The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

The Good
Oblivion is huge, both in terms of the game world and the number of quests involved. Its visually stunning and, despite problems on some systems, managed to run more or less flawlessly on my fairly mediocre system. The greatly non-linear game-play removes the strict need to do X, Y then Z, and theoretically allows many hours of game-play without even touching the main plot.

The Bad
But the sad thing is that the game ultimately lacks character. The visuals, although stunning are ultimately repetitive, and the quests themselves are similar. Cardboard cutout characters speak the same lines and have the same reactions, none of them able to endear themselves. The main plot and the sub-plots are uninspiring and generic, with the majority of the quests boiling down to the same basic game-play.

The game also fails to show progression. Enemies level with the player, and yet only end up getting bigger and stronger, and don't offer up anything fundamentally new. Meanwhile their constant levelling means that although its possible to change your play-style at any time, this leaves the main character critically underpowered.

At first I left the main quest largely alone, and explored the world, completing various sub-quests. Yet I soon realised that there was little actually there, and the first five minutes were pretty similar to the last, and after many hours of game-play I hadn't actually achieved anything.

The Bottom Line
Impressive in scale, but ultimately of limited character. The repetitive nature of game-play soon begins to grind, and the game never delivers a major feeling of progression. The strong modding community may be able to instill a bit of variety into the game, but by the time it had taken off I had already tired.

The Good
Oblivion is, for most purposes, a typical Elder Scrolls game: it puts you into a gigantic world which you can freely explore and undertake any quest you are interested in. One of the problems of its predecessor were boring, repetitive side quests that took the joy out of experimentation. Fortunately, Oblivion pays more attention to this; in fact, some of its side quests are more interesting than the "save the world" main mission. Working for the Thieves Guild or the assassins, you will discover some tasks that require you to make choices and generally involve a bit of variation on the usual "go to place X, kill person Y and bring me item Z" formula.

Like other Elder Scrolls games, Oblivion is set in large world with plenty of background. Dialogues contain tons of information about the world. One thing I loved in it was the abundance of books. I always like it when developers dedicate their time and skills to something that could have been simply left out. For example, I read with a great pleasure a story about a thief who had to sleep with the ugly wife of the person he was robbing in order to escape. It was just a book I found in one of the many stores. It has absolutely no significance to the story. But it was so well-written, with wonderful style and humor, that it left me wonder why the writers couldn't do the same for the conversations between the game's characters.

"Size doesn't matter", some people say. Well, it's still nice that Oblivion doesn't confine itself to narrow passages some other modern RPGs tend to do. You are free to explore this world in any way you like. Emerging from the first, tutorial dungeon into the open wilderness is an amazing sensation. Fortunately, not every location is marked on your ubiquitous map, so there is still some stuff to discover by yourself, without jumping from dot to dot.

The "radiant AI" was a welcome change from the signposts that were the NPCs of Morrowind. You can see characters talk to each other and perform some routines - less convincingly so than in Ultima VII, but impressive nevertheless. It was fun to take a stroll through the quiet alley surrounding the Mages Guild in the Imperial City and contemplate a Khajiit sitting on the bench and reading a book.

Oblivion has great graphics, and they are more than just eye-candy. The world is detailed, there are many objects everywhere, each room is stuffed will all kinds of things, not just important items like potions or alike, but candles, apples, quills, plates, mugs - regular household items. And you can interact with all that physically. There is a "grab" action in Oblivion that allows you to drag things in any direction, much like in Ultima IX, but with a more realistic physics system. It feels great to push tables and see how things fall off it. I know this is just fooling around, but that's one of the things I like doing most in games.

You can also jump, climb, sneak, swim, and generally do whatever you like in the world of Oblivion. The meticulous customization is always a joy. Alone the character creation is almost like a mini-game of its own. You don't just pick a character out of the several available pre-made ones, but create his face and body. You can even adjust things like nose shape and the color of eyebrows - with a little patience, you can make the hero of Oblivion look like yourself.

There are plenty of spells, and you can also make some of your own. You can play as a thief - there is a physical stealth element in the game. I liked the fact that you develop your skills simply by using them repeatedly (like in Quest for Glory games). This is a simple idea that makes the gameplay addictive, and in many cases very rewarding, because you feel you really did something, not just fought many monsters and miraculously became stronger overnight.

I found the music wonderful. I don't think there is a need to introduce Jeremy Soule to anyone who pays attention to music in video games. Much like the graphics, the music here is a very sensual experience. Sure, you could call it "generic fantasy orchestral track", and that is indeed the genre it belongs to, but it's the choice of melody, the harmonies, the detailed orchestration that make the difference. And there is full voice acting in the game, which is always a plus in my book.

