Gaming

Ah, thank you for your thoughtful response. I’ve tried to condense my thoughts as much as possible, but it’s still a giant wall of text. Sorry about that.

I basically agree with most of what you said, there really is a lot to like about Oblivion. But I’ve always perceived a strange contrast in it between its excellent quest design and the way it treats the actual Elder Scrolls lore, and it has always bothered me. How could they put so much effort into one aspect of the game and so little into the other?

When people reminisce about the game, they always mention their favorite quests: The Dark Brotherhood quest line, the quest where you go into a painting, the one with a paranoid elf, the one with a backwater village full of Lovecraftian cultists, the one where all the people in a village got turned invisible, the one where a ship that's being used as an inn gets hijacked by pirates and sailed out to sea while you're sleeping in it, the one where an orc gladiator finds out that he's the son of a vampire, the one were you help two brothers reclaim their family farm… And these really are some of the best and most memorable quests in any RPG ever.

But, with the exception of the DB, can you see what these have in common? They’re not Elder Scrolls quests. They have absolutely nothing to do with the setting, they're as generic as can be. You could lift them from Oblivion and drop them into any other fantasy game, and they'd work just fine with basically no adjustments needed.

When the game does make contact with the Elder Scrolls universe, it almost always does so in the most halfhearted and perfunctory way possible. The examples that stick out most in my mind are Boethiah's quest and Mankar Camoran's speech in Paradise. What sinister task does the Prince of Plots, whose domain is deceit, conspiracy, secret plots, assassination, and treason, have for you? Go into an arena and kill some dudes one after the other. Like... really? That’s a Mehrunes Dagon or Molag Bal quest, not a Boethiah quest! And the baddie, a supposed expert on all things oblivion, gives you a speech near the end of the game, during which he rattles off the names of some daedric princes and the planes of oblivion they rule over. Except that he gets every single one of them wrong. The writer threw in some TES terminology with no regard for what it actually means in the same way that Star Trek writers throw in technobabble.

These are just two examples, but you notice stuff like this all over the game if you keep your eyes open. Most of the people working on the game, with the exception of the DB quest line designer/writer and maybe a handful of others, clearly didn’t give one singular crap about its setting, avoiding it as much as possible and putting in the bare minimum effort otherwise.

Now the revelation I've had is not that the game is like this, I've known that for almost twenty years. It's why it's like this. It finally clicked as a result of combining three ideas:

One, I recently watched a video by Zaric Zhakaron in which he points out that the people who created The Elder Scrolls left the company decades ago. He argues that Starfield's worldbuilding stinks in comparison to Bethesda's previous games because it's the first game in decades where the developers actually had to do some themselves, they couldn't simply insert new quests and stories into a world that had been made by others and that they simply inherited (TES) or purchased (Fallout). And it turns out they suck at it. There was barely anyone left of the old Bethesda after Morrowind.

Two, modern Bethesda has no balls. Old Bethesda made a variety of different games, some of which were highly innovative both in terms of technology and design (e.g. it was Terminator: Future Shock, not Quake, that pioneered 3D enemies and mouselook in first-person shooters). But then Morrowind became a huge hit, and the price of success was the company’s soul. It spent the next twenty years making the same game over and over with different coats of paint.

And three, I had a brief discussion about Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. It's a game I like a lot, but whenever I talk about it, I tell people that it's an excellent pirate game whose biggest flaw is that it sometimes forces you to leave your ship and play Assassin's Creed. It's pretty clear the developers wanted to make a pirate game, but they still had to contort it into the AC straitjacket for marketing reasons.

I’m sure you can tell where this is going. You said Oblivion was made with passion, and that’s only half true. Yeah, the developers clearly did want to make a good game, and in many ways they succeeded, but they had no passion for The Elder Scrolls, because it wasn’t their setting. They hadn’t made it, it was just a leftover from some guys who no longer worked there, and as a result the new guys didn’t know or care very much about it. They still had to make a game in it, though, because that’s what the fans wanted. The result is a rather formulaic game that distances itself from its own setting whenever it can, yet is unable to develop its own identity because it would clash, and mangles it when it can’t.

Maybe I’m just slow and this stuff was obvious to everyone twenty years ago, but I feel a strange sense of closure having figured it out. If you made it this far, thanks for reading.