The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

To put it bluntly--and as reductively as possible--Oblivion is very, very unpolished and demonstrates little in the way of virtuous game development. Animations are stiff and often lack transitions, there are no animations for diagonal movement, HDR and bloom are blurry and blinding, water looks horrid even by the standards of the time, every character looks like a potato, the outfits are gaudy, the voice acting is C-list at best, the dialogue is very cheesy, and the main story is easily the most terrible of any game I have ever played.

It remains, however, one of the best games I have ever played. See, nothing really quite manages to draw me in like Oblivion did so many years ago, and even to this day, I can endlessly replay it without boredom. There is always something new to discover, some hidden quest I passed by in my previous playthroughs, items to collect, characters to meet, and curious locations to explore. And of course, it has most likely the best side quests of any game I have played next to The Witcher 3.

Truly, if Oblivion is to be applauded for anything, it must be the absolute ingenuity of its quest design and writing. Ranging from hilarious and off-the-cuff comedies to dark and macabre tragedies, each one acts as a little self-contained narrative filled with drama and just the right amount of irony. The vibe I get from this game's dialogue in general is similar to, perhaps, a Shakespeare play or an opera. It's whimsical and aloof, but grounded when necessary. All the while, juxtaposition is carried out gracefully--even the most evil and secretive of societies like to have fun, after all.

The game has aged terribly--but that only adds to the experience. Oblivion's implementation of Havok physics is rudimentary and results in objects either slowly falling to the ground--as if Nirn had the gravitational pull of the moon--or flying across the room at dangerous velocities like they were launched from the Hadron Collider. Ragdolls will shake uncontrollably when they get caught in a closing door, objects can be used to phase through walls, paintbrushes inexplicably float in the air when dropped, allowing the player to make impromptu staircases to exit the bounds of accessible areas (this is an integral part of a speedrun strategy that can take you right to the end of the game!)

On top of the physics-based jank, there are the trappings of an AI simulation that is a bit too big for Oblivion's breeches. This can result in hilarious and unexpected outcomes, like a certain beggar in Bravil being slaughtered by guards for stealing a loaf of bread, or NPCs mentioning how much they hate an NPC right to that NPC's face, which results in absolutely no backlash. The best part of this system is that it gives NPCs routines and needs, which can be abused by an unscrupulous player in many ways. For example, at some point in the Dark Brotherhood questline the player receives poisoned apples that can be used to furtively assasinate NPCs. To use them, the player needs to remove all the food in an area, then drop the poisoned apples. NPCs will eat the apples when they are scheduled to eat, which causes them to humorously groan as they eat, until their body pops up into the air and floats gently back down. It's actually ridiculously funny and I could do it for hours.

Another great/cruel trick revolves around enchanted rings. If you create a custom enchantment on a ring that deals constant damage to the wearer, you can pickpocket it into NPCs' pockets, and they will wear it, causing them to burn/electrocute/freeze to death. Although this AI system is nowhere near as advanced as it was in its initial implementation, it's still very fun to mess around with.

Similarly, this game has bugs. Lots of them. While some are gamebreaking and prevent the player from completing quests, others are simply funny or exploitable. Players can use scrolls to infinitely duplicate items, or use quicksaves to travel around the game quickly while retaining their quest progress and inventory. In that sense, the bugs don't actually detract from the experience--they ARE the experience.

It may perhaps sound like Oblivion is great for the same reason Tommy Wisseau's The Room was a "great" movie; but I assure you that isn't the case, at least not entirely. There is some true merit in the game, like the aforementioned quests, but also the game's open world itself. The environments are veritable theme parks, ranging from the snowy Skyrim-esque Jerall mountains to the dank and alien swamps near Leyawiin. Each is fun to explore and contains no shortage of dungeons to delve into, unmarked easter eggs to come across, and other little curiosities.

The weakest part of exploration, however, is easily the dungeon design. Apparently only one developer was tasked with making them, because they are all typically quite small and take place in only a single loading zone. Unlike in Skyrim, the dungeons almost never loop back around to the beginning, so once you clear it out, you have to trek back through all the way to the entrance, which can take several minutes in more lengthy dungeons. Assets and prefabs are chronically overused, and you will encounter the same traps, puzzles, and layouts over and over again. Enemies are typically always goblins, bandits, renamed bandits, necromancers, or bandits; but, you might come across certain dungeons that actually have fairly interesting enemies belonging to our common conception of high fantasy, like will 'o the wisps, ogres, trolls, ghosts, undead skeletons, or conjurers. Compared to Skyrim, enemy variety in Oblivion is actually quite high, and each one feels at least somewhat unique to fight against. It's fun to actually encounter something other than Falmer or Draugr, after all.

