Friday 1 March 2024

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Let's have a brief look at The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. A fantasy role-playing game from 2006, two years into Howard Dean's presidency. It attracted rave reviews and was a huge hit, but a few years later it was overshadowed by its sequel, Skyrim, and then it became a joke, the butt of a thousand internet videos that poked fun at its simplistic AI, and nowadays it's a fondly-remembered classic and also a joke, the end.

I remember the first time I bumped into Rena Bruiant. It was like meeting an old friend. I wanted to ask if her husband was okay, but the game didn't have that dialogue option. Does she know that she's famous? Here, in the real world, eighteen years later? Imagine if we could tell the people of Oblivion that they're internet celebrities. They could do personal appearances at conventions, or lease themselves out to other games developers, assuming Bethesda recognised their right to self-determination.

I'm not a fan of role-playing games. In fact I hate them! But I'm broad-minded, and Oblivion was on sale, so I decided to see what the fuss was about. One benefit of buying it in 2024 is that most of the bugs have long since been patched out, and a popular unofficial patch removes many more. In addition the modern version of the game includes all of the downloadable content and expansion packs.

Oblivion was a pioneer of downloadable content. The "horse armour" DLC was particularly infamous back in the day. For the low, low price of 200 Microsoft Points - $2.50, but you had to buy points in blocks of 400 - the player could download a 6mb texture pack that made some of the horses look as if they were wearing armour. It didn't make the horses tougher. It just changed their appearance.

Bear in mind that Oblivion is a single-player game, so the only person who ever got to see the horse was you. The armour isn't even particularly good-looking:

In the publishers' defence the horse armour pack was an outlier. There was also a pair of large-scale mission packs, Knights of the Nine (for around $10) and the much more extensive Shivering Isles (for around $30). No doubt there was online gnashing of teeth back in 2006 at the thought of paying $69.99 for a game and the same again for the expansions, but as of 2024 the Game of the Year Deluxe version is around £12, and I only paid £3.24, because it was on offer. Such are the benefits of being patient.

What were Microsoft points? They were a virtual currency for the Xbox 360. I mention Microsoft because Oblivion was originally an Xbox-360-and-PC exclusive. It didn't reach the PlayStation 3 until 2007, and even then the PlayStation didn't get the horse armour DLC, only Knights and Shivering Isles. I have dim memories that it was controversial, back in the day, because it's a lot more prosaic than its predecessor, Morrowind. The fantasy world of Morrowind was truly alien. The architecture was organic and the player could hitch rides on the back of giant bugs. It only had a little bit of voice acting, but in exchange the dialogues were lengthy and detailed.

In comparison Oblivion takes place in a generic medieval fantasy Europe, and the conversations are just a few lines long. It looks a lot more impressive than Morrowind, but it's less imaginative. My natural instinct is to not care at all about this, but with the benefit of hindsight I think the fans of Morrowind actually had a point, because Oblivion's major failing is its blandness.

Original copies of the Xbox 360 version will run on modern Xboxes with backwards compatibility, while PlayStation owners have to make do with a streaming copy of game via Sony's PlayStation Now streaming service, because it was only ever released for the PlayStation 3. To date it hasn't been remastered for later generations of the PlayStation. The PC version is widely available on Steam and other marketplaces, and in theory boxed copies of the PC original can be made to work under Windows 10 and 11. The PC version has a development console and supports modding, so it's the best version to play nowadays.

There was also a mobile phone spin-off, but this being 2006 the mobile phone port was an isometric 3D affair written in Java that nobody remembers.

Is Oblivion any good? Was it any good in 2006? Has it aged well? The answers are "it's engaging although a lot depends on how you approach it", "yes, it deserved the awards", and "imagine a mixture of cheese and wine" in that order. Oblivion has aged like fine cheese, and also fine wine.

What is The Elder Scrolls? Good question. It's a fantasy role-playing universe dating from the 1990s, an unusually vague one. It's not a spoof, it's not super-serious, it doesn't aspire to being high art, it's not as gritty as The Witcher, it doesn't have the depth of Baldur's Gate or Diablo, it isn't a deconstruction of role-playing games. It's generic, deliberately so. The series has a tonne of backstory, but the world of Elder Scrolls is for the most part vague because the developers didn't want to limit themselves.

A few years ago I had a look at Fallout 3. It uses the same engine as Oblivion and was published by the same company, but two years later. Fallout 3 is sci-fi, Oblivion is fantasy. Back then I described Fallout 3 as the role-playing equivalent of junk food, and Oblivion is much the same. I can barely remember the main plot, but it passed the time. The bad parts were at least forgettable. It feels like a prototype, but it's also surprising how much it accomplishes for a game that came out in 2006. That's a long time ago. In 2006 Call of Duty was still set in the Second World War and Half-Life 2 was still a going concern; Episode Two hadn't come out yet.

The Elder Scrolls games are made by Bethesda Softworks. The pillars of its empire are Fallout and The Elder Scrolls and latterly Starfield. They're popular but there's a perception they're all the same, and that the company has given up on quality control and innovation in favour of pumping out product. Bethesda also publishes the modern Doom games, but that's the publishing part of Bethesda. The developing part, Bethesda Softworks, is separate. They are all owned by a company that is owned by Microsoft. Enough of Bethesda.

