tesseract's Full Review: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion / Elder Scrolls 4 f...
Warning: Here comes one of my patented TMI® reviews. If you hate reading long ones, you might want to quit while you’re ahead. I just can't seem to find any middle ground between "It's great/it sucks" and going into vomitous detail. Anyway, Oblivion is a big game, and it calls for a big review.
I’m convinced there is a conspiracy going on in the PC gaming world to continually drive game requirements into the stratosphere to fuel continued sales of new computer hardware. I really don’t think that constantly upgrading your computer to run the latest bloatware is really what the gaming public wants. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would gladly swap the latest super-neato graphics in exchange for extra hours of engrossing gameplay. I’ve got half a mind to publicly call for a boycott of all new bloatware and demand that all software, especially games, be streamlined and designed to run efficiently on less computing power. Let’s not even get into the problem of sending crappy software out the door when it’s barely beta and relying on the public to debug it.
But I have to confess, when Bethesda published Oblivion, the fourth installment in The Elder Scrolls series, I fell for it just like the rest. I coughed up beaucoup bucks to upgrade my system, and I didn’t even wait for the game to go on sale. I forked over the expensive price for suckers because after falling in love with Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, I just couldn’t wait to lose myself in the wild, wonderful world of Tamriel again.
Morrowind was by far the most engrossing computer game I’ve ever played. Never before had I seen a game world so large, so detailed, and so absorbing. That sprawling monster of a game sucked up well over six months of my life, during which I kept the full color map of Morrowind spread out on my desk and lost interest in virtually everything else. I had a love/hate relationship with Morrowind-- loved the game, hated what it did to my life.
Now that I’ve played its successor, Oblivion, I have a different sort of love/hate relationship with it. I love it for what it is, but I hate that it’s not Morrowind all over again. While Oblivion has many good-- even great-- things going for it, and in some ways outshines Morrowind, it just doesn’t compare in terms of what really counts-- pure fun, and more of it.
Unlike many other RPGs, Bethesda games throw out the AD&D game model that’s been the standard for so long and start fresh using their own model. If you’re used to playing the many AD&D/Forgotten Realms-licensed games that are based on an AD&D universe and rules, Oblivion may seem topsy-turvy. You’ll see a completely new set of races and classes; the usual class-based armor/weapon/skill limitations are gone; there’s no such thing as character alignment, dual-classing, or experience points; armor class goes up instead of down; turn-based combat based on dice rolls is gone; Drizz’t Do’Urden is nowhere to be found... suffice it to say, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
If you haven’t visited Tamriel before, you’ll quickly find that it’s a world of swords and sorcery, rife with outlawry, adventures, and fabulous creatures. Opportunities abound for the brave and ambitious, and sometimes even for those who are simply willing to waste their time doing inane tasks for random strangers. Knowing a spell or two never hurts, and being heavily armed and armored is even better. A life of crime is certainly a possibility as well. Oblivion takes place in the province of Cyrodiil, the heart of the Tamrielic empire. After spending time in wild ‘n woolly Morrowind, barely pacified by Imperial forces, it seems quite a civilized place, sometimes even downright dull.
You begin the game much the same way you started your journey in Morrowind-- as a mysterious prisoner whose crime will remain forever unknown. Shortly after your arrival, you’ll meet Emperor Uriel Septim himself (voice acting courtesy of Patrick Stewart), but your new acquaintance won’t exactly blossom. He’s foully assassinated before your very eyes, and before he dies, he gives you a mysterious amulet and charges you to find his heir before it’s too late. If you get the sinking feeling that all hell is about to break loose, you're right. That’s pretty much it as far as introduction to the game. After making your way out of the catacombs beneath the Imperial prison, you find yourself just outside the Imperial City with a few meager supplies, and from there, in classic Bethesda fashion, you’re totally on your own. Really.
