Bethesda, I Write Cheap!
Content bottlenecks are most often the glaring blemishes on the respective faces of our favorite games. They lead to such atrocities as the seemingly endless repetition of the library stage in Halo 1 or the painful reiteration of “boo” gameplay in Doom 3. Essentially, when you don’t have enough time to build a piece of art, you have a content bottleneck.
So where are the bottlenecks in Bethesda’s Oblivion? Let’s see, we have umpteen square miles of beautifully rendered countryside, enough lines of dialog for around 9 Hollywood epics, hundreds of NPC’s with their own lifestyles, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A few of Oblivion’s other features include hundreds of dungeons, side-quests, player-owned buildings, thievery, murder, intrigue, spell-crafting, in game novelettes, and archeology. There is almost no repetition of design in any portion of this masterpiece, except in one particularly annoying spot.
Whenever my character overhears a conversation, or notices some event of world importance in Oblivion (like the Grey Fox wanted poster, for instance), the Radiant AI takes over and adds that topic of conversation to every relevant NPC I meet. These additional dialog trees have a fair sized group of voice actors doing their best to vary their inflection sufficiently to become hundreds of citizens. So why exactly are they reading the same lines for each NPC character? Does it cost any more for a voice actor to read one line over another? Nope. The strange bottleneck we have in Oblivion is with its writers, who apparently couldn’t be bothered (or paid enough) to write a couple different viewpoints on a particular ingame political issue or quest. This represents a tiny amount of writing work compared with the thousands of lines of dialog and prose found elsewhere in Oblivion and these particular lines would have added immeasurably to the immersion of Tamriel. For example, all members of the Emperor’s Blades wouldn’t simply toe the party line. Each would have his or her own opinion.
So, what happened? In my opinion, a writer represents the simplest portion of the game design pipeline. Their work doesn’t have to be textured, modeled, play tested, patched, version controlled, or story boarded. Writing the extra dialog and running it past a few editors and fact checkers could have taken all of a couple days. In fact, there are plenty of writers out here in Internet land who would have been happy to design and edit the entire Radiant “extra topic” system practically for free. If any Bethesda people happen to be reading this, my address is jpederson (at) thegamechair.com. I write cheap.
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17. September 2006 at 03:04
I have to say I disagree. My main problem with Oblivion was that it got fairly old fairly quickly. This was in part due to the awful levelling system that increases difficulty with the players advancements - stops there ever being any ‘rea’ challenges and, when there are, there are no real rewards because the loot is inevitably something you’ve already got.
I also found that a major portion of sidequests were fairly dull. There are obvious exceptions, like the Dark Brotherhood and the Painters Realm, but a vast majority were simple fetch quests or simply had poor writing supporting them. The conversational structure of the A.I never bothered me when I stopped to listen - which was rare.
Besides, the game is just too damn easy. Even a stupid player could realise that someone with a high Athletics and Marksman skill was just a juggernaut of running-backwards-while-shooting-action.
Oblivion was a good game, pretty as hell, but it doens’t deserve the accolades it deserves (being PC Gamers #1 game of all time?!) and a recent poll on Planet Elder Scrolls confirmed that most people agree with me there. To my mind, Morrowind is a better all-rounder than Oblivion, mainly because there are more guilds and the levelling is designed into their advancement schemes.
Lets just hope they do a better job with Fallout 3, or I’ll have to start a protest or something.
17. September 2006 at 08:14
-Joe
I used to be an Oblivion hater to :) So believe me when I say you really need to go back and give this game another shot. It isn’t about the loot or the leveling . . . these are just sorry hold-overs from sad last generation RPG titles. Design wise, Bethesda knew they’d have to keep a leveling system or risk being booed off the stage, so the only real option left to create a true sandbox RPG was the silliness that is monsters who level up with you. However, Oblivion is about characters, backstory, and not one single fetch me five foos to win this shiny bar. Perhaps, next time, they’ll ditch the leveling completely.
The first thing you have to do to really appreciate Oblivion is turn off the subtitles and quit clicking through dialog trees like they were made of hot iron. Then, quit tearing through the game as if it were a first person shooter. For example, last night I was working on a quest where I had to meet a crazy paranoid looking elf behind the church at midnight for some clandestine dealings. Pragmatically, to complete the quest, I could have simply reported this weirdo to the guards immediately or killed him myself . . . hooray, next hamster-wheel point unlocked, or wait, I could actually try and help this guy out.