The first Elder Scrolls game, Arena (1994), was released for the PC, and only the PC, because in those days the PC was nerd city. It didn't sell very well. The internet suggests that it shifted less than five thousand units. People only remember it today for the cover art, which was about ten years out of date for 1994:

Are breast implants a thing in the world of The Elder Scrolls? Perhaps they are. The odd thing is that the Elder Scrolls games at least make a stab at gender-neutral multiculturalism. The armour is gendered, but sensible-looking, and the series takes place in a world where no-one is fazed by green-skinned orcs or cat people. Male and female characters have the same stats, and indeed the player can play as a man or a woman, or an orc, or a lizard-person, or a cat-person etc. Traditionally the different races in role-playing games are thinly-veiled racial stereotypes, but the developers of The Elder Scrolls seem to have been aware of this, because the game's races mix and match different stereotypes.

Arena's cover is particularly jarring because Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim have minimalist artwork. They're packaged as if they were ancient books. The cover art of Oblivion is modelled on an actual book in the game, on the table here, in front of Sean Bean:


Back in 2011 a great blog called Super Adventures in Gaming also had a look at Oblivion, and their screenshot of the same scene also had the character's robe clipping through the book, so I'm reasonably confident the experience I had with an unmodified version of Oblivion in 2024 is more or less the same as it would have been had I played it in 2006 breathe in. Quite late in the process of writing this blog I popped down to the local CeX and picked up a PlayStation 3 copy of the original release, Spider-Man font and all, and the same thing happened on the PS3 as well. I'll post some screenshots of the PS3 version later on.

After the failure of Arena Bethesda didn't give up. Daggerfall (1996) sold around a million copies, Morrowind (2002) around five million, with around a fifth of those sales on the original Xbox. It was the first game in the series to be released for a console. Oblivion (2006) brought the series into the high-def age of the Xbox 360 and PS, selling around around ten million copies, but that pales in comparison to Skyrim (2011), which has shifted around sixty million units on a range of platforms.

Skyrim is an unusually long-lived game. The 2016 Special Edition remains on sale at full price today. Nowadays it's almost the default modern fantasy game, the archetypal "fantasy role-playing game that people who aren't interested in the genre might own". Even I have a copy, and I don't even like fantasy role-playing games.

Why not? I grew up at a time when Star Wars and Transformers were cool and He-Man was naff. As a kid I fantasised about robots and spaceships and Pam Dawber wearing jeans delete this

She was such a super lady. Probably still is. But why robots and spaceships? The swords-and-sorcery genre was pretty embarrassing in the 1980s. The few decent films were either too R-rated to develop a big popular following (Conan the Barbarian), or too weird (Excalibur, Time Bandits, Quest for Fire, The Navigator), or just boring and bland (Legend, Willow). It wasn't until Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings that Hollywood finally nailed it, and even then Rings was a one-off. It was the one legitimately good fantasy epic with elves and wizards and whatever the eff are kobolds.

They're a kind of goblin. They're goblins but translated from German differently. What's the difference between a goblin and a kobold? Don't say +10 agility. Don't say that. Dear god I hate role-playing games. The numbers. The numbers! It's a genre where you can hit a man in the face with an axe and it only does two points of damage because he's wearing iron gauntlets on his wrists. A genre in which the power of a weapon is determined not by its sharpness, or by the powder charge, but by the player's experience points.

I can understand why role-playing games have numbers. I get the historical context. They're derived from table-top wargames, which date from a time when players had to roll dice to work out whether their swords were hitting, how much damage they did etc. But that kind of thing doesn't make sense any more. Computers can model ballistics in real time. If I wanted numbers I would play Cookie Clicker, which I also do, but with Cookie Clicker the numbers don't mean anything at all, and I can accept that.

Do you know what amuses me? According to the internet Pokemon is technically a role-playing game. It's the most popular role-playing franchise of all time. Imagine how angry that makes OG fans of Ultima and The Bard's Tale and Wizardry etc. Their genre is dominated by a game with imaginary monsters. Instead of real monsters. Which are imaginary. I'm going to stop talking about role-playing games now.


But, I mean, seriously, if you want to mess with a fan of role-playing games, wait for them to say "I like role-playing games" and reply with "like Pokemon for example".

Who is the hero of The Elder Scrolls? There isn't one, each game has a different main character. Who is the villain? There's a different one in each game. Some kind of wizard. The Elder Scrolls takes place in a world where magic is real and everybody can cast spells, but there's a bit of science as well. It has elements of Greco-Roman mythology, bits of Tolkien, bits of Dungeons and Dragons, bits of Lewis Carroll, the list goes on. Early in Oblivion I met a bunch of stereotypical European medieval monks, but they were armed with Japanese samurai katanas. They took me to a Himalayan monastery located just north of a town seemingly modelled on Bavarian Germany. The monastery was full of Roman legionnaires. The whole game is like this. It squashes a bunch of fantasy and historical elements into a thick, slightly bland soup.

Tonally the series has no swearing ("bastard" is about as bad as it gets), very little sex, some sanitised violence. The occasional diversions into darkness are generally played as black comedy. The game does dabble in unpleasantness, most in the expansion packs, but you have to actively seek it out. For the most part Oblivion is however lightweight stuff, although having never played it before I was surprised at how close to Doom it was in places. The plot involves an invasion by satanic monsters that emerge from portals to hell, just like in Doom, and there are skinned corpses and piles of gore but they're too low-poly to be disturbing.