The highlight of Oblivion, apart from the quests, is easily the spellcrafting and enchanting systems. With enough gold and magicka, it's possible to create completely overpowered spells that make the game trivial, like fireballs that span the width of rooms, instantly obliterating enemies and sending them flying. Swords can be enchanted to paralyze foes, meaning that they get stuck in whatever animation they held when you struck them and amusingly fall to the floor like statues, allowing you to wail on them forever until they die. Armor can be enchanted to allow movement speeds faster than even the speediest horses, and on top of that, you can enhance your jumping ability too, allowing you to shoot up about three or four stories into the air.

While I'm at it, I might as well mention Skooma, a magical drug and hallucinogen that greatly enhances the user's speed and strength at the cost of cognitive ability. In Oblivion, unlike Skyrim, Skooma actually does something--and it's glorious. The speed-enhancing effect stacks infinitely, and if the player consumes enough, he can run faster than the game's zone loading can keep up. It's a testament to how great this game's relaxation of balance really is.

I would be amiss if I didn't say that Oblivion is deeply flawed. Level scaling is done very poorly and axes any feeling of progression (provided you aren't using exploits to turn yourself into a god) by constantly beefing up enemy health and damage as you level up. The level scaling keeps even lowly bandits a constant threat, and considering that it will eventually cause them to equip the best armor in the game once you reach a certain level, suspends a certain amount of logic and immersion. Daedric armor is supposed to be extremely rare, given that it's made from an elusive material that has been modified by a literal demonic pact, and yet bandits will eventually wear it en masse.

Additionally, if you make poor decisions while building your class and playing the game, you can find your own power level outpaced by the progression of enemies. For example, if you choose Alchemy and Athletics as major skills, you will gain progress toward leveling up each time those skills are leveled, even if your other combat skills don't increase. As a result, if you make a ton of potions and run around the map, your player's level will be high, but your combat skills too low to put up much of a fight against level-scaled enemies. This game design oversight has, I'm sure, frustrated many players.

In the end, Oblivion occupies a very special place in my heart. It was my first introduction to open world RPGs as a genre, and easily the most accessible one at the time. Despite its flaws and the obvious inexperience of the Bethesda crew, it remains one of the best RPGs of all time simply because it got so much right in the first place. In fact, the flaws themselves have a bit of charm about them that hasn't diminished with time. If you haven't played Oblivion, I urge you to pick up a copy right now and give it a go--you won't regret it.

I should preface this review by saying that Oblivion is one of the games that has had the biggest impact on me. I consider it an all-time favourite. Two things follow from this: a) I don't consider myself able to give a view on the game that isn't clouded by unheavenly amounts of nostalgia (and thus I would have preferred to not give it a score); b) this review is largely going to cover what I perceive to be negatives from this playthrough.

I began this playthrough with the Steam Game of the Year edition. That didn't last long. I couldn't get controller input working to my taste on Steam (and I am strongly predisposed towards controller gaming ahead of M+K where available and not totally insane) after trying both Steam input and a controller support mod. Accordingly, I restarted with an emulated Xbox 360 version via Xenia. As a small note to anyone inclined towards the same, while Xenia officially doesn't support Oblivion, I encountered only minor issues (graphical bugs occurred after more than approximately two hours in a session, but this was fixed by quitting out and reopening; I also experienced a few crashes but I honestly don't believe that this was more crashes than the number I experienced on console near launch).

After starting on Xenia, I played the vanilla version. This was a deliberate choice. While I wholeheartedly agree with those who love the Shivering Isles and, to a lesser extent, Knights of the Nine DLCs, my short time playing the GOTY edition reminded me how terribly the DLCs were implemented for fresh save files. In short, the player is presented with the DLC quests essentially immediately after finishing the tutorial sewer - but this is narratively jarring due to the player's lack of status and lack of in-world explanation of how those quests started, as well as inconsistent with the natural progression of the game.

Speaking of progression, the generally poor progression systems in Oblivion are probably some of the most-criticised aspects of the game. We'll talk about two widely commented-on issues, and one which I think is probably less discussed.

Increasing your character's overall level in Oblivion is a poison chalice unless the person has carefully planned their progression, and has done so from (at latest) the end of the tutorial. Without going into the precise system, in Oblivion, it is generally disadvantageous to have skills you actually intend to use as major skills (which is precisely contrary to the message given by the tutorial). Rather, you can either min-max by totally ignoring your major skills until you have tracked the precise gain in minor skills you're looking for, and then gain ten levels in majors to level up. Alternatively (and what I did) was simply set uncommonly used skills as major skills and rely on somewhat natural pacing.

