The Elder Scrolls has a role-playing problem: Oblivion and Skyrim's morality can't touch the nuance found in Fallout: New Vegas

It's no secret to anyone who knows me that I love The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. The remaster has been on rotation for me since its release, and I'm generally really happy with how it turned out. However, it did make me reconsider one recurring problem that the game has, and that The Elder Scrolls has more broadly: for RPGs, there's not an awful lot of role-playing.

Let me be more specific – of course, the games allow you to play roles, but generally, the games offer little reason not to do everything in the game. Yet do this, and you will be both the yin and the yang of Cyrodiil. You are the Hero of Kvatch, a legendary daedraslayer who rebuked evil and drove it away from the mortal plane. You are also an absolute bastard, you will commit countless murders as a member of the Dark Brotherhood, steal cultural artifacts as a member of the Thieves Guild, exploit Glarthir, a mentally ill Elf, and commit many other misdeeds.

Fangs for the memories

The game doesn't care if you do this. Sure, there is a fame/infamy system, with the player accumulating points on each side depending on their deeds, but one does not detract from the other. You can have both high fame and high infamy, and neither really matters all that much. It's not a system that I've ever cared about in the hundreds of hours that I've poured into the original, and I won't care about it in the remake, either.

This is a problem that The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim shares, too. You will almost always end up with your Dragonborn being pretty morally gray. You may, for example, defeat Alduin but still end up being a vampire who feeds on innocents.

Morality systems are a clumsy way to approximate something as complex as the vast spectrum of human behaviour in video games, but at least they can offer players a guide to follow depending on the type of person that they want to be. It is, I think, one of the ways that Oblivion has aged quite noticeably.

You may think that the ability to do anything and everything is a nice problem to have, and in some ways, that's true. However, on a broader level, it is a genuine problem. I want my roleplaying games to have roleplaying. A good example of this looks like Fallout: New Vegas, the Obsidian-developed albatross that Bethesda are fated to carry around their neck for the rest of time. Here, the reputation system isn't global: instead, it's different for the different factions and towns around the Mojave. This system isn't perfect, as it's quite possible to fudge it and end up with a mixed reputation, but it's definitely a better system.

I'm curious as to whether any modders will add a more in-depth reputation system to the Oblivion remaster. I want my approach to different problems to reflect on the game's other factions. If I am in the Dark Brotherhood, I shouldn't be feted as a hero, even if I end up solving the Oblivion crisis. Call me a cynic, but I don't think that most people would love a serial killer, even if they ended up saving the world from a thorny and fiery metaphysical problem. It's a problem that Skyrim modders solved in its similarly rough system with mods like Skyrim Reputation.

It is, lest we forget, constraints that breed creativity. It's what can make games more rewarding. If you can find a way to get around your poor reputation, or work to redeem yourself, like in Disco Elysium, it can feel incredibly rewarding. It's not only satisfying from a story point of view: it also gives you incentives to keep replaying. Going back to Fallout: New Vegas, it's common to hear people talking about different faction runs that they're going to do. Yes Man, NCR, Legion, these are all viable approaches to the game, and that means effectively closing off the others to the player. It's not possible to be all things to all people, and that's one of its aspects that makes it so compelling.

You could, of course, impose these restrictions on yourself. But when Oblivion's story requires you to be a world-saving hero, you're still going to have to compromise on your vision if you want to complete the main quest and do a bunch of side content. It's not something that the remaster could have easily fixed, so I'm not blaming Bethesda for overlooking it. However, given how the game has gripped gamers' attention over the last couple of weeks, I'm sure we're going to see some mods that will become absolutely legendary in terms of improving the game's rougher edges, and I can't wait to see them. Until then, I'd urge you to overlook this and enjoy being both the zenith and the nadir of heroism.

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