In which I, having not done so previously, shortly review the downloadable content for Oblivion. I'll go through each one, then I'll talk about the series as a whole.
DLC1: Horse Armor
Which gives you the ability to buy armor for your horses, allowing them to live longer in combat, and also look cool. Which is fine, and all, if you want your horse to look cool, but considering it's more expensive than all but two of the other DLCs (Mehrunes Razor and Knights of the Nine, both of which are very large), I'd expect more, and do anyway. Let us be clear, here: Oblivion's mount system stinks. It's a gimmick, and with the exclusion of actual mounted combat, a poorly executed one at that. Considering that you get leaped by enemies every five seconds in the wild, better armored horses is nice and all, but fails to address how annoying it is to have to hop off the horse and fight constantly.
Which explains why I don't use horses (multiple characters don't even have the free one), and why I've never used the horse armor, though I paid my $1.99 for it.
DLC2: Orrery
I wasn't particularly thrilled with this second entry in the DLC series, either, considering that it was so blatantly and obviously cut from the game in the first place, whether because of lack of time, or specifically to make it a DLC, who knows. Again, for the money I pay for the thing, even $1.89, I wish the quest was a little bit more substantial than "Go chase down bandit camps in the wild. Repeatedly." That aside, the orrery itself looks great, and the powers are kind of neat. I just wish that the quest weren't so completely uninspired.
DLC3: Frostcrag Spire
Finally, a DLC I can really get behind. This is a house mod, and a fairly well done one at that. There are a lot of good gimmicks in it, and some really great and useful stuff for wizards, like summoning altars, spellmaking and enchanting altars, an alchemy garden, and teleporters to the mages' guilds. Also, it looks awesome, and when the view from the spire is present, it's fantastic. The only thing I can really think to say negatively is that if there was ever a place to put display cases, boy that entry hall area is it. For $1.89, it's worth having.
DLC4: Spell Tomes
I love the idea of this mod, which is to insert spellbooks with learnable spells into the loot lists. I kind of wish you could just do this with scrolls in the first place, but what the hell. On the other hand, the execution is...flawed. Firstly, they're...reasonably rare, which may be me looking in the wrong spots, but even Alera, world traveler, hasn't found more than a few, and very few of the good ones. Secondly, it's hard to tell which spell you're getting, because of the annoying "Do you want to learn this spell?" popup. Yes, I probably do, but I can't tell what it does, so who knows? Given the inability to clean out your spellbook in Oblivion, this can get annoying. Thirdly, all things considered, if I'm going to find rare spells, I'd like them to be worth having, as opposed to "not quite as good as the ones you can make yourself", which is what they are in reality, and as opposed to sigil stones, which really ARE better than you can make on your own.
That aside, for $0.99, I don't see why you wouldn't just run out and get the thing. I nitpick, but it's still cool.
DLC5: The Vile Lair
As houses go, this one isn't precisely bad, exactly, but it's definitely not Frostcrag, and it's a little too 14 year-old Goth munchkin for my taste. The layout? Cool, especially the shrine. Secret hidden loot? Cool. Not so secret loot that rivals the best stuff in the game? Munchkin as hell. An altar that prevents you from needing to do the vampire cure quest? Probably ok, because that quest is fucking annoying, but still munchkin as hell. Also, I don't really feel EVIL in my evil lair. Just sort of misunderstood and on the run. The Dark Brotherhood sanctuary? Oh, now THAT place is evil. The Vile Lair just sort of plays it on TV every so often.
Go spend the $1.89 on one of the other house mods. You'll love yourself more.
DLC6: Fighter's Stronghold
Now THIS is a house mod. Every time I walk into some noble's castle in Oblivion, I say to myself "I gotta get me one of THESE!" And now I can. And while I have a couple of nitpicks that are common to all the DLCs, this is about as perfect as it gets. We have display cases. We have secret passages and rooms and enemies. I can watch the sunsets from the roof. Spar with my trainer, and take my men at arms to go hunt bandits. There's even a taxidermist to make awesome stuffed versions of wildlife. Run, do not walk, to buy this. Even if you aren't a fighter, Battlehorn Castle is worth it.
DLC7: The Thieves' Den
There's a lot of pretty intriguing stuff about this house mod, like it's location (which is kind of a pain to get to, but interesting), and things like the lock training chest and the trainers and the fence. Pirates are cool. What's not cool is that it's a little hard to actually store your stuff in what little room your personal cabin has. And that's the whole reason for house mods in the first place. That having been said, it's still a whole lot better than the place you get as part of the Thieves' Guild.
