steve kwan user experience designer

Review: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

(April 3rd, 2006 - 9:35PM)

The great outdoors. Picture taken from the official Oblivion website.

(5 / 5 stars)

One sentence summary: Quite possibly the best PC RPG ever made.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is ruining my life. Anyone who's played it understands why.

Oblivion is an exceptional game in every sense of the word. It's an open-ended RPG where you can be whatever you want and do whatever you like. However, it also provides enough guidance and plot that you're not likely to get lost in a sea of possibilities.

Oblivion is the fourth game in The Elder Scrolls series. The previous game, Morrowind, was widely popular but had a lot of problems. In particular, the game was bug-ridden and provided little player guidance. I personally had a hard time getting into the game, and only invested a few hours in it before I put it aside due to frustration and boredom. But that's not a problem with Oblivion.

All of the major problems in Morrowind have been addressed. The lack of guidance, the tedious walking from place to place, and the horrible crash bugs are all gone. All the barriers that prevented Morrowind from being a truly fantastic game have been removed in Oblivion.

Oblivion contains a sickening amount of content. I imagine that it would take you hundreds of hours to fully explore every aspect of the game. In addition, there's a tremendous amount of voice acting in the game, including work by Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean. Every character in the game has spoken dialogue, and considering how many characters exist, that's a lot of speech. Unfortunately you'll get used to hearing the same voices from different people, and occasionally you'll hear two different voices from the same character. But considering the massive amount of voice acting done, that's easy to overlook.

The gameplay is also a huge step forward from Morrowind, and for that matter, from other RPGs. Like Morrowind, Oblivion is a first-person game - unusual for the RPG genre - but it really works. In particular, the swordplay is great. It's simple and easy to understand, but yet fun and challenging. I haven't seen melee combat like this since The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay.

Oblivion is a major-time commitment. That's really the only bad thing I can say about it. It's not the sort of game you can finish in ten hours. If you start playing this game and get hooked, you might wind up wasting a lot of time.

I don't know how the developers managed to pack so much into a single game, but I'm glad they did.