It's early 2012 and I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Why? Because I (finally) can. Join me on my path to glory and the stabilization of the status quo in almost-Tolkien-land.
I reach a hastily thrown
up blockade of some sharpened logs manned by three guards in
plate-armor. Beyond it are the city walls and the city gate, in front
of which there is what can only be described as a hell-gate (or a
portal to Oblivion, as the game calls hell). Before I can talk to the
guards and tell them that the Player Character is here so all will be
fine, three little critters reminding me of the imps in American
McGees Alice (the game calls them something else but to me they are
imps from here on out) come out of the portal and the guards
immediately leave their fortified position to attack them. I join them
and we make short work of the fireball-throwing and clawing critters.
The guards return to their position and I go back with them and talk
to their leader.
As long as the portal is
there, he says, they cannot go back into the city. He has sent men
through it in hopes of finding a way to close it on the other side
but they have not returned. So I should go. Now if Martor weren't a
bit dim and I didn't know that he is the main character of this
story, he probably would have refused. I mean: Come on. About four or
five days ago I was an anonymous prisoner in the imperial prison and
now I'm supposed to go to freaking hell to do a mission alone that a
team of hardened and much better equipped city guards failed to do? I
feel like the game is piling on the escalation a bit much at this
point. I mean, half an hour ago I was fighting wolves (and not
werewolves) in the woods and now there is a gate to Pandaemonium I'm
supposed to do a one-man assault-charge through? Okay then, these
imps seemed weak enough. Heroically I stride away from the barricade
and towards the hell-gate. I jump through it only to find myself on
the other side of it, in front of the city gate. It doesn't work like
this, it needs a prompt from the action button to enter it. A little
embarrassed, Martor goes back through the hell-gate, avoiding
eye-contact with the guards at the barricade watching him. Then he
prompts to enter Oblivion for the first time.
Oblivion/hell looks like
one would expect. Barren, burned ground, oceans of lava,
hell-vortex-skybox, towers that seem to be made of bone and blades.
There is a man ahead of me, fighting some imps so I rush there to
help him. After we off the creatures we talk. He is one of the city
guards and happy to see another human being. Good thing, I'm not elf
or lizard-monstrosity then, huh? Anyway, I tell him that his captain
probably needs him in the real world and that I'll handle this
myself. He seems relieved and runs back out of the hell-gate. Lucky
him, I'll have to go in deeper. Apparently the guards wanted to
assault that weird tower-structure ahead but all died on the bridge
between some gates I cannot open. I have to find a way around and
this is the first time I have to fight these imps on my own. I notice
that oh, they are tougher than I thought. At first I try
dodging/blocking (the latter doesn't work) their fireballs until they
run out of mana and charge me and then it's melee from then on. This
way I can't really fight more than one at a time and they are hard to
kill. In between fights I am forced to stand around and wait for my
magic to regenerate so I can use my heal-spell over and over again,
healing minimal chunks of health as I have long run out of
healing-potions (and I foolishly sold a bunch back in the capital).
I slowly grind my way to a
bonfire and die to a land-mine. A land-mine? Seriously? Seriously. It
even looks like the hopper-mines from Half-Life 2 if it were powered
by a magick ruby. This is my first death and I frustratedly have to
start over at the hell-gate. My own fault, really, as the game told
me, upon entering, that Oblivion is dangerous and I better hit F5
often. Should've listened. Now, I guerrilla my way back through these
imps, by now having developed a tactic where I draw one imps
attention with an arrow and then reply to all of their fireballs with
arrows of my own while dodging. Then, when they charge, I switch to
sword and shield, block their initial charge and then go berserk on
them. In theory they can have anywhere around five arrows sticking
out of them when they charge but in praxis it's more like three hits
on average but this strategy seems to work somewhat well enough. My
sword is starting to go dull though and I curse myself for having no
backup-weapon with me.
