Oblivion Remastered
I've been working through why Bethesda's recent approach to setting bothers me despite my lack of interest in lore for its own sake. I was thinking about how, in Oblivion, the Blades, the imperial spy organization from earlier games, are suddenly also the extrajudicial bodyguards of the emperor operating out of a vaguely Japanese-looking temple because, I dunno, katanas are cool and need to be in there. And then in Skyrim they're also an ancient order of dragonslayers. It's not that I care about the Blades as a thing in themselves becasuse they aren't a thing in themselves, they're made-up, and what I mean when I say I'm a lore-hater is that a writer should do what's best for the present story without being constrained by the sanctification of made-up things. Especially re: decades-long game series, we should allow space for settings to reflect the preoccupations of necessarily different creative teams. What bothers me is that Bethesda doesn't treat the Blades like narrative connective tissue at all. It's not about what best serves the story; there's no reason why the emperor's bodyguards and the ancient dragonslayers couldn't have been their own things. Or why the Brotherhood of Steel needed to show up in and after Fallout 3. Often it'd be easier not to use the recognizable name. What it's about is branding. If there's a worse reason for putting something in a story than strategic promotion of lorebrain in consumers, it might be selling addiction-driven live service games by cultivating nostalgia for the T-51 power armor helmet. Not that these are substantially different processes.
With Oblivion, though, the Bethesda open world hadn't yet mutated into the flavorless microtransaction delivery vehicle of today. Setting aside the grim premonition represented by horse armor, it was only their first gesture toward abandoning RPG-likers in favor of the general Xbox audience. I don't believe them when they say they weren't doing this, but I do believe they had some ideas regardless. Oblivion is still pretty weird, and it's probably my favorite Elder Scroll.
You may wonder, why Oblivion and not Morrowind? I'd say Morrowind if you asked me which is better written; I'm not here to argue that point. What does it for me is the, I guess, simulationist approach to NPCs in Oblivion. They aren't just extensions of the UI, here to point you at quest objectives and provide the levers you pull to manage your resources. They all have daily schedules of varying complexity. Their need to eat isn't implemented as an animation that plays sometimes, but, at least in some cases, as a motivation to find a food item in the world. Most of them have beds. Some of them travel. Others shop, or pretend to in the absence of a simulated economy, but it's more interesting than Skyrim NPCs standing in place and repeating their three designated barks about the narrow set of current events relevant to the player character. Good writing in games is ... good, but like, I read books. I come to games for human-designed systems slamming into each other to produce weird results. And in Oblivion the results can be very weird.
Bethesda's third great writing mistake, after brand-oriented storytelling and insisting on full voice acting, is the apparent belief that more rigidly scripted and maybe marginally more naturalistic-sounding dialogue would be an improvement over random conversations about mudcrabs. Cartoon elves do not have to talk like real people. Some effects only cartoon elves can achieve. Disco Elysium has a whole early-game aside about, among other things, the power of cartoon elves.
Fortunately, under the graphical update, the modernized movement, and the welcome adjustments to the leveling system, Remastered is still Oblivion. The spell tomes DLC conjurer still spawns near some ruins and immediately hauls ass toward you, wherever you are. It doesn't get more Oblivion than that.
The other strength of the game, I think, is something you might associate with bad world design if you watch a lot of video essays. Now the idealized open world jerks the player around with huge landmarks and obvious and redundant quest hooks, and I like some games that do that, but I also think we lose something with that approach. The theme park world feels much narrower--my favorite thing to do in these games is find random unimportant caves and things, places I don't want or need much explicit information about but can imagine would be a product of a world with a history, but exploring those places feels pointless, contrary to what the game tells you to care about, when Skyrim's radiant quest system will probably send you there later anyway. New Vegas deserves credit for a lot of things, but that game's map is a circular hallway, and while Fallout 3 sometimes hides its interesting quests out in the wilderness somewhere, sometimes what I want is the experience of finding those things myself. Obviously everything in a game world is put there for you, but when every location is tuned for maximum convenience, every location feels the same. So, what's the point of all those caves in Oblivion that don't have quests associated with them? The point is that they don't have quests associated with them. If I don't know whether I'll get a magic sword or 20 gold out of it, the place has a different character, I'd say more character by volume, than a Dungeon with a Boss Chest.
I like Oblivion. Shame how it's a Microsoft IP and one of the prominent industry guy names attached to it belongs to a predator. But I guess that's video games. All three As stand for asshole.