guide to Oblivion to help understand some of the game’s nuances, and worse yet (or better, depending on how you look at it), get another Xbox 360 and a second copy of Oblivion so we can both play our own games. I’m not sure how save game portability works over multiple Xbox 360s, but when I get back home to Bonaire in just over a week, I’ll be checking the whole thing out.

While I truly enjoy the game, I will point out that there are a few things about it that annoy me. First is that transitioning between locations (like going into a house or fort from outside, for example) takes a painfully long time because the game is loading content of some sort. I have, a couple of times, even had the game just hang at this point (extremely rare, but it has happened). Similarly, accessing the save/load game screens is painfully slow too.

And, while I have gone on about the benefit of not having the scheduling limitation of an MMORPG when playing Oblivion, it sure would be nice to be able to play cooperatively with another person, either on the same system, or at least via System Link.

However, none of these minor shortcomings has been enough to keep me away from Oblivion. The only things that do that are my travels and my family and business commitments.

I give The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion a 9.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.