My sword (and everything
else) constantly degrading I fight my way into the tower where I'm
attacked by a creature in armor, a Daedra I think. While they do
look a lot more dangerous than the imps, I find these a bit easier to
fight, as long as they don't have an imp to support them. Dying once
more in a situation where they DID have an imp with them, I battle my
way into a side-tower, noting to my dread from the bridge that the
imps I fought my way through on the way across the plain of Oblivion
have re-spawned. Well, so much for an easy way back, I guess. I reach
the tower and slaughter the Daedra there, who before told me how much
he would kill me. Didn't work out so well, did it? He had a key and a
stripped-down man in a cage, apparently one of the guards, tells me
that this key gets me into the top part of the main tower and that in
order to shut down the portal I have to remove some stone from
somewhere up there. I want to free him but he says I got to go and he
is unimportant so I guess he wants to stay. By now I have replaced my
sword with one of the Daedras mace-like weapons which, while doing
more damage than my almost broken blade degrades at an alarming rate
– I now switch these whenever I have killed a Daedra.
Assaulting up the tower I
die once more upon running into a room with two Daedras (Daedrae?)
and an imp so the next attempt gets more
pull-one-with-arrows-and-kill-them-one-at-a-time-like. Works. After
some more fighting and perusing of suspicious looking fountains of
blood (like in Diablo – would you drink from a fountain of blood
you found in hell? Martor did!) I reach the top of the tower with a
hovering lump of rock and light that is probably my objective. I get
ready to hightail it back to the hell-gate and grab it when... Loading
screen – and I'm back outside. Well that was anti-climatic. I go
back to the guards manning the barricades and tell them I did it
(obviously). They tell me that they're gonna attack the city to free
the civilians hiding in the chapel and if I'd join them. Since Martin
is hopefully in said chapel I agree but tell them I first need some
time to get my stuff fixed up. So I go back down the path to the
blacksmith-woman and have her repair all my equipment, some of which
was in an alarmingly bad state.
After backtracking up the
path to the city, we attack. That means, we run to the gate, the
guards fade out of existence and I hit the use button to get my
loading screen in order to follow them. I find myself in a courtyard
full of ruins and the guards are already fighting some little
dinosaur-like critters. The battle rages on and I end up looking at
my life-bar, noticing that I'm almost dead and run away while the
guards take arrow-shots at the two beasts following me around. I wait
for a while before entering the chapel, healing myself with magic and
letting it recover twice. Then we go into the chapel. There are
survivors in here, two guards and four civilians, one of whom is
Martin, easy to spot as he has his fathers face with the age-slider
slid way more to the left. While they decide to walk back to the camp
I make the mistake of talking to Martin and telling him who he is. He
decides to follow me around while the guards want me to help them
rescue their duke und assoult the castle. Damn. This leads to me
backtracking down into the refugee camp once more, telling Martin to
wait here for me, going back up to the city, loading-screen my way
into the chapel and then collapsing on a bed there, as I have reached
the next level and need to sleep. Hurry, we need to attack the castle
as soon as possible indeed – I sleep for eight hours.
We get to the castle after
taking out some imps. Our great number is really helpful at this
point. Then I get sent back to get a guy who has a key we need to get
into the gate. Back in the chapel there are three imperial
legionnaires offering their aid and I have no choice but to accept it.
The key-guy, the legionnaires and I go through some tunnels, let in the
other guards and a fight in the castles courtyard ensues. The imps
are dispatched and I start collecting the other guys arrows – they
are steel, mine are iron and I guess theirs are better. Then we
attack the castle proper. The next section I had to play five or six
times, not because I was all that bad but because of the AI of my
allies. A battle in close quarters against half a dozen imps is
nothing Martor can do on his own at this point and my allies
sometimes run around in circles, sometimes run against enemies but
refuse to attack them and, in some cases, get angry with each other
and start infighting. In real life I would have yelled at them that
hey, we're friends, stop fucking killing each other, there is demons
about! But Martor has no such diplomatic abilities and is forced to
watch as the legionnaires and the city guards slaughter each other,
accusing the other faction of being murderers. In the end I get a
result that is sort-of okay, with us having lost two of the three
legionnaires and the guy I rescued from hell, which is a bummer after
all he had been through but there is only so much reloading I'm
willing to do. With two guards and a legionnaire I fight my way to the
dukes bedroom, looting the silverware on the way, reloading twice due
to infighting and then coming back out alive with the dead dukes ring
and three surviving friends. The mission is done, the city is free of
demons and the dozen or so remaining citizens can get to rebuilding
the place, I guess. I should get Martin to Chorol but as I'm already
quite near to the ruins that half-orc talked about I might as well
get a little side-tracked and check out that mission-objective. So I
have my stuff repaired, tell Martin to wait here in the refugee-camp
and then head out West.
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