Последние обзоры Laulajatar

Pretty little puzzle game. Not very hard, but relaxing. Took me about 90 minutes to finish.
Worked fine under Linux with Proton.

I picked this up on release day a few years ago, started it but then got distracted and just got back into it recently (about 3 years later).
I had only one crash in the 24 hours it took me to finish it, and that was while fast traveling; the autosave worked and I lost nothing.

With its price tag, I expected Ember to be a pretty little game for a few hours, and that's what I got.

Pros:
- I like the look of the game. Even if doesn't have the best graphics ever, I enjoyed them and it was one of the main reasons I bought the game.
- I also liked the different zones (forest, farmland, plains, snow, desert, swamp).
- You can store stuff in containers. I took over a house pretty early and stacked every single gemstone I ever found in a backpack, while keeping the unique loot in a wardrobe. I liked that this was possible, even if it is pointless.
- You can also drag items out of your inventory and place them somewhere. Same as above.
- You can reset you allocated attribute points. I ended up not needing this, but having the chance to is nice.
- You can fast travel to the different zones. This might not be a pro for players who like difficulty, but if you don't want to backtrack all the time this is nice.
- A sell all trash/treasures/crap equipment button!
- You can find 6 bags for your inventory with 16 slots each. Useful for sorting things and keeping them from being sold with the buttons above.
- Combat has a few auto pause settings (on start, critical health, skill use) and a difficulty setting.
- It's possible to remove the interface through the console for screenshots, though it is not possible to move the characters out of camera range.

Neutral:
- I ended up picking skills mostly for if they can be activated without dragging the cursor. Go away, Greater Heal, you are annoying, I take Healing Burst.
- The crafting system is OK, it allows you to get exactly the gear you want, instead of dealing with loot that might or might not fit. You can find/buy recipes, but also craft without knowing the recipe ingame (by experimenting or finding the recipes online).
- All crafted best gear uses almost the same recipe, and you can buy pretty much all ingredients for it. I could have probably saved several hours if I hadn't picked up every ore, every flower and every fish. I ended the game with over 50.000 gold and enough food, ingredients and crafting materials to supply a small city. Because:
- You can heal everywhere with a bedroll. This makes potions and food less useful and could have been a bit more limited (I'll take a nap, nevermind the zombie in front of me, he can wait 8 hours). Food can't be used during combat, and after combat you can just use the bedroll.
- Lockpicks are quite underused. There was one point during the story where a bunch of them were needed, but after that I can only remember one or two chests, making the pile of lockpicks I took with me useless.

Cons:
- I'm really not a fan of the system of getting skills via equipment. A big part of my love for RPGs is character building and that falls pretty flat here.
- Speaking of character building, the only thing you can select about the character is the name.
- All quests have markers, all the time, even the ones you haven't found yet are marked on the map.
- All the above points mean there is no replay value for me, as I can easily finish every quest the first time around and there aren't really any different characters to try out.
- Loot is pretty anticlimatic. Everything is orange (as long as it has a skill attached), but most items have a "Crude" prefix and are basically trash, and the occasional good loot is barely noticeable among those. Tying the color to the prefix would have been more rewarding.
- The comments during fights (especially of Zannon) are pretty annoying after a while. There isn't much voice acting so I just turned off voices and didn't have the feeling I missed anything.
- There are only 3 save slots (+ autosave, + quicksave).
- The screen fading to black for mining/fishing is unnecessray and incredibly annoying. I get not making animations for it, but I'd love to just pick that stuff up then without interrupting gameplay all the time.
- Some ambient effects can be a bit unfitting; it rained a lot in the desert area and I could swear I saw a bird fly through the lava caverns.

All in all, perhaps it wasn't the worst that this game had little character building, because I acutally finished it instead of spending days to wonder how to build my chars. I ended up playing "Warrior" with my two companions being "Mage" and "Ranger/Thief".
The story was nothing special, not very surprising but not the worst I've ever seen. There are barely any choices (nor consequences); sidequests are pretty straightforward, too, but a few had a nice touch. I probably won't play it again, but I enjoyed my time with it.

I can be a murderous plant guy, travel across space with my bird friend, ssstab mean apes, loot colorful chests, dig through asteroids with my mech, settle down on a blue planet with fluffy white cloud trees, build a giant tree house with pretty plant furniture, rainbow lights and a pink unicorn plushie and make my living off harvesting wheat and baking cake.

That's all I ever wanted.

7 hours in and stuck with no other option than to restart. For a game with no save slots and no chance to backtrack, this is just unacceptable. Especially since the game tells me that I have everything I need to solve the case, but that's obviously not true as a quick Google search for others with the same problem showed.

The graphics were really pretty and the story ok. The map has fast travel, which I loved. It's only my second Hidden Object Game, so I don't know what's "normal", but the HO scenes have silhouettes you have to find and you must often combine items (Need a zebra? Find a paintbrush, use it on a white horse ...). Having to find fingerprints and blood splatter in each scene with some crime kit was just plainly annoying and made me abuse the hint option.
I played it in Dutch to learn and noticed that not everything was translated - probably the same for other languages.

Overall, I liked the game, but I won't restart it and risk getting stuck again.

Whenever I think about which game I would consider my favorite game, I always come back to Oblivion.
Objectively speaking, it probably doesn't deserve that title. There were games with better graphics, better stories or better gameplay, but no other game sucked me back in so many times.

I would recommend the Deluxe version, which includes the DLCs that are not available outside of newer digital releases and can not be purchased separately afterwards.