Oh, and you should definitely get the expansion, Shivering Isles. It gives the game a much-needed "edge" both in visual presentation and quest content.

The Bad
Compared to the intriguing, fascinating world of Morrowind the setting of Oblivion is a disappointment. It is just your archetypal European-style medieval fantasy environment with somewhat repetitive scenery and locations. It's still beautiful, but it doesn't quite capture the magic of the previous game. The recycled textures in the dungeons also do little to preserve the ominous atmosphere that envelops you when you venture into one of those places for the first time.

Like other Elder Scrolls games, Oblivion pays little attention to narrative and writing. The main story is very short, very simple, and quite uninteresting. The only more or less exciting part, the search for the missing Emperor's son, was over way too early. Very soon you learn everything about your antagonists, and from that point on it becomes the usual hunt for items required to defeat the bad guys. I also think that the "save the world" urgency didn't sit well with the laid-back pace of an Elder Scrolls game, and was less exciting than the gradually unveiling mystery of Morrowind.

Why is there fast-traveling to cities you have never visited before? Who on Earth came up with this idea? I remember how interesting and rewarding it was to look around everywhere in Morrowind, which forced you to explore physically because there was no other way to discover locations. What's the point of exploring if there is always an easier and quicker way?

Despite the well-written books (which were actually ported from Daggerfall, if I'm not mistaken) and the overall clear improvement over Morrowind, the writing in the conversations is still painfully impersonal. The dialogue is there just because you'll need to receive quests and obtain information. The NPCs have no personalities, and there is no single living soul in this whole world you can become attached to. Remember your friends in Gothic games? Well, here, technically, you also have friends; but they are, with very few exceptions, distant and forgettable.

The levels-scaling system almost ruined the game for me. Basically, the stronger you become, the stronger are the enemies around you. I always loved this feeling in RPGs when you grow strong and then go to some place with enemies who seemed so tough before and just whack them in two hits (Gothic games were great at that). Well, you can't do that in Oblivion. You can get to level 99 and then go to some place where you saw level 1 bandits, and you'll see the've become level 99 as well, and on top of that magically procured very strong and rare enchanted armor. So if you don't specialize in combat, those level 99 bandits will actually kick your level 99's ass faster than they did when you both were humble level 1. So much for character growth.

The items you can find in dungeons are randomized and also scaled to your level. So you can forget about being a low-level guy who ventures into a dangerous dungeon and gets that super-strong sword before vicious creatures can tear you to pieces (and again, Gothic conveyed that feeling superbly). If you are low level, your reward will be low level as well. If you are high level, you'll already have found better stuff due to the fact of you being at high level. It's a bit like communism, actually. Sounds logical in theory, but makes life very boring.

The Bottom Line
Oblivion is a hard game to review. It improves upon Morrowind in several ways, but also retains many of its shortcomings and adds some new ones. Its dubious design choices are irritating, and you can't help thinking what it would have been if it had more charisma. And yet, despite all its flaws, Oblivion is still as fun and as addictive as only an Elder Scrolls game can be. Yes, it is a generic fantasy world, but one you can lose yourself in for hours without noticing how the time passes. It will probably not convert a new player to the series' fandom, but will certainly satisfy those who enjoy full-scale freedom and sensual immersion in a virtual world.

The Good
The graphics engine is finally good. It actually runs faster than Morrowind while managing to cram in tons more detail and kilometers of viewing distance.

The landscape looks much more realistic than in Morrowind.

Radiant AI is an improvement from NPCs just standing there.

The Bad
My biggest complaint is that the enemies scale with you. This means that at the beginning you'll be fighting bandits with leather armor and weapons and then towards the end you'll fight bandits with glass armor and weapons and higher levels. And it's not just that there's a higher probability of meeting tougher bandits. At each level there's only one set of bandits that you'll meet. You'll never meet bandits with cool equipment at lower levels. And this goes for all enemies. This makes leveling kind of pointless since any enemy you meet will be adjusted to your level. But that's actually a bit broken. See, if you invest in combat skills it'll be easy, but if you invest in magery, or heck, the more social skills, it'll be really hard and even impossible. This is a really dumb and game-breaking feature, and I don't understand what they were thinking at all. There are mods out there that address this but none fix it completely.

Equipment scales as well... that's right, the artifact's power depends on which level you are when you find it.