What you do next is completely up to you. You can pick a few pockets for fun and profit, add some direction to your life by joining a guild, start poking around for random strangers in need of your help, try to make your few gold coins multiply by betting on gladiators at the Arena, start killing everyone in sight, or just head for the hills to see what you find. Heck, you could even look into that quest the dying Emperor gave you. There are so many possibilities you might have trouble figuring out what to do first.
Character Creation and Advancement
Ah, creating your character. The really fun part of an RPG game! If you’re in the mood and patient enough, you could kill an hour or more just designing your character’s face, as you fiddle with every parameter from nose width to eyebrow angle to lip color. I actually think they may have gone too far with the facial customization, because it can be pretty tricky to build a character that looks the way you want without coming out bizarre. You can have it randomly generate a face, but they tend to be hideous. I would have liked to see a library of 5-6 standard faces for each race/sex, with the custom face tool as an advanced option.
Like Morrowind, Oblivion presents you with what could be considered a staggering array or a pathetically small selection of races, depending how you look at it. There are 10 distinct races with unique sets of attributes, skill bonuses, and special abilities, but technically, four of them are simply humans from different lands (Imperial, Breton, Nord, Redguard), and three more are different types of elves (High Elf, Dark Elf, Wood Elf), leaving the remaining three as the really different races (Orc, Khajiit, Argonian). No, there are no dwarves in Tamriel. If you played Morrowind, you already know that the dwarves mysteriously vanished from Tamriel many centuries ago, leaving only mysterious ruins and artifacts behind.
One of the most innovative things about character creation in The Elder Scrolls is that, like general gameplay, it’s completely open-ended. Gone are the arbitrary class-based armor and weapon limitations of traditional AD&D-based games. Yes, a mage can wear heavy armor and swing a battleaxe, and a fighter can learn as many spells as he can pay for. While you are required to pick a class, and an area of specialization (Combat, Magic, Stealth), they’re really more like guidelines. They’ll give you certain advantages in your chosen areas of specialization, but they don’t actually limit you in any way. If you don’t like the suggested classes that are offered, you can make up your own, literally adding any combination of available skills, from Speechcraft to Blunt Weapons to Healing. To learn new skills, just start practicing, and you’ll gradually get better at it. Or you can pay for training if you happen across the right teacher. Guild halls are a good place to start looking for training. One change from Morrowind is that you can only train five times per level, so you can’t just pay lots of money to instantly become an expert in a given skill.
The Elder Scrolls are different from a lot of other RPGs because character advancement is skill-based rather than experience-based. The advancement system is fairly easy to handle if you just want to play the game and not worry about it, or you can work at it strategically to get the most out every level you gain. Of the 21 available skills, you designate seven as your Major skills, and when you increase your Major skills by a total of 10 points, you’re eligible to gain a level. When you level, you get a certain number of points you can use to increase three of your eight basic attributes. How many points you get depends on how many of your total skills you’ve improved.
As you level, so does everything around you, including enemies, items for sale, and loot. In theory, this means that the game should always be just challenging enough, assuming you’ve selected your ideal difficulty setting, but in practice it has some wonky effects. If you’re not careful to max out your attribute points when you level, then you’re not getting the most out of every level you gain, and you’re gradually falling behind relative to the enemies who are leveling along with you, which means the game will get harder and harder until you either quit in disgust or wise up and turn the difficulty down.
Leveling enemies and loot also has some adverse effects on the quality of gameplay. When everything in the world is geared to your current level, it basically means loot is always boring. When you’re level 2, you find dozens of rusty iron daggers, and you have literally no chance of getting lucky and finding a really powerful item no matter where you look, and conversely, when you’re level 42, every two-bit bandit is wearing thousands of dollars of fancy armor and carrying a nifty enchanted weapon. Only it’s not so nifty when it’s the 27th one you’ve picked up. It basically destroys the excitement value of loot, and it does much the same for enemies. I would have liked to see a leveled system that also included certain quests and dungeons with fixed difficulty levels, and a small random chance of running across an enemy or item that is truly out of your league in a leveled dungeon, just to keep things fresh.
