Oblivion final game thoughts

I finally got around to completing the primary task sequence in Oblivion in early fall 2006. Took me a while, I tended to wander in-between subtasks on this sequence. The game is designed for you to do that, so no big deal.

The endgame on this isn't really all that hard, once you understand the key aspects to unfettered progress. If I'd played Morrowind a certain way, or knew some things from other games, maybe it would have been easier...otherwise it's an accidental discovery, not something that requires an Advanced Degree(tm).

Anyway. The key thing you want to achieve is Chameleon=100 magic enhancement. You do this by a combination or things: enchanting armor, and a spell or potion. I enchanted armor so that it was constant effect. I had a body armor piece I found with chameleon = 30, the Ring of Khajiiti with chameleon = 35, and 2 other pieces of armor I enchanted to chameleon = 20. Total = 105. Why is this good? Because you are permanently invisible, even while attacking or swimming. Sneak = 100 is good, but once you attack something, it can see you, and you can't sneak while swimming. Chameleon, however, is permanent, even when attacking and swimming.

So how do you get there? You aren't going to find enough items that are chameleon-enchanted, you are going to have to make some to get there quicker. This means that you have to buy the smallest enchantment spell that does enchantment (I think you get this from someone in the Mages Guild in Chorrol), and this means joining the Mages Guild--also required to enable you to do the enchantments. Then you have to run Mages quests until you get access to the Unseen University (not affiliated with Hyde University) and the enchanting store. Then you need some Grand Soul Gems with Grand Souls in them, which is achieved by fighting and soul-trapping. Oblivion doesn't seem to have the equivalent weapons of jinkblade and Soul Reaper from Morrowind, so you'll have to make them, too.

Once you have chameleon = 100, you can go anywhere with impunity, with no fear of detection or danger. You don't need to sneak any longer, either, except when you want to do critical strike on something. This makes Umbra a fairly easy takedown, which she's not, otherwise. It no longer matters how good you are with your sword, or spells, or whatever. No one can see you, ever, except when you talk to them, and those circumstances are harmless.

Result: the game is almost pointlessly easy. I might start over just to test how fast you can go from nowhere to finished with Camoran via the 100% chameleon route.

Money has little or no purpose in this game. Merchants aren't going to have enough of anything interesting to warrant buying, you will find/capture far better stuff out in the field. You do want to buy spells, that doesn't happen any other way, but you don't need too many. Heal, feather, summon, open lock, those are important; the rest are just baggage. In fact, you can progress on opening locks via spells far faster/easier than you can with lockpicks--I didn't hardly bother with them. (Well, I wrote "progress", but really I meant just opening them, not "security" skill level-up.)

Leveling up is of limited value, it seems, just makes the opponents harder, until you discover that that's how you get the better loot off opponents, which is only siginificant for buying those few spells you need. I recommend ignoring crates and barrels as loot containers. In Morrowind, barrels and crates often contained something interesting, like grand soul gems. In Oblivion, they probably contain plates and pants. Chests have goodies that are valuable, but even that only goes just so far. In the endgame, one of Mankar Camoran's sidekicks has a really high-value ring (21000), and since you can kill him and take that ring as many times over and over as you want (I did four or five), you could have mega-bucks really quick. Except that no merchant can buy that thing for anything near what the game says it is worth--which means that you really have to use a game mod to fix how much money merchants can spend. And given that some places, like inside Oblivion Gates, you can collect enough 5000-gold daedric warhammers to exceed any possible feathering you can manage, you need a game-mod to provide a way to hold onto them (Bag of Holding is good) until you can get back to sell (since there's no Mark/Recall combo). and then after you DO sell the expensive stuff, there's really nothing to buy, so you might as well go with a game mod that provides something worth buying ("Elemental Blades" is good, although the weapon shimmer is distracting). Some loot you'll want to keep, like Helmet of the Hunter (very long-range enemy detection), Black Marsh Helmet (unlimited underwater breathing), Frost Ring (100% ice/frost protection, important for one task, but nowhere else), and glass armor. Otherwise sell the rest, or just leave it behind. You can buy a house in each town, which I did, but not because I wanted a place to sleep everywhere--what's the point of that? (sleeping heals you, but so do spells, and they're actually better.) And you can buy furnishings for them, but that's the only high dollar thing you can do with money here; really kinda pointless.

Repairing your own armor is valuable, because once you reach skill level 75, you can take an armor or weapon from 100 to 125 quality, making it better than it used to be able to be. No merchant armor repair person can do that for you.

And you can bump your light/medium/heavy-armor skill to 100 fairly quickly (my estimate is two hours 0-->100) by letting a rat flail away on you while you heal yourself via spell (assuming, of course, that you are a character class whose magicka regenerates). You could do Block this way, also, but not nearly as fast, since Block tends to cause an opponent to recoil and pause. So maybe if you had multiple rats...And your Alteration skill goes up because you are healing yourself at the same time.

Those are the final thoughts. I've stopped playing this one, other than a small amount of time on it when I got a new graphics card last month. (well, they aren't quite final, Oblivion will get discussed in comparison with other games as I write about them.)