To be clear - one part that makes this game so outstanding to me is the ability to mod it. Without mods, it is still a good game and definitely a deal (especially on sale), and I would recommend it for a playthrough or two (or twenty). But it has its flaws.
I love making new characters, spending hours planning their story and their class and then dropping them off somewhere, ignoring the main quest, just running around, gathering plants, killing goblins and exploring the world. There are snowy areas in the mountains, a swamp in the southmost area, vibrant green grasslands in the center, some autumn looking forests above and some golden grasslands at the coast. I probably spent more time plucking Viper's Bugloss Leaves and Flax Seeds than on all quests combined.

In Oblivion I can:
- Pick one of 10 races, men, elves or beast, and customize my character's face freely
- Make my own classes out of all skills & attributes
- Increase my skills by using them; the class only decides which skills count for level up and which skills level faster, I can still use every weapon and learn every school of magic, I'll just be bad at it at first
- Join and advance in 5 major factions
- Pick flowers, craft potions and sell them
- Buy a horse and spend two hours riding up and down snowy mountains
- Go about everywhere; only a few locations are locked until a quest is active, but the whole world map can be visited at any time
- Buy a house and place gemstones on every available surface until my game starts to lag
- Run around in prety middle class clothing always
- Enchant my clothing so it is not completely useless
- Create my own spells
- Enter every house, pick up most items, sit on chairs, sleep in beds, open every container
- Get an enchanted weapon with damage and soul trap, so I can not only murder everyone but also steal their souls and put them in a cupboard at home
- Summon minions to murder my enemies while I hide with invisibility
- Eat bread and cheese and sweetrolls and rent inns for the night (at least my characters have a healthy sleep schedule)
- Use the console to get rid of the interface and take awesome screenshots of sunsets
- Sit on a hill and stare at the equally pretty sunrisedd
- Just keep a save at the sewer exit so I don't have to redo the tutorial in the future
- Keep as many saves as I want and save whenever I want
- Completely ignore the main quest - if I never go to Kvatch, there are no Oblivion gates or anything

I think on my first time playing this game I had 250 hours when I decided to start over with mods. In those 250 hours I had finished the main quest, two guilds, half of Shivering Isles and a great lot of the city/deadra/side quests. I could have spent easily another 50+ hours there. Many quests in Oblivion are memorable. Did you ever dream of making it rain flaming dogs or crash a dinner party? Here's your chance.
That's not even touching the DLCs. Knights of the Nine adds a decent questline with decent rewards, while the small DLCs mostly add player houses for different types of characters, the infamous horse armor and a huge dungeon. Shivering Isles, however, is the greatest addition. It adds another worldmap, another main quest, several side quests and a lot of new items. While Cyrodiil definitely has the eastern European standard fantasy vibe, the isles are a place full of fungi, weird insects and madness. And cheese. Cheese for everyone! Wait, scratch that. Cheese for no one. That can be just as much of a celebration, if you don't like cheese.

The graphics might be a bit dated, but most of it still looks ok. If you get real close to things, of course it looks very pixelated. The view distance is also a bit lackluster, Oblivion can't handle too many far objects, so it only shows distant landscape, trees and cities. Houses and ruins might pop in while walking around. For me, it's easy to overlook the flaws in favor of the game's atmosphere.
If you want better graphics, there are texture packs for about everything, not to mention various graphic mods that add better shaders and effects to the game. Some texture packs replace all landscape and architecture, some only replace clothing, some make character faces and bodies more beautiful, some make small objects more detailed, some make flowers awesome and some even take one single texture, like the nirnroot, and make it better.


After all that praise, there are some things in Oblivion I definitely dislike:
- The level system is quite bad, forcing you to juggle skill ups if you want optimal character progression, with no way to track progress ingame. It is not needed to progress optimally to beat the game, skills are more important than attributes, but completely ignoring it would be a bad idea, too.
- This becomes more important the more you level, because enemies level with the player and they don't care if the player has a high speechcraft and alchemy skill that made them gain levels instead of combat oriented skills. The infamous "bandits in glass armor" are a side effect of this aggressive world leveling.
- The interface could be more user- and pc-friendly. I especially miss an option to sell/deposit one item at a time or just skip the confirmation dialogue and to take all contents from a container with a keypress.
- Even though it looks like a console interface, it has no native controller support that really works.
- It is no true Elder Scrolls game if you don't fall through the floor, have a quest NPC not moving to where he's supposed to be, can't mess up a quest by picking something up before you're supposed to do it or encounter one of the hundreds of other known bugs (most of which are pretty minor to be honest). Regular, rotating, real savegames (no quicksave, no permanent overwriting of one and the same save) are a must, so it is possible to roll back a bit. I usually keep a permanent savegame every time I reach a new level - in every game where this is possible. Oblivion allows an endless number of saves, just use it.

Luckily almost all issues can be fixed with community patches and/or customized with mods. Unofficial patches fix most of the existing bugs and if there is still a problem, the console can most probably help getting past it. Even if you don't want to use mods, just using the ingame difficulty slider once things get ridiculously tanky works as well.


For me, the ability to make exactly the game I want is the true addiction. I spend more time in the construction set and photoshop, writing scripts, placing objects and recoloring textures than in the game itself.
In 2018, the modding scene still isn't dead. Two of the largest overhauls are still being updated, from time to time new mods appear and just recently a huge interface overhaul with native controller support was released. Most of the mods, however, have not recieved updates for the last few years and are considered finished and stable.

If I could give one advice, it would be not to follow any lists, to start with playing the unmodded game and then slowly building up when you encounter something you want to change - only installing a few simple mods at first, while learning to understand how the tools work and what files get moved to where when installing a mod. There are excellent guides out there and a community that is usually quite happy to help.

And by the nine divines stay on the road! It's the Daedra, you see...

A few years later and the soundtrack still makes me cry.
Good game.