In the videogame world, few things can compare to the creature known as hype. Since the early days of the NES, titles have been picked apart and analyzed months, sometimes years, before they even hit the market. We’ve seen this is in the recent past with such Xbox hits as Halo 2 and Fable, and even seen early glimpses of it on the Xbox 360 with Dead or Alive 4. However, the hype machine has been working in overdrive since October 22, 2004. This was the day Bethesda Softworks announced the follow-up to its massive Xbox title The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The answer to that title's success? The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Since then, we’ve passed along every screen that has come our way, given hands-on impressions from every event at which the game has shown up, and waited patiently for the eventual release. Now it has arrived—we’ve scurried the depths of Oblivion and have lived to tell the tale.
The story so far
The actual story elements of Oblivion aren’t directly tied in to past Elder Scrolls titles, but rather each new game acts as a separate installment in the mythology of the world. We absolutely fell in love with the journey that this quest took us on (more on that later), but the main gist of the story is this: The game is set in the Tamriel’s capital province of Cryodiil, although players explore so much more than that location. The game starts off with the assassination of the Emperor—by an unknown assailant, nonetheless—so players are sent out with the task to find who's responsible. Oh, yeah...it seems that the gates to Oblivion (think Hell, but with more fire) have opened, and evil minions are invading Cryodiil. It is clear that it’s hit the fan as far as Cryodiil is concerned. Now it is up to you to venture throughout Tamriel and uncover all it has to offer—which is quite a lot.
Gameplay
When the quest into Oblivion is begun, the first task is to create a character. This also happens to introduce our favorite part of this gaming experience, which is the amount of customization that is laid into your hands. The process starts off by picking a race, which includes Argonian, Breton, Dark Elf, High Elf, Imperial, Khajiit, Nord, Orc, Redguard, and Wood Elf. Some are human, some are most definitely not. Each species can survive the game’s quest, but this decision proves vital as to how a player will go through the world of Oblivion. Each is equipped with abilities that will solve a particular situation, no matter how big or small.
A list of skills with accompanying attributes is assigned to each, including Strength, Intelligence, Willpower, Agility, Speed, Endurance, Luck, and Personality. Each of these areas is broken down even further, and by doing varying tasks in the game, players can increase these skills to better suit the character. In addition, the character needs a specialization assigned to it, whether it is mage, combat, or stealth. Teaming this up with a character already naturally gifted in this realm (say, a mage) increase the abilities even further.
Adding even more steps to the mix, the character’s birth sign can be entered. By choosing either mage, apprentice, warrior, thief, shadow, lover, ritual, tower, serpent, atronach, lady, steed, or lord as a birth sign, players extend abilities or help to slightly negate deficiencies. Any type of character can be created by picking and choosing from the aforementioned attributes, such as one versed in pure mage or pure stealth. Players may also mix and match to make characters specialized in mage abilities (magic), but have class attributes in strength and endurance (melee combat). The laundry list of tweakable options goes on to include molding the shape of a character’s face, its age, hair color, gender, and on and on. We literally spent over an hour tweaking our character, but when you’re about to spend countless gaming hours controlling it, it had better be perfect, right?
Once a player decides a character’s specialties and where its abilities will lie, the rest of the game will be spent leveling up statistics to improve performance. There are three different ways to go about increasing skills in the game, which in turn increases your character’s abilities. The first way is to merely use the ability over and over again. This is the slowest way of raising a level, but the repeated use of a magical skill (such as Restore) will slowly increase a character’s ability to perform it. Another way is to train with another character, but a skill can only be raised five points by doing this. Reading specialized books about a particular skill also increases a player’s level.
To raise a character’s overall level (everyone starts at Level 1), players need to increase major skills associated with the class chosen at the beginning. Raising a combination of your major skills at least ten points enables you to move up to the next overall skill level, which is done by going to sleep as soon as the moon icon appears on screen. Once leveled up, you are given the chance to increase three of eight attributes as well. The way in which a character’s skills and abilities are increased works great for the experience, and we found ourselves not having to worry about what level we were, as it seemed to naturally move up as our quest evolved.
