Lgr - The elder scrolls iv - Oblivion review

"You are TOO PRETTY to worship in this place!" [awkward silence] [typing, Oblivion theme plays] The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by 2K Games in March of 2006. And just looking at this box for the PC version it’s clear that Bethesda was keen on correcting the weaker aspects of its predecessor, Morrowind, boasting about fully-voiced NPCs, an improved combat system, Havok physics, and a streamlined user interface. It was also the first time an Elder Scrolls game launched with a console port from day one, with Oblivion on the Xbox 360 released alongside the PC version and a PlayStation 3 port arriving a year later. Leading some to immediately write it off as, quote, a “dumbed down” console game. Didn’t seem to stop the masses from snatching it up though, quickly becoming the most successful Elder Scrolls game to date, selling over 3 million units by January of 2007 and moving over 9.5 million units by 2015. As a result, Oblivion remains one of most-played entries in the series, as well as being many players’ first Elder Scrolls game at all. So let’s go ahead and take a look at the PC version, which came in both standard and Collector’s Edition boxes. Each of these came with a single DVD-ROM containing the game itself, but the collector’s edition also had this “Making of Oblivion” bonus disc packed inside a delightful looking sleeve. You also get a little ad for the isometric mobile version of Oblivion for flip phones, the requisite in-game world map, this being the province of Cyrodiil, and a 50-page full-color instruction booklet touching on a wide variety of topics, like classes, skills, spells, weaponry, and general Elder Scrolls lore. And apparently the Collector’s Edition was supposed to provide both a Pocket Guide to the Empire and even a gold Septim coin, but mine didn’t so screw me I guess. Oh well there’s a tale to tell just as soon as you start the game, featuring the dulcet tones of Sir Patrick Stewart. [“This is the 27th of Last Seed; the Year of Akatosh 433.”] [“These are the closing days of the 3rd Era, and the final hours of my life.”] The story goes that while on routine patrol of the Romulan neutral zone, the Enterprise encounters a scout ship seeking asylum in Federation--er, wait. [rustling of papers] Uh, wrong Patrick Stewart game. Ah here we go. Ahem. It’s about six years after the events of The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, and Emperor Uriel Septim VII is freaking out about having seen the gates of Oblivion and is convinced he’s gonna die soon. His three sons have been assassinated and it’s clear that he’s next on the agenda, so he and his Imperial bodyguards, known as the Blades, are fleeing Cyrodiil because crap sucks. And so your story begins at the main menu, where you start a new game and create a character. In classic Elder Scrolls fashion, this begins with you as an imprisoned nobody, a blank slate ready to be molded into whatever weird shape you desire. After you choose your name, gender, race, skin tone and other basic stuff, you can go into a ridiculously complicated character creation tool set and use dozens of sliders to manipulate every millimeter of your appearance. Oblivion became infamous for its uncanny, weirdly-proportioned, pudding-faced characters, and it’s easy to see why using these tools. Just embrace it, I say, and go with the most ridiculous head you can come up with. After this you’re greeted with a much prettier sight than your face: the bleak stone walls of a prison cell. In keeping with Elder Scrolls tradition, this first area acts as the tutorial, although it’s more direct in Oblivion than previous entries with pop-ups blasting walkthrough text at every other turn. In-between ham-*** tutorial boxes you get freed from your cell by Emperor Picard himself, who brings you along with his entourage of meatheads through the underbelly of Cyrodiil. Tutorial messages continue to berate as you perform the Elderest of Scrollsy things like dispatching low-level rats and scouring each room for weapons, armor, and loot. Along the way you’ll choose both your birthsign and your class, each affecting the skills and capabilities of your character throughout the rest of the experience. Signs are pre-constructed, but as with previous Elder Scrolls games the classes can be customized to your liking and named anything you deem clever. Suddenly you witness the unavoidable death of Professor Emperor Patrick Xavier Stewart Picard the Seventh, who has apparently grown to trust you over the past five minutes and tasks you with protecting the irreplaceable Amulet of Kings. Once you reach the sewer exit, it’s one last chance to adjust your stats and then aw yeah, it’s that big Bethesda reveal moment, providing your first glimpse of a world of possibilities that lie in wait. [peaceful waterside sound effects, orchestral music plays] And wow was this a memorable moment in 2006! At the time I was still impressed by the open world of Morrowind, then to see all this not even four years later? Holy nuts. Drop in that orchestral soundtrack from Jeremy Soule and daggone, you’ve got yourself one classy role-playing experience. [classy role-playing music plays its role] Granted it ran like week-old garbage on my PC in ‘06, but even at mid to low-range settings it was still the most gorgeous open world I’d ever seen. The Gamebryo Engine had certainly had its detractors over the years, and rightfully so with its penchant for instability and bizarre technical shortcuts that can result in legendarily glitchy gameplay. But you have to give it props for providing such lovely scenery, and breaking new ground with HDR lighting, specular mapping, and lush vegetation. Even though it absolutely killed my computer to do so, there really was nothing like cranking the lighting, shadows, and grass settings to the max and admiring the flora and fauna. Just look at that grass! There’s so much of it! And it wafts! WAFTS I SAY. Then there’s another graphical aspect that has, in my opinion, aged poorly, and that is the intense bloom. Effects like this have dated games from the mid-2000s almost more than anything else, it just looks strange in retrospect with its blown out colors and artificial-looking glow around objects. Still, even going back to it now it’s no deal-breaker, since the gameplay of Oblivion remains pretty darned enjoyable. You’re given a huge map to explore right from the beginning, and whether or not you choose to follow the main story path is entirely optional. If you want to immediately head underground and