Since the
Wii hasn't come out with any games that interest me in some time, I decided last month to return to my
Xbox 360. One series, I am now astonished I ignored for so long was the Elder Scrolls series. I'm a big fan of games without direction. While plot structured RPGs like Final Fantasy do hold my interest, what I have been yearning for is an RPG similar to that of the modern Grand Theft Auto games. That's what Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is. Oblivion is a first person RPG game, which has lots of quest and few boundaries in which to accomplish your goals.
Story
The story of Oblivion centers around the methodical murder of the Royal Septim family. A cult that worships the satin-like Mehrunes Dagon center around these murders in an attempt to bring Lord Dagon's hellish world to the region of Cyrodill. It's up to you to solve the mystery behind these murders and stop Lord Dagon before it's too late. The main quest takes you all over the Cyrodill countryside fighting various monsters and cult members. The main story has a few twists, but they generally play out before your eyes without the need to adapt in any way.
While the main story-line revolves around the quest to stop Mehrunes Dagon, There's more to Cyrodill than just fending off Dagon's daedra army and restoring the Septim bloodline. Cyrodill is a living breathing world filled with various factions, stories and quests. Each citizen has their own story and routine. Some quest lines are just as involved as the main storyline, while just as rewarding to complete.
Gameplay
As mentioned earlier, Oblivion is a first person action RPG. Everything takes place in real-time. While you have the option to switch to a 3rd person perspective, your target cursor is only available in the 1st person, and is critical in performing some of the most basic actions. Oblivion is set in a world not unlike the fantastical Middle Ages. People battle with swords, bows and arrows, magic, and alchemy. Your character can specialize themselves in the various abilities available in the game either through their own race, class, or actions. Your race can determine your ability to sneak, pick locks, use or resist magic, or fight as well as your base stats like, strength, agility, and willpower. The class you choose specialize your abilities further by enhancing your skills in that area. You can also choose a birthsign which enables you with special abilities or attributes as well. Finally, you increase your skills in the various areas by doing actions that correspond with that ability. For instance, if you sneak around a lot, you'll increase your sneak skill. If you strike enemies with a sword, you'll increase your blade skill. Increasing your skills does two things. First it allows you to reach certain plateaus for which you can do greater things in that skill like new moves to strike folks, more damage, or more spells available to cast. Second, if the skill is associated with your class, you'll eventually gain a level. Gaining a level allows you to increase your base stats like strength and agility, but it also allows the world to advance around you. As you increase levels, NPCs, enemies, and creatures gain levels too. Also more powerful weapons start to appear too. What this does is create a world that's always relative to your own power level. You'll rarely be overwhelmed, but rarely are you underwhelmed either.
Oblivion has a wide variety of weapons, armor, spells and other items. Weapons are classified into blades, blunt, and staves. Blades typically are swords and daggers, while blunts are typically clubs, maces, and war hammers. You can also wield various armors and even shields if you have a free hand. Weapons and armor can also have magical effects too. Magical armor can simply be repaired and offer passive magical effects. However, magical weapons have charges and more active effects on its targets. Magical weapons not only have to be repaired but recharged. That can be done by paying others a healthy sum of money, or by filling soul gems and using them. There's also a wide array of items too like alchemy equipment to mash up ingredients found throughout Cyrodill, lockpicks to open locked doors or chests, or repair hammers to repair your equipment on your own.
The economy is pretty balanced, but like many games can become pretty irrelevant later on in the game. You start out the game pretty poor. Most items do not sell for much if anything and you cannot afford most powerful items. As you advance levels more powerful items can be found scattered about, which can be sold for more and more money. Buying houses will drain your cash the most but offers a great benefit of being able to sleep somewhere safe and have a safe place to store your belongings.
