Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Computer Game Review »

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Review

In our minds the point of any open-ended RPG is to get you to think that you're a part of the world you're interacting with. You should be fooled into thinking the world is real and be given as many choices as you possibly can as to who you want to be in that world and how you interact with it. Doing this takes time, effort, and a whole lot of skill.

Morrowind came closer than maybe any other game at providing these things. The world was huge, detailed, and you could go anywhere and do almost anything. There were a lot of surprising things you only saw if you put a ton of time and effort into the game. It was no surprise therefore, that it was successful both on consoles and the PC

For some of us, the whole thing just seemed a little bit too big. While there may have been a central story, your quests became hard to keep track of as they piled up. Traveling often took too much time. I kept feeling like I was sliding off the sides of it and often felt overwhelmed and confused by the whole thing. It was an interesting experiment, but in many ways I feel like it failed. The console version had its share of bugs, and many of them were only fixed in the Game of the Year edition that came out much later. It also chugged on all but the fastest computers; I tend to look down on games that don't scale well. It feels lazy to me.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has been hyped to... well, oblivion. It was supposed to be a launch title for the Xbox 360 but got pushed back in order to give the game some polish. I know more than one person who even cancelled their Xbox 360 preorder because of that. The 360 needed a good RPG, and in my opinion the PC could use one as well.


Bethesda most likely has a hit on their hands no matter what they do. Morrowind's star has risen as the game has aged; computers have finally caught up with how demanding the game is and hundreds of player-created mods have improved the play of the game substantially. The sequel will have a lot to live up to.

It's also interesting in that it's launching simultaneously on the PC and the 360. A lot of people are going to be looking at this game as a way to bench their system against Microsoft's new console. It's a hugely ambitious game and will bring most computer' to their knees. How will a US$400 console compare? Will one control scheme be better than the other one? This game is firmly in the forefront of the battle between consoles and computers, and the arguing between the two camps has been intense for the past few months.

Many of these screens could be masterpieces in their own right
For this reason we're doing something different with this review. Instead of just me hogging the spotlight we've brought fellow Opposable Thumbs writer Rodney Quinn on board to talk about the game. I picked up the 360 version and he bought the PC version. We've had three days to play it, and for those three days we've done little else. While our character choices have been different, between us we've seen a lot of what the game has to offer, and there's a lot go over. Did one version trounce the other? There's only one way to find out.

See you in Tamriel.

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