Things I Love and Hate About Nehrim

I just beat the amazing and free Oblivion total conversion Nehrim (from German modding group SureAI) last night.  I enjoyed the game start to finish, and I encourage anyone who enjoyed Oblivion (or hated Oblivion but enjoyed Morrowind) to give it a shot.  It's free, after all.

That said, nothing's perfect.  (Especially not me with my compulsion to complain about things.)  There's a few things I don't really like about it, or at least feel could have been done a bit better.

Things I Didn't Like

1.  NPCs with nothing to say - The game is loaded with characters who will either tell you they don't want to talk to you, or say some mean things about the Aeterna, the hated Elf-Jews of Nehrim's medieval world.  Even after all the deeds you've done by the end, and even in areas where the Aeterna are respected and even admired, they still say these things.  There's never a reason to talk to townsfolk unless they're running a shop.  The ones who have quests will walk right up to you and start the conversation themselves, thankfully.

Another way this disappoints is with certain named boss characters, who will rush at you and attack without saying anything.  There's one rather large sidequest in particular (spoilers) where an unseen villain tricks you into unleashing an evil through a series of innocent notes.  When you finally meet him at the quest's conclusion, and rather than taking the opportunity to explain why he did it, he wordlessly attacks you.

2.  Skill and Attribute kerjiggering - A few changes were made to Oblivion's Skills and Attributes.  I can forgive the fact that Conjuration was removed entirely - I never used it much to begin with; the thing that really bothers me is the fact that Light Armor is the only Speed skill.  It makes raising your Speed more tedious and makes the whole system seem uneven.  Also, Illusion is no longer under Personality, which might make sense for some but it basically renders Personality totally useless.  Which brings me to

3.  Personality is totally useless - I love the inclusion of useful non-combat abilities in RPGs, but in practice Bethesda did a poor job of making the Personality skills that compelling outside of Illusion. Nehrim doesn't quite make good of that missed opportunity.  There is never a point in the game where you need to use that Speechcraft minigame to befriend someone - in fact, on most characters you can't use it at all because of the one-line conversations mentioned in #1.  And Mercantile is as useful as it always was (ie not at all).  And, as I mentioned, Illusion is no longer under Personality.  So why leave Personality in the game at all if it's of no use?  They should have either removed it entirely or thought of a way to better use it.

4.  Bugs and crashes - It's hardly their fault, as Oblivion was crashy to begin with, but Nehrim seems to crash a lot more frequently than Oblivion ever did.  It also runs a bit sluggishly at times, probably because the game pushes Oblivion's engine well past Oblivion's limits.

5.  A little sparse for sidequests - Nehrim focuses on the main quest, and consequently the sidequests suffer.  There's a few, but no TES-style guild questlines or anything close.  That said, my favorite quest in the game is a pretty epic sidequest (mentioned in #1) to which nothing in Oblivion can compare.

To assuage my guilt for picking on a free game made by modders, and also to be straightforward honest about how I felt about it, I have to also point out the things I really liked about it - things I hope someone at Bethesda noticed for inspiration in Skyrim or some other open-world game:

Things I Did Like, Very Much So

1.  Stuff to collect - One of the most fun things about Oblivion was hunting down those Nirnroots out in the wild.  The actual reward you got was lame and negligible - for some reason finding a Nirnroot was it's own reward.  SureAI noticed this and put two new non-respawning plants in the game that litter the wild waiting to be found.  Unlike Nirnroots however, these two plants are useful - one increases your carrying capacity by 1 point, and the other your Luck attribute (which was the hardest one to raise in past TES games) by the same.

There's also experience-granting magic symbols hidden in dungeons, and a ton of named special armor sets to find that give additional bonuses for every armor piece of the set worn at the same time.

2.  The main quest - SureAI manages to do what Bethesda failed to do - to make an engaging main storyline.  It starts out simple and intriguing and by the end is pretty epic in scope.

3.  Level design - There were few areas in Oblivion where I sat back and thought "this is really cool looking".  There are plenty in Nehrim, including airships, floating islands, and a capital city built on a mountain spire.  The levels themselves have neat setpieces and puzzles that keep them interesting, and even though they're all built from the same pieces as in Oblivion, the devs have done a good job of making everything feel different.

4.  Translation - It's not that the English translation is super-fantastic that impresses me (though it's decent), but merely the fact that it exists at all, and is (mostly) complete.  A few untranslated books and dialogue snippets here and there are quite forgivable.

5.  It's more "Oblivion" and it's free - It's a bigass TES-like game and it'll cost you nothing.  Not much more to be said.  The perfect thing to tide me over till 11.11.11.

That's all I have to say.  Can't wait for SureAI's next project, which will apparently use Skyrim's engine as its base, which will probably come right in time for something to tide me over until TES6.