The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Game of the Year Edition) (PC, 2007)

The Good

* Huge, lavishly detailed world offers tremendous amount of action and adventure
* Main mechanics like combat, stealth, and magic are fun and well designed
* Impressive artificial intelligence and hundreds of believable characters
* Outstanding symphonic score, as well as excellent voice acting and sound effects
* Tremendous replay value, plus gorgeous graphics to make it easy on the eyes.

The Bad

* Frequent though fairly brief loading times
* You might run into some technical issues with performance.

This is a rare and remarkable achievement--a huge, open-ended, complex, detailed role-playing game that's fun to play and a pleasure to behold. Oblivion not only delivers everything that earned the Elder Scrolls series the devoted loyalty of a huge following of fans, but also significantly improves on the weaknesses of its 2002 predecessor, Morrowind. Morrowind earned recognition for being one of the best role-playing games in years, but the immersive and long-lasting experience it provided wasn't for everyone. Oblivion is hands-down better, so much so that even those who'd normally have no interest in a role-playing game should find it hard to resist getting swept up in this big, beautiful, meticulously crafted world.


Morrowind was a tough act to follow, but Oblivion isn't just better--it's a lot better.

The Elder Scrolls series is known for its sheer size and depth. These are games that you could lose yourself in, spending hours exploring a fantasy world, traveling for miles, or just looking for minutiae, such as rare plants or hidden treasure. Oblivion lives up to this pedigree, putting you into a massive, cohesive, highly immersive world. You get to create your own character--the possibilities for customization seem limitless--and then explore the world as you will. There's a compelling main quest for you to follow, which takes about 40 hours to finish the first time through, but the majority of the game's content is peripheral to that main quest. You can root out evil in hidden dungeons, join and climb the ranks in a number of different guilds, visit all the different towns and try to solve everybody's problems, compete in a long series of gladiatorial battles to the death, break into someone's home and rob them in their sleep, get caught and face the consequences, contract a disease that leads to vampirism and then try to find a cure, buy a house, steal a horse, invest in your favorite shop, and, if you can believe it, there's much more.

So the breadth of content is as remarkable as ever, but the most important thing is this: The many types of gameplay in Oblivion are well-designed and deeply satisfying, even when taken on their own. That's the main difference between this game and Morrowind. This may be a role-playing game, but you could play it like a pure action game, or like a stealth game, or like an adventure game, and it'd still be at least as good as, if not better than, games that are specialized in these regards.

Oblivion does a great job of quickly introducing you to all these different aspects of play, successfully engaging you rather than overwhelming you. You see the world through your character's eyes, but a behind-the-back perspective is also available. Initially you just pick a name, race, and gender for your character, and the game opens with you stuck in a dungeon cell, being taunted by a fellow inmate.

Overall Rating: An 11/10

I'm not going to go where everyone has already been in my review of this game except to say that if you have a system that can handle it the graphics are outstanding!

Whats a system that can handle it? Well...for a test I installed this on my old 2.6Ghz P4 Northwood with a crappy Glendale 400Mhz fsb motherboard. This motherboard only has pci slots on it, & the best card that will run on it is a pci Nvidia 6200 card. Crippled as that may sound it still managed to be playable with most game settings set to low-med.

Then I tested it out on my, also old, 3.0Ghz HT P4 with an 800Mhz fsb, & an agp Nvidia 7600GS 512 MB video card overclocked right from the factory. Now this is just so much better! So this test has shown that the 3.0Ghz with a good AGP card would be my recommended min requirement to really begin to enjoy what this game has to offer.

Now for a few other random things I'd like to talk about. Most RPGs I've played don't allow the character to jump up on things & you can do that in Oblivion. That was a really nice thing to find in this game. Too bad they didn't also allow you to grab & climb up on things? Oh well, at least you can change back & forth between 1st and 3rd person perspectives just by pushing R.

Now most of us know that RPGs all having you going on quests. In Sacred it that quest is often be as uncreative as finding a farmers lost chicken! In Oblivion some of the quests can be a real challenge...nice for a change!

This is kind of anti-climatic here, but you can choose between starting the game as 10 different characters, male or female, & even choose hair color & length, features etc.

It hardly mentions it in the manual but if you do battle with a vampire you can end up being infected yourself. If you don't want to be a blood sucker you need to drink a potion to cure yourself right away. If you ignore this in a few days you will have to go on a complicated quest to find a cure. Also you will have to suck blood every day in order to repress the vampire in you. If you don't drink blood people will start to notice how sickly you look & you won't be able to go out into the sun without sustaining damage.

Another thing is that there are so many quests, and factions to join, (guilds & such), that it's really difficult, if not impossible, to just stay focused on the main quest. After hours& hours have passed, & there's always just one more things to do, you begin to realize the real reason that they named this game OBLIVION! Loads of fun, but very time consuming. A real in depth review of this RPG would take much more room than is allocated here...now back to the game, ha, ha!!!