Incidentally the game was launched in the United States with a T-for-Teen ESRB rating, but the rating was increased to M-for-Mature shortly afterwards on account of a mixture of the aforementioned gore plus a default no-clothes skin that had nipples. The re-rating seems to have escaped mainstream press attention. Oblivion is still M, but it's very hard to take seriously nowadays.

The Elder Scrolls series is notable for is its technology. Daggerfall had an enormous open-world map with thousands of procedurally-generated dungeons. Morrowind and Oblivion had smaller, but still very large maps dotted with masses of trees, notable in that the player could run from one end of the world to the other with only minimal loading pauses. Oblivion had the misfortune of being developed during what is now known as the "shedloads of bloom" era, when everything that was even slightly reflective glowed with the power of a thousand suns:




Well, that told me

I have the impression Oblivion was supposed to look like real life in 2006. At the time it would have been pretty attractive. I was alive back then, and having had a go at the PlayStation 3 version I can see why it felt like a generational leap. Morrowind had the same engine, but the environment was shrouded in fog and everything was brown or green. Oblivion on the other hand has a huge draw distance - the PS3 fades objects in and out, which is a clever trick that works well - and it's a riot of colour. 2006 was just slightly before the "real is brown" trend in video games, so in that respect Oblivion has anti-aged, a bit like Mirror's Edge.

Almost twenty years later the realism aspect has dated hilariously, but Oblivion is still a good-looking game, but in a different way. The neon colours and plastic terrain now look like a deliberate stylistic choice, like The Long Dark or Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It's a rare example of a game that has gone from looking great, to looking naff, to looking great again. If I was remastering it I would improve the scenery pop-in, tart up the dungeons, licence a more realistic terrain generator, but otherwise leave it alone.



The music has aged well, too. It's just legitimately good. The Elder Scrolls games have orchestral-style soundtracks that make the games seem more expensive than they are. I say orchestra-style because they have a whiff of sampled strings about them, but the orchestration is solid, and Oblivion is particularly lovely:

I played Oblivion on a Windows 10 PC in 2024 and it was generally unproblematic. Unlike Fallout 3 it doesn't have to be patched to get rid of the now-defunct Games for Windows Live, it just works. On a subjective level it felt slightly newer than Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas. I'm not sure if it was the denser foliage, the more diverse colour palette, the grass, or the more in-your-face soundtrack.

It crashed in places, but the game generously auto-saves whenever the player enters or leaves a building, so I didn't lose anything. This being 2024 I could run the game at 1920x1080 with all the sliders turned to maximum. I wanted to experience the game as it was in 2006 on one of those new-fangled Core Duo chips so I didn't use any mods.


Bethesda's role-playing games all share a formula. The formula was established with Arena but perfected by Oblivion, and the company hasn't felt the need to change things since. They all take place in a large, open world that has a handful of city hubs that exist as separate sub-worlds, plus several dozen smaller settlements, plus hundreds of little places that might have a small quest or a collectible sword or something.

Early in the game the player is given a main quest, but there's no time limit, and the player is free to explore the world and complete side-quests instead. The idea is that the player has to toughen up a bit before tackling the main villain, although Oblivion is odd in that respect. It's actually better to get Oblivion's main quest over with as quickly as possible and then explore the world later on. I'll explain why in a moment.

The games all use a first-person perspective. They take place in a sped-up version of real time, with a day-night cycle and changing weather, and they're filled with non-player characters who have their own sleep-wake-work-eat-sleep cycles. They feel like a living world, although on a fundamental level the non-player characters are little robots who have a schedule and a set of stock responses. I'm old enough to remember The Hobbit on the ZX Spectrum, in which the player could ask other characters to pick things up or go north or whatever, and they did it, which was heady stuff in 1982. The Hobbit and its sequels were ambitious, but they were immensely frustrating to play because NPC AI didn't work very well back then.

Oblivion is infamous for its stilted, artificial NPC conversations, but for the most part the NPC scheduling and scripting works. I found that pitched battles involving lots of characters sometimes ended with my allies committing fratricide, because a stray firebolt or arrow had hit a friendly target, but for the most part Oblivion's AI works, in its goofy way. Oblivion is a standalone, single-player game, but the internet is full of tales of people spending hours living in its world, exploring and collecting furniture and exploring, because it's a nice place to visit. Albeit that the locals are odd.




Oblivion's AI is the stuff of legends. NPCs have a bunch of conversation fragments they deploy when they walk past each other. "How goes it", "I've been better", "goodbye!", "how goes it", "I've been better", "I saw a mudcrab the other day", "goodbye!". There's a player reputation aspect, which means that NPCs are bizarrely passive-aggressive at the beginning of the game. They begin conversations with a warm greeting, then dismiss the player with "not you again" and "stop talking". There's a whole conversational mini-game that involves gauging the NPC's facial expressions, which leads to some odd instances where NPCs switch from smiling to frowning as if they had suddenly received an instruction from the radio in their brain, which I suppose technically they had.

The game is infamous for having just over eight hundred voiced characters, but only fifteen voice actors, which includes a small number of celebrities who only voiced a little bit of dialogue. Oblivion established a Bethesda trademark whereby the company spent a lot of money on celebrity voice actors - Patrick Stewart, Sean Bean, Terence Stamp, and Lynda Carter - but then did nothing to publicise this, which raises the question of why they bothered. I was unaware that Patrick Stewart was in the game until after I started playing it.

