Classic RPG players, wait no longer! The arrival of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion takes us back to the way role-playing games should be played. The game provides players with many character attributes, tools, weapons, tricks, and quests to choose from. Also, the world map is the most expansive I’ve seen in a long time. As the hours turn to days, gamers will come to appreciate traditional RPG gameplay.
The first half hour of the game can easily be spent customizing your character. Gender, race, and physical attributes are all customizable. I spent at least five minutes choosing a hair style for my Elf.
Your character begins the game in a jail cell. Soon, the Emperor of Tamriel appears and it’s your job to help him escape from his assassins through the castle while listening as he predicts the events of his own death. Evil critters including corpses (shudder) attempt to block your way. After realizing that the Emperor’s predictions were correct, your quest is to deliver an amulet to his illegitimate son that no one knew he had. But hey, the plot here is uninteresting and ultimately not important.
The beginning of the game also serves as a tutorial. However, the tutorial is not complete and many of the controls must be discovered during gameplay. I’ve heard rumors that the Xbox 360 controller is more suited to the game than a keyboard and mouse…
Having escaped from the castle, you are thrown into the world of Tamriel with your first quest. A small red diamond on the compass indicates the direction in which the quest lies. Those expecting a rather linear plotline be warned: it is entirely possible to have several quests on the backburner at once. However, your menu does a good job of tracking them, and priority can be placed on any of them at any time.
The world is humongous! You can travel for hours and not run into any of the same places twice. Be on the lookout for plants, wildlife, houses, caves, towns, monuments, and camps. There is a symbol for all of the major landmarks on the compass, providing many opportunities for distraction and muck-raking. Collecting plants and killing animals are essential for alchemy and trade. Houses and towns provide a place to sleep, steal items, and activate new quests. Monuments can provide your character with new weapons and spells. Caves hold some treasure, but I found more skeletons, corpses, booby traps, and wolves most of the time.
To help navigate the gigantic world map, players can select a town or area they have been to previously and then warp to it. After playing for several hours, it is easy to forget which direction the last town is in. Warping provides a great shortcut for accomplishing quests.
The graphics in Oblivion are great. There is a small amount of load time in each area, but if you own a powerful computer it is not enough to slow gameplay. Animals are realistic, plants are easy to identify, and people’s faces look awesome. Grass blades are separated from each other and logs have moss growing on them. Deer have fur and bears have claws. The water ripples when you touch the surface. It is easy to get distracted by the beauty of the surroundings. Also, the graphics of Oblivion are literally scary. I felt scared wandering through the woods. Corpses have lumps of flesh hanging off of them. One house I walked into had a corpse thrown on the fire (presumably the house’s owner) and five skeletons strewn about upstairs. I haven’t felt this scared since I heard about where McNuggets actually come from (run for your lives!!!!).
Like other Elder Scrolls games, players may join one of four guilds. (Warrior, Thief, Mage, or Assassin.) These are a great way to obtain rare items, complete interesting quests, learn skills, and make money. Guilds also offer improvements to characters that are otherwise unobtainable, and it is entirely possible to become the head of that guild.
When starting this game, be prepared to be a slave to your computer. Wandering and quests take up a great deal of time. Characters must be asleep to level up, which can be irritating because of the time the player must devote to sleeping. (booooring.) Skills, such as blade, magic, or alchemy skills, increase automatically during gameplay as you use spells and weapons. After playing the game for thirty hours, I felt like I had barely scratched the surface of everything that Oblivion has to offer.
Oblivion offers a delightful amount of distractions during gameplay. Playing with the mortar and pestle not only increases alchemy skills, but it can be fun too. Exploring caves and ruins with weird booby traps and hidden treasure (although minimal) is interesting too. Players can buy real estate and horses, fight in arenas, explore to their heart’s content, and run from bears. (As an aside, I had loads of fun finding bears and then locking myself behind gates. I then shot them with my bow and arrows to increase my marksman skills and collected bear claws for a particular quest I was attempting to complete.)
The voicework and soundtracks in Oblivion are great. Some actors have multiple characters, but many players won’t care. It seems like each character has a distinct voice. Subtitles are offered, but they can be turned off easily. Actors speak slowly and with diction so in many cases the subtitles are not required. Also, rats grunt, corpses gargle, horses neigh, bears growl, wood makes a great clanking noise when struck with a sword, and people scream when attacked. Sound effects are essential to a fun game. The soundtrack for Oblivion is passionate in all the right places. An orchestra was used when creating the soundtrack, and it sounds as if the players are sitting in my living room. Crank up the volume and enjoy!
The physics of Oblivion work extremely well. When you kill a wolf on the hill, he rolls down it. Vases and plates can be flung across the room, smash into the wall, and fall in heaps on the floor. Enemies hit with arrows flinch as the arrow pierces their body or armor. The physics help make the game all the more believable.
Oblivion is a lot of fun, but it is by no means flawless. Some aspects of the game are extremely irritating. Here are a few examples:
Getting on and off horses is arduous. The rider has to dismount from the horse to collect items, and then climb back on. This process is stupidly slow. So is attacking from them and riding them in general. It may be a faster way to travel, but I felt better off on foot.
Stealing seems like an integral part of the game. How else do you acquire repair hammers and bread? If you get caught with stolen goods town guards will take you to jail. This makes absolutely no damn sense to me.
The biggest annoyance to me in the game is that each area of the game levels up as you do. “Challenge scaling” is the term used to describe this crap. If I went back to the sewer where I started the game, the rats would not be easier to kill, but the same difficulty. The game tries to match your character’s skill, but each baddie gets exponentially smarter and more skilled as you do!
Last but not least, healing is a pain in the ass. Bedrolls and hotels are few and far between, and creating potions for healing is not possible until several hours through the game. Players must trade for potions or hope they run into the scarce herb aloe vera. After casting spells for long enough, a curing spell is an option. But then how do you increase your magic bar?
Flaws aside, Oblivion is a great, fantastic, fabulous, awesome game. Sitting down to play it has been one of my great joys during the last month. Not many games can achieve a perfect score in every category, but this game is so good that nearly everyone will enjoy it. Oblivion delivers what Elder Scrolls and RPG fans were hoping, so what are you waiting for?
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The graphics in Oblivion are so amazing that they’re worth a second look! Here are some sample screenshots taken from just wandering around the vast world of Oblivion…