Oblivion Revisited
OK,
I know I don't update this - ever.
I'm going to try and commit to updating this blog at least once a week, so let's see how long that keeps up.
So last night, I was having dinner with a couple of friends from out of town, and my buddy Rick asks me "So what's the deal with Oblivion, every time I log onto Xbox Live, you're playing Oblivion." This is the story I told him.
Oblivion was the third game I bought for the 360. (I bought G.R.A.W. and Fight Night Round 3 when I got the system.) I had sworn up and down I wasn't going to buy it, because I knew I would get hooked on the game, and I was supposed to be writing a book (which has since been published). I ended up getting it anyway, and I played it more than I should have, but I still met my deadlines.
When I started playing, I intentionally avoided the main quest. I thought it would be more fun to do all the faction quests first, and just explore the game. One of the quests I came across is the infamous "RockShatter" quest.
In it, Maeva the Buxom tells you a heart-wrenching story about how her good-for-nothing husband ran off with a family heirloom, a shock-damage mace called "RockShatter." Her husband is hanging out with a gang of bandits at Fort Strand near Anvil. Depending on your level, Fort Strand is easy money. Most of the bandits have decent loot, which you can sell in town and make bank.
Anyway, I'd work my way through Fort Strand, and find the villain, kill him, and loot his body.
At that point in the game, any reasonable person would have taken RockShatter immediately back to Maeva the Buxom, and collect their reward. But since it was a decent one-handed blunt weapon, I decided to hang on to it for a little while.
I hung onto it so long, in fact, that when I was running low on funds, I went back to Fort Strand killed all the bandits, and noticed that whathisname's body was still there. I went to look it, and lo and behold! Another RockShatter! Fully Charged! Zero Weight!
Well, I kept going back again and again, till I had something like 9 RockShatter maces. When I tried to give one of them to Maeva, she acted as if I didn't find it! Always with "Did you find RockShatter yet?"
Apparently, this exposed another bug in the game. The first bug was having the ability to pick up multiple RockShatters. The second was Maeve treating RockShatter != 1 as RockShatter == 0. Bethesda fixed the first bug, but not the second. Essentially, they told me that the problem was fixed in a subsequent patch, but did not apply retroactively. Meaning if I ever wanted to finish the RockShatter quest, I had to restart my game from a save prior to picking up the second RockShatter.
That was more than 100 hours of gameplay I would have to undo. I probably would have ignored it, but I ran into a problem in the main quest, where Count Hassildor's argonian assistant was running around in the forest. She's unkillable, but she'd always get attacked by bears and spriggans and the like.
So I put the game down for months.
Then I started from an earlier save.
So, basically, I've been playing catch-up, and I've only recently gotten past where I was before I gave up.
I know I don't update this - ever.
I'm going to try and commit to updating this blog at least once a week, so let's see how long that keeps up.
So last night, I was having dinner with a couple of friends from out of town, and my buddy Rick asks me "So what's the deal with Oblivion, every time I log onto Xbox Live, you're playing Oblivion." This is the story I told him.
Oblivion was the third game I bought for the 360. (I bought G.R.A.W. and Fight Night Round 3 when I got the system.) I had sworn up and down I wasn't going to buy it, because I knew I would get hooked on the game, and I was supposed to be writing a book (which has since been published). I ended up getting it anyway, and I played it more than I should have, but I still met my deadlines.
When I started playing, I intentionally avoided the main quest. I thought it would be more fun to do all the faction quests first, and just explore the game. One of the quests I came across is the infamous "RockShatter" quest.
In it, Maeva the Buxom tells you a heart-wrenching story about how her good-for-nothing husband ran off with a family heirloom, a shock-damage mace called "RockShatter." Her husband is hanging out with a gang of bandits at Fort Strand near Anvil. Depending on your level, Fort Strand is easy money. Most of the bandits have decent loot, which you can sell in town and make bank.
Anyway, I'd work my way through Fort Strand, and find the villain, kill him, and loot his body.
At that point in the game, any reasonable person would have taken RockShatter immediately back to Maeva the Buxom, and collect their reward. But since it was a decent one-handed blunt weapon, I decided to hang on to it for a little while.
I hung onto it so long, in fact, that when I was running low on funds, I went back to Fort Strand killed all the bandits, and noticed that whathisname's body was still there. I went to look it, and lo and behold! Another RockShatter! Fully Charged! Zero Weight!
Well, I kept going back again and again, till I had something like 9 RockShatter maces. When I tried to give one of them to Maeva, she acted as if I didn't find it! Always with "Did you find RockShatter yet?"
Apparently, this exposed another bug in the game. The first bug was having the ability to pick up multiple RockShatters. The second was Maeve treating RockShatter != 1 as RockShatter == 0. Bethesda fixed the first bug, but not the second. Essentially, they told me that the problem was fixed in a subsequent patch, but did not apply retroactively. Meaning if I ever wanted to finish the RockShatter quest, I had to restart my game from a save prior to picking up the second RockShatter.
That was more than 100 hours of gameplay I would have to undo. I probably would have ignored it, but I ran into a problem in the main quest, where Count Hassildor's argonian assistant was running around in the forest. She's unkillable, but she'd always get attacked by bears and spriggans and the like.
So I put the game down for months.
Then I started from an earlier save.
So, basically, I've been playing catch-up, and I've only recently gotten past where I was before I gave up.
posted by Leiterfluid at 4:53 PM
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