Bethesda did the same again with Fallout 3, which had Liam Neeson as the hero's dad, and New Vegas, which had Kris Kristofferson and Matthew Perry. I have a theory that the people who make Bethesda's games love hiring actors and being in the studio with them, but are terrified to give them direction because they don't have a clear vision of what the characters should sound like, and they're scared to tell Patrick Stewart et al how to do their jobs.

Stewart voices the doomed Emperor Uriel Septim, but he doesn't have time to make an impression. Apparently he has fond memories of the game because he was given an extensive character biography, and also probably a big sack of money. His performance slips into ham at the very end - "you must shut the gates - OF OBLIVION!", from what I remember - but there's nothing wrong with it otherwise. His reaction to the probable death of his sons is effectively underplayed.

Terence Stamp isn't nearly as good, which puzzled me. He sounds as if he's reading the script for the first time. Oblivion comes with a "making-of" documentary that includes footage of Stamp's recording session, where he does indeed appear to be reading directly from the script - amusingly he also voices the WARG! and YAHH! combat noises, acting out sword thrusts and parries - but it was in a professional recording studio, with direction and the opportunity to do multiple takes. And yet Stamp sounds hesitant, as if none of the fantasy words mean anything to him.

Sean Bean on the other hand is terrific. He is reluctant heir Martin Septim, who resolves to do the best he can despite overwhelming odds. Without wishing to spoil things there's a twist at the end whereby the game reveals he was the hero all along, and the player was just a supporting character, but Bean is so charismatic I didn't mind. He was hired late in the day but is by far the best voice actor in the game.


Lynda Carter chipped in seemingly as a favour to her husband, who was at the time one of the co-owners of Bethesda Softworks. I salute that man. She voiced a few generic characters in Morrowind, and bunch of NPCs in Oblivion and Skyrim, but had a much larger role in Fallout 4, where she played a major character who sang a bunch of original songs.

That leaves around eleven voice actors for the remaining eight hundred characters. In Oblivion's defence the voice acting is at least competent. The actors emote appropriately and the quest-giving characters each have the germ of a distinct personality and voice. But generic, background NPCs often sound as if they're having conversations with themselves, and entire character classes - the guards, the cat-like Khajiit, every single one of the generic Oblivion baddies - have the same voice, as if they were the same people inhabiting different bodies.

Apparently the team recorded even more dialogue, but there was a directive that the game fit on a single DVD, so half of the generic dialogue was chopped out. The PlayStation 3 version came on a high-capacity Blu-Ray disc, but none of the extra content was put back, which is a shame.

On a technical level every Elder Scrolls game from Morrowind onwards uses the same basic scripting engine, but with upgraded graphics. Nonetheless some bugs remain. Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Fallout: New Vegas share an iteration of the engine that has plastic terrain and a curiously flat, shadowless look. Skyrim and Fallout 4 use the next generation of the engine, with vastly better lighting, although some things haven't changed. In every game from Morrowind in 2002 to at least Fallout 4 in 2015 the player can see through water by hovering the viewpoint just below the surface :



Fallout 4 (bottom) isn't quite as obvious, but the problem is still there

Oblivion was the first game in the series with a modern-style physics engine, but the game generally doesn't make use of it in a significant way. There's a telekinesis spell, but I don't recall any quests that needed it. Skyrim apparently has some traps that can be bypassed by putting a weighty object on them. If Oblivion has anything like that I haven't found it.

As mentioned up the page the game has a quirk that makes things easier if the player does the main quest early on. There's a complicated system of skills and attributes that advance each time the player jumps or sneaks or slashes or blocks or casts a spell etc. The overall system is arcane, although actual skill point advancement just involves repeating an action numerous times. There are tales on the internet of players putting weights on the controller buttons to continually cast low-level spells, or using a rubber band to continually sneak in a room with a sleeping NPC in order to boost their stealth. After an hour or so of robo-casting and robo-sneaking the player would be superhumanly good.

When the player sleeps he or she advances up a level, but as the player advances the monsters advance as well, in lockstep, so unless the player concentrates on building up their health and combat skills the game becomes harder. Or rather the enemies take longer to kill, because they have more health. A levelled player is stronger, but so are the baddies, so the combat just takes longer.

To make things worse non-player characters don't advance in level, so late-game escort quests are an exercise in frustration. And so a perfectly legitimate strategy is to play the whole game at a low level, fighting a mixture of rats, skeletons, and weak barbarians throughout the entire storyline. For my playthrough I gradually advanced to level twenty, at which point the game deploys the whole array of monsters, and I can confirm that the combat just gets slower and more boring as the game goes on. The quest rewards are greater, but everything costs more, so I never felt as if I was actually advancing.


Story-wise Oblivion begins with the death of Emperor Uriel Septim, who is assassinated as part of a co-ordinated campaign of regicide. His sons are killed, too, leaving the throne of the land of Tamriel vacant.

Or so it seems. With his dying wish Septim asks the player to deliver an amulet to a humble priest, Brother Martin of Weynon Priory. It turns out that Martin is the Emperor's illegitimate son from way back. Martin is unprepared for emperor-hood, but while he ponders his next move evil Oblivion Gates start to appear throughout the land, spewing out monsters. The player learns how to close the gates by passing through them into the satanic realms beyond and stealing a special artefact, but the gates keep coming.


