The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the fourth instalment in the series and features guards with a famous catchphrase. Can the game stand up to the storytelling genius of its predecessor The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind?
ROUND-UP:
REVIEW-UP:
As always with Bethesda games, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is nothing short of an epic adventure. With hours upon hours of quests and many different factions, you can guarantee you will have plenty of content to keep you going. It doesn’t have as strong a story as its predecessor, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, but it certainly had a good standard story; and where it truly shines is in its freedom to forge your own destiny. Your character really feels like your own and you had a sense of purpose.
Introducing features such as fast travel did mean the epic feeling of the game could be cut down quite considerably, but it isn’t a necessity to use this feature. If you want to have the same level of travel as you did in Morrowind, the title would accommodate this. You are able to play the game exactly as you’d like… but in here lies a flaw.
As you play, you level up in skills. Once you’ve levelled up in enough that relate to the class picked at the start of the game, your character can go to sleep and level up, gaining points for their primary statistics. Whereas The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim‘s method of choosing health, mana or stamina and then which skill you wanted to level, with Oblivion you are able to choose which of your major statistics you want to gain points in. You get more points for levelling in primary skills that relate to that statistic, so for example by swinging battle axes and levelling up many times in axes you can gain more points in strength than say intellect.
It’s a simple system; however, it is breakable. For example, you can be ready to level up at level one and never actually have to do so. This keeps your enemies weak as this is a game where they scale their difficulty with you. Whilst this isn’t the only title guilty of doing this, it felt quite easy to play through Oblivion and get through the Oblivion gates fighting just scamps and easy-to-kill foes. Whilst this is all well and good, you don’t get the variety so it honestly does feel as if you’re cheating yourself somewhat. But the fact of the matter is: enemies scale with you, the player.
This isn’t the only element of the game that is fairly breakable. The economy is laughable at best; take the ability to sell items up to a certain value to traders. It says that the trader has, for example, fifty gold and you can sell ten items for five gold each, but then you can sell another ten items for five gold. So long as your items do not individually pass fifty gold, you can keep trading with the same vendor. I found this very peculiar, and another way you can trick the game somewhat.
Don’t be fooled by these simple problems though: Oblivion is a brilliant game with captivating landscapes and a fun story, and you will have hours of fun with it. If you enjoy exploration then the luscious environments and fun enemies will keep you amused – especially the mudcrabs.
The graphics of Oblivion were good for the time of release and are still pretty decent today. Even the textures weren’t bad, as was a problem in Skyrim. The models are well designed and this was possibly the first Elder Scrolls title that made Khajiit and Argonians look better. I didn’t say ‘good’ however; it took until Skyrim for that to happen but they look much better. Speaking of characters…
The voice acting somewhat baffles me in this. It feels as if they went all out for a good number of select dialogue lines with brilliant voice acting, but then suddenly that beggar you were talking to who needed money to buy himself some food for the night gets the voice of a posh Imperial man. I’m not sure how this happened and perhaps we can prod at the lack of quality control with this? But I find it quite funny!
The music is as good as that in other Elder Scrolls games. It sets the mood perfectly and all of the sounds fits in nicely with is being portrayed onscreen at the time. It’s simple, themed perfectly and can either pump you up or calm you down depending on your situation. The sound effects are equally as good – with the exception of the aforementioned voice-acting issues.
The quests make sense; there is a fantastic chain in how to cure vampirism and they always build you up for something bigger and better. This is especially true of the Fighters Guild, where your first proper mission is to deal with a rat problem in which a lady’s pet rats are being killed off; you go downstairs and find yourself met with a surprise guest who you have to deal with. It made you feel like there was a legitimacy in what you were doing yet was still able to prod you early enough to make you believe you’re just going to be an errand boy forever. Don’t worry: you certainly won’t be with basically all guilds eventually letting you be the leader, which can be a headache when you’re the head of the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood simultaneously. How does that even work?!
So Oblivion isn’t the best title in the Elder Scrolls series, but with mod support and plenty of hours of quests to get through, including expansions, it will keep you entertained. What more can we ask for? I am happy to have played the title, flaws and all. After all, without it we would never have had one of the best memes on the internet.
RATING-UP:
How did we reach these scores? Click here for a guide to our ratings.
1001-Up.com 
i kinda regret missing this one when it first came out.
It’s fun undeniably, but its massively flawed. I see it as a good thing though, as it’s a game with character! 🙂