The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion review

Maybe it was the time I saw those two male mages climb into bed together. Or when the Imperial guard chased me for twenty minutes across Cyrodil before I even realised he was there. And what about that time my horse was prayed upon by a vicious wolf that was subsequently kicked to death by the beautiful steed?

Actually, no – it was the time I spotted something small moving in a nearby lake. Upon closer inspection I discovered a deer that was swimming away from a nearby hunter. And when the deer saw me standing there, fearing for its life it turned and swam in another direction. A safer direction.

That’s about the exact moment I truly realised the sort of game Oblivion is… A masterpiece. One of the best ever made.

See you in Cyrodil

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion… hmmm, where to begin? How am I supposed to tell you things you don’t already know about what is clearly the most eagerly awaited PC game since Half Life 2? It’s certainly the most anticipated RPG on the PC, that’s for sure. It’s also the best thing to happen to the Xbox 360 since its release.

So I won’t do that. I won’t tell you what the plot is. I won’t tell you what you’re expected do either. That isn’t through fear of spoiling anything - it’s through choice. And if there is one thing Oblivion is the perfect embodiment of it’s choice. The main quest is merely one part of a much larger element. Whether you pursue it or not is entirely up to you.

As of writing this PC review I’ve barely even touched the main quest. How can I therefore call the game a masterpiece, you might ask? It’s simple: just over a week since its release and I’ve so far spent over 60 hours playing it. That amounts to around 100 in-game days.

Within that time I’ve done so much that to document it all would probably mean us hiring an agent and securing a book deal.

Less is Morrowind

But the best thing is this: there will be loads of you who have spent as much, if not more time with the game as I have. Every one of you will be having a different experience. The only thing that ties it together is the quests themselves – they will never vary regardless of how many times you play.

But how you play the game is what’s important. Because it’s going to be different each and every time. Oblivion isn’t so much a sandbox as a giant toy box. Sure, you can’t actually do anything or everything you want. Those restrictions are very securely tied to the quests and how you complete them. But as a fictional environment Oblivion is one giant playground.

You can tackle quests in any order you want, join pretty much any guild you want, kill a lot of the people you want in any particular way you want. Again it comes back to choice. Cyrodil is there for you to explore and after an extended linear training section in disguise that’s exactly what you can do.

Few moments in gaming come close to when you escape the sewers at the beginning of Oblivion. The graphics are amazing (as long as you have a PC that can cope – I played it on an AMD64 Athlon 3800+ Dual Core, 2GB Ram and a GeForce 7800 GT rig). The land stretches out before you. There’s a section of the map clearly marked as to where you need to go to further the story. But do you want to go there or do your own thing? It’s up to you.

Close Shut Your Social Life

I can whine about what does and doesn’t work in the game (Harry already covered a lot of the basics in his Xbox 360 review and both games are identical so the same essentially applies here) but I'm not going to. Suffice it to say that your indoctrination into the Arcane Academy is a chore, becoming a vampire is about the single most annoying thing in Oblivion and the Oblivion itself actually sucks.

Not everything is perfect with the game and some of the things that annoy do so to a large extent (Jeremy Soule’s score, for example, is almost exactly the same as Morrowind’s). The Radiant AI is anything but, leading to some rather stunted encounters between the townspeople. The levelling-up system is rather clunky too. And while I’m on the subject of niggles, the “Loading Area” signs suck.

But when the world is this immersive, well-written and open-ended and its choices as different it’s hard to fault it. I’m already thinking about the next time I play it and what I want to do differently. But regardless of what I do next time it will still be different to what the rest of you are doing.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is less a videogame and more a life in and of itself. The longer I’m away from it the more I come to appreciate it. Few games have that effect on us and those that do are one thing above all else: unique. Oblivion is every bit a unique experience. It’s the best 360 game so far, one of the best PC games in existence and arguably one of the best RPGs ever made.