User:Music2131

My experience with Role Playing Games has always been on the player's side only. Although I used to play role-playing games on SNES, most of my gaming was geared towards First Person Shooters, although some of my favorite games were hybrids (Deus Ex, and System Shock 2, excellent games) I didn't really start playing them on the PC until I bought Knights of The Old Republic (KOTOR). I knew it was a great game, and cheap ($20, a year or two after it came out), but didn't realize it was an RPG. It got me hooked again.

My favorite role-playing games are KOTOR 1 and 2, Neverwinter Nights, Secret of Mana, Secret of Evermore, and Oblivion.

My Interest in Oblivion: I've been playing for hundred's of hours, and played a significant portion of the quests, as well as completed all of the guilds and the main quest. My tinkering is simply out of an interest to look beyond the normal part of the game, and into the hidden and customized aspects. My only contributions to Wiki, as of now, are to the Non-Random Loot page (Sorry about the edits page :( ). I may branch off into other pages if I feel like I can make a good contribution. My interests also lean towards facial modelling (making DDS files so you can import a face as the main character), but I have yet to make anything worthwile in that aspect, and won't contribute anything unless I do.


[soapbox]

My commentary on Oblivion: I really like this game, but it is not the best role-playing game I have ever played. That title belongs to Secret of Mana. It felt emotional, the music was incredible, and you felt like you were a major factor in the game.

Oblivion has great title music, but most of everything else I've heard in the game has been... okay. The first Knights of the Old Republic game had incredible music, made more incredible by the fact that it was a score based on the Star Wars style, yet not made by John Williams (All other Star Wars games before, to my knowledge, used the original music. In fact, the entire Jedi Knight series used the actual clips of music from the original trilogy). I believe that KOTOR overcame a huge stigma in music and created a score that still sounds good, even after playing the game 40 hours and hearing it over and over again. For a game as expansive as Oblivion, I would have preferred a little more interesting music for certain, important parts of the game. Secret of Mana did more with MIDI than Oblivion could do with a complete orchestra.

Secondly, Oblivion has hundreds of hours of content, yet it feels pretty empty. Most of the puzzles are simple and solved for you. Fast Travel feels like a necessity to me, and most of the time main quests don't involve exploration, they involve going towards the little green arrow (Heck, in the Anvil recommendation quest for the Mages Guild, they tell you to walk from Anvil to Kvatch, and be prepared for an ambush at any time. Your map will then tell you exactly where you are going to be ambushed, so much for suspense). The Radient Artificial Intelligence (RAI) is, in my opinion, a great step forward in gaming, but incredibly lacking in substance for now. I have yet to see a single NPC conversation that made sense in context, timing, location, or substance. My favorite thing about the RAI is that characters go places, they walk around with somewhat a sense of purpose, and you don't see 99% of what is going on in the world (which is the way it is in real life).

Finally, there is virtually nothing emotional or involving about this game. When I get to the ending, it's "cool, now what?" Everybody says my character made a difference, but it felt like I was just a heavily armored pizza delivery guy. Here's your shiny stone, your daedric artifact, your other shiny stone, your lost heir, your amulet (somebody lost it the first time, not naming names), your book, and your other book with weird writing in it, do you want twisty bread with that? In KOTOR, you can either save or crush the galaxy (although, oddly enough, it doesn't make a difference once you play the sequel). In Secret of mana, you and your companions save the world. And in both of those games, your main character harbors a important, dark secret (which I won't utter here). I still don't know why I was locked up at the beginning of the game, or why my character happens to know the fine for necrophelia. [/soapbox]

My Links:
Amazing Facts of Cyrodiil
Hilarous page that compares life in the game to real life.

Hieronymus Lex's Fantastic Voyage
Radient AI at it's best - following an unkillable NPC from one city to the next
The Cowards Quest
A good example of making the game your own, and a neat angle of playing the game

The Elder Scrolls Source
Great place to look for mods, textures, add-ons, everything to customize the game

Viktoria
In my opinion, the best looking add-on playable character I've seen.

Non_Random_Loot
The page that I can't stop editing