Gaming Memories: Oblivion

Welcome to “Gaming Memories,” a blog series where I reminisce about my favorite video games. I will slowly but surely get to every game on the list, and speak to why each holds a special place in my heart. That not only means I’ll talk about why I think each is a great game that speaks to my tastes, but also where and how it affected me in a larger context. I hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading.

In the spring semester of 2006, I was studying abroad, far from home. For five months my gaming time was limited to handhelds, and while I used that time to play many wonderful handheld games, I couldn’t help but see footage of then “next gen” games for the newly released Xbox 360, and get excited about the chance to experience them. My interest in the new console slowly but surely turned from indifference to awe, and when I returned home for the summer, I made the plunge. And there was one game that drove the purchase drastically more than any other: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

Oblivion started with the standard Bethesda opening: you went through a brief tutorial in a closed, linear environment -- in this case a jailbreak through the sewers -- to emerge out into its vast, beautiful, and open world. From there, you could go wherever your curiosity took you. It’s a powerful and effective moment in a lot of their games, but experiencing that moment on a console in HD for the first time remains one of the most visually resonant gaming moments I’ve had. Cyrodiil was a bright and diverse land that was immediately appealing, and its visual splendor enticed me to explore right away. I especially appreciated said diversity, which was one of Oblivion’s biggest strengths. While you first emerged into rolling green hills, your adventures could take you to all sorts of varied locals: dense forests, pristine lakes, radiant coastlines, frigid mountains, murky swamps, and so on. Situated in the center of Tamriel, Cyrodiil inherited the geography of its surrounding provinces around its own periphery, which proved to be a welcome boon. It made my exploration consistently enjoyable and often surprising, and combined with how gorgeous the game was, I didn’t stop exploring until I had seen everything I could. All of Bethesda’s open worlds are a treat to explore, and Cyrodiil is one I remember more fondly than most.

Oblivion was also a more polished game than its predecessors, which made the process of exploring and engaging with the world much smoother. While plenty have argued that Oblivion “dumbed down” the franchise to some extent, I personally appreciated its more streamlined approach. Combat in particular received a welcome boost with Oblivion: it was much more responsive and visceral, and thus more engaging and less tedious for me. The menus and UI were also cleaner, which made keeping track of quests and my character’s stats and gear much simpler. As such, Oblivion made it easier than ever to remain focused on The Elder Scrolls’ core strengths of freeform exploration and intricate character-building, strengths which were still very much intact here. Exploration, in addition to the natural beauty of Cyrodiil I described above, could also reveal countless likable characters and fun quests. The core questlines were worthwhile in their own right (shout-out to The Dark Brotherhood), but you could also stumble into surprisingly interesting one-off quests in all corners of the world. Character-building leveraged The Elder Scrolls’ iconic open-ended system once again, which allowed players a lot of control in crafting highly unique and personal characters. Oblivion carried on these traditions splendidly.

Yet for all its polish, one aspect of Oblivion remained rough: its skill and leveling systems were convoluted and easily breakable, which had results both good and bad. On the one hand, levelling up could potentially be a negative, which is counterintuitive and nonsensical. Since enemies in the world gained levels when you did, depending on exactly how you leveled, it was possible to fall behind the curve. On the other hand, if you understood how it all worked, you could easily manipulate Oblivion’s systems to become an unstoppable god. It was totally wild, and once I wrapped my head around it, I went on to have one of my most memorable experiences building a video game character. I planned, I busted out the spreadsheets, and I carefully abused the system to create a character with the maximum possible stats and skills at the lowest possible character level, thus keeping enemies at their lowest possible level as well. In addition to being incredibly overpowered, it was also a blast to have a character who was good at everything: sword and shield, giant hammer, bow and arrow, stealth, charisma, any flavor of magic you could want. The joy of character-building in The Elder Scrolls is in how malleable it is, how you are never constrained to character archetypes and can dabble in everything all at once. In Oblivion, this was true to the point of being completely busted. Yet I loved every minute of it; nothing was off-limits for my super character. It was the ultimate power fantasy, and the personal effort I put into the process made the payoff that much more satisfying.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion took the freeform exploration and intricate character-building the series was known for, streamlined it without losing much depth, and took advantage of more powerful console hardware to make a stunning leap in audiovisual presentation. It felt like the perfect storm for the series at large, and while there was certainly a “right time, right place” effect for me personally, it was undoubtedly the perfect storm for my enjoyment of it. After getting a Xbox 360 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, I spent most of the summer of 2006 exploring Cyrodiil and all it had to offer. It was a magical time I’ll never forget.

Playing Oblivion as an alchemist was my first experience with the Tetris Effect. Every time I saw a flower IRL, I'd find myself mentally listening the potion effects of its in-game counterpart. What an immersive game!

Great writeup. Though I find it hard to go back for anything more than a novelty these days, I still count it as my favorite game ever. I had played a fair amount of games before Oblivion, but Oblivion is what made me into a "gamer" (much as I loathe that term). I played it initially at a friend's house and stepping out of the sewers for the first time on his huge TV and realizing the scope of the world was a stupendous, magical feeling that no game since has ever truly recaptured.

