Does this game need introduction?
The way it was introduced to me was "this is boring as hell, doesn't have the good parts of Morrowind or the good parts of Skyrim". I somehow managed to avoid playing Skyrim, but I can at least compare it to Morrowind.
I did spend 100+ hours on it so they must've done something right. But admittedly most of the time I had a podcast (or a Zoom lecture) in the background to avoid boredom.
The story and setting are not nearly as interesting as Morrowind. Gameplay-wise, at first the game seemed like an improvement over the predecessor (yay for no RNG, the early-game is actually playable now!), and then I ran into Oblivion's infamous leveling system... In case you didn't know (I wish I knew this when I started playing), the game spawns significantly harder enemies as you level up. Almost every RPG (including every Elder Scrolls game) does this, but Oblivion's balancing is severely against your favor, to the point that it's much smarter to *not level up*. It makes sense that the devs would rely on this mechanic a lot, since the game features fast travel, letting you go almost anywhere on the map at any point in the game, so this is one of the few good ways to scale the difficulty over time. But it just wasn't implemented well at all and ruined the fun at some point.
On the other hand, the (anti-)leveling system did encourage creativity: basically, to avoid leveling up and to keep the difficulty manageable, I ended up having to rely on "minor skills", which I would not have used otherwise. I picked Battlemage as my class, so the only combat skill that wouldn't level me up was... Hand-to-hand combat. So I made a spell for myself which increased my Hand-to-Hand skill, gave me a shield, and drained fatigue of nearby enemies. I used this spell to run up to demons' faces and punch them to death. It was especially hilarious doing this as a cute female character, and doing it to humanoid enemies, whose fatigue would get drained to 0, so they could not resist my punches and just went flying like ragdolls. I died a lot and had to really abuse quick-saving, but it was worth it. Later in the game I abused a 90% Chameleon build to get out of more tedious encounters.
I also loved the awkward NPC interactions and voice acting. It's a shame that the dialogue had to be reduced overall for this to be possible, but still, it's very lovable jank. The same can be said about the game overall, though. *7/10*, the Shivering Isles DLC was pretty neat though.
(though of course there were exceptions when it came to voice acting)
The game ran okay under Wine, but even then, max graphics settings would push my laptop to its limits. Booting into Windows 10 made things a bit smoother of course. I started playing this game on Linux, but then I installed the (still in development) Wayland Wine driver, and that somehow totally broke the game (even after restoring to the standard Wine package), so later on I ended up switching to Windows to finish the game.
Game finished 2023-06-03
gardenapple - 2023-06-29
