While watching Todd Howard repeat himself for the 50th time to a games journalist (must be the worst type of journalists, right after sports journalists), feeling incredibly bored by the hype of Skyrim, something occurred to me. A game like Oblivion succeeded in one area you simply cannot predict or test, regardless of how many dragons, mammoths, running water and snow storms you put in there. It succeeded in charm! Now, this may sound odd, but you cannot design or plan a game world people want to spend 2 or 3 years of their life examining, exploring, interacting with other characters ect ect. You can try, and it definitely looks like they're trying, but how do they know? How do they know that mining operations won't be annoying after 3 years? How do they know that packs of wolves hunting mammoths will still be a joy to watch in 6 months? Can they really ignore the fact that even a random encounter with a dragon can get tiresome after a while? And maybe it will get incredibly annoying that NPCs doesn't stop moving when you talk to them.
Sadly inspired by the hordes of comments on the internet, Beth spends a lot of time pointing out the obvious weaknesses of Oblivion and I guess they have the right, since they created it – but they should to be really careful with that kind of marketing. For a game world to beat Oblivion in pure charm and be fascinating for players until 2016, they have to hit something that can only be described as luck. Yep, Oblivion had all the weaknesses, Bethesda points out whenever they get the chance; the landscapes didn't really change an awful lot, conversations with NPCs stopped time, Mysticism was confusing (I still don't understand what they are so confused about) and a lot of other stuff that I'm glad I forgot. But what if the weak spots was what made Oblivion last forever? What if the static and wooden menu were part of what made Oblivion special? NPCs standing around, doing absolutely nothing is not necessarily a bad thing, as they made a perfect contrast to the NPCs that did a LOT. Now we get menus inspired by iTunes, NPCs that walks around at all times and can't even be bothered to stop doing what they are doing when you talk with them, we have so-called “handcrafted” dungeons, but what if the copy/paste dungeon approach of Oblivion made the more complex dungeons a bigger surprise? In short: unless they've played Skyrim for 5 years, they can't be certain of anything, and I'm sure they are aware of that. To all the people on the forums: Careful what you wish for. To Todd and Bethesda: Good luck.