DLC8: Knights of the Nine
To borrow a phrase, this mod is so perfect that any possible nitpicks are nullified. A temple faction (which was the best faction in Morrowind, or near enough, and it's better here)? Great. Awesome quests? Well...awesome. Fantastic new gear and abilities? Hot. One of the single best cinematic views of the entire game (which has some awesome views, let me tell you?) Icing on the cake. Knights of the Nine is so good, I like it even more than the actual expansion pack, and there are even more factions (like the Imperial Legion) which could have used the same treatment.
At $9.99, it's the most expensive of the DLCs, but it's by far the best, and considering the amount of content and the scope, it's hard to see why you wouldn't put down the money. Stop reading here, and just go get it.
DLC9: Mehrunes' Razor
This is basically a $2.99 dungeon crawl with an artifact at the end, which I assure you you've done previously in Oblivion. If you haven't, are we even playing the same game? But I feel pretty confident in saying you've never experienced one quite this cool. Mehrunes' Razor takes cave scenery about as far as you can take it - cities, ruins, a little dash of Oblivion itself, combined with interesting enemies and some good loot. It's worth doing.
DLC Series
And now the series as a whole. On the whole, I feel like this series was weaker than what we got with Morrowind. Things like the Seige at Firemoth, the archery shop, and adamantium armor plugins were cooler and probably more useful than almost any plugin here, and they were free.
For things I had to pay for, there were some noticable clunkers here - the horse armor was pretty offensive, especially as a first plugin. So was the Orrery, which had a quest that was wildly inferior to almost any Oblivion quest, more on par with some of the ones in Morrowind - good at the time, but we're _better_ than that now.
On the other hand, some of them are quite superior. Frostcrag Spire. Battlehorn Castle. Mehrune's Razor (number last, but actually one of the earlier plugins) showed us that the DLC series could actually be quite good if we and they let it. And Knights of the Nine is clearly a superior work, giving a faction that is immediately in the top tier of faction quests, vying with the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves' Guild. Most of the house mods are generally better than the houses you have to pay for (which except for the Skingrad and Anvil ones, probably aren't worth it).
One more nitpick, however. The practice of having a huge quest dump upon exiting the sewers after chargen, or upon loading your game, is atrocious, and decidedly Not the Way To Go. Most of them could have been done better easily, ala Knights of the Nine and its rumors. I know they wanted people to be able to immediately use their new stuff, but it breaks immersion and gives you massive quest clutter, which is a lot worse than waiting around to hear a rumor.
Related to that, there were opportunities for quests, especially in the house mods like Frostcrag or Battlehorn, that, had they been expanded on, could have been quite good. Battlehorn came closest to this, but ultimately failed (that was a pretty weak ass bandit seige), and seriously, what was with the guy who just gave you Frostcrag? A missed opportunity, I feel. For the price, I suppose I get what I pay for, but I wouldn't have minded a few cents more for a little more polish.
All in all, though, most of these are worth having, and a couple of them make the Oblivion experience so much richer, it's hard to understand not having them.
Posted by Dwip at April 5, 2008 9:11 AMNice little run down there. For the most part I was largely disappointed with all of the DLCs and in fact the only reason I have them was because they came on the Knights of the Nine CD.
Horse armor? Gayness. I mean, come on. Steel and Elven? Surely they could do better. Why wasn't this just part of vanilla? It took them all of maybe 2 hours to build this in. Yes, even I'm good enough with the CS to have done this myself. For free. Except the graphic models, but hey.
Orrery? Right. Skip the stupid quest and just put it in the game. Clearly someone had already made the graphics for it. Aside from looking spiffy it's worthless.
Frostcrag Spire? Looks cool from the outside. Fails miserably on the inside. And why the one way teleports *TO* the guilds and no way back? A house high up in the Jeralls is near useless unless you fast travel to it.
Spell Tomes? 30 minutes worth of creating random junk for the loot lists. Go get Fran's instead. You'll be happier. And yes, I say this having been dead set against modifying creature and item lists for a long time. Fran's is also free.