The graphics engine is good, but the graphics themselves are kind of boring. The Imperial City is truly something to behold, but only when viewed from afar. Inside the city everything looks bland, thick, cartoony, unreal. It just feels... wrong. Morrowind had beautiful, varied architecture, from the familiar Imperial to the breathtaking Telvanni organic strongholds. In Oblivion it's all Imperial. The greatest variety is stone vs. wood buildings. Humans look absolutely awful. Not awful as in low-poly. Rather, they look like they all have Down's syndrome. Seriously.

The physics engine doesn't add anything to the game at all. I don't see why they included it.

The interface is terrible. Big ugly fonts, lots of ugly icons, and worst of all, an omnipresent GPS that shows nearby points of interest and with an arrow to your next objective. You can mod the GPS out, but it's pointless since none of the quest-givers tell you where to go, as they just assume you'll follow the friendly arrow.

Mana now regenerates on the fly, not just when sleeping. This makes mages much less tactical and spells into just another sort of mundane weapon. The levitation spell is gone.

There are only two types of dungeons: Goblin caves and ghost caves. And they all look exactly the same.

Whereas Morrowind felt more like a coherent world where things happen if you are there or not (even though they didn't really), Oblivion felt like I was playing an arcade game, where every single object and feature was there for some carefully thought-out (but sometimes badly implemented) gameplay element.

There's tons more to say of course, but I'll stop here.

The Bottom Line
A dumbed-down cartoony Morrowind. It's not outright bad. Certainly it's better than some of the more recent RPGs, but it could have been so much more.

The Good
I see a pattern in the elder scrolls series, while I know some people will disagree, I felt the series got its start on the wrong foot. I just didn't care for Arena, the first game in the series even if the ambition of the project got some respect from me. Then Daggerfall came, and provided one of the most epic RPG experiences of all time, garnering my game of the year and quite possibly my favourite CRPG next to Fallout. While there were a couple good spinoffs, such as Battlespire and Redguard, it would be a long 6 years before we were given a true sequel. While I know some people feel different, Morrowind was a disappointment. To me, it lacked what made Daggerfall epic and I just couldn't get into the game. Yet when I started noticing the pattern of "Bad, Good, Bad, Good" I knew that the next entry had to be great.

I was right. When Oblivion came, I was treated to another incredible Elder Scrolls game. While it may not have been as awesome as Daggerfall, and it was definitely smaller than Morrowind and Daggerfall, but it was still an ambitious, beautiful, and incredible game. The first thing one notices when entering Oblivion are the graphics. The game came out 4 years ago and it still looks wonderful. The world in Oblivion is a paradise, and there are various locations that look and feel different. Many towns and places to explore. Exploring an Elder Scrolls game is always a treat, and Oblivion provides plenty of surprises for explorers.

The music is beautiful too, wonderfully composed and always fitting the mood and tone. The sound effects are decent, and it is nice to have full voice acting this time around, which means that if someone is giving a long, 3 minute speech it no longer requires you to read a novella to know what they are saying. There are some problems with the voices though, which I will list below.

The gameplay is definitely Elder Scrolls, you play from a first person perspective and you get various weapons of your choice and you can cast spells, pick various races, traits, and skills. The role playing system has been improved in some areas as well, such as the fact that you now learn skills not by picking them, but by doing them - much like in real life. Walking the wilderness, hiking, jumping will increase your agility and speed, simply swinging a hammer in battle, hit or miss, will slowly build your knowledge of blunt weapons. It is an intuitive and unique way to learn skills and helps the immersion.

The game is very easy to pick up and play, even those who shy away from RPGs or have no prior knowledge of the series can pop Oblivion in and get straight into the action and have fun. While there are some negative side effects of this, which I will list below, it means that Oblivion has something for everyone even casual gamers.

Freedom is another large aspect, your character can be a peace loving alchemist that makes and sells unique potions, or he/she can be a dark mage that has a nasty habit of melting your face if you stare at him wrong, and so many other possibilities. Most quests have choices to make and they can be done in your own time or style. As large as the game world is, the amount of quests is even bigger. There are enough quests that it could take a player a year just to see half of them, and as always, new quests and objects are found through the reward of exploration. You can join guilds, too. My favourite was the mysterious dark brotherhood, who make you an assassin. There is a quest for the Dark Brotherhood where you must kill a bunch of guests in a house as they search for a fake treasure, and you must mingle and slowly pick them off, you don't get your bonus unless you kill them silently and unseen, which raises panic in the group. Its like being the killer in your very own murder mystery, and its a helluva lot of fun. The Dark Brotherhood also gets rep because they can make you a vampire, and vampires rock.

