The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

 The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the fourth installment of the Elder of Scrolls series, and one of the best games this generation can offer. You can easily spend dozens and dozens of hours in it, and you'll do it knowing you're in for a gaming experience of a lifetime. This game is so immersive that almost breaks your heart just to bear the thought of it coming to an end eventually. Oblivion's innovations and well-developed mechanics transform it into one of the most complete and satisfying experiences in epic single player RPGs ever.

Like any average RPG you get to choose various aspects about the character you're about to use, you choose the race between humanoid, reptilian, feline, elves and among others, each with it's own set of special abilities and advantages. You can change pretty much anything about your character in hope of creating someone unique for you to play, a must for this kind of role-playing game. Some of the aspects available are skin color, eye color, face expressions, hair, gender; pretty customizable. Then you get to choose your job, another must have for epic RPGs of this kind, you have at your disposal average jobs but you can also create a hybrid one based on what you want, for no trouble deciding you can easily select a knight, an assassin, an archer, a mage or any other previously set class, if you're new to the game you probably wanna select a class right away since most game mechanics are still new. Another customizable aspect for your character is the birthsign which simply gives you a bonus depending on which class you chose, the birthsign selected should reflect your character's main focus and abilities, if your character focuses on magic you should choose an appropriate birthsign, if you're a pure melee the choice should be different, and so on.

The leveling up is a unique system, depending on the class you choose, or hybrid you might have created, you'll have major skills that should lead to level up, along with minor skills which can be increased too but will not be the focus of your character. For example, if you choose a mage, it's highly probable that your character won't need hand to hand combat, so that should be a minor skill for any kind of mage; as well as a magic-focused attribute shouldn't be a knight's main ability. The level up will give you a higher overall level and the choice to increase three attributes of your character. What makes the system shine is that for you to increase skills you must do certain requirements for each one, to increase light armor stats you need to take damage while wearing light armor equipment; while to increase heavy armor stats you need to use heavy armor instead. Each stat has its own requests for improvement, like athletics that depends on how much you run or swim, acrobatics which depends on jumps and falls, to increase armorer you need to repair your own equipment using repair hammers. It's an awesome system that doesn't revolve only around killing enemies and choosing which stat to boost like other RPGs.

When you're through creating you character and done with the tutorial mini-quest you're gonna find yourself in a vast and beautiful world full of things to do right at the beginning, it's so immense and you're so free that you don't really need to care about the main quest if you simply choose not to do so, you can go around talking to people learning about the cities, finding quests, joining guilds, reading books to understand more about the story of Cyrodiil, venturing inside dungeons, completing side-quests, raising level and skills or doing whatever you feel like doing. Quests won't be a problem, in basically every corner of every city someone will have a job for you to do.

Soon enough you'll find out that strange things are happening in Cyrodiil, the capital province of Tamriel which is the world in The Elder Scrolls, gates leading to Oblivion -- which would be hell on the land of Tamriel -- are appearing everywhere across the land and hellish creatures and monsters of all kinds called Daedra are coming out of these gates. The game is not a direct sequel to Morrowind or any other game of the series and the plot focuses on the struggle of Martin Septin, who is the illegitimate son of the Emperor, to save the world of Cyrodiil from the Daedric invasion. For that, the Emperor trusts you with the Amulet of Kings -- the amulet that Akatosh gave to Alessia to seal the Daedra into Oblivion -- saying he had seen you in his dreams. Now you, along with the last heir of the dead Emperor Uriel Septim VII, Martin Septin, will try to once again light the Dragonfires to bring peace upon the land of Cyrodiil by preventing the Daedric invasion and the release of Mehrunes Dagon, one of the sixteen princes of darkness. The plan starts to go wrong when the Amulet of Kings is robbed by the Mythic Dawn, a bunch of worshipers of the prince of darkness Mehrunes Dagon with all members sharing the will to unleash the dark lord once and for all, as well as their leader, Mankar Camoran, who escapes with the amulet to his self-made realm in Oblivion called "Paradise", to stop the evil from prevailing you and Martin need to seek for four items needed to create a portal to Mankar Camoran's Paradise and retrieve the Amulet of Kings.