This is because the size of attribute gain one receives on a level up is dependent on the number of relevant skill levels gained prior to hitting the tenth major skill level required to level up. Ten major skill levels alone will not come close to achieving optimal attribute gains.

The reason this is problematic is that all enemies receive attribute scaling upon the player levelling up, such that the player choosing poor attribute gains means that fighting the same enemy after achieving a level up in the manner the game suggests you should play is harder than it was before. The only objective benefits to levelling up are a) access to higher level loot, which sells for more gold (which is generally only useful to buy skill training and houses, the latter offering no further theoretical benefit after the first one is obtained*); b) access to certain quests; and c) access to some new enemies which drop consumable items not easily obtainable at earlier levels. For the most part, the game completely fails to offer a sense of the player getting better as a character.

This leads into the closely-related second problem: levelling past about level 25 is simply a bad idea. By level 25, the player has unlocked access to all weapons and armour. This means that even optimal, counter-intuitive levelling results in enemy scaling being unmatchable by the player.

I should caveat this by saying that this is a critique of the Oblivion levelling mechanics specifically, and not level scaling as a mechanic generally.

The final point on progression is that some of the appropriate methods to level individual skills are simply asinine and rely on an unnatural playstyle, but the time to reach level 100 in those skills is simply unrealistic without resorting to those methods. In an approximately 40 hour playthrough of all major questlines and some side quests, I only hit level 100 in sneak (sneak has a 'cheat' method but it is essentially unnecessary given the levelling speed). As examples of these silly methods:

athletics is best levelled 'afk' by holding down an input while swimming with a waterbreathing enchantment

acrobatics levels based on jumping, or by taking fall damage. This is somewhat intuitive but, being aware of this going in and thus jumping pretty much every time I hit the ground for 40 hours, I only reached level 78

the worst offender, mercantile, gains xp each time the player sells an item and receives at least one gold. It levels incredibly slowly, and beyond the early game, selling items is rarely worthwhile because of the diminished value of gold**. The 'cheese' method is selling a large stack of items such as arrows one at a time, which is nothing short of tedious

magic skills level per cast. This is intuitive, but they level slowly enough that getting high levels is rarely possible, even as a predominantly magic user, without creating a 'cheese' spell in the mages guild to cost as little magicka as possible.

armorer, somewhat similarly, levels based on being able to repair an item, with the best method being to create a skill to break down your own weapon and armour, and alternating cast/repair. I am mentioning this only as a sub-point because the actual method of levelling is intuitive, and while it is unlikely that you will be able to repair enough without obsessively picking up, repairing and dropping all enemy armour pieces without a heavy armour tank build, that build is most consistent with that of a blacksmith in any event

Moving on from progression, the single best aspect about Oblivion is its story and worldbuilding. As a teenager, I doubt I took the time and care to read lore books as I did in this playthrough, but I genuinely believe that the presence of hundreds of different books, each expanding the world's story a little bit, is a shining example of world design which sets Elder Scrolls games apart. Likewise, quests, and in particular side quests, are generally very good.

The guilds vary in quality, however; and this is largely because of varying quest types. The Arena barely needs mentioning: it is a series of fights in a colosseum-type area. It comes associated with a very good side quest (Origin of the Gray Prince), but the remainder of the guild shines a spotlight on Oblivion's combat system, which cannot be seen as an advantage.

The Fighter's Guild is also weak but remains a substantial step up. In contrast to some other guilds, the main antagonist of the questline is introduced as an antagonist rather than an innocent competitor relatively late on. Moreover, the bulk of quests prior to that point are variants on going to caves and fetching items or killing people. Oblivion caves were procedurally generated, and it shows. They don't stand out from one another, don't feature an internal increase and release of tension like a well-designed video game dungeon, require essentially no thought, and lack distinct combat encounters.

A substantial further step up is made by the Mages' Guild: in fact, my main objection to the Mages' questline is the fetch quest required to rejoin the Guild after killing a member (which is all but required if the player plays through the Thieves' Guild quest line after joining the guild). This requires the player to obtain 20 vampire dust and 20 daedra hearts, both of which require active and conscious effort to obtain. Without access to a wiki, vampire dust in particular is best gathered by finding a location with vampires, clearing it, then waiting for three in-game days for those vampires to respawn. To say this is unenjoyable is an understatement.

Aside from that, the MG is excellent. The storyline is compelling, and the antagonist faction is introduced early enough for the player to naturally develop distaste for them. However, I think this is best comparable to the Fighters' Guild in the locations the player is sent to.

