The
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the latest in Bethesda’s
legendary series of sprawling RPGs set in the exotic world of Tamriel.

The series has offered
games that were widely considered to be mixed blessings, offering
enormous role-playing freedom in a buggy or otherwise unwieldy package.

To be able to talk about
Oblivion with any perspective, it’s necessary
to take a quick look back at the most recent game in the series, 2001’s
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

Morrowind
was a frustrating mix of spectacular virtues and vexing weaknesses.
On the plus side, the gameworld was stupefyingly huge, complex, strange,
handmade, mysterious, and beautiful. The game offered a flexibility
in character creation and development that was a virtual role-player’s
wet dream. The problems with the game included a clunky interface
(particularly regarding inventory and the quest log), lifeless NPCs,
endless generic-feeling quests, and a general lack of urgency that
eventually caused an entropic exhaustion in many of the players.

Morrowind
really drove me crazy. I can’t remember another game I loved and hated
so intensely at the same time. The whole time Bethesda was developing
its follow-up, Oblivion, my mantra (oft-repeated
to the Bethesda folks themselves) was “If they can keep everything
that was great about Morrowind and fix half
of what was wrong with it, they could have an RPG for the ages!”

Dynamite Quests

Everything about questing
in Oblivion is superior to its predecessor.
First of all, the Quest Log works beautifully. It allows you to keep
track of current, active and completed quests. In addition, it tracks
the steps of multi-part quests. Finally, it gives you directional
help so you can find the object of your quest more easily.

But it’s not just the way
you keep track of quests that has been improved. The quests themselves
are vastly superior to those in Morrowind.
Instead of generic-feeling, listless fetch quests, Oblivion
offers a multitude of interesting, story-driven adventures. These
missions involve everything from foiling fraudulent vampire hunters
to pacifying a lonely old sailor ghost; from exposing corruption in
a city guard to morally compromising an honest man. You’ll step into
an oil painting, fight pirates (and pirate ghosts!) and harvest bear
teeth.

The game’s main quest line
involves the death of the current Emperor (voiced by Patrick Stewart),
seeking his secret heir, and dealing with a series of portals to hell
that open all over the land. This main storyline is interesting and
rewarding, but it’s just the beginning. You can have an entire career
(with hefty quest lines) as a thief, fighter, mage, assassin, or all
four. You can roam the land seeking out ancient shrines where you
can do the bidding of despotic old gods. You can fight your way up
the gladiatorial ranks in the Imperial City’s Arena.
You can become a vampire hunter, or become a vampire yourself! Or
you can simply freely adventure through the land, disturbing bandits,
beasts, demons and undead in a myriad of wilderness camps, ruins,
and dungeons.

Obviously, there’s lots
to do in Oblivion!

The Story

As in all four Elder
Scrolls games, the story begins with you in a jail cell.
In fact, it’s the same exact cell in which your character begins in
the first game, Arena. You don’t know who
you are or why you’re there, and before you can think about it too
much who should show up in your cell but the Uriel Septim, the Emperor
himself! He’s accompanied by guards, and appears pretty agitated.
But he stops short when he sees you. “You are the one from my
dreams!” he exclaims. (Of course you are.) You are ordered by
the guards to follow the Emperor and his contingent through a secret
passageway out of your cell and into an underground labyrinth. Within
a few minutes, the sovereign has been assassinated and you are charged
with finding his hidden heir.

This early sequence serves
as the game’s tutorial, during which you learn the basic skills of
the game, including combat, magic and stealth skills. Along the way,
you are asked where you are from, which is the game’s way of determining
your race. Like Morrowind, the game has
a generous assortment of races, all with different appearances, lore,
strengths and weaknesses. These include Nords (great fighters), Bretons
(super magic users), Imperials (great at personality skills), Argonians
(think lizards), Khajit (cats), Red guards (the best pure fighters
of all), Rocs (tough but hit with the ugly stick) and an assortment
of Elves.

All
this is dramatic and exciting, but an even cooler process is japanning
“under the hood” during this prelude. One of the interesting
characteristics of all Elder Scrolls games
is the organic way they help you determine what kind of character
you are going to play. In Oblivion, the
game is observing how you are playing this prelude part of the story.
Which skills are you stressing, and which are you ignoring? Depending
on how you are playing, when you get sent on your mission after the
Emperor is dead, the character speaking to you makes an assumption
about your class. “You seem to me to be an Assassin,” he
might say. Or “Knight,” or “Agent,” etc. (He assumed
I was a “Dungeon Decorator,” but that’s neither here nor
there.)

