Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Thoughts On Completion

Bethesda’s next-gen RPG ‘ES4: Oblivion’ won best RPG at E3 last year, and quite deservedly too; graphics are excellent, HDR lighting is beautifully deployed, weather and climate changes are numerous and well implemented, and gameplay is involving and engrossing. It’s been said that to experience the entire game you’ll need to dedicate about 150 hours to playing it. As someone with a full-time job, part-time website and several fully part-time commitments, I can’t justify handing over 150 hours of my life to a single title - there are far too many great games to play, and I’d retire from the game feeling like I’d wasted more time than I should have done.

So my game playing strategy was to complete the main quests unaided, then embrace the gargantuan guide as my humble sidekick, and enjoy the full game without spending 100 hours walking aimlessly wondering where to go next. Having just reached the 1,000 point acheivement status for the game on Xbox Live, I feel I’ve got as much from the game as I need, and so I’m ready to write my thoughts.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the game. The main quest is where you start off and it’s easy to complete in a coulpe of days - or even a day if you’re unemployed. The storyline is very ‘Lord Of The Ring’sy, but very enjoyable. There’s a variety of things to accomplish and people to meet. Every true RPG needs people to talk to, lands to explore and weird looking blokes to kill. Oblivion provides, with firery skies and glowing swords to boot.

After completing the main quest, you’re free to move onto completing several ‘guild’ sections. These sections are as vast as the main quest. You join a mages guild, thieves guild, the dark brotherhood (shadowey murderer-type guild) and the fighter’s guild. The non-linear stylings of the guilds mean you’re free to do what you want, when you want, and you’re even free to mix all the guilds up and do them all at the same time. I’m not strictly reviewing the game here, so if this all sounds interesting then google a review and read about the game in more detail.

Completing these guilds - along with the main quest and a vicious set of mini-battles in the Arena area - took a comfortable 60 hours of my life. This is about average for an RPG. I feel I got everything I wanted out of the game in this time.

What I’ve enjoyed most about Oblivion is the freedom you are granted to do as you please. No item in the game is simply a background object. If you see something lying around that you like the look of, you can steal it. If you’re caught, you’re arrested. If you don’t like being arrested, you can resist arrest and get into a fight. If you lose, you die. If you win, he dies, and you do a runner until you’re caught for the initial robbery and the subsequent murder of a guard. If you resist this arrest, you fight again… and so on and so forth. You can always stop killing guards and pay the increasingly large fine and be done with the whole ordeal. It’s completely up to you, and that’s what I love. You can even get involved in real estate and buy your own houses in a variety of towns.

If, however, you just want to play the game like a law-abiding citizen (chicken) then you can, and the flowing storylines and engaging characters will make the non-linear gameplay feel more linear and structured. Map markers show you where you need to be and detailed maps display routes. Your journal also gets very full and clearly logs all the quests you’ve completed, are completing or are yet to complete. It’s a very gripping experience, especially if you’re an RPG fan.

Not everything is good though and the thing that annoyed me most was that almost all characters sound the same.

It feels a lot of the time like there were only four people involved in recording voices: two men, two women. It’s gratingly annoying how so many characters sound identical. It ruins a fundamental prerequisite of an RPG: character variety. It would only’ve taken maybe seven or eight men and seven or eight women to create a really diverse set of unique-sounding characters. Given the vastness of the game, this oversight just results in irritatingly repetative dialogue and frustrating conversation.

Another thing I was unhappy with was the draw distance of distant objects and areas. This only dissapointed me due to the next-gen status the game proudly holds. For any other game it would’ve been more than acceptable. Simply put, things in the distance don’t appear until you’re pretty close to them. This comment refers only to the Xbox 360 version as the PC version of the game givesyou a plethora of graphical options to play with, including the ability to reduce or increase the draw distance.

The PC version offers many graphical advantages. After completing the game on the 360 I still hold the opinion that the game looks ten times better on a PC with all the knobs turned up to eleven. Although only a minor complaint, the grass and trees on the 360 are terrible, even for a current-gen game. I really feel this was only a tiny issue, but still an issue since it’s hard to ignore it everytime you see it.

Overall this is a terrific game and was loads of fun. The longevity is over and above what is expected of a game, and even over and above what is expected for an RPG. This will go down in gaming history as being for the 360 what Final Fantasy 7 did for the PlayStation 1. If you remember cracking open that beautiful white-fronted FF7 case for the first time, and losing seven days straight to the game from the moment you turned it on, you may feel a touch of deja vu whilest playing Oblivion. It’s an instant classic, though certain elements could’ve been improved upon to make this game worth more than 90% perfection.