Completing quests typically drives you in Oblivion. Only completing the main storyline and all the guild quests offer Xbox Achievement points, but there are various other side quests scatters throughout Cyrodill. The main quest is pretty short, though it does offer a few challenging missions. Most of the missions involve closing Oblivion Gates. These gates can be extremely challenging to close given the numerous enemies you'll have to face. Most other quests in the main storyline involve retrieving certain objects through dungeon crawling or infiltration, or through other means. As with most other missions there are various ways to accomplish your task, through stealth, magic, or brute force. Cleverness is rewarded, whether it's leading your enemies to the town guards, or causing them to trip a deadly trap; any method you choose often does the trick.
Many quests can have many parts leading to an ultimate conclusion. For instance, guilds have various quests, leading to the conclusion of that quest line. Often these quests get more and more difficult the more you progress regardless of level or ability. Yet with the greater challenge comes more variation in terms of completing your goal. Often I found that missions offer more various routes to victory. Each quest is often rewarded based on difficulty and level. That is the more difficult the quest the greater the rewards. Similarly the reward is that much greater the higher your level. So it's often beneficial to advance your character while also improving your weaponry and armor too.
Sometimes cleverness can prove to be your downfall. Whether it's intentionally set up by the developers or unintentional via a wide array of bugs, certain quests might not be able to be completed if you perform some task in a specific order. That is, certain items might be removed or certain characters might die as a direct or indirect result of other quests. If you can update your game via Xbox Live, this does help quite a bit, though there are many instances where your choices can lock you out of completing certain quests. Luckily, this doesn't happen for most major quests as vital characters cannot die prematurely and quest items can only be removed from your inventory by special action from the quest itself. Still, it is something to be aware of and forces you to create a small network of saved games just in case it does happen.
Overall, the gameplay offers many diverse ways of accomplishing a task. It seems as if each method is equally as difficult as it is rewarding. Well rounded characters will find a wider array of paths to take in terms of completing tasks, but also a more difficult route in completing each quest if not adequately advanced. Still, I think this method of balancing offers a rewarding gaming experience.
Controls
The controls are great. The two analog sticks conform to the standard 1st person shooter standards. That is the left analog stick moves and strafes, while the right analog stick looks around. Why a developer would use any other setup is beyond me (Hello Nintendo!). The right trigger attacks with the weapon you're wielding. The right bumper casts the spell you currently have set. The left trigger blocks, or zooms in when using a bow, while the left bumper will pick up an item, provided it's not too heavy, without storing it in inventory. The face buttons do common actions. For instance the A button is your all purpose button. You use it to activate something, pick up something and store it in inventory, or other miscellaneous operations. The Y button allows your character to jump, the X button sheaths (or unsheathes) your weapon and the B button activates the menu. The 8 corresponding directionals on the dpad act as hotkeys for spells, potions, scrolls, or weapons. This is handy if you're a mage who uses a variety of spells to down opponents. Clicking the left analog stick switches you into sneak mode. This tends to happen occasionally in the heat of battle and can be annoying. Clicking the right trigger switches your perspective into 3rd person mode. This is useful to cheat when looking around corners. Finally the back button activates the wait menu, allowing you to wait in a certain spot for 1-24 hours at a time. And the start button opens up the menu allowing you to load, save, or access game options.
Overall the controls are good because they conform to proven standards. Some of the analog button controls can be annoying, but they don't ruin the experience. Overall, the controls really enhance the experience because they allow you to do things very quickly and efficiently, while minimizing the learning curve.
Graphics
The graphics in Oblivion is probably one of the most amazing aspects of the game. The world of Cyrodill simply looks amazing. The details of the landscape, right down to the diverse architecture of the various regions is breathtaking. Not to be outdone is the level of detail with the various people, creatures, and even the most mundane objects. Each offers a level of detail that pushes the boundary of immersion in a console game.
The animations are also wonderful as well. The physics engine does a great job of providing a realistic environment for animations. Very few games really capture the realisms of gravitation while keeping the game fun. It also makes for some rather unique animations when you strike an enemy dead as they can flop or stiffen up in an instant. There are some noticeable clipping issues as well as some minor hit detection issues as well. This is because Oblivion does have some immovable objects (rocks, walls, heavy objects jammed against immovable objects) and some irresistible forces (closing doors, moving walls and rocks, swinging blades). When they meet, it can cause some interesting graphical anomalies.
