Oblivion

First off, sorry. I know it has been almost 2 months since my last update. Not that I have a bunch of readers, but still. I've been playing a lot of Minecraft, and there isn't much "blog worthy" in that game. It's like playing with Legos. You can't show off anything until you get done, and the adventure of building it is only fun for you. Unless you're the kind of person who likes hearing "I was digging for this brick, and I kept finding this one. And then I found the brick I was looking for only to realize I now needed that other one I kept finding! But now I couldn't find it!" Which, in Minecraft is "I spent 3 hours digging a mine shaft last night. Found like 5 diamond and 20 iron. It was awesome."

But this blog title isn't Minecraft, it's Oblivion! So, who has seen the Skyrim trailer? Oh man, is it awesome :D
http://www.joystiq.com/video/8845f15c For those who haven't yet seen it. All two of you in the whole world. It's a Bethesda game. It's pure crack! They make games that you'll get hundreds of hours of gameplay out of. I'm still playing Oblivion. Just going everywhere and killing everything. It's a beautiful game and it's built around looting. Which is my favorite part of gaming. Why, I don't know. But it's just so addictive. Anyway, even though it's an awesome game, I haven't had a lot of epic stories involving it. But I have found a lot of things that raise questions and the like.

First off. Gems. They serve no purpose in the game other than gold. That's pretty lame, in my opinion. In most fantasy games gems are good for something. Often something cool, like increasing the power of weapons and the like. I'd really like to see gems have a use in Skyrim. Maybe they can be used in alchemy at a high enough level. I think that would be pretty interesting to see.

Next. Why is the gameworld for Oblivion so huge, but the game world for both Fallout 3 and New Vegas so small? It's annoying to play Oblivion and see this massive game world and then play New Vegas and feel like the world is so small.

Can we please get more than one waypoint on these maps? I'll often find something really cool that I want to go back to later. Maybe it's not on the map, or maybe it's fairly forgettable. I'd like to be able to mark these places on the map. Something that says "hey, I found something cool here that I either want to go to again or that I can't get into now." This happens more in the starting levels of Fallout as you find high level locks that you can't pick yet. But you don't want to forget about this safe! Now I don't want all these to appear on my HUD, but something that will help me remember that they're there would be nice. I don't feel like I should have to print off my own map to do this kind of thing.

There aren't many areas I'd really want improvement on the "Oblivion engine" but those a few. That weren't fixed in the last 2 Fallouts. They added a keyring in Fallout 3, so I won't bitch about that being annoying in Oblivion. Etc. But this leads me to one HUGE bitch of a complaint. Why did you put New Vegas on the Oblivion engine rather than waiting and putting it on the Skyrim engine? Once I play Skyrim, going back the New Vegas (with all the DLC. Because God knows I've already done everything I could do in that game as of now) is going to be a pain in the ass. It will feel so... well... ugly. Unrefined. It's like going back to Morrowind after playing Oblivion. The same game is there, it's just missing so many things you've gotten use to that it makes playing it a chore. The only good thing that comes out of this is the hope of an awesome Fallout game on the Skyrim engine. The last 2 have been fun, well worth the money, but they haven't been as magical as I really hoped for. Maybe a newer engine (and the leaps and bounds worth of improvements from 3 to NV) will help to capture the feel of the original Fallout games better.