Oblivion

There's a game coming out on 11/11/11 called Skyrim. It's the fifth game in a series of role-playing games (RPGs) called the Elder Scrolls series.

I always used to hate role playing games with an unsually passionate loathing, until Ms rhapsody9 showed me how they worked. It was at that point I started to enjoy the sheer richness of the content of games like Morrowind and the general feeling of immersion in a world where one can read notebooks and scrolls, create spells, craft weapons, generally do your own thing and wander where you will.

As an exercise I installed the last Elder Scrolls game, Oblivion. Sadly the programmers, Bethesda, who are a brilliant development group, rather buggered the fourth Elder Scrolls game by making it far, far too easy.

What happens in these and other RPGs is that typically your character starts off a bit wussy, and gets stronger and more powerful as the game goes on. Unfortunately a well-intentioned miscalculation by Bethesda meant that all the other characters in Oblivion did exactly the same thing, so there was never any sense of challenge. Worse, the loot you could nick and the rewards for quests would also scale regardless of where you were in the game to fit around your character.

This sucked the life out of the game, and after messing about with it for a bit I just gave up on it.

Anyway, a little while later I discovered something called 'Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul'. This is a modification (mod) that one can apply to the game to fix it. This has made a huge difference, and gives the game a much-needed edge.

As such, I'm now replaying Oblivion and thoroughly enjoying it (though it's still nowhere near as good as Morrowind!), and am now hugely looking forward to Skyrim...