Pretty graphics come at a pretty heavy price. That price is terrible loading times. The loading times are PSP-bad. Simply entering or exiting a town can cause a wait of 1-2 minutes, which is unbearable when doing a mission that requires heavy traveling. What's worse is the game will start loading in the middle of a town without a loading screen. Sometimes these loading times will take upwards of 30 seconds, leaving you wondering whether the console is frozen. Also, there are times where my console has frozen. Certain towns like Leyawiin are notorious for causing your console to just lock up. If there was one aspect of this game, which really ruins the experience, it's the way the Xbox 360 handles the graphical quality. I wouldn't have minded a lower resolution or duller textures in exchange for faster loading times and the elimination of console freezes.
Sound
The sound is pretty decent. The music fits in well with the medieval era without resorting to folkish lute music. Instead it sounds more epic as if you were part of a movie instead. While that's good, many of the themes do tend to repeat themselves. I even found myself streaming MP3 music from time to time. The music does alter itself a little depending on the situation. If you're in a town, there are a handful of themes that differ from the wilderness, or dungeons. However, if you're actively being pursued by an enemy, there are a few themes which really make that abundantly clear. It's to this end where the music is really useful in determining how at risk you are for attack. I did see some musical anomalies from time to time. There were cases where the music shifted suddenly to various tracks in rapid succession without rhyme or reason. It didn't harm my experience at all, but it was kind of weird.
The sound effects are also pretty good. Important sound effects like the clanging of swords and the casting of magic spells really capture the essence of the moment. While other more subtle sounds like an arrow ricocheting off a stone wall is captured with precision. The sound effects really offer a more enhancing experience as a result.
The voice acting is also pretty good. Each character delivers their lines convincingly the majority of the time and also accurately relative to their disposition. The scripts also are well written and help aid in the experience. Still, it would have helped to have a more diverse voice acting cast. There's really only a half dozen voice actors or so. While Patrick Stewart voices Uriel Septim, he only has a small handful of lines to deliver. The rest are delivered by a small voice acting cast and it's painfully obvious right from the beginning. Also I found it odd that when asking someone about rumors, their disposition always changes to the highest level temporarily. It's just kind of weird that you can be caught robbing someone, but they'll be nice to you if you ask them about various rumors, then curse you as you break off conversation.
Replay Value
The replay value is tremendous. While playing through Oblivion is enough for many gamers, simply doing that can occupy hundreds of hours of your time. I have played through probably 95% of all the possible quests, and I have chalked up 120 hours of game time as a result. However my character is primarily a warrior, specializing in hand to hand combat. I could easily (and much to the chagrin of my wife) start up a new character which specializes in magic or stealth and redo all those quests again. In many cases these quests would be just as new and interesting because of the various ways to solve them. Many of them you can fight your way through hordes of foes, while in other cases, you can sneak past them or deceive them using potions or magic. Such options extend the replay value through a strong diversity of gameplay dynamics. In addition to the base 120 hours of gameplay I put forth, there's various add-ons like the Knights of the Nine quest line, and the Shivering Isles expansion, which can add another 30-50 hours to your Oblivion experience. Finally, the open endedness of the game allows you to do things that might not be associated with any quest. You can dungeon-crawl through the dozens of forts, caves, and Aleyid Ruins, or you can simply try to fight an entire town to the last NPC.
Still, if there was one aspect of the game that causes me to put the game down it would be the loading times. I hate to bring this up again, but I cannot stress enough how annoying this was to me. While there are various bugs scattered throughout the game, some of which can cause major problems if you don't have a good network of saved games, it's the loading times that really make me angry. It just takes up most of my time waiting for a new section to open up. I just wish this was approached better.
Overall Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is a must have game. Even fans of other genres should appreciate the various ways to play the game. The game will provide a decent challenge for most folks, while there are ways to make the game much harder or easier as you like. As is the theme with many games I have played, don't be foolish and let this one pass you by.
