"Oblivion is one of the best looking games ever and is geared towards all players."

The Elder Scrolls series has been a constant, but overlooked, face on the PC market. While the games were incredibly innovative in their approach to RPGs they mostly seemed to appeal to a niche group. Not everyone was interested in, or even capable of, playing a game as open world as these games. When I was around 16 I found myself totally lost playing Daggerfall. It took a long time for me to really appreciate what these games have to offer. Thanks to Morrowind and now Oblivion these games have fully entered the mainstream of video games.

Much like the other games in the series, Oblivion focuses on one continent in the Elder Scrolls world and the dangers that are befalling it. Oblivion tells the story of the mainland, Cyrodil, and the assassination of the Emperor, Uriel Septim. With his death, and the death of his heirs, the nation is thrown into turmoil while the forces of Oblivion, the realm of chaos, threaten the entirety of the land. You start the game as a prisoner in the Imperial City and are quickly pulled into the situation, eventually having to shoulder the burden of saving the world (aren't we always?).

From this point you are thrown into a world typical of the Elder Scrolls; a giant free form and open world where you can do pretty much whatever you want, whenever you want. You can be a hero and go around completing quests to save people or you can be a villain, going around and murdering people and stealing their stuff. It really is up to you how you wish to proceed and both ways have rewards as well as consequences. More or less the entire game is open to you from the get go, so you are never limited in what you want to do.

One change made to this game from previous entries in the series is the scaled difficulty and item acquisitions. If you are a level one character then going into a dungeon means you will fight level one enemies and acquire weak equipment. Should you instead do that dungeon later on (or return later in the game as many dungeons restock on enemies and treasure) you will fight harder enemies and get better treasure. Certain items are consistent in that no matter when you go to get them, they are simply set.

While this makes it so that you are very rarely in over your head when you adventure into a dungeon it is also kind of unrealistic. For a game that really lets you do whatever you want, this level of hokey unrealism just kind of ruins the experience. I wont say that I enjoyed getting my behind handed to me by super hard enemies, early on in Morrowind or Daggerfall, but it was realistic. It's far more believable that, when exploring strange dungeons and ruins, you might end up over your head.

To coincide with this, the game has made a bunch of changes to all of its systems but the most notable changes are to the combat system. Rather than standing there and hacking at each other, missing at point blank range, this game has a pretty cool combat system. Running back and forth, sniping enemies with arrows, using your shield to block attacks and then hacking them apart… this game is a lot of fun to kill enemies in.

The biggest change to this game from the previous ones is the inclusion of skill benefits. When your skills get to certain ranks you will gain a benefit from it. So when your weapon skill gets up to 51 out of 100, you will gain the ability to make a special attack, while getting a 100 in the Athletics skill allows you to do crazy things like jump on water to stay afloat. These benefits don't really change anything but they do make dealing with certain situations a lot easier.

When you hear people raving about the beautiful graphics in this game, they are most certainly not kidding around. This game looks incredible and standing on a cliff and looking down on a mountain valley is fairly breathtaking. The assorted greenery, lakes and even waterfalls all look absolutely wonderful. While I wont say that the enemies are beautiful, quite hideous in fact, they look great, showcasing the power of the next gen systems and attention to detail that Bethesda put into this game. The finale of this game pretty much is one of the high points of my gaming life with how wonderful it looked. If this section, or the scenery in this game doesn't impress you, you must not have a pulse.

The sound is just as incredible as the graphics. Pretty much every single person in this game is voice acted; there is no times where you are simply reading text. Even if it is something as simple as the NPCs that you come across in town they are voice. Now, admittedly, there are only about four to six different voices for all the townspeople but its still nice to not have to be reading text and dealing with flat conversation. The NPCs will even have conversations amongst each other. These are a bit stilted and their pre-generated responses don't always match up perfectly but it's a step in the right direction.

While it is mostly praiseworthy the AI in this game is a bit silly at times. Basically the bad guys will tend to go after you or any other NPC labeled as a good guy by the game and the good guys will do the same, except going after bad guys. So if you are walking around and a bandit sees you, the bandit will attack you. But you might come across that same bandit going after a member of the Imperial Guard due to him running across the bandit in the wilderness.

This sounds great but some really silly situations come up. While standing in town I was attacked by an enemy. When the guards came to help me they fired their bows and accidentally hit each other with their bows. So once the enemy was dead, a huge fight in the middle of the town broke out with town guard fighting town guard. By the time it was over there were about ten dead guards, whom I promptly ravaged for their equipment and sold it to make a small fortune. It worked out well for me and it was funny as hell but it was incredibly silly to have happen.

Oblivion is a good game but it isn't really what I would have expected of it. Basically they traded in a bunch of the depth and mechanics from the previous games for ease of use and accessibility. While it is nice to see the game do so well some of these changes, frankly, suck. Those who come into this game expecting to use certain skills, such as Enchant, will find them frustratingly gone. As a long-standing fan of the series it was hard to see some of these things being absent. However I cannot deny that, standing on its own, this is an incredible game.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/31/07