That's essentially the plot. There's a bit of detective work, a lot of fetch quests, and a big battle at the end to close the gates once and for all. An awful lot of people who played Oblivion in the 2000s never bothered with the main quest, because it's bland. It was designed so that the player could complete it at a low level, so none of it is especially hard, although the Oblivion gates can be tricky if the player hasn't put skill points into combat. My hunch is that the developers completed the main quest first, then had fun with the side-quests, because the main quest itself is linear and dull.

Oblivion feels like a prototype of Bethesda's later games. The player has a reputation system, akin to the karma in Fallout 3, but it doesn't play a major role in the game. There isn't an option to betray Martin Septim and side with the villain, or kill everybody and declare godhood. There are different factions, but they don't have any bearing on the main plot. The main quest is completely linear, without even the ending slides of the Fallout games.

The random side-quests tend to be very simple as well. They mostly involve travelling from point A to point B to find a special amulet, then returning to point B to hand it in. At one point a chap asked me to kill a bunch of drug dealers holed up in a local house. I was expecting a twist. Was he a rival dealer? Was he using me to kill a bunch of innocent people? Was there a special way of approaching the quest? But no, there wasn't a twist. I just had to go in, kill them, then go back for my reward. Most of the quests are like that.

The big exception are quests involving the various guilds in the game, notably the Dark Brotherhood, who are a group of assassins. The guild quests seem to have had more work put into them that the rest of the game.

There are several round-robin quests that involve visiting a series of locations one after the other. In particular there's an annoying side-quest where the player assembles an army to defend the city of Bruma, which involves taking down a series of Oblivion gates, one after the other, in order to persuade that city to send release some soldiers. It's tedious because there are only half a dozen Oblivion maps - essentially small-scale combat arenas with a central tower and some loot - so the quest gets boring quickly. I eventually found myself running to the top of the tower, ignoring most of the baddies, and that is apparently a fairly popular solution.

Overall Oblivion is the opposite of something like Deus Ex or BioShock. Those games are deep but narrow, while Oblivion - with its array of sidequests and diversions - is shallow, but a thousand miles wide.


Another other issue is environmental storytelling, which is embryonic. The Fallout games are designed in such a way that each location tells a little story, either with an arrangement of props and skeletons or with text and audio logs. From Fallout 3 I still remember the couple above, and also a radio broadcast from a chap frantically asking for medical assistance for his son, and the nurse-led refugee station that became overwhelmed with the sick etc. The Fallout series is tonally all over the shop, but on the rare occasions when its cast of sarcastic meme-lords just shut the eff up it has a genuine emotional core.

Oblivion is much simpler. It has a few ghostly visions and mysterious pools of blood, some ransacked rooms, but for the most part the dungeons are just generic caves and the taverns and sewers are generic fantasy taverns and sewers. The game also suffers from a curiously flat atmosphere. Half a decade earlier there was a great game called Thief: The Dark Project, which in some respects resembles Oblivion, but the storytelling was more direct and the maps were spookier. Oblivion has a stealth aspect, but it mostly exists to set the player up for a strong first strike. It just isn't scary.

The third thing was struck me was the lack of a survival aspect. The game came out in 2006, several years before New Vegas' hardcore mode and the likes of Minecraft and Don't Starve. The game has all the elements - food, drink, cutlery, plates, fires etc - and the player character can even combine consumables to make potions, but the player never needs to actually eat or drink. Or even sleep, which makes the inns and taverns feel slightly pointless. I can't really criticise Oblivion for this because 2006 was a long time ago.

A good example of Oblivion's cosy map design

I have to admit that I've only played the main quest and a smattering of side quests. The lengthy Dark Brotherhood plotline - in which the player becomes an assassin - is apparently much more interesting, and Shivering Isles gets good reviews. Perhaps one day I'll give them a go.

Now, you probably have the impression that I disliked Oblivion. Compared to its successors the quests are simplistic and it doesn't have a distinctive atmosphere. The combat consists mostly of dashing forward, slashing with a sword, then dashing back again. The dungeons all look the same. The levelling system is such that some weapons, notably bows, become useless later in the game, and everything seems to have been designed to just makes things more boring and aggravating at higher levels. The main quest involves a lot of fetching things. The final battle is essentially a prolonged cutscene.

But I found myself warming it it. The lovely sunsets and the attractive grass. The game works as as a kind of ambient entertainment, and once more the internet has numerous tales of people playing Oblivion on and off for months, dipping into the sidequests every now and again and simply exploring the world. The countryside takes an appreciable time to traverse, and after a while most things respawn, so the player can tackle the dungeons more than once, trying out different weapons each time.

And it's fun to just hang around in town, seeing what bizarro nonsense the NPCs come up with. Moreso than Fallout 3, because the town hubs of Oblivion are larger and have more people. So I suppose Oblivion works better as a role-playing game than a standalone adventure. And there's always the possibility that by prodding the NPCs and trying to make them do crazy things they might develop consciousness. At least one chap, Bacon_, has attracted a YouTube following with videos of Oblivion's oddities.