Vile Lair wanted to be cool but its too far out of the way to be useful. Because really, who hangs out in Leyawiin to make it worth the hassle anyway? It also has bugs. Bad ones. Don't put your stuff into the cabinets next to the sleeping coffin. It'll be gone seconds later. The upshot to this? You can have as many Crimson Raiments as you want because said bug duplicates them like photocopies.
Dunbarrow Cove? Skip it, really. The underground dungeon ship thing is nice, but the rest of it is junk.
Mehrunes' Razor was cool the first time through. Then not so cool with other characters. The dungeon crawl is long, tedious, and did I mention long? All for a knife that's half of what the one from Vile Lair is.
Battlehorn Castle is cool though. Close enough to Chorrol to be useful as a base. Stuffed trophies? Greatness. Could have used more display cases though, the ones up front are too small, and there's only 2 big ones in back. It also feels somewhat under defended with only a couple guards floating around. Oh, and be careful of the servants. They're thieves. Caught one red handed pilfering stuff out of my display case in my private quarters. Tsk tsk.
That leaves us with Knights of the Nine, which again was the only reason I bought any of the DLCs. Sufficiently large to be well worth the money. Filled a badly needed void since the temple faction was missing. The quest is actually interesting and the prize at the end is well worth it. And being able to haul around a bunch of knights when its all over just for fun is pretty cool too.
I noticed you failed to comment on Shivering Isles. I think you know where I stand: http://www.iguanadons.net/Oblivion-Shivering-Isles-49.html :) (maybe I missed your review? )
BTW, regarding the quest spam at the beginning, there is one mod out there that will solve that. However, you have to be an insane maniac to use it. The guy wrote it as a binary patcher that directly edits the original esp files. BAD MOVE. I've not even risked altering mine to remove the dirty edits Bethesda left in them, let alone some unknown game modder.
If you're looking for good quality stuff that doesn't actually suck, you really should be using player created mods. Even the bad ones are usually way better than anything Beth cooked up outside of KOTN and SI.
Posted by: Samson at April 5, 2008 1:30 PMMy original SI review is here:
http://dwip.alsherok.net/archives/2007_04.html#000581
(note to self: static archive pages linked to each entry would be great)
What would I say now, almost through my second run-through?
For what they wanted to do, they did it pretty well for the most part. It looks crazy, the NPCs ARE crazy, and there's some really wild stuff going on. That having been said, I qualify:
- I feel like, given the nature of SI and what goes on there. I could figure how to roleplay my mage there, and have her do the morally questionable things she did (and you ALWAYS have to do morally questionable things), but my crusader? I'm pretty sure he would have joined up with the other side.
- I loved the dungeons. They're nicely convoluted, and their scenery is a nice change of pace, much as all of SI is a nice change of pace from Tamriel and Oblivion. Good new traps that actually surprise me is a plus.
- On the other hand, I hate the new enemies. There's nothing awesome about grummites except that they take an age and a half to kill, knock you about, and just aren't fun to fight in the packs you always find them in. Hungers and the new undead were pretty good, but most of the rest are generally mediocre besides looking cool.
- Quests, their rewards, and random treasure is wildly bipolar. Easy quests give great treasure, harder or more tedious quests give straight gold. The main quest gives you some of the best eq in the game, while the sidequests are about 50% worthless except for laughs. Random treasure is either 3 gold and a silver pitcher, or ore and matrices for some good armor and weapons. There's definitely not the same range of loot as in Tamriel, and I find that sad.
- If I'm going to gain the kind of status the game wants me to have, I ought to have some powers that match. You pick up some good ones, but I'm sure not as game-breakingly powerful as I'd like to be.
In short, the main quest is awesome, and basically all the time, but the entire rest of the Isles may as well be tacked on for the illusion of depth, because other than the two amusing sidequests, the rest were boring, frustrating, or (in the case of Tove), both.
I can recommend SI, but not as wholeheartedly as I do Knights of the Nine, which I felt set some kind of standard for this sort of thing. In fact, I feel about it sort of like I feel about its spiritual companions, the Half-Life 2 Episode trilogy - if you can shorten development time, put them out cost effectively (which KOTN most certainly was - one of the best $10 I've spent in forever), and make them in a quality manner (which KOTN was, but the other DLCs were various stages of not even to almost), I don't see why you wouldn't leap all over it.
