Elder Scrolls Oblivion Cheats: Why You SHOULDN’T Use Them

March 24, 2009: Socrates once famously declared: “I would prefer even to fail with honor than to win by cheating.” Yet Socrates never felt the impatience or frustration that can come with spending anywhere from $5o-$80 on a game and being stuck at a difficult point only thirty minutes into the game.  Not to mention that the benefits to cheating are every gamer’s dream. You can max out your character’s level. You can stay immune to every single blade, fireball, and poison thrown out you. You can become, in essence, like a god right out of an ancient greek myth spun from Socrates’s time that portrays the hero’s quest to fight off villains and save the world. So what is the path to this total dominion over virtual nature?  Ask any gamer and they will answer with  ‘easter eggs’, since both the virtual eggs and the holiday gifts they are nicknamed after are hidden treasures that can be found through some skillful detective work . Sometimes developed by game creators to test various parts of the game as it is being produced, these official cheats are simple methods of getting everything out of your character that you could possibly imagine. And Bethesda’s explosive addition to its popular Elder Scroll series, Oblivion, has no shortage to the number of easter eggs found by clicking the ~ button on the keyboard and typing in a special word or two.

But Oblivion happens to be a bit smarter than the average slash-and-smash game. As an RPG, it requires your character to level up in order to advance in the game, and to make sure that you aren’t too spoiled with upgraded skills, enemies level up right along with you. This is where the problem with cheats come in. Want to kill off that annoying minotaur? Sure, type in ‘kill’ and it is dead. But you do not gain any stat points from such a kill, and so your character loses out on valuable assets that could have been used to upgrade your armorer technique or blade strength. Set the immunity cheat on and restoration points go out the window. Changing your character’s look or class in the middle of the game has an even more drastic effect, as all your skills get reset to the beginning, even though your level (and hence enemy’s levels, with upgraded skills) stays the same. Basically, the only real advantagous cheats are the ones that give you extra lockpicks or repair hammers.  Still, if you save a game after successfully breaking in with few lockpicks and repairing an item without losing a hammer, and load when something goes awry, then you can save lockpicks and repair hammers without getting that just-cheated guilty feeling. Of course, typing in a few words is a lot more efficient then repeatedly saving and loading. But by using this cheat, or any others, did you really ‘win’ the game after you finish it?  At what point are you no longer playing the game, but instead using developers’ codes to play it for you? Perhaps there is no real answer. But, as Socrates would certainly agree, the advantages of cheating  just aren’t worth the advantages of not cheating.