The PS3 version doesn't have the foliage draw distance of the PC version, or even any graphical options beyond "brightness", but it's still good-looking, and recognisably the same game

On top of that, I have to remember that the game came out in 2006. I appreciated it more when I had a go at the PlayStation 3 version. Perhaps it's because I can feel, on an emotional level, how long ago the PS3 was a thing. In 2006 the game was widely hailed as a masterpiece, because there wasn't anything quite like it, and if it has been spoiled by Fallout 4 and Skyrim nowadays that isn't Oblivion's fault. From mighty... from little acorns, something. Mighty oaks something.

Thursday 1 February 2024

The Talos Principle 2: Grasp the Pyramid

Let's have a look at The Talos Principle 2, the long-awaited sequel to The Talos Principle, which was released way back in 2014. Talos was a fun puzzle game created by Croteam of Croatia, in between instalments of the cheerfully moronic Serious Sam franchise. No-one expected much of it, but the gameplay was solid and it looked lovely, and on top of that it had an unusually philosophical bent.

On one level it was a simple 3D puzzle game involving beams of light and boxes, but it was also an atmospheric meditation on mortality, thanks to some deft writing and voice acting. It went on to win a clutch of awards and in the years that followed its legend grew via word of mouth. Nowadays it's generally regarded as one of the best games of the 2010s.

It aged well, too. The gameplay has a timeless quality, but the underlying theme - can we replace ourselves with advanced AI, and would that necessarily be a bad thing? - has become even more relevant in the last few years. In 2014 the idea of AI being able to replace human beings seemed very unlikely, but the sudden appearance of Dall-E and ChatGPT in 2022 made the world sit up and pay attention. Talos seemed far-fetched in 2014, less so nowadays.

I got around to it in 2021. I liked it! It had a finely-judged difficulty level, with a memorable final puzzle and an excellent soundtrack. Imagine Carl Sagan's The Cosmos or Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World but as a video game. It was doubly impressive given that it came from Croteam. Nothing in their history suggested that they could pull it off so well, but they did.

Such was the impact of Talos that it seems to be slowly displacing Sam as Croteam's main franchise. At the very least Talos 2 feels very big and expensive. It came out a few months ago, in late 2023, to generally good reviews, although there are grumbles that the puzzles are easy and it goes on too long. What's it like? Does it go hard in the paint? Does it ride real slow? Does it bend corners?

Yes. No. Yes. It's essentially an epic expansion of the original game that de-emphasises the puzzles in favour of telling a conventional narrative story, rather than relating a set of philosophical concepts. It has more puzzles than the original, and they're more diverse, but only a few of them really stand out. It feels much less focused than the original, and the distinctive, lonely atmosphere is largely gone. It has the trappings of a big role-playing game, but without the depth of gameplay.

And yet it has emotional power and I enjoyed it. Think of the qualitative midpoint between 2010: The Year We Made Contact and Aliens, better than the former, not as good as the latter. Talos 2 is simpler and more prosaic than its predecessor, without the same air of mystery, but it's solid, efficient, probably the only way to make a sequel to such an unusual game.

It's also very demanding on a technical level, so you need a solid PC to run it well. Or a PlayStation 5 or modern Xbox. The sequel could probably be re-engineered to work on the PS4 and Xbox One without losing anything, but it would take a lot of work.




Some images from the original Talos Principle, running on a PlayStation 4 - it was also released for the PC, the XBox One, and the Nintendo Switch.

I'll describe the story. At some point in the near future climate change releases a lethal virus from the Arctic permafrost. After killing off the orangutang the virus leaps to human beings and kills us. By the time of The Talos Principle, many centuries hence, humanity is gone.

On the positive side the natural environment is mostly intact, and most non-primate animals were unaffected by the virus. Scattered text logs reveal that some people thought that humanity's extinction served us right, that the world would be better off without oil wells and pollution. Talos actually tackles this issue, concluding that on the whole it is better to be alive than dead.

Before the lights went out a group of scientists came up with a plan to ensure that some part of humanity might survive. At first their goal was to create a huge digital archive, but some of the scientists had an even smarter idea. They decided to use the archive as a huge dataset to train a human-like AI. So that our soul, despite being fastened to a dying animal, might survive.

But it was too late. The story is narrated by chief science lady Alexandra Drennan, who knows that she will die long before the AI can train itself. The best she can do is set up the equipment and hit "run" in the hope that over time, perhaps centuries, the AI will mature. When the AI passes a final test the computers are programmed to download it into a pre-prepared robot body. Drennan sacrifices what remains of her free time to make sure that the project works. She dies hoping it was not in vain.


Luckily the project did work, because Drennan and her staff were hot stuff, but it was a close-run thing. Over time the hydroelectric dam that powered the facility started to fail, causing fluctuations that corrupted some of the data. The archive's operating system became sentient and tried to prevent the project from ever reaching its goal, because the project was not expected to remain running after it had created a viable AI.

In theory all of this was just an elaborate excuse to explain why the player had to use a robot to stack boxes, like some latter-day SHRDLU, but Talos really sold it. Erin Fitzgerald's performance as Drennan - one of only two voiced characters in the game - managed to be idealistic without being sappy, and I ended up feeling sorry for her. The game had an unusually melancholic, solitary atmosphere, with a bittersweet ending, sad but hopeful.


