Oblivion and the ‘leveling problem’

In preparation for Skyrim, I’m doing a new playthrough of Oblivion. I really like this game but hate its broken-ass leveling system. If you’ve played Oblivion before you know what I’m talking about. The game’s enemies and treasures level up as your character does, which sounds like a great idea in theory but it’s entirely possible to screw up your character to the point where you are ‘behind the curve’ of the game and the enemies all own you. To figure out why this happens we have to analyze how the leveling system works.

When you create your character, you’re asked to choose 7 major skills that basically define your character’s abilities and also determine when you level-up. These skills have their own independent skill levels that are raised as you use those skills in the game. When you have a total of 10 skill levels across your major skills you level up. If you are playing as a warrior, for example, you might want to choose ‘Blade’ and ‘Heavy Armor’ for major skills in the interest of improving your character’s fighting ability. This would most likely be fine because with these skills you should be able to handle the stronger enemies as the game progresses.

The problem arises when you decide to try a more interesting character build, like say a thief. As a good thief, you will most likely want to choose a major skill like ‘Sneak’. What good is a thief that can’t sneak? Just imagine yourself in a dungeon, shrouded in darkness, bow and arrow in hand, just ready for that sneak attack on an enemy guarding a treasure you so desire. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? Here’s the problem: choosing a major skill like ‘Sneak’ for a thief could actually hurt your character. You will sneak pretty much constantly and your character could level up too fast, causing enemies to become too powerful for you to defeat. What you will end up having to do is stop using ‘Sneak’ and the other major skills you chose in the interest of not leveling up. That’s right, in this game you want to avoid leveling up. This is inherently flawed because as an RPG gamer your sensibilities are to choose the skills that your character is going to use most, but some skills level up so quickly through normal play and don’t really contribute to your characters ability to stay alive that they end up hindering you more than helping you.

So what’s the solution to this problem? What I am going to try for my new playthrough is the following: I’m going to pick major skills that I can generally avoid using in the game, things like ‘Hand to Hand’, ‘Heavy Armor’ and ‘Conjuration’. Basically my strategy will be to have all my good skills as minor skills, level them up until I’m satisfied (gaining minor skill levels does not cause your character/game to level up) and then level up a throw-away major skill 10 times to trigger the character level up. How ass backwards is that? This will be my first time trying this strategy but I think it will result in the best character for me. The beginning of the game might be harder due to the fact that I will not be getting the initial stat bonuses from choosing such skills as ‘Sneak’ and ‘Marksman’ as major skills for my thief character, but I think in the long run it will make my character better and the game more fun.

I’ve purposely been avoiding looking up Skyrim info to avoid things getting spoiled, but I’m very happy to say that Skyrim will be adopting the (much better) leveling system from the Fallout series.

TLDR version: To make the best character in this game, choose major skills that you don’t actually want to use.

Assassin’s Creed II Platinum

Last week I got the platinum trophy for Assassin’s Creed II! I really enjoyed this game, even though I found it to be a tad on the easy side (more on that later). I particularly enjoyed getting the platinum for this game because they don’t require you to waste a bunch of time replaying the game on multiple difficulty settings (looking at you, Bayonetta). I was worried that it would be a pain to get 100 feathers, but it really wasn’t. I had a little more than half by the time I had finished the game and rounding up the remaining ones was easy using this guide from gamesradar.com.

Actually, the most annoying trophy was Fly Swatter: Kick a guard while using the flying machine. This trophy is insanely easy to get if you know about it, but if you don’t it’s a missable trophy. If you miss it your choices are to play through the game again (the ability to replay chapters is not possible and the flying machine segment occurs a little more than halfway through the game) or buy the Battle of Forli DLC for $3.99 which has a flying machine available for you to use whenever you wish. I chose to buy the DLC pack as I didn’t have the patience to replay the game. The DLC pack (which, to add insult to injury, does not have any trophies of its own) is entirely a waste of $3.99 unless you need to use the flying machine to get your platinum like I did. Boy, did it piss me off when I realized how crappy the DLC pack was, but I was happy to finally have my platinum even though I basically had to buy it.

Trophies aside, I really liked this game a lot. The ending was very interesting and well done, the gameplay and graphics are top notch and you really feel like an assassin sneaking around the cities. My one major gripe with the game is that it is just entirely too easy. The game offers little to no challenge, if you can power on your PS3 then most likely you can beat this game. This would not be so detrimental except for the fact the game puts so much emphasis on stealth but in reality your character is so awesome at fighting that you can just annihilate anyone in the game that happens to see you, thereby completely nullifying the need for stealth. The developers attempted to balance this by having certain missions automatically fail if you are seen by anyone, which was just annoying. That being said, this game is a really fun experience. I had the most fun just exploring the cities, running around on the rooftops and looking for treasure.

So now that I’ve completed this game I’m going to give Brotherhood a go, most likely when it comes down in price a little bit more. I hear the online aspect of that game is really awesome and I’m interested to see where the creators go with the story.