The titular world of Oblivion is also a very memorable part of the game, coming across as a marriage between Hell and Mordor. Lots of freakish demons, mazes, and strange things await you in Oblivion, and each time you enter a gate its sure to give you a spooky feeling and a fight for your life.

The Bad
Although the game can immerse you at times, there are many bugs and problems that can sometimes break immersion. Animations are poor, characters literally freezing to talk and stiffly staring at you. Its somewhat creepy. Speechcraft is also a lame element, as it always has been, and makes little sense and simply isn't fun, on the contrary its a nuisance but the game forces you to use it a lot if you wish to get your desired result.

The voice acting is also often poor, while there are moments that the voice acting is decent, you will run into tons of people who have no interest in what is going on and just speak their lines in a dull manner, and you will also run into tons of people who all sound the same.

Scaled leveling doesn't work here, although it worked in Fallout 3 due to the small monster roster as well as other elements, in Oblivion scaled leveling is an annoying feature, and it'll take you ages before the action truly heats up and the best of the monsters appear. Leveling up is also somewhat confusing in Oblivion, you have no idea how much experience you have and you will level up at random, long intervals and sometimes you won't even know it, its also annoying that when you level up, you cannot tweak your skills until you go to sleep.

The graphics, while great, can get repetitive. The land isn't nearly as varied as previous Elder Scrolls games, maybe excluding Arena, and as lush and pretty as the greenery is you will want to see more and very few areas truly deviate from that look and many places you stumble upon, excluding ruins/caves/etc. that are run by humans have little to differentiate from other such places and feel incomplete.

The Bottom Line
Overall, Oblivion is yet another vast, gorgeous and ambitious game from Bethesda. Its easy to pick up and play even for those who don't like RPGs or don't play them that often, such as myself, and it improves on Morrowind in gameplay and has a buttload of content which will last you a long time, giving you tons of bang for your buck. Its not as good as Daggerfall, but it is easily the second best game in the series.

The Good
1. Extended Gameplay. Yes, the main storyline is on the short side (esp. when compared to RPG classics such as FFVII). However, the side quests and faction quests provide 100+ hours of extended game play. As well, purchasing the 'Game of the Year Edition' provides the Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles extensions to further propel the main quest.

1. Graphics. Simply stated, the graphics are beautiful. It is no longer a monotonous burden to wander through the gaming wilderness.

2. Customization. The character customization is ridiculously expansive. If you don't fall under a pre-made design, simply create your own character.

3. Sound. The score is amazing.
   
   The Bad
   1. Leveling. If you use (and abuse) the character's main skill sets, your character will level insanely fast...and so will the monsters. Good luck to those who prefer to use pure-magic characters.

4. Bugs. Yes, the 360 will lock up if played for 5+ hours. Save often. It is possible to jumble the quest lines. For instance, I forgot to ask for advancement following every quest in the fighter's guild story line and ended up not being able to be promoted to Master rank because of it. Tip: Buy the Prima Guide.

5. Addiction. This game is ridiculously addictive.

6. Oblivion Gates. There are too many of them and conquering them becomes a chore after closing 2 or 3.
   
   The Bottom Line
   I'm a graduate student who recently purchased an XBOX 360 "for fun." Thus, I own the system to play games like Halo 3, Call of Duty 3 & 4, and NCAA Football. However, this game caught my eye in Best Buy one day, so I started flipping through the Prima Guide. I really enjoyed the Final Fantasy series for Playstation 10 years ago, so I thought I'd give Oblivion a shot. What I didn't realize is how immersed one can get in the game. You start on the main quest line, but is so, oh so easy to get off track with one of the Guilds or Misc. quests. A great game, but make sure you clear your social calendar for a while.

The Good
First off all, the graphics and sound are very good, and combat feels nice and frantic. Oblivion features a large game world, and hundreds of hours of gameplay...

The Bad
...and that's where the good stuff ends. The 'hundreds of hours of gameplay' almost exclusively consists of roaming dark dungeons that consist of the same textures, and most of the dungeons consist of copied segments from other dungeons. After the first dozen or so dungeons this becomes oh so not fun. Worse yet, there is a huge disparity between the amount of equipment there is to find and the sheer number of dungeons in the game. You won't finish a tenth of the dungeons in the game before the rest have pretty much nothing to offer you, making the dungeon crawling as pointless as it is boring and repetitive.

With the exception of the too short main quest, the quests feel mundane and unimportant --and seem to serve more as filler than as material. A longer main quest and fewer meaningless side quests would have made Oblivion a much better game.

