The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Basics: Made by Bethesda Softworks Published by Bethesda. Rated teen for Blood and Gore, Language, Sexual themes , use of alcohol and violence (similar to the movies, since the game is so open ended most of these things are left up to you, if you don’t want to go drinking, you don’t have to. The violence is pretty much unavoidable though.) It is a roleplaying game/ first person shooter (many people would say that it is purely an RPG but I think there are enough shooter element to put it in-between).

Yay its here! After months and months of anticipation (okay maybe more :D) Elder scrolls IV: Oblivion has finally gotten into my hands. Hooray!

Okay anyway did this obviously highly anticipated game live up to my unfairly high expectations? Well in a word, yes! Except for the graphics which are almost definitely due to my aging machine and the lack of co-op gameplay that I’m sure I heard mentioned somewhere, this game lived up to my expectations completely.

MILD SPOILER WARNING!!!!!!!!!

Okay so the story this time around is pretty standard for role playing games. You start off the game as a prisoner in an imperial (human) prison for some reason (I still haven’t found out why yet but I’m not through the game yet) when suddenly the emperor and a small armed escort come into your cell and take a secret exit out the side. It turns out the castle is being raided by assassins and the emergency exit is through your cell. You follow the emperor and his escort out of the cell and proceed to go along with them fighting there way out of the castle. Then the emperor tells you that you are destined to be a hero blah blah blah, gives you an amulet and proceeds to allow an assassin to get him. So now your deep in a conspiracy dealing with a mysterious cult and centering around the opening of gates into oblivion (the equivalent of hell in the game world).

Or instead of following your main objectives you can just travel around the game world (its about 6 square miles in size) doing whatever the heck you want! The game is that complex.

Anyway as far as features Oblivion sports a good handful of them. You can get a horse to ride around, join the thieves guild and go around stealing things, turn into a vampire (not new but still cool), save the world from terror, engulf the world in terror, or have a beer with the local drunks.

Instead of the stat based approach that was in morrowind, the game is now taking a more realistic approach. That means where in morrowind even if your weapon CLEARLY hit the enemy but all you got was that oh-so-infuriating “swish” sound, it will now work a lot more similar to real life. If your weapon hit the target it hit the target.

The game runs fairly smoothly, although I encountered a small amount of lag in the early part of some of the outdoor parts of the game. Load times are surprisingly quick and you don’t have to load the same area twice in a gaming session. That means if you accidentally go into an area you didn’t want to, you don’t have to reload where you were before (unless you started there).

As I mentioned earlier there is no multiplayer in oblivion which was a bit of a downer. But of course there is always a silver lining and had Bethesda split there time between multiplayer and singleplayer, the quality of the game overall likely wouldn’t have been as good.

So all in all Oblivion is a truly excellent game and I recommend it to anyone who has a good enough gaming rig to run it.

9/10

(highest rating ever)