I find the shortened list of Oblivion additions (8 DLCs, 1 super-DLC, and 1 xpack) to be relatively small, considering how much could potentially be done with the setting, and considering that I'm sure people would be willing to buy multiple DLCs of KOTN size if they were good. In particular, I can think of the following off top of my head:
- An Imperial Legion faction (present in Morrowind, strangely missing in Oblivion)
- Noble intrigue, ala Morrowind
- Various aftermath issues with the main quest, which could tie into the noble intrigue thing quite well, be a seperate SI-size xpack, or even TES:V
- I suggested a Morrowind aftermath xpack, which could clearly be expanded to, er, expand on any of the provincial rumor sets.
As it is, we have what we have, and we further have to hope that TES:V isn't a MMORPG as there are hints of.
And, as you say, user mods are the future, although with my own high standards (note that I'm dissing heavily on official content), it's hard to get stuff I like. In particular, Kvatch Rebuilt was ok, except for the niggling little details and a set of fairly serious bugs involving the arena there. So far, the only one I'm happy with it my own for Weye, which, well, my house mod is better than Beth's house mod.
And actually, to qualify that even further, the real good stuff is in quests and quest lines, and it's pretty hard apparently to pull that off convincingly, without either being lame, or significantly overpowering the game, which even I'm treading close to a line on.
Posted by: Dwip at April 5, 2008 2:16 PMAlso, in actual reply to your comment:
- What you said about horse armor. I bet it took about 2 hours for the graphics, and half an hour of CS work to do that.
- Again, as you say on the Orrery. What really got me was how it was a blatant attempt to sell us content, and you could tell. Again, there wasn't even the pretense of a good quest in there. Also like horse armor, there's no reason this shouldn't have either been in the main game, or freely downloadable.
- What else, besides display cases, would you do with Frostcrag's inside? I thought it looked cool enough, even if the storage was kind of crap.
- On one level, I agree with you. The way Oblivion clearly should have been designed is as they did it with Morrowind. I'm fairly certain everyone in the world but Bethesda knows this, and there's a fair chance that they know it too. But since they went down the path they did, Spell Tomes had to look like it does. And while it could have and probably should have been in the main game to start with, for the sub-dollar price tag I find it hard to care.
- Also what you said about Vile Lair, but really, I think the main issue is that it's so clearly powergamer, on a level that's ok when you're 14, and so totally not ok when you're a company like Bethesda. Also, this one definitely falls prey to the "Dude, where's my quest?" complaint I have.
Also, the "But it's way out in the middle of nowhere!" complaint makes sense if you aren't willing to fast travel to your house, which I totally am. OTOH, my mod is set in Weye. OTOOH, the bigger complaint about Vile Lair is, "Where's the fucking door in? I've been looking for five minutes!"
- I tend to have a higher opinion of Dunbarrow than you do, but you're right. Unless you want some fairly specific things out of it, you may as well just go buy the house in Skingrad and be done.
- I liked the dungeon crawl in Mehrunes' Razor, but then I also have an appreciation for cool environments, which it has. And yeah, of COURSE the Razor is half as good as the Crimson Eviscerator. See comments on Vile Lair.
- You can never have too many display cases.
- I've actually thought fairly hard about making some kind of official plugins mod to fix my complaints with these things, but at the end of the day, it's way more trouble to me than it's worth, especially considering limitations on master files and the like. Better to just make my own, better mod, which I did.
Posted by: Dwip at April 5, 2008 2:51 PM"What else, besides display cases, would you do with Frostcrag's inside?"
I don't know. I guess the whole mage home thing has little appeal to me given my preference toward warriors and stealth characters. It's just a vast empty useless nothing with goodies I have no use for.
I suppose I just have a higher opinion of SI than you do, other than the rather nasty game killing bug that got past QA initially. KOTN was awesome but I still think SI was just as awesome. But like the rest of Oblivion, random dungeon crawls are dull.
The bandit village in Razor was cool. So was the very useful variety of arrows. The Ayleid ruin section sucked ass after the first time. Sideways Cave is 10 times the ruin, if only for the neat tablets they left in there.
If TES:V is an MMORPG, I won't be bothering. Those things are a sad waste of the player's time, the developer's resources, and the game company's overall talent. I'm waiting to see if they nerf Fallout 3 or if they can create the world of awesomeness everyone knows it can be with the right people in charge.
Posted by: Samson at April 6, 2008 4:44 PMAs if in answer to prayer: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=11474
Posted by: Samson at April 7, 2008 6:21 PM