I have played Morrowind and I wanted to see if the effects experienced would be the same in Oblivion. They are. The graphics, the sounds (both for/background) are great. The sound track is as if it were from a good movie. The characters strike conversations with each other on there own, whether you join in or not.
You can buy houses in a number of cities, even though it usually means more than just a transaction of money, you must complete a task or two for consideration of being a buyer.
The greatest and most dangerous part about the game is the time travel. You sit down and your totally enveloped in the story/quest and when you look around yourself to take a breather you might it it 3, 4 or even 7 later. It feels like you just sat down to play, but somehow you have gone through a time warp and your food is now cold or moldy, your cell phone is dead, your water has been shut off, the mailbox is over flowing and your wife and kids are with their grandmother. It's amazing how this technology works.


PS
If it's unclear where I'm going with this... the game rocks!


Pros:
Game play graphics are as good if not better than the intro. If your video card can support a higher res. you will be rewarded richly with many detailed enhancements with great lighting. The world/map is huge and you can walk/ride horses forever and meet new people and forget the story line if you wish and just do small quests. Earn money, buy real estate, harvest pearls, explore caves, camps, forts, underground temples... anything you want to do or be .... be evil or be a defender of the just. Possibilities are wide open.


Cons:
Conversations that characters hold are at times rather repetitive. I would like to hear different topics. One day you may awaken and be a vampire. But if you feed on others as a vampire, they do not turn. How lucky are they!? Kinda bites for you though. No pun intended.

I have played Morrowind and I wanted to see if the effects experienced would be the same in Oblivion. They are. The graphics, the sounds (both for/background) are great. The sound track is as if it were from a good movie. The characters strike conversations with each other on there own, whether you join in or not.
You can buy houses in a number of cities, even though it usually means more than just a transaction of money, you must complete a task or two for consideration of being a buyer.
The greatest and most dangerous part about the game is the time travel. You sit down and your totally enveloped in the story/quest and when you look around yourself to take a breather you might it it 3, 4 or even 7 later. It feels like you just sat down to play, but somehow you have gone through a time warp and your food is now cold or moldy, your cell phone is dead, your water has been shut off, the mailbox is over flowing and your wife and kids are with their grandmother. It's amazing how this technology works.


PS
If it's unclear where I'm going with this... the game rocks!


Pros:
Game play graphics are as good if not better than the intro. If your video card can support a higher res. you will be rewarded richly with many detailed enhancements with great lighting. The world/map is huge and you can walk/ride horses forever and meet new people and forget the story line if you wish and just do small quests. Earn money, buy real estate, harvest pearls, explore caves, camps, forts, underground temples... anything you want to do or be .... be evil or be a defender of the just. Possibilities are wide open.


Cons:
Conversations that characters hold are at times rather repetitive. I would like to hear different topics. One day you may awaken and be a vampire. But if you feed on others as a vampire, they do not turn. How lucky are they!? Kinda bites for you though. No pun intended.

While I'm still partial to Morrowind and still play it on rare occasion, I also play Fallout 3, Bethesda's newest game. I think of Fallout 3 as an extension of Oblivion. Oblivion is great, and that means Fallout 3 is great.

About a year ago, I lost my copies of Morrowind GotY and Oblivion GotY in a drastic turn of events. I lost a lot of stuff, and I'm trying to get back all the stuff I miss from back then, including Oblivion. However, when Fallout 3 came out, I considered sticking with just it, because it was supposed to be like Oblivion but better, newer. I honestly got sick of it. The theme just doesn't appeal to me as much. Also, Oblivion wasn't as demanding of system resources.

Moving on, I started looking for the GotY (Game of the Year) edition in stores, and it was nowhere to be found. I saw the standard Oblivion and the new Fallout 3. I had a choice to make: Pay $60 for a brand new game I've never played or pay $50 for a game I played, modded, added expansions, beat the expansions and so on. The choice I made was to get Fallout 3. I can't say I regret that decision, though, because the GotY Oblivion can be pretty cheap through EBay!

Now, I'm going to give you a few reasons why Oblivion is better than Fallout 3:

1. dragons
Mods for Oblivion are much more integrated into the overall theme of Fallout 3, and the theme of Oblivion allows for some very nice implementation of dragons. There are pet dragons, dragons you can ride, customizable dragons and even dragons as boss fights.

2. swords and shields
Fallout 3 has blunt weapons and guns. It doesn't give you the same sense of excitement that Oblivion offers. Also, Oblivion characters are much more customizable.

3. clothing
While clothing in Fallout 3 looks great, there aren't a lot of options, not without mods. Even without mods, Oblivion offers an insane array of clothing combinations, and the mods have a lot to offer, as well. Keep in mind that Fallout 3 doesn't give you separate clothing parts to combine; Oblivion does.

4. physics
This is actually very iffy, but Oblivion has the exact same physics engine as Fallout 3. The animations are also almost exactly alike. Therefore, since Fallout 3 has higher system requirements, I say Oblivion is better. The only thing that Oblivion lacks is the severed limbs, and, while I love that feature, Oblivion doesn't need it.

5. music
Fallout 3 doesn't have that classical theme song you could easily find yourself humming. Oblivion's music isn't quick as exciting, but I like it more.


So only get Fallout 3 if you have a very powerful computer. Otherwise, stick with Oblivion. Also, if you like adding new features to your games, Oblivion's modding community is a lot bigger, but it has been around a lot longer, as well, so Fallout 3 might eventually become a better modding community. Only time will tell.