At this point you can agree
with his assessment and your character class is automatically assigned.
Or you can choose from a dizzying array of prebuilt classes.

Here’s how a character
is built in Oblivion. Two primary attributes
are chosen (out of these six: Strength, Endurance, Personality, Willpower,
Speed, Intelligence), and then seven (out of a possible twenty-one)
primary skills are chosen, along with a focus in Combat, Magic or
Stealth.

The many pre-built character
classes are based on combinations of the two primary attributes. Hence,
a Strength/Personality character is a Knight; an Endurance/Personality
build is a Pilgrim, an Intelligence/Willpower character is a Mage,
Strength/Intelligence = Spellsword, Speed/Agility = Archer, and so
on and on.

As if these many combinations
were not enough, you can build your character completely from scratch,
choosing your own primary attributes and primary skills and then naming
the class yourself.

Oblivion
follows up this extremely flexible character creation system with
a remarkably organic leveling system. In this game there are no experience
points at all, and no skill points to spend upon leveling up. No experience
points or skill points in an RPG? Yep, you heard right.

Skills are leveled in the
most natural way — by using them. Thus, if you want your Blade skill
to increase, swing that sword a lot. Want your Mysticism ability to
shine? Summon, summon, summon. Etc. Leveling occurs when you’ve leveled
your seven primary skills (in any combination) a total of ten times.
At that point you get to increase your stats a bit, and can even get
bonuses depending on what combination of skills you improved.

The system works remarkably
well, and really allows the character development system to get out
of the way of the player so she can simply play naturally.

Another plus is that none
of the skills you don’t choose as primary skills are blocked off to
you. They just increase more slowly, and don’t count toward character
leveling. But that doesn’t mean you can’t raise them to impressive
heights. For example, I played a pure Mage with zero fighting skills
among my primaries, but by the end of the game my Blade skill was
nearly 100.

Many activities which were
clunky or a downright pain the ass in Morrowind
are much smoother in Oblivion. Alchemy,
spellcasting, summoning, speechcraft and lockpicking are all solid,
intuitive, rewarding, streamlined, and fun.

The variety of skills in
the game give you lots of opportunities to have fun in different ways.
Develop a silver tongue with the Speechcraft skill. Get devilishly
good prices with Mercantile. Become a burly warrior with Blade, Blunt
and Block. Enjoy thievery using Security to pick locks and Sneak to
go about your nefarious way undetected by enemies. Repair and even
improve your armor with Armorer. Brew powerful potions and poisons
with Alchemy. Use Illusion magic to hide yourself, Destruction to
nuke your enemies into submission, Alteration to get past locked doors,
Conjuration to summon powerful enemies, or Restoration to heal and
buff yourself and others.

Music

Lucky for us, Bethesda
was able to secure the services of the remarkable Jeremy Soule to
compose the score for Oblivion. Soule is
simply the best RPG game composer working; he provided the memorable
music for Icewind Dale, Neverwinter
Nights, Guild Wars, Star
Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and of course, Morrowind.
Soule understands the job of the musical score in an RPG: To create
the sense of epic urgency and importance. The music in Oblivion
is, not surprisingly, superb.

Presentation

The
overall presentation of Oblivion is top-notch.
There’s great attention to detail, not only in the visuals, but in
the writing. I’ve talked about the imaginative quest storylines, but
there’s an added bonus for gamers who like in-game reading: There
are over 400 books in the game, which provide a rich background to
the lore and history of The Elder Scrolls
setting of Tamriel. Reading some of these books will even provide
you with skillups!

Whole Lotta Game

While there’s not the
stupefying amount of content that was present in Morrowind,
there’s still tons to do in Oblivion. I
completed the game in about 110 hours, and that included the Main
Quest; the Arena, the Thieves Guild, Mages Guild, Fighters Guild and
Assassins Guild quest lines; about half of the Daedric Shrine quests
and about 80% of the Miscellaneous quests. If I had pursued the remaining
Daedric quests, the Wilderness quests and a couple of long item-collection
quest lines, my playtime could have easily clocked in at closer to
150. Finally, if I’d scoured every extra freeform dungeon and ruin,
the number could be pushing 200 hours. That’s a lot of game value!