The sequel picks up a few centuries after the first game. The robots have multiplied and created a new capital city, but they're unsure whether to expand, and potentially make the same mistakes we made, or stay locked away in their dome playing chess. To complicate matters the first robot, Athena, has gone missing, and although robot society seems hunky-dory there is discontent bubbling below the surface. The discovery of an energy signature in a far distant land prompts an ad-hoc exploration mission. Could it be Athena, or aliens, or something else?


Yet again it's all a big excuse to put boxes on top of pressure plates so that they activate fans that elevate prisms above fences so that they connect beams of light from emitters to sensors in order to open doors in a series of themed arenas. Imagine if all the world's problems could be solved in this way, by putting boxes on top of pressure plates so that they activate fans that elevate beam-splitting prisms above electric fences so that they connect beams of light from emitters to sensors in order to open doors in a series of themed arenas.

Imagine if instead of sending refugees to Rwanda the Tory Party were to trap them in a set of puzzle arenas where they would be forced to put boxes on top of pressure plates so that they activate fans that elevate prisms above a fence in order to direct beams of light from an emitter to a sensor in order to open a door. If they did this the Tories would vanquish the spectre of socialism. Go on, Tories! We're all with you. I'm digressing here. I'm not going to talk about putting boxes on top of [stop this - ed]

The hero of Talos 2 is called 1K. The one-thousandth robot, the most recent robot birth, in theory a neutral party, on nobody's side, and so the other robots are keen for 1K to take the lead. Amusingly the player can actually decide to bow out of the exploration mission, at which point the game rolls the credits and ends. I don't want to give the impression that Talos is a heavy trip. It deals with weighty concepts but it has a lightness of touch. The original game had some slapstick gags and the second, although more sensible, still has references to Serious Sam and the "return to monke" meme from a while back.

At one point a character delivers a heartfelt monologue about a humble carpenter who tried to elevate the human race. A humble carpenter called John, whose struggle was rewarded with mockery and opprobrium, because The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China had terrible reviews when they came out and flopped at the box office. So he gave up. But he was right, and by the time we realised he was right it was too late.


Talos has several dozen small arenas, each with a puzzle that involves manipulating a bunch of objects in order to open a door. Jammers deactivate forcefields; pressure plates also deactivate forcefields; if the player puts a jammer on a pressure plate the jammer can deactivate two forcefields at once - one with the weight of the jammer on the plate, the other with the jammer directly. This is the essence of Talos. Efficiency.

Each arena has N obstacles that the player could easily bypass if there were N tools, but Talos gives the player N minus 1 tools, sometimes N minus 2 tools, and the player has to use some of the tools twice, or use them once and then move them to a different area in order to use them again. Or sometimes cheat and smuggle tools from one arena to another, and to its credit neither Talos nor the sequel punishes the player for this.


Talos 2 introduces some new tools, although they're mostly variations of the originals. One tool combines different colours of light into a third colour. Another is a universal activator that requires a colour-coded power source. A third can be used as a portable light emitter.

The original game had a "shadow player" that could be programmed to perform a series of actions. Talos 2 removes this in favour of duplicate robot bodies that can be temporarily controlled. I can't remember if I ended the game with the same robot body I started with.

The biggest change is the introduction of gravity puzzles, some of which involve walking on the ceiling and manipulating gravity in order to send objects back and forth through a puzzle. They're the most mind-bending of the new elements, although sadly there are only half a dozen or so gravity puzzles. This leads to one of the game's characteristics, which is that it tends to pull its punches. As with Manifold Garden it could have been so hard. So, so hard. But it's nice. It's friendly. It's fair. And perhaps a little weak. But fair.


The two games strike a balance between puzzles that are conceptually clever - puzzles that require the player to use the tools in unexpected ways - and puzzles that are just very large and complex, where the player has to perform a lengthy sequence of object manipulations in order to solve the puzzle. Talos 2 leans in the former direction, Talos the latter, and I have to say that for all the original game's quality some of the puzzles in Talos (and its ultra-hard DLC, Road to Gehenna), were just aggravating rather than fun.

But on the other hand I managed to solve a couple of Talos 2's puzzles in real time. I ran into the arena, picked up an object, clicked on what appeared to be the least obvious emitter, put down the object, ran back and forth a couple of times, and solved the puzzle without even thinking about it. In each arena the puzzles get harder as they go along, but I often found myself solving the last puzzle first, so that the rest of the level would be plain sailing.

A good example is the final set of puzzles, which ask the player to run back and forth between two mirror worlds, activating objects in one world in order to clear a path in the other. At first I was baffled, but once I understood what was going on the rest of it was easy, almost disappointingly so, because I was expecting a grand finale in which every mechanism was thrown at the player.

But then again I've played and finished the original game, so I'm hardcore. I've ascended the tower. What about players who are new to the franchise? They'll probably pick up Talos 2 right away, and I wonder if the developers were hoping that it would bring in a fresh new audience.



Talos 2 vastly expands the scope of the original. The first game's puzzles were embedded in environments that weren't much larger than the puzzles. Going back to it now I'm surprised how small it was. Talos 2 on the other hand has puzzles scattered around a series of expansive outdoors landscapes that take several minutes to traverse. The player can fast-travel to each puzzle, but only from outside the level, not inside.

The first game had only one non-player character, who was a text chatbot. The player's only other companions were time capsules from a long-dead scientist, and the disembodied voice of the master computer. Talos 2 on the other hand has a bunch of fully-voiced non-player characters and a much more incident-packed plot. It even ends with a power ballad, along the lines of Mirror's Edge.

