Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition
by Bethesda
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Product Summary
Brand: BethesdaAudio: English (Unknown)
Published: 2007-09
Release Date: 2007-09-10
Platform: Xbox 360
Model: 39284
Publisher: Bethesda
Product features:
- Includes Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine expansions
Video Game Reviews of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition
Customer Review: The Most Complete Roleplaying Experience I've Found Yet
Summary: 5 Stars
Hey folks,
I love roleplaying games. I've been playing tabletop RPGs ever since I was in the fourth grade, when my cousin got me a copy of the original Basic Dungeons and Dragons boxed set for Christmas. I'm 40 now. I've since met my girlfriend online while playing the 'Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar' MMORPG. I'm currently designing my own version of a pen-and-paper RPG rules system. So, believe me when I say I have a vested interest in RPGs.
I was initially interested in Oblivion because I'd played Morrowind on the original xbox and enjoyed it immensely. Originally, I bought the Game of the Year PC version and it was awesome, but since my computer wasn't really up to par as far as the graphic strength the game required, it didn't get much play time until I got my xbox 360 console. This was the first game I bought for it. It was the original version, but I've since bought the Shivering Isles expansion disc and have all but one of the downloadable content from XBOX Live. To date, I now have about 1200 hours invested between 4 different characters on Elder Scrolls IV, and it's one of the best games I've ever played on a console.
I make it a habit to read through a number of other reviews before I write my own so I can look at different points from several angles. This is so I can try to be as unbiased as I can (impossible, I know; no one can shed their pre-conceived notions and opinions, but I try). Most of the reviews have been positive, but there are a few nay-sayers. The main impression I get from the negative reviews is that these people are just not happy about SOMEthing and are looking for a soap box so they can engage in a b*tch session. One complaint I see is that certain objects are subject to a fade-in the closer you get to them. Noted, but the amount of detail you see on the screen is unsurpassed (all in high-definition), combined with the degree of interactivity evidenced in the gameplay, producing more eye candy than I've seen on any other 360 game to date. Another complaint is that there is a drop in framerate when fighting multiple enemies. I have never experienced this. From closed in caves and forests to the all-out battle on the frozen tundra of the Battle of Bruma during the main quest, the game has ALWAYS run smoothly for me. And when you're outside, the loading times between areas is almost non-existent. Come on guys, consider the technical differences between the xbox 360 and a top of the line PC. The 360 has 3 core processors running at about 3.2 gigahertz each, a modified 512 megs of video memory (shared with the CPU), 512 megs of GDDR3 RAM (shared with the GPU), and depending on which model you buy, up to a 120 gigabyte hard drive for storage. A state of the art desktop PC can have up to a quad-core processor operating at up to 3.86 gigahertz each, 24 gigs of internal triple channel DDR3 RAM, dual 2 gigabyte HD video cards, and up to 4 terabytes of internal hard drive storage. The Oblivion xbox 360 edition has been optimized for the console, so it is subject to its limitations. A few of you would say that the developers at Bethesda should have found a way around these obstacles, but I put it forth to you, if you feel you can do a better job, step up.
GAMEPLAY-5 Stars
I have never seen open-endedness in a game like I have in the Elder Scrolls series. This is the only game I've seen, including ALL other roleplaying video games, where you can enter a tavern, slaughter all the people inside, steal the silverware, and pawn it off at the local store or Thieve's Guild fence. Granted, the local guardsmen might become involved, but even then the game gives you the choice of either paying the fine directly, serving time (which could adversely affect certain of your skills), or flipping the guardsman off and running for it. Also, the degree of interactivity in the game is beyond belief. If there's a door that you come across ANYwhere, it can be opened, be it either by simply going through it during normal business hours, picking the lock after hours (again taking the risk of tangling with the law), or finding the appropriate quest key. You can search through just about any chest, barrel, crate or cupboard you happen upon and find something in it. Bookshelves aren't just graphical decorations. Each book you see on one can be picked up and read. Reading some of those books will improve specific skills you have. Any creature or person you kill can be looted, and some of them have some good stuff. The game makes use of the Havok physics engine, so any loose object can be picked up, dropped or thrown and it behaves realistically. Lighting provides dynamic shadows and is directly relevant to your ability to move around unnoticed. People react a little more negatively towards you if your overall reputation is bad-meaning your infamy score is higher than your fame score-or when you have a weapon drawn (how friendly would YOU feel if someone stuck a gun in your face and then asked "Nice weather we're having, huh?"), and more positively toward you when you successfully do something in their favor, so it's relatively believable.
