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.
