Lost in Cyrodiil. Send alchemy regs, daedric arrows.

Yeah. So I’ve been playing Oblivion a lot, thus cutting into my valuable blogscore. Damnit!

When not PKing people with my lovingly enchated Flame Bow of Flaming Flames for the Dark Brotherhood, I’m helping to draw up milestones at work. I’ve been jokingly saying “OK, first milestone, let’s have a working client and server!” and only half kidding. Somehow I suspect working with me is much like trying to shoot a crack baby. I mean, you think they’re all helpless and baby-like, but then they start jerking around uncontrollably and you just can’t draw a bead! Plus, me taking an active role in production IS one of the signs of the apocalypse.

So to merge these two strands: I’d like to say I’m taking all sorts of thoughts from Oblivion and taking “this would make a cool MMO!” from them, especially since Oblivion is pretty much what would happen if ninjas showed up at my desk and said “Hey, what do you want in a CRPG, anyway?” Except that with the exception of launching you into a cool plot involving demons and porting into hell within minutes, I’m not sure that there’s much that’s transferable. I mean, a lot of what makes Oblivion cool is where it DIVERGES from MMO-ishness. Morrowind could well have been a single-player MMG, but Oblivion has lots of features such as time compression and spatial compression that wouldn’t work well in a multiplayer environment, and others like twitchy combat and munchkiny use-based game mechanics which are, suffice to say, much easier to do in a single player environment.

I suppose you could take “have a freakin’ huge staff work on content for six years”, which admittedly did work for World of Warcraft, but unless we want every MMG to cost sixty kajillion dollars and thus take no design risks whatsoever, than we probably want to diverge from that paradigm.

Feh. I’m overthinkin’ again. I need to go find more sellable loot – I just got access to the Arcane University, and Daddy’s got an armor enchanting addiction to feed!

Edit: Ironwill on the F13 thread had the perfect criticism of one of Oblivion’s weakest links: the Speechcraft minigame.

Speechcraft is a F***ING JOKE. I have to say ‘your hair is pretty, two men walk into a bar, I am a great lover and GIVE ME EAT’ every time I want to talk to someone?

Yeah, that confuses anyone listening. Especially when I rip through it very quickly to get 70 Disposition fast. “Not now not ever oh you dont say thats a good one please dont hurt me!”