GameScore: 8
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Editors Plus Rating: +.9
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Although perhaps not (yet) a household name, the Elder Scrolls games have been pushing the bar in huge-world RPG gaming for over a decade. While Oblivion has nothing to do with any of its predecessors, meaning anyone can get straight into it, it does share most of the things which made all the previous Elder Scrolls games so great: beautiful visuals, an enormous world, a captivating and very refined freeform gameplay. While Morrowind fans, or serious roleplaying fans in general will find a lot to complain about, Oblivion is an amazing experience.

 Like all Elder Scrolls games, you start your adventure as a nameless criminal rotting in a jail; your first task is to select a race, your appearance and your gender. The facial manipulation options available are amazing, you can pretty much make any face you want. You’re immediately plunged into the story as you come face to face with a fleeing emperor, voiced by none other than Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart. This opening scene allows you to get a feel for the game and try out all the different styles of play, from picking locks to shooting fireballs. Toward the end of the tutorial, an imperial guard suggests a class for you based on how you’ve gotten through the dungeon, which is a nice touch. But if you aren’t interested in his offer, you can select another from the list, or create your own custom class.

 And then you step out into the world to find yourself looking at a lake cutting across the land with a distant tree line broken by somekind of ruin. The beauty is breathtaking – if your pc has the muscle, Oblivion offers what is pretty much the best looking game yet conceived. You can set off to explore the ruin, kill its guards and exhume its secrets (and loot!), or you can set off in any other direction and explore the world. Or, you can use the instant travel option to move to one of the many cities dotted around the map, from which you can start questing. There are more quests in the game than I can count, each guild (fighters’ guild, mage’s, assassin’s, thieves, etc) all have long quest lists allowing you to rise through the ranks, the main plot arc lasts around 30 hours and there are dozens of random individuals dotted around cities all in need of help. Or maybe in need of having their house key pickpocketed so you can break in easily at night and steal their stuff. The choice is yours

 Elder Scrolls doesn’t use generic experience points to advance in levels after enough have been accumulated, instead, your major skills determine your level – the more you use your skills, the better you get. The higher your skills, the higher your level. It puts your level in practical terms and allows you to advance in level your own way. Although each class – or custom class – has major skills which define their core abilities, every class has every skill – to some extent – so the options for character development would seem to be almost limitless, but it doesn’t work out right. All of the classes blur into the same invincible supersoldier hybrid of warrior, mage and assassin at high levels, and while freedom can be a great thing, too much freedom can defeat the purpose – and that’s what happened with Oblivion’s character development.

 Visually the game is nothing short of breathtaking – the high dynamic range lighting makes the world look so amazing, sometimes it’s easy to forget you’re playing a game. I simply can’t convey with words how amazing this game looks – if your pc has the muscle, it’s easily one of the best looking games available right now. And besides the raw numbercrunching – the world itself is stunning, from the cathedrals towering over medieval-style villages to procedurally generated forests – which is essentially very sophisticated randomisation based on realistic variables (tree and rock formations, soil erosion, etc) rather than being hand designed, which results in far greater realism.

 What makes Oblivion so special, besides its massive size and practically limitless depth, not to mention its astounding beauty, is all the little things. At one point I walked past a guard to hear him remark “You have the eyes of a trained marksman” – which was my character’s main skill. Another time I had a man approach me offering to pay me to collect some ancient artefacts after finding out I’d sold one to a local shop. All these little things make the world come alive in a truly engrossing way. And there’s so much periphery to discover in the world, from ancient ruins to demon-prince shrines surrounded by worshippers. The AI system also has night/day cycles for every npc in the world, so, rather than just stand around all day saying the same thing over and over, they walk around, go to work, shop, drink and at night sleep. As you walk through a village, you’re walking through a living community. This world is alive in a way never before seen in a computer game.

 But the good things aside, Oblivion has a lot of faults. For one, while it’s a great game – Oblivion is a bad roleplaying game. The plot is quite utterly dire and can actually be ignored, meaning it sort of undermines the entire point. The character class system, as mentioned above, is terrible – but a boring and generic item system augments this by making the entire character development system utterly stale. The combat system is also rather generic and boring, and you won’t ever really find yourself thinking ‘wow, this is fun!’ as you repetitively hit the attack button until your enemy runs out of health. This effect is amplified at higher levels, when your character is probably invincible and can stand and melee anything, even if you’re playing a pure spellcaster class. If you enjoy roleplaying games, you’ll find a lot to hate in oblivion.

 It would take ten thousand words to do any kind of justice to how amazing this game is, but failing that, this will suffice; buy it right now. Even if you don’t like fantasy games, there’s something for everyone in this game, with perfect visuals, engrossing gameplay, a deep and rewarding world, not to mention the game can easily last over a hundred hours, well, everyone who owns a pc good enough to play this game, should play this game. It has plenty of flaws, and roleplayers will come away with a sour taste, but it is nevertheless an amazing experience.