The Game World: A Feast for the Senses
Once your adventure gets underway, you’re sure to notice Oblivion’s truly stupendous, jaw-dropping graphics and incredibly detailed, immersive game world. When you first step out of that sewer entrance into Cyrodiil, you’re likely to spend several minutes just walking around staring in awe. Everything is ultra-realistic, from the waving trees and grass to the rippling, reflective water, to the rainstorm that’s drenching you... to that bandit that’s attacking you! Weather effects are excellent, including fog that ranges from a light mist to pea soup so thick you can barely see your sword, thunderstorms that will really make you feel wet, cold and miserable, and sunsets that fill the world with syrupy-golden late afternoon light. You can add user-created mods that will enhance both weather and outdoor environments even more. Indoor environments can become repetitious quickly, and while some, such as the intricate trap-laden Ayleid ruins, are incredibly detailed and beautiful, others are rather dull. Natural caves in particular seem to be a big problem for game designers, and the modular nature of the textures and landscapes becomes all too obvious in a hurry.
Like Morrowind, Oblivion impresses with a highly detailed and interactive world. You can pick up, open, wear, drop, steal, eat, or otherwise use nearly everything you see-- you can steal the silverware, read any number of real stories in the books you’ll find lying around, collect random clutter from people’s homes, or eat the fruit plate that’s been set out for you in your hotel room. You’ll soon discover that the same is true for the people. Oblivion has the most richly detailed non-player characters I’ve ever seen. Every last one of them (and that’s hundreds, possibly more than a thousand) has a unique daily, weekly, and monthly schedule that governs when they eat, sleep, go to work, go home, visit certain taverns, travel to other cities, etc. While carrying out their daily business, they move around the world and interact with things and people the same way you do. They have a large number of unique conversation topics, although by the time you’re done playing the game, it will seem pretty small and repetitious. I remember being particularly impressed when a townswoman happened across the body of a dead soldier lying by the road. She actually looked sad, bent down, reached to touch his face, and said a small blessing over him. That's the kind of detail I'm talking about.
Oblivion uses an ultra-realistic physics engine that governs the movement of every object in the world, including an apple you drop, your sword when it hits an enemy... yes, that’s right, it governs how and when your weapons strike as well as everything else. Gone is the traditional turn-based, roll-of-the-dice combat of AD&D-style games. What you see is what you get. If you swing at the right time and in the right place, you hit. If you get your shield up in time, you block. If you aim your fireball wrong, it misses. Whether your actions do any damage or protect you is a different story, and depends on a lot of things, including your skills, your enemy’s skills, your equipment, your enemy’s equipment, and a certain amount of luck. But it generally means that if you try to take on several enemies at once, you’re dead.
The magic system in Morrowind couldn’t have been simpler, and Oblivion adds one or two small complications, but it’s still pretty simple. Spells come in seven flavors, corresponding to the seven schools of magic, which also correspond with the seven magical skills. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), there also happen to be seven major cities in Cyrodiil outside the capital, and each of them contains a Mage’s Guild chapter that specializes in one of the schools. Acquiring a new spell is as simple as finding someone who sells it, and buying it. If you can afford it, you can buy it, no questions asked. In Morrowind, you could also attempt to cast any spell at any time, and your chance of success depended on your skill in that particular school of magic. Oblivion changes that with minimum skill limits for all spells above novice level, which I think is totally bogus.
What’s Cool
Super-stupendous graphics and an incredibly detailed, immersive game world.
The new and greatly improved journal does a much better job of keeping track of your active and completed quests, and it comes with a compass which will usually give you a general idea of where you need to head to complete the quest. Some players griped that this made it too easy, and there is a mod out there that deactivates the compass, but there’s often still a certain amount of challenge in accomplishing what needs to be done.
As with Morrowind, there’s an active modding community out there producing free mods that add cool new armor and weapons, add new quests, enhance performance, tweak weather effects, and even completely overhaul the character advancement system.