So, I spent the next couple hours stealthily tracking the various citizens who this elf thought might be watching him, and sadly none of them were. Although, one of the women who he thought was part of a conspiracy actually had a bit of a crush on him. The genius part of this quest was, that I actually began to buy into his story at first as I followed the Radiant AI characters through their daily lives, noting who they sat next to in church, and who they spoke to behind trees outside town. The character arch was actually happening within me, instead of neatly canned up for me like certain other so-called RPG’s (cough**KOTOR**cough).
Oblivion is chock full of excellent writing and emergent story telling exactly like this, which is the main reason why the repeating dialog trees bug me so profoundly. See the Oblivion over time article linked below for more of my conversion-from-hater speech ;)
http://www.thegamechair.com/2006/06/21/oblivion-over-time/
18. September 2006 at 13:26
I still have to disagree with you, though you made some good points. The idea of turning off subtitles is a good one for example, which I’ve done on my last play through.
Now, don’t get me wrong - I love Oblivion, but I still don’t think the writing in it is very good and I think a lot of that is to do with both confusion and misunderstanding what people think of as ‘writing’ in games. In my eyes, the design of an over-all quest is not writing at all, its the task of a developer who plans out dungeons etc. To me writing is (mostly) the specific task of writing dialogue and cutscenes.
So, to refer back on you, the paranoid quest involving Glarthir is excellently DESIGNED because it allows the quest to show off some radiant A.I. and such. The quest as a whole is excellently concieved because it forces the player to examine what they are and aren’t willing to take on faith for Glarthir.
But actual dialogue is where all the quests fall apart for me, because they seem disjointed and often with poor motivation. There are some exceptions (Martins speech is well done for example) but Glarthir especially is very 2D and unconvincing as a person - not just in relation to his quest. None of the dialogue has any ‘meat’ to it, as opposed to a game like Beyond Good & Evil by Ubisoft which has writing to make you laugh, scream and cry throughout, and I mean that in a good way.
Of course, most of the problem with it is that none of the NPCs in Oblivion can ever really interact with each other. You are either talking to one or nobody and can never hold conversations with one or more people - sure we have the comments when they pass on the street, but often they are just ‘talking from lists’ as I like to put it.
18. September 2006 at 14:54
Half the disk is audio. You want more lines? You get more disks. Simple as that. I’ll take repetitive optional conversations over a 20 gig game install any day.
18. September 2006 at 16:35
-Joe
Great points on design vs. writing. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that a quest’s design and writing would be done by different people. If that is truly the case, then it is definitely part of the problem. It seems to me that in a game like Oblivion, separating design from writing would be disastrous.
How would that go hypothetically? I guess the designer would rough out the gameplay elements by saying the Glarthir quest involves meeting a paranoid character then tailing various members of a conspiracy. Possible results are player completely buys Glarthir’s story and helps him uproot the conspiracy, player partially buys Glarthir’s story but later reports him to the guards, or player completely doesn’t believe Glarthir and kills or reports him immediately. Now, the designer hands the rough gameplay elements to the writer and says, “Write the dialog trees, peon.” Another idea might involve the designer writing rough versions of the dialog trees then handing them to a “real writer” to flush out the ideas. In my opinion, either method I just described would cause endless complications that simply disappear if the writer and designer are the same person.
I do agree with you that most of the dialog in Oblivion isn’t Shakespeare. It’s also not, “our princes is in another castle,” though. My favorite monologue by far is the Dark Brotherhood spiel you get the day after killing your first innocent. That was some absolutely chilling writing and voice acting. Also, some of the ingame novels, poems, and dispatches are excellent.
On the random conversations, part of the problem is that the actors didn’t have anything to act against when recording them, so the emotional content of the conversations often doesn’t match up. There really isn’t anything to be done about this problem that doesn’t involve hugely increasing the amount of work the voice actors have to do. The few prescripted-to-be-overheard conversations that are actually part of quests are a good example of this.
-Therizo
The recorded lines themselves are already different recordings, so this idea wouldn’t have taken any extra disk space. The difference is dialect and inflection is there, but these actors are reading the same lines for different characters.
25. January 2007 at 00:38
I couldn’t agree more with this article. I really do like Oblivion, but this issue has long irked me. Voice acting is expensive, and writing different wordings is comparitively cheap. So why on earth did they make multiple recordings of the exact same words? They missed out on a whole heap of opportunities for subtle, interesting characterisation.