Elder Scrolls games are fun, but after a while of playing them I get a kind of... empty feeling. There's no emotional core to the story. The worlds are big but not that interesting to me, with fairly generic fantasy stuff played VERY straight, and nothing you do seems to matter too much. I do remember it having some neat quest ideas though, like jumping into the painting.

@wollywoo: Funny enough playing it straight without a twist is the new superman is a good guy. It's the ability not to go the route of trying to one-up and be this new untold fantasy that hooked me. Like a lord of the rings game without someone mucking it up with dark fantasy with magic but it's cyberpunk magic with orcs but they fly and theirs class racism but it's on the moon and so on. Just pure fantasy. My favorite part was the quirky zoom-in faces, realizing how cool it was that almost everyone spoke, didn't care that most sound the same, and the night stuck in that house to do clues like mystery or the one where you get the sword in the basement. never finished it, watched the ending on youtube thou...didn't seem like it was worth the trouble cause going back after Skyrim is off. The pathfinding never seemed so bad at the time but the samy looking dungeons I didn't mind getting lost in with multiple paths now become a nuisance. Getting lost and in some crazy off-the-road side quest is much more fun in Skyrim. Can't go back to Skyrim either thou cause like many I soaked up all I could from it. 100 hours of magic you cant get or go back to. Good at the time, self-made nostalgia. Even a new better quest made by mods wasn't enough to keep me in Skyrim, graphics update and all. Skyrim 2 has a lot to contend with. It can't be more Skyrim but it also cant be something entirely crazy. Well, see.

Nice write-up Mitch. Oblivion was also my first experience with a Bethesda game, albeit one that was very different to yours. Having come to it from an almost exclusively Japanese RPG background, I found the "go anywhere, do anything" angle too overwhelming my first time through, and ended up putting the game down after only a few hours. I eventually came back to it after cutting my teeth on other Bethesda and Bethesda-adjacent RPGs - Fallout 3, which to my mind has the best execution of the "linear tutorial into open world" trope; Morrowind, which taught me how to approach character development in an Elder Scrolls game; and Fallout: New Vegas, whose peerless quest design and writing helped me to work out what I really like about these kinds of games, and by extension helped me to overcome that overwhelmed feeling by giving me a better idea of what kind of content I should be focusing on. Off the back of those three experiences, I was able to have a much better time with Oblivion when I eventually returned to it, but at the expense of a lot of the innovation and wonder imparted on those who played it at launch. As a result, and perhaps also in part due to its more generic fantasy setting, I don't find Oblivion to be as memorable as the other games I've mentioned. Nonetheless, I still had an enjoyable time with it, the Dark Brotherhood quest line was a particular highlight, and part of me would like to go back to it some day and check out the Shivering Isles expansion.

Oblivion was one of the first REAL next gen games of the 360/PS3 Era. In some ways, I think the game is still ahead of its time (the radiant AI being so good, they dumbed it down in Skyrim, for example). I also remember buying this game and Fight Night Round 3 on the same day. Needless to say, it was a gooooood day.

Oblivion made me lust after pc parts so hard. I lurked on the pc forum in gamespot all day learning about hardware and dreaming of a pc that could run it at max. Never built that pc, I was too poor. But I can run it now on modern hardware lol.

The game that forced me to get used to the default analog stick camera setup. Before, I always used Halo's other style.

@danielkempster: Thanks! I had dabbled with Morrowind a tiny bit, but Oblivion was effectively my first Bethesda game. I did have some experience with some Bioware games like KOTOR, and I did play pen-and-paper D&D. But I was largely coming from JRPGs like you. I think the time and place of, getting it near release, and having a summer break to really dive in, helped me really get into it. It probably is a harder game to go back to after the fact. I do remembering really enjoying The Shivering Isles though!

@csl316:Ha! It did the same for me. I grew up on Goldeneye for first-person controls on consoles, and stuck with that scheme for as long as I could, which Halo had an alternate option that matched Goldeneye. Oblivion didn't have any alternate options for analog stick setup... It was painful at the time, but in the long run it was a boon. Oblivion's a long game, and not one that requires a ton of precision, so it was an effective and gentle way to adapt to the now-default scheme. I've stuck with it since. Still an inverted y-axis guy though :)

I beat the tutorial dungeon and started doing side quests with a mod that switched the music to the LotR soundtrack. 200 hours later I decided to start doing the main quest lines. Dropped it almost immediately after :p

Oh man, I remember the build-up to Oblivion. A friend and I had spent months playing through Morrowind and we were so excited. I seem to remember short videos being dropped, one a day, a week before the release of the game.

And there was a countdown! My friend and I actually skipped school because we wanted to see the countdown end, hoping for a gameplay video or something. After sitting in front of the pc, almost screaming the numbers going down, skipping important information about the finals, it finally got to zero, and what popped up was.... the word "Huzzah!" in plain text.

And then we had to wait two weeks for it to be released where we lived! Which we didn't, because pirating was a thing, but still!

Oh, and the game was good too.

I got a 360 in spring 2006 in no small part because I wanted to play Oblivion so bad (I was in high school at the time). It did not disappoint. The more polished (hah) systems in skyrim make it hard to go back to now though, for me at least.