Even worse is the monster leveling system which scales all the in game enemies to your level. In other words, if you are level 1, so is the "Grand Champion of The Arena" and if your level 99, all the bandits and highwaymen will also be level 99.... good bye immersion. Even worse, if your character is not centered on combat, all of your enemies will still scale to your level and will hugely overpower you. There are mods that give enemies a more static level, but as Oblivion was not originally designed with static levels in mind, these mods ruin both the gameplay balance and the pace of the game.

Last but not least, the game is chock full of bugs. I get random crashes to desktop all of the time, and sometimes I will get a crash when I attempt to save... ruining that savegame file. Oblivion also crashes every first time I attempt to run it, and I can only continue my game after my second attempt at running the game.

The Bottom Line
If you want to play a good RPG with a solid storyline, try Gothic. Oblivion is a giant of a game that fails due to gaping gameplay holes, the lack of an intricate and focused main quest, and the pure mind boggling repetitiveness of the thing.

The Good
Welcome to the best RPG released in the last few years. What makes it so great? The prime factor is the freedom of choice. At the end of the tutorial you are left to a world that you are free to do as you will. You can explore the magnificent and extremely huge world of elder scrolls. You can be a fighter in the dreaded Arena. You can join one of the many guilds for the adventurers and be a part of Tamriel's history. You can delve in to deep dungeons and uncover riches you can hardly imagine. Or maybe you should just climb to the next hill and watch the sun rise. The point is the game lets you do anything and everything that you want, any time you want. And of course it lets you breath the atmosphere of Tamriel, a detailed RPG world, in a graphic quality that will not be matched in years to come. These two traits make this game a real classic and a worth game to play. Actually they make it a star in the night sky.

The Bad
Still there are things, in my opinion, diminishes this game. The game on the surface is detailed and beautiful. But that stays in the surface. One of the most important parts of RPGs, the character system is a serious mistake. While it is usage based (To improve a skill you need to use it, The more you use it, the better you become doing it.), the system and the game world does not leave room for flexibility. The only way to gold is through dungeons. The shops does not allow trade opportunities. They are only places to sell your loot. Also thieving is worthless, simply because you would mostly be finding worthless junk inside other NPCs houses. Some NPCs do have a daily routine. Some don't. It is easy to find tavern keepers who stand on the same spot 7/24. One other point is the difficulty level, that is for lack of a better word. The game world (and I mean world) advances in levels according to your progress. The city watch is always a few levels higher than you, thus your character who can beat the proverbial dragon is beaten down by mere town watch. The same is true for the bandits on the roads. While they start with fur armor, in no time they will be wearing mithril or even elven armor and weapons and skills to match. But this has another down side. The loot, the monsters in the world outside, inside the dungeons. They are all leveled according to you. So a first level character can go to any place on Tamriel, enter any dungeon he wishes, and he could finish it. And when he returns there after, say... 10 levels, he will be facing real monsters, but still he will be able to finish the dungeon. Simply said the difficulty is linear at best. The failure that comes with this linearity is the skill system. In this kind of setting you "must" get the best from each level up. Which forces you to power gaming, keeping papers around to write needless stat changes, or for others simply cheat. Still most of these things are design decisions and not flaws. While I prefer a deep RPG environment, maybe other would like to see more action.

The Bottom Line
To sum up this game is a star that shines brightly through all those games in the shelves. However it is a real classic, it is far from sating the thirst of a hardcore RPG fan.

The Good
This is the best RPG I have ever played, and I am an RPG nut. The expanse covered in Oblivion, while not as big as the world in Morrowind, is still quite sizable, and the game developers used the space assigned to them to the maximum. This means that, while there is less land, there is more to do, and more to have fun with. Also, you can spend hours just trying to customize your character and his house - I spent an hour and a half trying to put my armor on display the right way! I used to be a Morrowind fan, but Oblivion definitely puts it to shame, not only expanding character customization, but allowing for a world that completely immerses the gamer. One could sit down and start a game at nine A.M., and the next time they look up, they will see it's night time. A surefire way to enjoy your PC or 360.

The Bad
...? not... like... oblivion???

The only problem was that it froze a few times, and that is not a problem if you save a lot.

The Bottom Line
This game is possibly THE best game I have ever played. It has consumed my life, and will continue to do so until they make an Elder Scrolls V.

The Good
First of all, the graphics are breathtaking. Superb lighting effects, great 3D models, impressive textures. Second of all, the voice acting is just right, transporting you in the virtual world of Tamriel. The next game of the Elder Scrolls series keeps the races and classes from the previous versions, and adds great features such as horseback riding (present in Daggerfall, but removed from Morrowind) and an active cross-hair showing the health of the NPC (or monster), the possible actions with the NPC, and if it's OK to use an object or not (it turns red when you look at an object that's the property of an other NPC). The new combat system is just great, with the option of manually blocking an attack, and being able to cast a spell even if you have weapons / shields equipped. The story (with it's flaws) is perfectly integrated in the world of Tamriel and there's loads of books and scrolls that add to the Elder Scrolls lore.