You see, many MG quests are very similar in premise to FG quests: go to location, save person, kill person, collect item, etc. However, the setting is predominantly Ayleid ruins. In contrast to caves and mines, these (I believe - I cannot find confirmation of this) are loaded with traps, puzzles to progress, but also viable workarounds making use of your skills (an obvious example is that some walls can be jumped over or around with a good or boosted acrobatics skill). While there's a design motif to these, they feel a lot less samey than other types of location. I'll also mention one specific quest, Vahtacen's Secret, in coverage of quest design later.

The Thieves' Guild and Dark Brotherhood are both incredible. Both have a strong internal narrative, building to enable the player to get invested in them, twists, turns, and marvellous endings. However, perhaps more pertinently is the gameplay associated with them. The core feedback loop of most of Oblivion is subverted: rather than go, kill according to your build, return, both guilds attach conditions to the performance of missions which requires their completion in specified manners (most of the TG requires that the player not kill anyone while completing the mission, and the DB usually requires completion by a prescribed method to obtain an additional reward). They would be strong short linear narrative games in their own right.

The main quest is fine but unexceptional to my taste. I think the issue I have is that the narrative stakes are already humongous at the outset: a murderous cult has assassinated the Emperor, and portals to daedric realms of Oblivion are popping up all over the game world. This probably hit different to people who played Morrowind first, and it may be this is where my nostalgia is hindering my enjoyment, but at this point, I don't have a real reason to care about the world I'm saving. It's also fairly short if the player hits one quest after the other, which limited my ability to become more invested.

Oblivion excels in its side quests. Fairly early on, the player is likely to encounter a quest about a trader in the Imperial City undercutting all the others. We investigate to discover that he is simply exceptionally efficient, but rather obtains stock from a shady-looking dealer at night on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Upon investigating further, the player finds out that the dealer is looting buried corpses ! The denouement of this is an encounter where the player is lured into a tomb with the dealer and locked in there with him and his bodyguard . This is paced in a way to be gripping throughout.

I will revisit the Mages Guild to mention my single favourite quest, Vahtacen's Secret. In Vahtacen, the player finds two MG members struggling to get past a pillar, with semi-cryptic suggestions as to proceeding. Crucially, this is one of the few points in the game in which the player isn't simply given an objective marker to proceed. It has an easy, but intriguing puzzle, and behind that the player gets to explore an Ayleid ruin - as mentioned before, a location which would improve any quest.

This leads into an alternative point, though: Oblivion's decision to introduce objective markers really does reduce many quests to the aforementioned run/kill/loot. The narrative is very easy to ignore - to its great detriment. I certainly don't object to objective markers per se, but quests need to be written with the mechanic in mind. In contrast, many Oblivion quests feel designed for the Morrowind, marker-less system, with the markers introduced after playtesting discovered that many quests offered slightly too few contextual hints to make them enjoyable in isolation. My recollection is that Skyrim did this slightly better, and I certainly know that it was subsequently improved upon in Fallout games - but it's a real weakness of Oblivion.

And so, to combat. Combat is functional. It is poor if the player's idea of good combat design is heavily dependent on real-time reactivity and optimisation. However, if your desire is rather to play around with stacking effects and break the game, there's a huge number of buildcraft options to enable this in a number of different ways. On the whole, my impression of Oblivion combat is that it is often over-maligned by people expecting to play a refined action RPG system in a game which, although it happens to have action combat, certainly isn't designed around it.

I'll leave it there. There's an awful lot more I could say - Seeking Your Roots is my kind of collectible quest but I think the reward balancing is slightly too ha... - I'll restrain myself, as these thoughts are already 2400 words and counting.

I'll repeat what I set out at the outset. I love Oblivion. The fact that my comments here are almost entirely negative should not be taken as me saying it's a bad game. However, it's easier to note the cracks in your rose-tinted glasses than the actual rose behind them.

*in practice more houses is better as storage containers tend to lag substantially upon a lot of items being placed into them, and thus access to more permanent storage containers reduces overall lag. I struggle to give the game credit for a reward minimising the negative impact of a technical fault

**this is not true playing on the hardest difficulty, where gold is very important to sustain supplies. However, I couldn't recommend the hardest difficulty to anyone - it only scales combat difficulty and, as I'm getting to later, I think combat in Oblivion is acceptable but not good

This game is great. It is an open world with an interesting history and a main story that can be followed but does not have to be. Many people have learned about the open world genre from this game, and it is fantastic. The RPG aspect is also top-notch as well, allowing players to customize their experience. Whether you want to be a thief or a knight, you can find that skill and pursue it. The side quests are top notch as well, the game has some very interesting side quests and many of the best ones are optional!