The Ayleid ruins rock. They’re beautiful, they’re intricate and interesting to explore, they’re filled with diabolical traps and puzzles as well as a variety of enemies and loot, and there are a lot of them.
What Sux
Those stupendous graphics that are so stunning will also stun you with the ungodly amount of power they suck. Even after upgrading so I was comfortably above the minimum requirements, I still had to turn down a lot of settings and add numerous performance-enhancing mods (thanks to the active modding community) to get it to run with reasonable smoothness. If you’re just barely at the minimum, you can forget about running Oblivion.
Lo-o-o-ong loads, and a lot of them. Just walking from a hotel room to the street in the Imperial City can take ages, because you might have to pass through as many as three doors, and each one is a new loadzone. It even takes forever to shut down after you exit the game.
Simply not enough meaningful gameplay. This may seem like an incredible complaint to those who haven’t played Morrowind, but seriously, there are too few factions to join compared to Morrowind, and it’s too easy for one player to succeed in all of them. In Morrowind there were about a dozen playable factions, including all the Great Houses, all the Guilds, the Imperial Legion, the Temple, etc, and it was literally impossible for one character to join them all because their minimum requirements for membership were so vastly different. Plus there were scads of side quests. So Morrowind had high replay value, because you needed to play at least three times with three very different characters to “win” every faction. Not so in Oblivion. Even counting the “secret” factions, the main quest and the Arena, there are only six, and it’s absurdly easy for a single character to advance to the top of all of them without developing a superhuman skillset. My assassin must have been the worst Archmage ever, but it didn’t seem to bother anyone that I could only cast the most elementary of spells. And after playing the game a mere 1.5 times, I had done literally every quest there was to do and gotten pretty much every unique item. Sure, you can run around raiding dungeons literally forever, but after the first thousand times, that gets more than a little old.
A lot of the main quest involves spending time in the demonic plane of Oblivion, which I just found extremely unpleasant and tedious. Ugh.
Bethesda removed some of the skills from Morrowind, and pared the skill system down to 21 skills from 27, with 7 in each of the three specializations (Combat, Magic, Stealth) instead the former 9. To do that, they simply omitted some skills, like Enchant, Unarmored, and Spear, and collapsed others together. For example, Short Blade and Long Blade are now just Blade. And for some dumb reason, axes are now part of Blunt Weapons, which makes no sense at all.
As beautiful as Oblivion is, it’s distressingly mundane. There are no giant mushrooms, no houses made of huge crabshells, no kagoutis or netches, and no scrib jelly or kwama eggs. Instead there are regular trees, regular houses, regular wild animals, and regular food. Even the monsters, with the notable exception of the daedra, are fairly uninspired minotaurs, imps, goblins, trolls, ogres, and the like. I miss the fun and exotic things found on the island of Morrowind. I really, really, really miss the utterly gorgeous night sky of Morrowind. It was like the Aurora Borealis every night. It was so cool, it almost makes me sick to look up and NOT see it in Oblivion.
As in Morrowind, you can only wield one weapon. Since dual-wielding and focusing on speed was always one of my favorite tactics, I’m really bummed out when you can’t fight with two weapons at once.
Although Oblivion does have vampires, and it is possible to become one, there’s no vampire faction, and no real vampire quests. Being a vampire is actually pretty boring—if you want to play as a vampire, I highly recommend adding Drokk’s Vampire Mod.
Oblivion has no thrown weapons. Morrowind's throwing stars, throwing knives and the like are all gone, although bows and arrows still exist. So much for my ninja character.
The Bottom Line
As beautiful as Oblivion is, beauty is only skin deep. Don’t get me wrong, Oblivion is a great game-- it’s just not Morrowind. Its basically a five-star game downgraded for not being Morrowind and for being such a damn resource hog. I honestly would rather play a game with less extravagant graphics that runs smoothly and easily on my computer and has more substantive gameplay.
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