The Bad
The bad things... The leveling system is a great idea, but it still allows you to turn your character into a "jack-of-all-trades". I mean there's actually no problem for your orcish character to sneak around pickpocketing people and braking into the NPC's houses, or to become a heavy armored, axe wielding wood elf. The requirements for this game are rather high, meaning that you need a high end system to play it. (Kind of restrictive, huh?) The story: You were a prisoner back in Morrowind. Come on, can't you guys come up with another setting for the start of the game?

The Bottom Line
This is like the ultimate single player RPG. If you enjoyed the previous Elder Scrolls titles, you should play this game. As for all of the game's problems, they'll surely be solved by the massive Elder Scrolls community through mods, just like the previous title, Morrowind.

The Good
2nd Update

I remember the vastness of Ultima VI: The False Prophet, one of the few games that made an impression on my childhood. Now we have Oblivion that is like 1000 times bigger than the world introduced by Origin and their motto was "We create worlds". Boy, technology sure seems to go way fast.

Anyways, before I start there is something I need to say. I played Morrowind and Daggerfall (since they're one of those you love it or hate it kinda games). I wasn't quite too fond of the others, regardless playing those dang games for weeks/months. And most people I know don't want to touch Oblivion because of those bad experiences: Too big a world, but monotonous, linear, etc. When I heard about Oblivion, I wasn't too excited. Another Morrowind? Hah. Booring.

Needless to say, I was wrong. Dead wrong. And probably Oblivion was supposed to be what the developers had in mind in the first place, but were technologically speaking insufficient. So here we go. The good stuff.

Big IS Better
OK. This world is big. Huge, enormous. But being big is also boring for some games. Not in Oblivion. The level of graphical detail is amazing! You DO NOT GET BORED walking around without a purpose. You could stumble across ingredients for your alchemy, monsters (of course), undiscovered dungeons and temples. Or you could just watch the sun and the moon and be amazed at its beauty. Better still, if you watch it by the sea. Now if there's a place I would want to take my girl out, its at sunset in Anvil (a seaside port city in Oblivion). Geeky me!

Non-linear
Well, every game is technically linear. Especially when it comes to RPGs. It's as linear at the primary mission. What makes a game un-linear as so introduced by games like Final Fantasy is the choice to do something else BESIDES the primary mission. This is what makes Oblivion fantastic! There are Guild quests, Side quests, didn't know that was a quest - quests. Boy, this game has a lot of quests. And a lot of those quests take a looong time to complete, but it's not just about defeat this and take that item. A lot have stories. Which is why this game is very good. This game has a lot of dang stories. Weird stories, funny stories, sad stories. All embedded in those multitude of quests.

Options in how you want to finish a quest is also plentiful. You can kill the dude, steal from the dude, ignore the dude. Depends on how you want to finish the job. Though some aren't that optional, but there are other ways. I play Oblivion with 2 other friends, we all have different tastes. And for a game like Oblivion (and other game for that matter) is to have other people you know try stuff you would never even think of trying or is against your "rules of engagement" in playing games.

Graphics
Mentioned it before. Not a particular fan of eye-candy. The game doesn't have eye-candy. The game does have "graphical detail" which to me is different than eye candy. Eye-candy doesn't astound you. Graphical detail does. Graphical detail makes you respect the developers that spent months creating something that made you "feel" the atmosphere of the world of Oblivion. Even more amazing is that I played Oblivion at the graphical minimum settings. I can't imagine what more settings would make the game feel like.

Artificial Intelligence
This game rocks! All the beings in Oblivion have a standard of going places, doing things. Needs work though I tell you, but you know the AI is very beneficial when you're running to the city gates being chased by Ogres and Goblins and the City Guards run to help you fight them off. If you're pissed at the Guards, you can hit one of them and run to the nearest guild (of which you're a member of) and see everyone fight each other. This is anarchy in the making!

Personalized Voice-overs and Dialogs
Though you tend to notice sooner or later that a lot of dialogs are repeatable as well as the voice-overs. The magnitude of those that aren't repeated is incomparable though.