This game is so big and full of cool shit that you may not find it all, but you will still get one of the best experiences you will ever see in a game!

I've played well over 100 hours of various Bethesda games but I've never beaten one proper until this one, but now that I've seen what it all led up to I'm comfortable with not needing to ever complete the main quest in any of these games again, lol.

"Oblivion is a Bethesda game" is about all you need to know--this was the clear beginning of the formula they've run with mostly unmodified for the better part of two decades, and once you get into it, it plays nearly identical to any of the others. Much ink has been spilled about the "loot loop" and from what I've seen so far, this was really the first Bethesda game that cared more about the loot loop than the role-playing. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is a deeply thought out world with tons of moving parts and stuff to get invested in, Oblivion is a video game (emphasis on "game") where you grind caves or gates or dungeons for gear/money with a mostly standard high fantasy skin with some demons from a Doom game thrown in sometimes.

That isn't to say Oblivion is a bad game--far from it--but man, does it wash over you. I feel like I played 35 hours of Subway Surfers. The story is not even a draw in the slightest--go get this item, ok now go get this item, ok now go seal these oblivion gates, remember this is to Preserve The Royal Bloodline!! It's not offensive or bad (except that (apparently optional, whoops) part where you have to close like 8 incredibly repetitive Oblivion gates in a row), but, like, it's giving Nothing. Generic at every step. There's never a point where you actually care about what you're doing past it being something to do.

But this is the formula. Unlike Morrowind or Fallout: New Vegas, you can be all things to all people. You can join every faction and do basically every quest, but in removing these barriers, Oblivion disincentivizes roleplay and instead incentivizes dispassionate interaction with the world, incentivizes clicking through text boxes so they give you a waypoint that you can go to and kill some things and get an item and come back, just to do it again. This is the eternal problem of basically every post-Morrowind Bethesda game, but playing Oblivion to completion is where it finally clicked what puts me off about these games. Like many big-budget AAA games, they are made to be toys to play with and little else--the world is only there for set dressing. Even the ending reflects this--after Saving The World (and being shown a short cinematic), you are immediately dumped back in so you can continue doing more quests, forever, turning any sense of victory or accomplishment into something much more hollow.

When playing it, it's fine, it's entertaining, it's better than scrolling social media or whatever other means of wasting time. But when I closed it, especially as I grew closer to the end, I was struck by how much it was just A Thing To Do and how little it was a Work that I Engaged With. Which probably is to be expected out of a Bethesda game, but it's still lame.

The trajectory of The Elder Scrolls - from rough freeform complexity to polished, restrictive 'streamlining', attained a magical balance with Morrowind. But the release of Oblivion began their descent towards the latter end, of guided storytelling, less complex RPG mechanics, fully-action combat and lush environments, i.e. towards greater mass appeal. Like its predecessor, much of the intrigue is owed to its playstyles. This time it's the leveling system that influences gameplay, and in particular their major/minor skills, of which only the former awards level EXP. When played normally (as in: selecting the right major skills for one's intended build), the experience suffers from oppressive level-scaling and chronically weak combat. When played in reverse (as in: by assigning seldom-used talents as major skills), the player is faced with an oddly accommodating RPG. Morrowind had balanced this by way of dice rolls, which made building low-level misc skills (here known as minor skills) especially difficult without a trainer. Their absence this time around allows one to easily hone skills regardless of the character's class, and even stay at level 1 for hundreds of hours (although exempted from major quests and stuck with lesser treasure). It's yet another exploit-prone system, but the exploit's effect on gameplay is unusual: Players level up with complete agency and ideally when prepared to increase the difficulty & loot. As skills improve, the attribute bonuses of old lead to carefully-sculpted builds reminiscent of Pokemon's EV-training.

Acrobatics (and/or speed-boosting effects) replaced jump spells as the alternative means of world traversal, now equipped with much better air control that - at high levels, turns dungeons into quasi-platformer stages (with potential for sequence breaking). The rest is a mixed bag that's heavier on the negatives: Features such as spellmaking and enchanting are tidied up and locked behind quests. Weapons lack feedback despite removing skill-based hit chance. The icon compass and a return to fast-travel-from-anywhere detract from the sense of discovery. And finally the inclusion of voiced dialogue (more than a line or two) indirectly reduces the quality of writing, but that does little to hurt their scenario-building.

Enemies are bullet sponges.
This isn't polished or fun in anyway, why bother?