Graphics

Duh. It goes without saying
that the graphics in Oblivion are jaw-dropping.
The character models are rich and detailed, the colors are vibrant,
and the fancy new technology used to create the outdoor areas is quite
impressive. It’s really great to stand under a tree, look up, and
see and hear the leaves and branches swaying and rustling in the breeze.

You can theoretically get
slightly sharper looks on the PC version, but the XBox 360 version
is no slouch.

NPCs

There was much criticism
of the lifeless NPCs in Morrowind with their
generic and listless conversation. This has been greatly improved
in Oblivion. For one thing, every single
one of the many thousands of lines of dialog are spoken, which is
quite an impressive feat. The voice acting is rock solid as well,
which is no surprise considering the cast includes Sean Bean and Terrence
Stamp). The much-touted “Radiant A.I.” Bethesda talked about
so much makes the characters feel more lifelike. They engage in conversations
with each other, and as you progress through the game they will react
to various aspects of your reputation. You’ll start to get comments
like “You have the hands of a healer!” or “Look at
the muscles on you!” (yes, I also get this one in real life constantly).
When you ask rumors, you’ll often even hear tales of your own exploits.

Make Your Own
Kind of Music

All of this richness of
content and flexibility of character development means you can pretty
much play Oblivion like you want to. You
can play it as a hack and slash or as a stealth game. You can sweet-talk
your way to success or pick off your enemies from a distance. Oblivion
truly lets you “role play,” which is a huge accomplishment.

Travelocity

Another handy feature
in the game is the Fast Travel system. You can travel to any city
in the realm from the beginning of the game, and to any other point
in the game once you’ve discovered it on foot. This makes questing
much more efficient.

The Downside

Graphics, cool character
system, great quests, lively PCs . . . so is the game a homerun? Almost.

I’ll now discuss the aspects
of the game which disappointed me.

Graphics:
Complaints about the graphics? Hold on. This is more of a design complaint.
Oblivion‘s design is very standard High
Fantasy, with the requisite Medieval European or Romanesque architecture.
And the wilderness areas are very pretty . . . but they all look almost
exactly alike. In addition the world of Oblivion
(consisting of the Imperial Province of Cyrodill) is much, MUCH smaller
than the island of Vvardenfell in Morrowind.
I miss the enormity and fantastical strangeness, not to mention variety,
of Morrowind‘s wilderness. I miss the vastness
of the country side — it made exploration exciting and scary. I miss
the wild and alien architecture in the cities.

Also, as in Morrowind,
the animations for the spell effects were particularly disappointing.
As you moved up through more powerful spells in a given category,
the animations would stay disappointingly the same. This really cut
into the fun of playing a magic-based character.

Conclusion

My hope for Elder
Scrolls V (the sales of Oblivion
pretty much guarantee it’ll happen) is that it returns to the strangeness
and vastness of Morrowind with the Fast
Travel feature, livelier NPCs, better interface and tightened quest
structure of Oblivion.

But don’t get me wrong.
These complaints are minor in the face of Oblivion‘s
spectacular virtues. My hats are off to Bethesda and 2K games for
taking what they’ve learned in previous iterations of this sturdy
series and moving the franchise forward in a huge way. Oblivion
is a blast to play, and it’s a considerable achievement in the annals
of electronic role-playing games.

Final Grade: A
(find
out more about our grading system)

PC System Requirements:

Minimum System Requirements:

• Windows XP, Windows
  2000, Windows XP 64-bit
• 512MB System RAM
• 2 Ghz Intel Pentium
  4 or equivalent processor
• 128MB Direct3D compatible
  video card and DirectX 9.0 compatible driver
• 8x DVD-ROM drive
• 4.6 GB free hard disk
  space
• DirectX 9.0c (included)
• DirectX 8.1 compatible
  sound card
• Keyboard, Mouse

Recommended:

• 3 Ghz Intel Pentium
  4 or equivalent processor
• 1 GB System RAM
• ATI X800 series, NVIDIA
  GeForce 6800 series, or higher video card

This
review is copyright Ray Ivey and Just Adventure and
may not be republished elsewhere without the express written consent
of the author. Republication of said review must also contain a link
back to Just Adventure.