The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Game of the Year Edition

"A game of aweinspiring scope and openness but ultimately broken where it counts most."

So you are curious about Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion? Well I'll try to fill you in as best as I can. First off let me tell you my experience with this game. I bought the original near its release and it was one of my first 360 titles and played the game for a full couple of weeks before it ended up shelved in my collection. Wanting the expansions for the game but not wanting DLC I traded off the game recently and bought the GotY edition which I'm currently playing as I write this.

The game starts off with you in the Imperial Cities dungeon, a prisoner for whatever reason, only you can know. Suddenly a group of guards and the Emperor Uriel Septim, ruler of the land, himself enters your cell as an apparent secret escape tunnel for the emperor is hidden within. You are immediately swept up in this escape as Uriel has seen you in a vision of his and knows you are to play some part in this affair. As you and the Royal troop make your way through the caverns underneath the castle a group of dark warriors assassinates the Emperor, before he dies he entrusts you with his families sacred amulet and you are given the mission to find his long lost heir and appoint a new Emperor before the forces of Oblivion can make their way over from their dimension to this land. From this moment on what happens here on out is ultimately up to you.

This is a game that pretty much is what you make of it, you make a character, choose a class specialty and are set loose on this world free to do what you want. By doing what you want I pretty much mean exactly that. This game is enormous. Oblivion without the expansions is 16 square miles of terrain for you to explore. There are many towns and countless dungeons that are all optional. Hundreds of somewhat unique NPCs with nearly as many quests to take up, pretty much all of which has nothing to do with the main quest. Of course you can follow the main quest line as well all the way up to its end if you wish and then after beating the game can go off and do all the exploring and side questing as the game is open ended, or you can literally spend hundreds of hours in the game doing the optional stuff never even doing a single main quest.

The optional side quests lines are all just as well thought out as the main ones are. Some of them are very humorous and intriguing and outright bizarre. You can choose to aid the people of this land or be a total nuisance and be a complete villain through out. This is a game of ultimate freedom, some even consider it a single player MMORPG and in many ways that holds true. Personally I play MMORPGS solo and the idea of a single player MMO like game definitely peaks my interest. The game is so limitless in some ways that if you are not a dedicated player the game can completely lose direction and focus for you and you can be very much overwhelmed. Unlike RPGs like Final Fantasy this game doesn't hold your hand very much, but they've taken some steps to help those not used to this level of freedom, when compared to previous entries like Morrowind, by allowing for instant warp travel to locations through the map if you choose not to travel by foot also you can make any quest an “active quest” an it will put a marker on your map indicating where you need to go for it. In this way the game somewhat holds your hand if you need it to.

Character Creation at first glance seems pretty incredible you have a large variety of races to choose from and have a long list of classes to pick from or you can create your own class and choose from a list of skills which ones you will specialize in. In essence at first glance it looks like you can be anything you want. In practice though the games skills and class system is broken. Not because you can't be what you want, you ultimately can. But to be good at it while you are leveling you can't pick everything you want and you have to excel at everything. When choosing skills for your created class you are to choose 7 major skills. These major skills determine how and when you level in the game. By working and training on those skills you gain overall experience and level up. Leveling up, levels up future loot you've yet to obtain and levels up the worlds creatures so they are to stay challenging to you the player.

However the problem is often picking all the traits you want to specialize in will often times cause you to level up faster than your skills individually level up which throws the balance of the game off and causes the enemies to be stronger than you can ultimately handle. I will give 1 example of this. I made a character and wanted him to use only bow/arrows and have the sneak ability be very stealthy and nimble and have light healing abilities so I specialized him all those things as logic would dictate you'd do when making a class based around them.. But since everything I was doing was very specialized and because I stuck with it, my skills were increasing my overall level too fast as they were all increasing rapidly and while they were all raising up as well they couldn't keep up individually with the increasing difficulty of the enemies making the game exceedingly more difficult as I wasn't doing enough damage or being able to take enough damage.

So to effectively make your class you basically have to leave out key abilities you want and throw in a few slower leveling abilities to slow your characters leveling. Because as another flaw of the game. All those “minor skills” that weren't part of your class you can still fully master as long as your stat, that the skill in question uses, is high enough and apparently leveling all your “minor skills to max” is one of the things you need or is “recommended” to do to make your character strong and competitive. And that my friend's is a broken system. When you need to specialize in areas that have nothing to do with your characters build in question to be a worthwhile character or when you need to leave out key abilities from your main skills that you want to use just so they don't cause your character to level to fast something is truly wrong. Minor skills should be just that.. minor, not needed and yet they are and in fact you actually want at least some of your targeted skills to be minor ones so you don't level up faster than your skills strength.

The game itself or it's time of release looks amazing. Now in the later half of 2008 the game is really starting to show its graphical faults but the game can still provide some truly breathtaking sites. The game has one of the most realistic foliage/forestry layouts you have ever seen in a game. It's quite a sight to behold to be next to a dense forest with fields of tall grass and trees. It looks eerily realistic and very beautiful. Dungeons and cave areas are just incredible to be in while dark and lacking color there is lots of texture lighting effects that make them truly fun to be in. But at least on the 360 that's where it ends. You have to be fairly close to an area for it to look good. Landscape details steam in last minutes and you only see the games full glory close to you and just out like 20 yards or so the graphics take a nosedive. All details like tall grass and rocks as such disappear and it becomes a smooth flat ugly mess with trees scattered around. To add to this annoyance there is constant framerate issues in the game, not as bad as I've seen in other large games like Two Worlds but still there nonetheless. This is likely to cause some headaches if you play for long periods you should really invest in some aspirin along with your purchase of the game.

The game sports some nice epic/sweeping melodies in the game that constantly play in the background and change based on location and whether or not you are fighting. It stays pretty low key for the most part and amplifies the large scale/epic feeling you get while playing the game. The voice work is done well, but the problem is there is only a max of like 4 or 5 different voice types in the whole game. So every NPC talks the exact same. Its just ultimately feels lazy after awhile and with other games like Mass Effect out there which have large varieties of voices I just can't see why they couldn't have used other people to give the game far more variety and atmosphere and sadly the expansions seem to use the same voice and music for their different lands so you don't even get the joy of hearing anything new when you get to them.

Oblivion is a huge game with so much to do, that most gamers that play it will never do everything and see everything, much like an MMORPG. But due to the creators striving to create such a customizable open to the player experience the inner workings of it are ultimately, sadly broken. If just exploring and questing is enough to keep you satisfied you should definitely check out this game. If you don't mind your “specialized class character” actually being a godlike master of everything or if you don't mind turning the difficulty meter up and down constantly to handicap your gimped yet truly specialized character the game is probably worth your while. Myself personally while playing I find myself wanting to just go play an MMO like World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online as I can get pretty much all the same freedom out of one of them that I could in this game but with far more skill/class balance and structure and polish. If you are very forgiving in nature this game has hundreds of hours of gameplay to enjoy, there is definitely a lot of hard work put into this game and it is impressive in many areas but it in others it's broken. If you aren't very forgiving or if you are very touchy about class structure you best just go pick up an MMO of your choice for a far far more polished experience.


Score: 6/10

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/29/08

Game Release: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Game of the Year Edition (US, 09/10/07)