Oblivion
I am hopelessly hooked on the PC game, Oblivion. I’ve played lots of RPGs in my day, but never has one been so immersive. For those that enjoy playing stealthy types, one of the main programmers from the Thief series designed the stealth components of this game. The stealth ability has greatly improved since Bethesda+'s previous game, Morrowind. For once, thief missions involve sneaking in and out of places like a cat burglar, rather than just assassin missions. In fact, it is a bit of a challenge to even find the thieves guild.
Patrick Stewart, Sean Bean, Terrence Stamp and Lynda Carter provide extra flavor to the game via voice acting. Patrick Stewart starts off the game providing the voice of the Emperor. In the hands of someone else, the dialog might have come across as cheesy. In Stewart’s hands, it gets the game off to a fantastic start.
I went through the opening scenario a few times, not just to hear Patrick Stewart (although that was an added bonus), but to test the new character creation model. Rather than picking stats, skills, professions and a whole bunch of options, you pick a race, name, and gender and then start playing the game. At the end of the first scenario, the game will suggest (via a character in game) a possible profession. During your escape with the Emperor you come across many weapons and armor types and depending on what you choose and how you handle certain situations, the game will suggest a class. If you don’t like the class suggested, you can choose another or make one that is entirely unique. I really loved this feature. I can remember spending quite some time in other games choosing stats and skills and then after spending more than a hour preparing to play, find out I hated the mechanics of the game or whatever, and never play the game again. This is a very clever solution.
The graphics are stunning and the combat is real-time, meaning if you want to block that sword blow from your opponent you have to block it. So far I haven’t run across any of the bugged quests that seemed to plague Morrowind. As much as I wanted to like Morrowind, and I did like many things about it, I always seemed to wind up “stuck” because I had inadvertently completed a part of a quest before I even knew there was a quest for it. If you are going to provide an open ended game, then you need to make sure the quests have some flexibility, ie, if you’ve already freed all the slaves, don’t send the player to go on a mission to free non-existent slaves.
I have encountered a few “crash to desktop” type bugs, mostly on exiting the game. Bethesda has a beta patch and the “crash on exit” bug is addressed in the patch notes. I think I’ll wait until the final patch is made available but I’m very hopeful the patch will fix what I see as a minor issue. My current character is a female Argonian bard. I’ve ventured on quite a few sub-quests (there is no shortage of quests or dungeons to explore) but I’m ready to rejoin the main quest. Did I mention how many quests and dungeons there are to explore? Almost everything scales to your level so if you choose to enter a dungeon early in the game, the dungeon will be populated with opponents appropriate to your level. If you return to that dungeon later when you are an uber sword fighter, the dungeon will contain stronger opponents.
Overall I’d give the game a 9.5 out of 10 (docking it just a tad for some minor annoyances like crashing on exit). I’ve played many of the current MMORPGs (think they go by MMOGs now) including World of Warcraft, Everquest2, Guild Wars, and Dark Age of Camelot and this game is much more fun and without the gold farmers, perverts and other annoying behaviors of the online games. It is also one of the few games able to tear me away from the Sims2, although that game is still great for just goofing off for an hour or so.
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