Waiter! Why Is My Dungeon Stale?
I played Oblivion for the first time in many months last night. I was really playing it to get a good look at it's auto-map (go figure). But it was kinda fun to jump back into the game that blew me away for weeks after I first booted it up.

I'd forgotten how to do simple things like drop equipment, so I had to spend some time figuring out how to play the game again. Once I achieved a minimum level of proficiency, I decided to comb the landscape looking for new dungeons. In spite of putting over a hundred hours into the game, I'd never fully explored the geography of the game world. It's far smaller than that of previous games in the series, and therefore its possible to actually explore everything, but it's still a bit of geography to cover.

The problem with random exploring in this game is that there isn't much point. Yeah, I know - after well over a hundred hours of the game, saving the world from destruction and all that, I should have expected the game to be pretty well played out. But there were still places to go and things to see. At least in theory.

But what I found was that while I'd forgotten how to do some basic things like jumping (oh, yeah, the "E" key...), I had also forgotten why I'd quit playing the game even though there was obviously content left to explore. After discovering the ruins of a fort, a cave, and an abandoned house, I remembered.

The dungeons were stale. And pretty boring.

Aside from their name and the modular layout of their tiles, the dungeons were exactly the same as every other dungeon of their type. They were populated by a random assortment of bad guys (some coven of mages in the fort, bandits in the cave and house). The treasure chests - all of hard or very hard difficulty - contained around 69 gold coins and a couple of other precious items. Just like every other treasure chest in the game.

There was no indication whatsoever of what the location had once been, or who its current residents were (aside from "bandits" or "mages"). In fact, I noted in the back of my mind that I was more bugged by this latter deficiency because the antagonists were human-like. If the dungeons had been populated by inhuman monsters, I might not have cared who they were or why they were there. But I found myself wondering these things, and a little irritated because I knew there was no answer. They didn't really belong.

Sure, wandering randomly into a lair of not-so-nice people is likely to result in something like this, but it would be nice to have some clue. And yes, that's a tall order with the random scaled-difficulty populations, I guess.

But what about the locations? What about having something unique or specific to each location would have been nice. Maybe a special treasure buried in each dungeon. Or some kind of plaque or book or something explaining some brief history of this very particular ruin or whatnot. At least the first time you visit the dungeon. Unlike this games' 90's ancestors, Oblivion's dungeons are not algorithmically generated out of billions of possibilities. Why couldn't the designers have put a little extra flavor, meaning, history, and / or distinguishing features into them?

Maybe I'm just getting persnickety in my old age. And I found the world incredibly immersive the first few hours I played - it took many hours before these smaller things broke it for me. Few games could hold up to that much scrutiny unscathed. And the Elder Scrolls games are famous for being wide open and filled with algorithmically generated content. And the game sold a bajillion copies, so its highly questionable whether than extra effort would have been at all worthwhile.

But hey - nothing is above some suggestions for improvement. So now it is YOUR TURN! What sort of things really help make any computer RPG more immersive, believable, intriguing, and fun to explore? What makes you WANT to explore rather than just make a beeline for the Big Bad Foozle? What makes a game world come alive for you in a computer or console game? What makes you willingly suspend disbelief? On the flip side, what kills it for you, and brings you crashing down to the reality that it's just a game, just numbers and pixels?

Post your responses here in the comments, or in the forum for a more long-term discussion... (One of these days I'm gonna have to really play around with things and see how I can merge these two together in a pseudo-transparent manner...)

PLEASE INSERT YOUR $0.02 IN THE FORUM....


(Vaguely) Related Persnicketiness...
* A Counter-Manifesto?
* Oblivion: The Flower-Picking Simulator
* What Makes a Great RPG - The World
* The 16 Essential RPGs
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Labels: Mainstream Games, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:05 AM (Permalink)