That's Plenty

Last year about this time I had pretty much stopped playing video games. My most recently bought console, the Game Cube, gathered dust. Being more of a PC gamer, this wasn't that surprising, but every game that came out for PC was pretty dissappointing. Doom 3 was neat looking, but utterly boring. Warcraft 3 offered the same RTS crap over again. And my favorite genre, Role Playing Games proper, was a wasteland. With the exception of Vampire: Bloodlines, all rpgs released last year were shit. In fact, I started replaying RPGs from seven, eight or even ten years ago. The greats. The Thief series. The Ultima series. The Fallout series. These were the games that made me believe in the potential for immersive games. But even the most recently released of these games, Thief II, came out in 2000. A full six years ago.

Oblivion is the fourth in the Elder Scrolls series, dating back to 1994. The series has always been ambitious, grasping towards a living breathing fantasy world, where the player is offered freedom of movement and choice. Most main stream gamers believe Grand Theft Auto to be the be all end all of free-form games, which is of course ridiculous. Your options in GTA are limited to being a criminal or not playing the game; in terms of complexity of the game world, it is made entirely of painted-on doors, and movie-set buildings. The elder scrolls, like Ultima, never attempted such forgeries. The doors can be opened, the windows looked through, the books read etc. Neither were you limited in these series by goals or choices. The limitation was in how everything looked and felt. Forests weren't dense enough, people weren't life like. These were great games, but they looked like shit, and never stopped reminding you that they were in fact games via their ugliness.

Oblivion has raised the bar, really really high. All problems mentioned above have been eradicated. It has been in development since 2002, and while a four year development cycle typically means lots and lots of fuck ups, the Betheseda spent that time crafting the roughly 16 square mile area of Cyrodil, consisting of mountains, forests, cities, rivers, lakes, as well as over 200 unique underground caves, mines, dungeons, and fortresses, and of course the other dimension of Oblivion. The game is populated with hundreds of expertly voice acted (cast includes Patrick Stewart, Lynda Carter, Sean Bean, and Terence Stamp AKA General Zod) unique characters, with unique personalities and routines. After playing for almost a month I would guess I have explored about 25-30% of the game, and interacted with around the same amount of the characters. Bottom line, its huge. It also is beautiful. Take some time to check out the screen shots on the official site.

And yes, it is open ended, and there is plenty to do. At the pace I have been going, I would imagine it would take somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 hours of game play to do every single thing in the game. Miraculously, none of it feels like filler. Every quest or challenge feels well crafted and intuitive. Before playing I was worried that the sheer quantity of things in the game would take its toll on the main story line, but alas, it doesn't. It's well written and well paced, and just like everything in the game you can participate in it when ever you damn well feel like it.
Also, as a nod to the very hardcore, they implemented an exceptional system of skills and advacement. Any game that would ask you devote this much time to realizes that starting over for replay value is alot to ask, so the skills system allow you to change your "focus" of character simply by practice. Don't want to be a burly swordsman anymore? Then pick some ingredients in the forest and start making potions. The game also scales the difficulty to your gameplay, meaning if you've been playing for a while things get more difficult along with your increase in abilities. It also features a well rounded difficulty slider, to make things easy or harder for the casual or the obsessed.
The only negetive thing I can think of is the steep system requirements for full on pretty graphics on the PC. My old clunker has to play it with low resolution and long load times, and I still enjoy it. If you want a reason to buy an XBOX 360,or upgrade your computer, this is it.

In conclusion, this is in my opinion the greatest game ever made. It is a straggering achievment, and everyone who worked on it should be bursting with pride. While I can't recommend this to people who don't like games at all, it is massive after all, or to people not down with good ole swords and sorcerey(DYLAN) I can without a doubt say that the holy grail of immersive gameplay has been achieved. Nothing even comes close, and likely will not for a long long time to come.