Many dialogs also have very funny stories/comments, which apparently was created out of fun by the developers. Here's one of my favorites:

Dark Elf Shopkeeper: "Do you know what the fine is for Necrophilia?" My answer: "Is this your first time offence?" Dark Elf: "Let's say, yes?" My answer: "Then its around 500 gold coins." Dark Elf: "That's much cheaper than in Morrowind! Thanks!"

The Bad
Unfortunately, the game has a lot of irritating factors too. Among others but in no particular order.

Game Difficulty
About 38 hours later I discovered that you can adjust the game difficulty (doh) - in game. Which is fine, what is not fine is that the enemies don't really adjust to your abilities. The default game difficulty is somewhat too easy. You need to adjust the difficulty a bit more to the right (although adjusting the difficulty to maximum means you couldn't kill that rat no matter what you do).

Another thing is that most of the game difficulty heavily relies on your armor and theirs. Daedra are difficult only because they wear Daedric Armor. If they were naked, they are a little easy to kill. There appears to be an unbalanced use between armor/weapon and skills.

Horses
Oooh, you can ride a horsey. Yay! Er, but that's about it. You can ride them but can't do anything on them. Can't fight on horses, can't cast spells on horses. The driving mechanism is lame (can't move it like your walking). In fact for me, horses have no use what so ever in Oblivion. Can't even get horse meat if you kill a horse (Alchemy reasons). So personally for me I just walk all over the place. Takes longer, but at least you get have time gathering herbs. This is of course, subjective taste...and I wasn't referring to the horse meat :)

Sound and Music
The sound and music in Oblivion isn't one of its strong suits in the game. If I were to say so far, it doesn't fulfill the magnificence the game represents. Oblivion is an "epic" kind of game. While the music for example is almost always the "prologue" kind of music. Never does it hit the "epic" level you hear in epic movies. The sound is so-so. Standard nothing worth mentioning. When it comes to sound and music, nothing ground-breaking happening here.

3rd Person Perspective
You can change your perspective from 1st person to 3rd person. 3rd person is somewhat fun when you're travelling. But when it comes to combat. You always go to 1st person. Why, because the game mechanics weren't made for 3rd person combat. You can't fight very well in this perspective. You can't target you're spells for example, unless you're right in front of the enemy. Even that, you can still miss since you're assuming the direction the spell is going.

Note: I finally realized that for melee special attacks, its actually easier in 3rd Person Perspective. Doesn't work very well in 1st Person Perspective. Now this is quite confusing since now both perspectives have pro's and con's. Someone obviously forgot to mention a combat tutorial somewhere...

Character leveling up
Hmmm, I recall in Morrowind even Minor skills can help you level up in the game. In Oblivion only Major skills effect your leveling up. Pretty stupid from where I'm standing. I'd like to think every little detail effects you. Oh well. This also means there's a faster level cap for Oblivion than previous games...something I'm personally do not like.

Where's my teleport spell?
Mind you, I haven't installed any mods or patches so the version I got didn't have a freaking teleport spell. A game this big and no teleport spell? Hello, what were you developers thinking?

Useless Skills
There are a lot of useless skills in the game however. Speechcraft, Security, etc. Since these can be replaced by certain magical spells. In fact a lot of skills can be replaced by magical spells. In fact come to think of it, you cannot survive this game WITHOUT magical spells. This game is too heavily dependent on magic. There's no way you can defeat an enemy fast without casting a spell or two. This is self evident when you increase your level and try comparing between melee skills and magical skills. More than often, magical spells tend to kill the bloke faster than whacking the monster with an over-sized tree branch.

Re-spawning Items
Well, most of you may disagree, but I personally like that fact that the house I just robbed should REMAIN empty!!! This only applies to items in chests, drawers or any storage object. Items here apparently re-spawn after several days (around a week, I think).

Fan Mod Dependent
If you check out the fan mods created for this game, you'd be surprised at how creative our fellow gamers are. What saddens me is that a lot of those mods should've been minimal standards for the original game release. You really need to do a LOT OF DOWNLOADING to fully appreciate the experience this game has to offer.

Inventory Chaos
Yep. This inventory in this game is somewhat chaotic. The screen isn't very nice, somewhat needs to be more user-friendly: The fonts, the quick linking, etc.

Alchemy Chaos
Yikes, creating Alchemy Potions here is a complete nightmare! My kingdom for an in-game recipe feature, easier filters for ingredients, etc.

Quick-Button Limitation
Now this is the most stupid feature in Oblivion. For a game that has a lot of weapons/spells/items, you really need to switch between one item to the other fast, right? Right. The thing is, you only have 9 Quick Buttons. What? Only 9? You need 2-3 for weapons, 2-3 for potions, at least 20 for spells (hehe). This limited Quick Button feature really is bad, since there are a lot of buttons on the keyboard waiting to be assigned. They shouldn've learned a thing or two from Neverwinter Nights about Quick Buttons.

