The Elder Scrolls Iv: Oblivion Review

The Elder Scrolls is a series of RPG’s (Role-Playing Games) which started back in ‘94 with the release of Arena, a game that set standards in its time for longevity and free-roaming. Despite being an important franchise in gaming, it’s more than probable than you’ve either never heard of it, or did with the release of Oblivion, and that isn’t by any kind of accident.

The fourth chapter in The Elder Scrolls was hyped to the limit by the fans and mostly all gamers alike, and it’s time to know if it lived up to its hype, 3 years after its release.

The moment you set foot in Tamriel, the imaginary world that serves as scenery to this franchise, you are greated by a great character editor, with 9 races and lots of haricuts to choose from, taking out a great face editor that will let you model yourself into the game (if you choose an humanoid race that is). After you’re happy with your selection, you are dropped into an engaging tutorial, teaching the game mechanics perfectly, while giving a quite good introduction to the plot. The only complain you can possibly have here is that you’ll end up choosing your skills badly on your first character, and being forced to go back a create a new one, but that’s part of all games in this genre really.

Once you complete the tutorial and enveil the beggining of the main quest, you will be amazing with the scenery in front of you. A mist of nature, acient ruins and a medieval world right there in your first frame outside the sewers that do the job of teaching you the basics. You are left with a little indication of where to go to carry on the main story line, but you are not at all forced to follow it. You can play hundreds and hundreds of hours without even starting it. And while we’re on the topic of the main quest, I have to say it offers a good 40 hours of gameplay, more if you decide to explore the world in between the various quests, and although its plot isn’t breath taking, it serves its purpose and won’t leave you with an empty feeling in the end. It basically goes around the fact that an ancient cult murdered the emperor Uriel Septim and his heirs, and  is opening gates to Oblivion all across the huge land (I’ll get back to it in a minute). Your job is to defeat the daedric monsters coming out of Oblivion and find the Emperor’s long lost son.

And while the main quest is lenghty and will make you explore a fair bit of Cyrodiil’s land, there is much more to do in Oblivion. There are around 230 quests in Vanilla Oblivion, scattered around the whole province, which is really really large, taking at least 90 minutes from one point to the other, and much more if you right with all the monsters you meet. The quests are found in shrines, in the middle of nowhere, inns on smaller roads, the cities (each one of them offers an unique personality, and you’re bound to fall in love with them), and finally, the guilds or factions. There are multiple factions you can join in this game, each with different gameplay, plot and reward. There is a guild for fighters, mages, assassins, thieves and you can also join the Arena, fighting as a combatant in a fight-to-the-death kind of thing, much like the romans used to do. You can move up ranks in each faction, and you’ll notice lots of variety in this field. Not wanting to give much of the story away, you’ll be fighting rival guilds, outcasts, killing targets for cash and stealing valuable stuff. Killing targets is actually a lot of fun you can have, either with the quests, or simply by picking an NPC, study his routine and killing him cold blooded.

NPC routines are actually a big part of the game, in a system Bethesda calls ‘Radiant AI’, and that lets each NPC in the game to have its own interests, liking or disliking you based on the crimes you commited, the quests  you completed, the help you gave or the factions you are a member of. But it also lets them have their routine. All NPC’s wake up in the morning, do something before lunch, go to an inn to have a meal, go to work, chill out during the evening and then go to sleep. And it’s done in a very realistic way, and you’ll see that each one of them has intelligent routines based on its personality and professional activity.

There’s just so much you can do in this game, so many different approaches, that talking about it ain’t going to do. You’ll need to experience it, and I promise you you will get addicted the first minute you step out of the sewers.

However, just to give you some examples of what you can do here, let’s take the Arena I talked about earlier. You can fight as a combatant down there, you can bet on who wins, or you can simply steal the bet money from its chest when nobody is looking (Or you can pickpocket/murder the chest keep for the key, making the breaking into the money much easier). You’ll find yourself in a mansion where you’re supposed to kill every guest without anyone suspecting it’s you (Agatha Christie style here), investigating a theft in one of the county castles or assassinating someone who is in prison.

Seriously, it’s impossible to describe this game, and I didn’t even mention the standard aspects a review covers. The sound is fantastic, the graphics were major when it was released and still are outstanding, with the exception of people’s faces, which are much better done in Fallout 3. The Lasting Appeal is obviously huge by reading what I wrote, and the gameplay mechanics are refined: you can fight in first-person view or third person, and although some parts of the game were obviously meant to be played in first person, you’ll be okay with both, believe me.

The only downside of this game are bugs and slowdowns when loading textures and areas, especially when you are riding a horse across the land, but they won’t ruin your game at all, and they’re small bugs for such a big game.

And now that patches are released, lots of mods if you’re on pc, and two amazing expansion packs, wether you’re setting up a fight in town, exploring the huge world, clearing out dungeons, roleplaying any character you imagine or helping people in quests, you will get a great deal out of this game, which is in my opinion a serious candidate to game of the decade.

Graphics: 9/10

Gameplay: 9.5/10

Lasting Appeal: 10/10

Sound: 8/10

Fun Factor: 9.5/10

9.5/10