Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Game of the Year Edition

Rating Mature Genre role-playing Publisher Bethesda Game Studios External Links Official Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Website

Welcome to the prisons of Cyrodil, the capital province of Tamriel. Do not be alarmed; though you are incarcerated now, soon you embark on an amazing adventure. You shall witness the death of the King, become the Seeker of the Heir, battle the Lords of Oblivion as they invade the world, and finally bring peace back to this troubled land. Or you can just stay in your cell and wait for the end to come; the choice is, as always, yours.

For many, Elder Scrolls has become a staple name in the market of PC RPG games, and the Game of the Year award is just one of many achievements that the series has picked up over the years. For those of you like me who have never played an Elder Scrolls game before, Oblivion makes for an entertaining and enjoyable introduction to the series. In addition to the core game, Bethesda Game Studios have added its most popular expansion, Knights of the Nine, as well as its latest creation, Shivering Isles, to the PS3 release.

As the game begins you are given the chance to begin your Character Creation by choosing a race from the ten most heavily populated races in Cyrodil. This will be your first taste of the customization capabilities in Oblivion, and as you will discover it’s a strangely mixed bag. You have plenty of options, but not quite enough of the right kind of options. No matter which race you chose, the only feature on your character that you can truly alter is your face. In this aspect, Oblivion goes above and beyond, allowing you to change everything from bone structure to eyebrow locations. Sadly, each race has only one facial type that can be altered, and you cannot change the body types in any way. With so much effort placed into the facial customization aspect of the game, it’s a small disappointment that different facial and body types weren’t also offered.

Continuing through the Tutorial section of the game will bring you to the Birth Sign selection process. This allows you to choose a special Birth Sign for your character, which will impart a series of specific benefits (and in some case weaknesses) to your character. As you conclude the Tutorial you will be able to finalize your character by choosing from twenty-one pre-made classes. Each class comes from one of the three basic concepts; Combat, Magic, and Stealth, which provide a +10 bonus to their related skills. From here, the only difference between any of the classes is which of your skills are considered Major. Major Skills faster than Minor Skills and start with a base point value of 25. The final benefit is a +5 bonus to two Attributes.

If you don’t particularly like any of the pre-made classes, Oblivion allows you to create your own unique class following the requirements listed above. While this is a wonderful idea, and would help create a unique gaming experience in many games, the final decisions you make here become void once you’ve actually started the game. Each of your skills can be maxed out at 100 points, both Major and Minor, and no class has any special abilities above any other, so eventually all classes become the same class once you’ve mastered all your skills.

Speaking of skills, Oblivion uses a rather unique leveling system based on your skill progression. Traditionally the player gains experience through combat and the completion of story events, gaining levels as you gain the required experience. In Oblivion, your character gains a level after you have increased your seven Major Skills by a total of 10 points, split any way across the seven. While this is an interesting idea, several of your skills can be maxed out in a matter of a few hours, while others require days of continual use. The result is certain classes leveling much faster than others, and a crafty player can exit the tutorial as a level 10 character with a little creative class making and five hours of free time.

Due to the unbalanced nature of the skill and leveling system, players will have completely different experiences. The main story line, in which the player must discover and help the King’s true Heir, can take anywhere from ten to forty hours to complete, depending on which skills you’re using and how high you’ve made them. But the main story line isn’t all there is to do in the world. Ignoring the two expansion sets in the game, Oblivion still has tons of side quests to keep players coming back for more. Players can attempt to become leaders in several Guilds, fight for fame in the arena, or simply help one of the thousands of people in trouble in the land. Believe me, there is ALWAYS something that needs to be done.

Oblivion offers players a first-person perspective as its default, but can easily be changed to a third-person view for a more observant view of your surroundings. Controls are quite intuitive, despite the complexity of the system. You attack by pressing the R1 button, cast spells with the R2 button, block with L1 and grab with L2. The analogs follow standard FPS rules, the left for movement and the right for camera control. The action buttons allow you to jump, use doors and levers, ready your weapons, and access your journal.

The most complicated aspect of the game, the journal, contains all of the information for your character from your stats to the items you have in your inventory. Everything can be searched through easily and quickly, as each section of the journal has been organized for easy access. Your most used part of the journal will be your Quest Log. If you get lost in a quest, or get sidetracked with one of the dozens of other quests you’re trying to complete, you can go to the log, click on the desired quest and instantly receive a marker on your map indicating where you need to go. The map screen provides you with the ability to quick travel, allowing you to cross the country in the time it takes to load a screen rather than walking the entire distance, a handy tool later on in the game.

As stated earlier, there is a lot of customization in Oblivion, and none more enjoyable than the crafting abilities. Oblivion allows players the ability to not only mix potions from ingredients that you harvest, but create your own unique spells and magical equipment. The options are wide spread and limited only to your own imagination… and the base programming of the game.

Graphically, Oblivion might not be the most impressive title ever released on a console, but taking into consideration just how massive the gaming area is, we can afford to be understanding. There isn’t a single inch of land or sea in the country that you cannot go to, whether to the deepest pit or the tallest peak. Every aspect of the game is vibrant and believable, from the rolling hills and forests to the dank dwellings of the undead. One of the more impressive sights is the ability to stand on a hill, see a castle in the distance one hundred miles away, and know that you can actually ride out to that castle without cut scenes or load screens. As for the loading times, they are remarkably fast for a PC conversion to a console, usually taking anywhere from twenty seconds to a minute depending on the area. When were talking about this kind of scale in a game, twenty seconds is amazing.

The music and effects are amazing, providing an extensive orchestrated soundtrack that blends perfectly with the moods of the environment and actions that are occurring. Along with the breathtaking music, several well known sci-fi and fantasy actors lend their voice talents, none more recognizable than the King of Cyrodil himself, Patrick Stewart. Utilizing these voices is Oblivion’s Radiant AI system, which allows the NPC characters to decided where to go, what to eat, and what to say to the player and other NPC characters. It came as no surprise that this groundbreaking AI doesn’t work quite as advertised. Often NPC characters will get locked walking into walls, threaten to kill you for no reason, or even have a two-minute conversation of saying hello with each other. Thankfully once you actually begin interacting with the characters these glitches seem to fix themselves and offer only mild amusement rather than annoyance.

In the end, this first experience with the Elder Scrolls series has been an enjoyable excursion into a world I should have already been acquainted with. While the game still contains many glitches and several redundant mechanics issue, Oblivion offers an in-depth story that will keep players entertained and coming back for more, no matter your playing style.