The Bottom Line
If RPG is the name of your game, this game is the best PC RPG game since Fable. This game will keep you busy for weeks if not months.

Note: If you require low-level intelligence RPGs (hack and slash RPGs) then this probably isn't the RPG for you...

The Good
The graphics were insane (but there is a downside to it... possibly)

the music score to this game is insane it fits perfectly with the game.

The beginning of the game had an actual... for a lack of a better word... introduction to the controls. unlike Morrowind that basically said "well pick up the knife... press R to attack... well you broke the law... good luck with that" while oblivion gives an explanation and a through walkthrough of everything you will do before you are released into the world.

The quests are very fun to do and when you finally finish them you (sometimes) feel like you actually did something very good.

Combat is good but will get better as you progress in the game.

Horses are cool to ride on and the fast travel system is very good (WAY better than paying some guy and a bug to take you to a city that is still just as far away from where your supposed to be... damn morrowind... why do i keep playing that?)

a whole lot of factions make the game very fun and will keep you busy for... at least 48 hours straight ... don't get any funny ideas your 360 will just freeze like mine does but that might be from different reasons.

very good lay out of controls. but if you make the jump of morrowind to oblivion... just as a heads up the controls are different.

The Bad
graphics are way too good... it sometimes made my xbox 360 freeze (this may be because i played around six hours straight, or the fact that i just got the game and the system at the same time)

also the story line seemed extremely short... i won't spoil anything for you but in the end it just seems like you went a long way to almost nothing.

Sometimes quests are just real b.s. and are there to piss you off... or require a patch (don't drop the ring of burden... WHAT EVER YOU DO DON"T DROP IT UNTIL THEY TELL YOU... IT DOESN"T COME BACK!).

no horse combat

no creatures like in Morrowind (i just like comparing the two games even though they are on two different sides of the world the fact is this make the game more in depth and shows how different the worlds of each uhh province are).

Oblivion gates... i really hate them ... just as a little tip you don't need to close any that you pass in the world you could just complete the story line and they will all just close.

The Bottom Line
very good ... don't play it too long or else ... well lets just say "good-bye" to your social life ... and everything else!

The Good
Everything about this game is lovable. Bethesda has kicked it up so much. The environments are as beautiful as the character's themselves. They cleared up the fog that was forever looming in Morrowind and now you can plop up on top of a mountain and just see what you can see. The combat system is wonderful. You can hit,block,fireball and hit again. The NPCs are now voiced, so your not just talking to a mute person with paper and pencil writing their conversations. And the new mastery of your skills is incredible. New moves to learn and skills to master make this game a perfect gaming experience. Also, the addition of a compass make traveling easy, so now your not running around in circles look for a cave that's miles away from you. And the ability to ride a horse does make traveling faster.

The Bad
The only things I didn't like about Oblivion are many common problems, I guess. First, all of the characters are voiced by the same people. So you talk to a guard with a really deep voice then you go talk to a midget with the same voice. Second, the story line could have been more plentiful. You play a few very simple missions and you win. These are the only problems I see.

The Bottom Line
A must have for any and every RPG fan boy/girl. Once again Bethesda knocks us dead.

The Good
Technologically, Oblivion is stunning. After escaping the initial dungeon, you emerge onto the sunlit surface of a vast wilderness. The first thing I did was hike up the nearest mountain and try to explore into the deep wilderness. Oops! No deep wilderness, you cannot travel this direction any more. Oh well, wander around and explore the world. Nothing memorable to encounter, just generic enemies and generic dungeons.

The game is fantastic to look at, and it's exciting to see what will be done in future RPGs with the graphical features displayed in Oblivion, but as a game Oblivion is soulless and devoid of anything cool or heartwarming.

The Bad
Well, the fact that it's not really a game, it's an engine with a few half-baked RPG elements thrown in so consumers can rationalize why they just spent $70 on a terrain-modeller.

Oh yes, the SpeedTrees look good from a distance, but a cursory look reveals that each tree looks identical no matter what horizontal angle you look at it from. Trees in Oblivion are little more than glorified sprites -- not that I have anything against sprites and 2D graphics.

The Bottom Line
A waste of time and money. In the next few years we will probably see an engine like Oblivion's put to good use. People need to look back and remember what made classic RPGs great -- Drakkhen, Baldur's Gate, Betrayal at Krondor, Ultima VII -- before anything truly special can be added to this nearly-dead genre.