blog.erik.rainey.name

I've beaten TES IV: Oblivion. 130 hours, level 30. I've pretty much exhausted all the quests except some of the Thieves Guild and the Dark Brotherhood.

I've been a huge fan of The Elder Scrolls series since Morrowind. The scale of the TES series has always blown me away just terms of the shear amount of content that they manage to put into the game. Oblivion definitely has lived up to the standard of the series thus far (i'm level 11). There's so many neat features they've added that are really awesome. I feel that I don't need to cover them here, since there are about a hundred reviews online about it. I will however cover my gripes.

• Mages Guild Teleports: I was going to complain about the lack of an instantaneous system of movement, until I realized that Fast Travel is the equivalent and it's free. So my gripe is that it's unrealistic. Traveling across the world should not take a few minutes. However, I can see that a method of calculating the time travel duration via roads and whatnot would be prohibitively complex.
• Skilling from Books: The amount of Skill Books in the game is severally diminished. I've found only 1 in the 20+ hours I've played so far.
• Chests tend to forget your stuff: I've lost about 2000 gold worth of stuff because I left it in chests that eventually get reset by the game with a default set of crap. Thankfully I'm playing the PC version and I can give myself all the stuff I lost by looking up the items in the TES Construction Set, finding the ID#, then adding the item in the in-game console. Only the hollow stump in the Merchant's Quarter in the Imperial City seems to be able to keep your stuff. I bet that there will be some quest related to it later, which might clear out my stuff later, so I'm going to play around with placing a chest with the TES Construction Set which I can use to keep some stuff in. I'd buy a house but they're rather expensive at this point (~15k). I am looking forward to buying one, so that I can arrange all the neat armour I've left sprawled all over the world, around my house. I know, it's a bit OCD to want to do that, but that's just fun to me.
• Recharging magical items: is ridiculously expensive. If it's a 3000 charge item, it's 3000 gold. That's a gold piece per swing!

Update: I forgot to mention my Oblivion PlayLog that I'm keeping on Backpackit.

You'll find 2 new t-shirts in my pixel tee's store. Ruby Life and Workout Shirt (that one's for working out). These are in addition to the normal stock of fine nerd-related t-shirts, such as Katamari Damacii. Enjoy!