An interesting story indeed, and compared to the game as a whole, slightly brief. No need to insert a lengthy story anyway since you'll be entertained long after you finish the main plot by the endless side-quests scattered all around Cyrodiil, the main plot will last more or less 15 hours, which by some today games standards is already a considerable amount of time, but the side quests will make you come back for at least more or less 80 hours, it's not hard to break the hundred-hour mark with this game, you may reach that mark and wonder if it's been all that time really, the game flows gently and grows on you easily, making you forget about the real world. No wonder you can also buy houses in Cyrodiil, if only you could enter your television.

You'll have the opportunity to play through the immense world of Cyrodiil, and believe me, it is gigantic, to go from one extremity to the other by foot might take almost an hour or maybe more, if you were to travel only by foot to every place you needed to go the game would fall in the field of boredom and turn out being frustrating, you would take hundreds and hundreds of hours to finish all and the overwhelming majority of the time would have been spent running from one location to the other. Luckily that's not the case, since you can fast travel to any location you may have already discovered or any undiscovered big city, the fictional in-game time is still counted. The fact the game is probably 4 times larger than Morrowind explains why they chose to do this, and Morrowind had the town-to-town fast travel, now as long as there are no enemies around you can fast travel to any known location you desire. If you didn't like this new feature, simply don't use it, and don't come with the "but it was there so I felt the urge to use" argument, this was meant to simplify for those who don't have the entire life at disposal to throw away in a game, which should be the majority.

With so much freedom and power in your hands of what to do, if you ever grow tired of being a good guy and decide to kill some innocent people or knights of the empire you will be able to do so, but everything at a price, if you break the line of a considered normal behavior you will be confronted by one of the guards and forced to decide between three options. The first is simply pay the fine and get released right after, the bounty will differ depending on the degree of the crime you've committed, if you murder someone you're gonna have to pay a whole lot of gold, if you just steal something the price of freedom will be much lower. You can also go to jail and serve your time, the amount of time you'll stay jailed is based upon the cost of your bounty, each hundred gold equals an in-game day. Or you can resist arrest, in this case, quoting the very guards who will confront you, you're gonna have to "pay with your blood" and choose whether fight or flee.

You have many guilds to join, the two most common guilds and easiest to join are the fighters and mages guild, they're respectively a guild for melee and magical-oriented characters, even though any magical-oriented character can join the fighters guild and complete all the quests, and any melee character can join the mages guild and complete the quests as well. There's also the thieves guild, consisting of thieves, and the Dark Brotherhood guild, which is a guild made of assassins. There's also the Arena, which is not a guild but actually a quest, but you can join as a combatant of the blue team and fight combatants of the yellow team in a Colosseum-like battlefield. The goals of the guilds are pretty straight forward, in the Dark Brotherhood you must eliminate targets, in the thieves guild you must steal things, in the fighters and mages guild you must complete quests requested by other characters. Each has its own way of admitting new members; for instance, you need to murder somebody to receive an invitation for the Dark Brotherhood. All guilds have several hierarchic degrees of membership, you advance as you complete the requested tasks asked about by the higher ranked members, climbing your way to the top and receiving the bonuses that come with it.

Another big plus is the voice acting, every dialog in the game is spoken, no exception, and the voice-over is top-notch. An evolution over Morrowind, even though some would complain that it takes away the interpretation of intonation and voice tone from the player's imagination, I can't seem to have that opinion, only the most die-hard purists would actually care, especially with a job so nicely done like it is. You might feel lost when you think of how could a game of this size fit in a single DVD disk, all voices, a colossal world, amazing graphics and a complex game system make this an achievement. The most important characters in the game have their own distinctive voice-actor, the rest is dubbed by the average actor of each race. But still, no phrase goes undubbed.

