The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion GOTY Edition – Review

The Elder Scroll: Skyrim has quickly become the new hotness lately, faster than you can take an arrow to the knee. But what if you don’t want to jump into Skyrim right now, but still crave an expansive open world RPG of that ilk? Than maybe you might want to try the game prior in the Elder Scrolls series, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, or just Oblivion as it is more commonly known, was released by Bethesda for the 360 and PC in 2006, with the Playstation 3 hitting the shelves a year later. The story revolves around the quest of a magical creature trying to take over the land of Cyrodiil. You begin as whichever race you choose, locked in a prison cell for some crime, but it turns out that you are divinely chosen, and will play a part in the battle for the land of Cyrodiil. I know that is extremly vague, but I don’t want to give away any of the story. It is extremely well done, and that is just the main story, there are a number of other smaller story arcs in the other quests available that are also well done. I’ve heard that if you stuck just to the main quest line you probably could beat the game in about 20 hours or so, but if you set out to do everything there is to do you can easily sink a couple hundred hours into just the main game, and probably another 50 or so into the DLC.

Gameplay is a mix of ranged and melee combat from either a first or third person perspective. I loved the archery in the game, I though it was extremly well done, you do have a small reticle for aiming, but you do need to adjust your aim based on how far away the target is, so it is really satisfying when you take down an enemy unaware at a great distance. I did not find the sword and melee combat to be nearly as satisfying, it mainly came down to block, then strike, block, and strike again. The magic was also fairly well done, with a wide variety of spell ranging from healing to spells that alter the world around you, to spells that deal damage and ones that can summon creatures and weapons. The world is one of the major draws of the game, according to Bethesda the world is approximately 16 square miles. It is fun to just ditch the quests sometimes and wander around the world exploring. One downside in the game is the leveling is very complicated, and the game doesn’t do a good job of explaining how you should go about it. This seems to be the common denominator throughout the game, as the tutorials are not very well done for a lot of things, and I would have to look up how to do different things in the game.

Graphically, the game looks ok, it doesn’t hold up the best, but still looks alright at high settings. And there are several mods available for PC where people have touched up the graphics and made it look very nice. Voice acting is extremely hit and miss. The major characters are well done, yet it seems like they tried to save money on voice acting for the other characters, as there seems to be only three or four voices for all the other male and female characters, and it really bugged me at times because you would be talking to a beger who started out in his voice, then when you asked another team he would reply in the voice of one of the guards.

As far as content, it really depends on how you play the game. It is M rated, and there are some really dark things you can get into if you want to play the game that way. In playing the game more as a good guy the content wasn’t extremely bad in my opinion, but I see how it can get much worse if you start playing more as a bad guy.

There is one more thing to talk about, after all this is a Bethesda game, so that means that thing is bugs. It’s been out for 6 years now, and I did not come across any major bugs, but even after all this time there are still bugs that Bethesda never got to. I’ve had a few instances of glitching into objects, seen animals and enemies glitched into stuff, but no major gamebrakers. If you are playing on the PC there is a fan done “unofficial” patch that fixes around a 1000 or so glitches that were never fixed originally. So if you do want to play this, at least on the PC it isn’t an extremely glitchy mess.

Overall, I would say this is definitely worth trying if you like open world or fantasy RPG’s. This game was extremely polarizing for me, I can’t think of a game I have played that I wanted to play more when I wasn’t playing it, yet dreaded playing at the same time due to some of the mechanics.

Overall (3.5/5)
Well done story, amazing world, some fun gameplay mechanics, confusing leveling.

Graphics (1.5/5)
Looks ok, can be improved with mods.

Objectionable Content (4/5)
It is M-rated game.

Gameplay (3/5)
Archery and magic is fun, though melee is not extremely deep.