Another complaint I've read in other reviews is that the game is TOO open-ended. I counter that the game gives you options and lets you choose what to do. You start off with humble beginnings (you begin the game locked up in prison) and can ascend to the heights of greatness, limited only by your drive to do so, just like in real life. Oblivion's main game gives you 16 square miles of area to wander around in. It doesn't lead you by the hand, other than providing a destination marker to your next objective when you're undergoing a given quest. And you can pick up or leave off a quest at any point. In many other RPGs I've played, you were forced to finish one quest before you could pick up another. With Oblivion, you can pick up multiple quests and finish them at your leisure. One of the only real gaffs I found is in swimming. Wearing heavy armor would normally make you sink like a stone, but I'm thinking the developers sacrificed that particular point in favor of playability, so you can swim like a fish while wearing anything and if you have the right magical item, you can breathe the water indefinitely. This is also one of maybe three games I've run across that wasn't purely aquatic based where, if you decide to take a swim, you can dive beneath the surface. You CAN go diving for pearls and other assorted buried treasure. Note: you want to be careful which chest you store your valuables in. Certain ones have a time limit. On my second character, I completed the Mage's Guild quest, ascending up to arch-mage status, and stored all my magical-type equipment in the chest at the foot of the bed of the top level of the Arcane University. It disappeared after a week of game time. I ended up saying a few choice things before I calmed down. Sure, I've got multiple game saves, but I don't really fancy almost starting over to get my stuff back. Maybe in the future...
The variation in equipment has to be experienced to be believed. The amount of weapons and armor is unreal, and most of it is magically upgradeable. You can pick flowers and herbs from all over the countryside to mix up when you're practicing your Alchemy skill or you can sell them at the local Mage's Guild outlet. If you're hungry or in need of healing, just take out one of the deer that's running around in the woods, a pig, or one of the giant rats that comes up on you. If you're near the water, you can take out a mud crab and enjoy a meal. And this brings me to the next point. For any of you who play online games like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars or Lord of the Rings, you start off in a particular area. You quest, get better, and can start branching out to tougher locales. If you go to those other places too soon, you end up pretty much as lunch meat. This game realizes that, while the area to explore is immense, it IS finite, so it compensates by upping the challenge level you face in a specific locale, although even this is alterable by adjusting the difficulty slider in the options menu. This way there is at least some amount of risk involved and you don't become completely bored by being able to take any opponent out with a single swing of your weapon. So said, you might face a wolf starting out. When you get more experienced, that same area might contain a troll or an ogre, or an undead lich and they hit a lot harder, although the enemies' toughness does plateau when you reach around the 20th level, so the ones that have complained in their reviews regarding this, all I have to say is: patience, grasshopper. You want to hope you have better gear until then, which starts to appear when you increase in level. There are also other planes of existence for you to wander through, such as the Plane of Oblivion (about the closest vision of the Christian Hell that I've seen in a game), which carry their own hazards to avoid. As well, Oblivion crams more things to do in that finite space than any other game. Just about everywhere you turn while roaming puts you at the entrance to a house, fort, city, or cave that you can explore. I've found almost 300 (!) different locales on the main game's map and each one of them has a distinct layout. There are no carbon copies of any other place.
And you don't have to run around just killing things. If you have the money, you can buy a house and deck it out. You can become a vampire. You can join a guild. There are four major guilds in the main game and numerous minor ones gained from side quests. If you DO feel like getting bloody, you can become a contestant in the Imperial City's arena and possibly rise to the status of grand champion. You can spend time improving your various skills, either on your own or by finding trainers to help you. If you're into that sort of thing, certain towns have drug dealers you can buy from (parent's notice: this game makes no moral judgements; it's up to YOU to decide what your kids have access to). Hell, if you feel up to it, the game even lets you grab a pair of shears and go after the local sheep (heh). About the only thing I've found that the game doesn't let you do is get married or rent out your property, like in 'Fable: The Lost Chapters', or get pregnant and raise children like in 'Fable II'.
Well, yet, anyway...
If you finish the main quest, the game doesn't end and require you to start from scratch. You can go around afterward, tying up all the loose ends you come across and after they're all done, you can still just run around the countryside looking at the scenery and tackle any of the heavies you find there. The average roleplaying game will take me about 75-80 hours from start to finish. As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, I'm roughly 1200 hours into Oblivion with plenty more to go. There really is no true ending to this game. You simply get more value for plunking down your money.