Throughout the adventure you'll face several enemies and collect many items which you'll be able to sell to earn some extra money or use them yourself, for collected items the best choice of storing is the floor, yes, find a secure place and just throw them in the ground, being sure to find them there whenever you need them; you can also store them inside chests. You might want to buy a house later in the game to centralize the item dropping at one safe place only. The weapons and armors also suffer from usage, if you take too much damage or attack too many times you equipment lowers the efficiency and the attack and defense will become jeopardized unless you repair them. The same thing can be said about your fatigue which is the third of the three quantity bars your character will have, the other two are the common health and magic bars. Fatigue is how tired your character is, the lower the fatigue bar gets, the more tired you are, the more tired you are the less damage you can inflict. Also, pretty much everything you do like swinging your weapon and jumping lowers your fatigue, the amount decreased lowers significantly as your character gather experience and advances.

The difficulty of the game is carefully monitored, it depends on your level, as you advance tougher enemies will appear with much better equipment, in earlier levels you face enemies with light armors made of fur or chain, in later levels it's easy to face enemies with light armor made of glass; also easier to stock up money since they're worth a lot more. You won't have the god-like impression you might have experienced in Morrowind for example, in Morrowind the enemies levels were predetermined, meaning a high-level character would find no trouble in most places, this can't be said about Oblivion, you'll always feel the need to watch out since as you advance, the enemies will certainly do too; seems like only fair if you ask me, and the challenge won't go away easily, making it not a hell on earth at lower levels, and not a walk in the park at later ones. Balance, that's the real deal. You can also take in consideration the enemies' side, it's a lesson of self-importance to think that you'd develop and gain levels as your enemies would just sit around waiting for you to make your presence known, they're out there growing stronger, like it or not.

There's nothing wrong with the game itself, but some not-so-good aspects come to mind, the graphics are so well made that even on consoles you experience some slowdowns, not often but sometimes it happens, but it isn't the worst part. The worst aspects are the glitches and bugs, there are many, even some save file corrupting glitches, but normally you'll just face glitched items or freezes. It doesn't stop you from wholly enjoying the game at all, especially the slowdowns, which are rare. Now if you, again, compare with Morrowind, this game is almost bug-free, the problems are minor if comparing with the previous game, and we can honestly be glad for that, because another bug-infested adventure like Morrowind would be too much to handle.

The controls satisfy greatly, it's easy to master and you have everything at hand. The menu will be your best friend during the adventure and it's important that it turns out being easy to handle and pleasurable, otherwise a huge part of the game would be ruined, dealing with your items and stats. The menu, although complex, is really well constructed and does the job greatly. You have four main separations in the root menu: Stats, with information about your character, numbers, minor and major skills levels. Items, with your weapons, armors, rings, potions, books, key items, ingredients, stones, all collectible items. Spells, for special abilities and diseases, listing collected spells, diseases, temporary and permanent boosted abilities. And for last you have the adventure's quests and map.

A mention to Morrowind's journal must be made, one of the worst aspects of Morrowind was the journal, it was simplistic and downright catastrophic, everything would go in a book-like menu where everything you did, every quest you triggered, every quest you've completed, was stored there; no separations, no shuffling choices. The bad thing is that you could easily lose your grip about what was going on or what still needed to be done. It doesn't happen here because you have separated the quests you've completed, the quests still active waiting to be explored, and the active quest where your map would lead you to the specific locations of the mission. Something Morrowind wouldn't give you as option as well, the coordinates were given and it was up to you to find whatever it was for you to find, not that it was entirely bad, it actually wasn't bad at all.

Oblivion is not only one of the best epic RPGs ever, following the known and loved formula and bringing several new stuff to the table, but it's also one of the most amazing experiences in gaming that should not be missed by lovers of a good RPG, but also shouldn't be missed by those who eager for a great game, no matter what kind or genre.