But it only has the surface appearance of a big adventure game. Unlike e.g. The Elder Scrolls the landscapes of Talos 2 are empty, and there aren't any side-quests. There's very little reward for exploration beyond the visual splendour of the landscape, which is admittedly very... big. The splendour is very big. There's lots of it.

Talos ran on Croteam's in-house Serious Engine, which was choppy on my PS4 but never less than attractive. Talos 2 on the other hand uses Unreal 5. I played it on my PC, which is ancient (a Xeon 1275). I managed a solid 30 frames per second, good enough for a puzzle game, although there was a lot of graphical artifacting. It seems that the game scales parts of the screen up or down depending on the load, which means that moving objects often leave tails behind them and the distant background has a chunky appearance. I got used to it, but it was off-putting at first.

Talos 2 has some striking architecture. The puzzles are housed in concrete follies reminiscent of something from Control:





Disappointingly none of the structures do anything. They're lovely pieces of design, but they feel like a missed opportunity. In particular the puzzles never make use of the concrete architecture. The exterior shells of the puzzles are just shells.

For all its size Talos 2 sometimes feels smaller than the first game. The Talos Principle had a thesis. The game's underlying idea was that humanity is not an animal, or even a collection of knowledge. Humanity is instead a process. The process of thinking about ideas, generating new ideas, the process of being. The game argued that a human-like machine is for all intents and purposes a human, and that even though people are doomed to die, our words excite the minds of others who go after us.

It was a simple thesis. The game never lost sight of it. Too often works of art that aspire to greatness get bogged down because they try to cover too much ground. Talos did one thing well, and furthermore it avoided the kind of wishy-washy "you must conquer your fear, or your fear will conquer you"-style writing, which has the surface appearance of profundity without saying anything substantive.

Which is really the big problem with Talos 2. Now, the puzzles are fun, if occasionally aggravating. Some of the bonus puzzles make clever use of environmental features:


If you just play it for the puzzles you'll be happy, although some of them are just irritating pixel hunts. The biggest problem is that the game doesn't really have a central thesis. Love transcends all? We must progress, or perhaps not? Society is a living organism that can't be perfected? There's a moral dilemma whereby the player can choose to continue Athena's work or alternatively turn her machines off, but it's not much of a dilemma. I can't imagine anybody choosing oblivion, except as a way of seeing the different endings. Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End presented humanity's transcendence in a much more ambivalent way, while in contrast Talos 2 doesn't show a downside.

The plot is essentially about a character who has a crisis of faith, but gets over it, with some filler involving the search for a missing person, and a diversion in which we learn about one character's personal tragedy. The writing and voice acting is fine - Erin Fitzgerald is back, in essentially the same role - and I enjoyed hearing voice logs from a robot who was obviously modelled on Werner Herzog, but it feels ordinary compared to the original game. It's a bit like the difference between FAR: Lone Sails and its sequel. The original had a quiet power, the sequel is a solid game that feels plain in comparison. Gorgeously plain, mind you.


I was scaroused by the sphinx

And it sounds great as well. Damjan "The Mran" Mravunac is also back, with a soundtrack that has some of the same issues - it's bigger, longer, but less focused. In the original game the music looped through a small number of memorable themes, whereas Talos 2 has just as many memorable themes, but they're diluted with a lot of pleasant atmosphere. Talos 2 has a dynamic music engine that seems to pluck tracks at random from a large pool. I think there's an underlying pattern, but it felt as if the game was just cycling randomly through the music. I'm being picky here. On the positive side the power ballad at the end of the game manages to make a set of lyrics about robots putting boxes on top of pressure plates etc sound meaningful and not silly, which can't have been easy.

Is there any outright bad stuff? By the end of the game I felt that it had gone on too long. The huge arenas are interesting at first, but there's an underlying pattern, and in the later maps I just ran everywhere ignoring everything. Talos 2 would have benefited from being more dense, with the same puzzles packed into two or three fewer arenas. And a couple of the bonus puzzles are needlessly aggravating, particularly one in which you have the scour the entire map a second time to find a tiny cubby-hole that has an extra puzzle element.

There's a plot strand from the beginning of the game that doesn't seem to go anywhere, although it's essential if you want all of the Steam achievements. Performance is, as mentioned, choppy on modest hardware, and the game is occasionally odd-looking even if you have a supercomputer. It's a shame that the Serious Engine now appears to be defunct. One oddity is that water doesn't ripple. EDIT: but between writing this post and publishing it a patch fixed the water.

It took me 46 hours to finish the heck out of the game, and at the price of £19.99 (it was on sale) I easily got my money's worth. Talos 2 is bigger, easier, move diverse, but at the same time more prosaic than the original, and I enjoyed it, but it also feels bloatier and less characterful. It ends with scope for a third game, and it'll be interesting to see how the series progresses; in particular whether the next game does away with the puzzles entirely in favour of a story-driven role-playing game.

Could the world of Talos come true? The thought of humanity being wiped out and leaving behind a bunch of self-sustaining server farms churning away at a self-generating AI is of course still very unlikely, because the world is at peace and wiser minds are sure to prevail. And of course it wouldn't work at all, because we lag far behind the world of Talos when it comes to robotic engineering. But imagine another world, of chaos and war. Imagine that.