The professions you have to choose from are class-based and make sense for a medieval setting. If you don't like the pregenerated classes the game provides for you, you can create your own (another part of the open-ended aspect), based on the type of character you want to play. Each contains seven major skills and the rest as minor skills. The game takes the logical approach in that you improve your skills through using them. By improving your major skills, you improve your overall experience level. I don't know if there's a ceiling on your character level; my highest level character is 32nd and I haven't come CLOSE to maxing out all my major skills on him. When you reach an experience threshold, you're prompted to rest and meditate on your achievements, allowing you to increase 3 of your core attributes (Strength, Intelligence, Willpower, Agility, Speed, Endurance, Personality, and Luck). These in turn improve your derived attributes (Health, Magicka and Fatigue) and your chance of performing successful skill attempts. You also have a wide variety of ethnicities and species to choose from for your character.
STORY-5 Stars
A game has to have a good story to keep me interested. Visuals do NOT hook me like a good story does (I've been playing tabletop RPGs since back in the day where the only thing you saw were your overweight buddies with scruffy beards, glasses and long hair sitting across the table from you eating potato chips and goofing around and you had to picture everything in your head). The main plot line for this series is top-notch. You've been destined to save the land of Cyrodil from a demonic prince and his group of fanatical acolytes -and for any of you religious types that might complain on this particular point, Oblivion does NOT allow you to 'go snake' and join the bad guys; you HAVE to fight them, so go find another game to jump up on your soapbox over. Through combat and investigation you uncover a plot to kill the emperor and his heirs, thereby breaking an ancient pact and opening the floodgates of Oblivion. You discover one remaining living son and end up assuming protection of him so he can renew the pact and reseal the barriers between the two planes of existence. And there are literally DOZENS of side stories you pick up along the way that work to completely immerse you in the history and culture that the guys and girls at Bethesda developed for the series.
SOUND-5 Stars
The soundtrack for the game fits in perfectly with its fantasy setting. There's a good mix of classical tunes, as well as specific tracks for when you're underground or in a gloomy area. The music also reacts with the situation, changing to a more frenzied pace when you go up against an opponent. The ambient sounds match the background area perfectly. The one major issue in this area is, aside from the big name actors they contracted with (Sean Bean, Terence Stamp, Patrick Stewart), that there's a total of maybe five people they signed on for the voice talent, and they become pretty recognizable throughout. To their credit, they do good work with the tasks they're given.
GRAPHICS-5 Stars
Again, given the technical considerations of the xbox 360, the visual appeal of this game is unsurpassed, and the artwork is as good as I believe it can get on this console. The old forts and dungeons are dank, with cobwebs and dripping water. The forests are lush. The frozen tundra is cold, replete with snowfall. The graphics incorporate anti-aliasing and bloom effects to smooth out the jagged edges, adding to the ambience and the draw distance allows you to gaze out well over a mile of terrain at major objects without 'pop-up' or fog to cover the inconsistencies of the visuals. The fog and mist is simply there to enhance the mood. Again, all of this runs smoothly in high-definition.
REPLAY-5 Stars
What can be said about the replay value of a game with a 'go anywhere, do anything' mindset? No matter what you choose, this game will likely be different each time you play it through.
EXPANSIONS
The Shivering Isles expansion disc contains the two major expansions for the 360 that originally came out for the PC version, plus the updates required to make use of the downloadable content available from XBOX Live. These include:
Knights of the Nine Expansion
Rating-5 Stars
This expansion introduces a new faction into the game for you to join. What's happened is that the church in the city of Anvil has been attacked and defiled. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find out what's going on and put a stop to it. You must gather the relics of the original Divine Crusader to defeat the evil Ayleid (pronounced 'Ay-lee-id', the ancient elves that ruled the land eons ago) king. To accomplish this, you first have to undergo a pilgrimage to eliminate the taint of any of your past actions, and then perform specific selfless acts for each relic item. This quest line is not as lengthy as the ones for the major guilds, but it delves deeply into the history of the land and adds to the general ambience and 'feel' of your overall gaming experience. It also gives you some good weapons and armor originally worn by the first Divine Crusader. Word of warning: If you like to play fast and loose with your ethics in a game, completing this side quest puts you on continual watch from the gods of the realm. Any questionable actions afterwards could render you unworthy to wear the raiments of the Divine Crusader, requiring you to undergo another pilgrimage to purge yourself of your sins. This message will NOT self destruct in five minutes, but after having to do enough pilgrimages, you might...
The Shivering Isles Expansion
Rating-5 Stars
The closest way I can describe this expansion is as the Addams' Family version of Alice in Wonderland. It introduces a gothic setting into the mix and also provides another map to roam around in, increasing the amount of explorable area by about one-third, with roughly another 50 locales sprinkled throughout. The deal is that you go through a doorway that magically appears off the coast of the city of Bravil and enter the realm of Sheogorath (shay-o-gor-ath), the daedric prince of madness. It seems that all of the people living here have spent a little too much time sticking their fingers in light sockets (do they have light sockets in fantasy settings?) and they're ALL a little bit crazy. But that's not your biggest worry. Or maybe it is. Seems that the madgod has got an issue that needs resolving and he's handpicked you to save the day. Things happen along a course of events, which might possibly lead up to you taking on the mantle of godhood yourself. Think you have what it takes? I don't, but then again I could be wrong. Not usually, but sometimes. STOP TALKING!!!! I'M TALKING!!!! No, I'm not; I'm writing. But whatever, this expansion gives you new side quests, a new city, new caves and hamlets to explore and new items, weapons and armor to play with. Just try not to come back too crazy.
DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT FROM XBOX LIVE
I don't rate these because they're just bit pieces that add to the main game. It's up to you to decide if they add to the overall experience.
Deepscorn Hollow
This add-on gives you another domicile located just south of the city of Leyawin to fill out with equipment. The original entrance is underwater, so you may have to search a bit for it. It's targetted more toward the socipathic crowd as the original owner of the place was a former member of a Dark Brotherhood-like Guild and was converted into a vampire. It also has a shrine dedicated to the evil god Sithis who will only help you if your infamy outweighs your fame, meaning you HAVE to be evil to reap his rewards. You can purchase a vampire minion who carries out assassinations in Sithis's name. Be careful if you decide to do this, because if you do it too many times you'll most likely have to perform another pilgrimage to be able to make use of the Divine Crusader's equipment.
Horse Armor
The add-on allows you to purchase two different versions of horse barding to protect your mount from the stablemaster just off the Imperial City. The versions are Steel Heavy Armor and Elven Light Armor.
Frostcrag Spire
This add-on grants you the inheritance of a wizard's tower in the northern part of the province just off the city of Bruma. You can buy accoutrements for it at a store in the Imperial City, including items that will allow you to enchant weapons and armor from inhabited soul gems. In the living quarters, the mixing table set up against the wall opposite the bed magically increases your Alchemy skill by 15 points while you're in its vicinity, with an alcove off to the side containing plenty of ingredients for you to collect, both mundane and daedric.
Magical Tomes
This add-on includes magical tomes in some of the loot you pick up. These tomes each contain a magical spell you can learn from reading the book, so you're not forced to purchase these spells at magic shops.
Battlehorn Castle
This add-on gives you a mini-quest to save a castle just off of the city of Chorrol from marauders. You arrive at the castle to find it being besieged by about six or seven bad guys. Kill them to win the prize. The prize is the deed to the castle itself. It's pretty bare at first, but you can touch it up by purchasing items from a travelling merchant located in the Imperial City. One of the items you can purchase includes a dwarven (who are known in this backdrop as the 'dwemer') blacksmithing forge that magically increases your Armorer skill by 15 points when you're in its vicinity.
Repairing the Orrery
This add-on gives you a mini-quest to repair the Orrery (a working mechanical model of the game's solar system) at the Arcane University in the Imperial City by finding some dwarven cogs and rods located at various campsites around the province. Repairing the machinery will allow you to, once a month in game time, obtain a specific spell-like power.
Mehrunes' Razor
Mehrunes Dagon (pronounced 'may-roons day-gon') is the daedric prince of destruction you're fighting against in the main quest of the game. This add-on let's you search for his weapon, one that's been lost for ages, a powerful daedric artifact. This quest is a little more involved than the other add-ons, but the prize is well worth the effort. Warning: If you've completed the Knights of the Nine quest, some of the things you're required to do to obtain this weapon (such as devouring a still-beating heart) will almost CERTAINLY render you unworthy to wear the Divine Crusader's relics until you undergo another pilgrimage.
Thieve's Den
This add-on I don't currently have yet, but that's going to change. It's primarily for stealth-based characters and lets you take command of a pirate ship and the ship's cave after first clearing out it's original undead inhabitants. You can then lead a life of plunder. Ahoy, mateys!
OVERALL-5 Stars
This game provides one of the most complete experiences you can have in a virtual setting. Though there is no such thing as the perfect game, Oblivion comes as close to meeting the mark as I've ever found. As a matter of fact, I'm writing this review online while I'm at work in between calls (it's a NICE company that lets you do things like this), and once I get home , kiss the wife and eat dinner, I plan on playing a little Elder Scrolls IV. Peace out.
Description of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition
Oblivion Game of the Year edition presents one of the best RPGs of all time like never before. Step inside the most richly detailed and vibrant game-world ever created. With a powerful combination of freeform gameplay and unprecedented graphics, you can unravel the main quest at your own pace or explore the vast world and find your own challenges. Also included in the Game of the Year edition are Knights of the Nine and the Shivering Isles expansion, adding new and unique quests and content to the already massive world of Oblivion. See why critics called Oblivion the Best Game of 2006.Role-Playing Games
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