hunt for treasure, go right ahead. If you wanna explore one of the big cities, go for it, there are even fast travel points provided from the start. Personally I just pick a random direction and start walking. Er, well, more accurately I start running and jumping constantly, gotta get those athletic and acrobatic skills up, nawmean? [jumping, skill increase sound effects] And if I’m not run-jumping I’m riding a horse, because horses are a thing again. Stables can be found outside each major settlement, and you can either pay for one outright or go full bandit and steal one to ride off into the sunset. And it won’t be long until something tries to kill both you and Mister Ed, so it’s a good thing Bethesda overhauled the combat system. Because as much as I absolutely love Morrowind, I’ve never been tremendously fond of its combat. I mean, I understood and accepted it, dice rolls and all that. But Oblivion was the first time with any Elder Scrolls game I just *didn’t* think about what I was doin’ when killin’ stuff. Swinging axes, clubs, and swords into your enemies feels more intuitive now, like you’re actually connecting with a body and not just flailing their general direction, hoping for a lucky hit. And ranged attacks in the form of bows and magic come across as more satisfying with predictable results right from the start, no need to level up a ton to dole out notable damage. Part of this has to do with Oblivion’s dynamic level scaling, where enemy strength and damage dealt adjusts to your current abilities. So as you level up, each new enemy becomes stronger, with the idea being to provide a smoother difficulty curve and to keep combat challenging. But the strength of this system is also its weakness, and that is that no matter what, there’s always a chance you’ll get pummeled by some random encounter even after you’ve become a battle-hardened warrior capable of slaying the baddest demons around. But that’s more of a late-game balance problem and it doesn’t affect every playthrough in the same way. Besides, I’m more interested in sneaking into places and stealing all their stuff anyway, and thankfully that remains quite a good time indeed. I especially enjoy combining stealth and thievery skills with magic to crawl around nearly-invisible and take advantage of every attack I can. Mm, sneak damage multiplier, that never gets old. Still gotta be careful though, since NPCs often jump at the chance to run and call for guards instead of fighting, which means: ["STOP RIGHT THERE CRIMINAL ***!"] ["NOBODY BREAKS THE LAW ON MY WATCH"] ["I'M CONFISCATING YOUR STOLEN GOODS. NOW PAY YOUR FINE,"] ["OR IT'S OFF TO JAIL."] [sick beats play in jest] Heh. So here’s another highly-discussed point of contention, the voice actors. Or rather, the lack of them. It’s not that the acting itself is bad, for the most part it’s actually quite good. And considering that this is the first Elder Scrolls to feature fully-voiced dialogue for every NPC, it’s impressive in sheer sense of scale. You’ve got Bethesda game staples like Wes Johnson, Michael Mack, and Elisabeth Noone, in addition to Hollywood actors like the aforementioned Patrick Stewart, as well as Lynda Carter and Sean Bean. ["Something has changed."] ["Jauffre believes that the death of the Emperor and the darkening of the Dragonfires is the key."] The issue arises from the fact that there are around 50,000 lines of dialogue that were only voiced by about a dozen people, so you ended up with tons of NPCs that sound identical, especially if they’re the same race or character class. The repetition is bad enough that it’s a meme to this day, yet in a sense I find it charming. It’s like this whole world is an amusement park that spent most of its budget on set dressing, and the staff is just doing the best they can to act out a story with the limited resources on-hand. Same goes for a large number of the dungeons, they really start to look confusingly similar and rather bland before long. There’s nothing wrong with using a bunch of pre-made components to build these things, and besides, apparently there was only one guy at Bethesda in charge of building all of them. But more often than not, in Oblivion it’s painfully obvious, which led to me ignoring most of the tertiary caves and dungeons in favor of those from the main story. And the story itself is, ahh. It’s an Elder Scrolls story. There are ancient prophecies and powerful objects and great beings and all that stuff, and I quite enjoy the world-building and lore presented. But more often than not I get distracted and find myself joining a cult or something. The usual guilds and their associated questlines are here and they’re awesome: the Thieves Guild, the Mages Guild, the Fighters Guild, and the Stabby Guild, aka the Dark Brotherhood. Have to appreciate a group of people who enjoy nothing more than helping each other pull off the best murderin’ possible. You also deal with The Order of the Mythic Dawn in Oblivion, a Daedric cult that brought about this whole Oblivion Crisis in the first place. In an act that had detrimental effects on the property values of Cyrodiil real estate, Oblivion Gates have popped up all over the place like fiery zits on the face of Satan. Entering one of these gates teleports you to one of the many Planes of Oblivion, filled with daedra and other nasty creatures hellbent on being evil and whatnot. Within each Oblivion gate there’s a towering central tower in the center, and tucked away up top is a powerful Sigil Stone. If you make it up there alive then grab onto that sucker, watch as everything goes apocalyptic, and hooray: the gate is now closed. Hope you enjoyed that because they continue generating all over the map. Several of them are hand-crafted realms pertinent to the story, but the rest are randomly-generated and the fun runs out fast. As a result it’s an unfortunate fact that my least favorite part of Oblivion is well, Oblivion. Thankfully you can ignore most of them if you want to, and enjoy the freedom to play the role of your choosing. This includes buying houses again, with several domestic dwellings available for purchase in multiple locales, each of which can be decorated. Up to a point anyway: you can’t place individual items wherever you’d like, instead relying on merchants that offer preset furniture and decor. Seems like a good time to talk about the bartering and speech systems, which are largely affected by associated skills and haggling percentages, in addition to your relationship with each given individual. And eh, I’ve never been too enamored with this mini-game, but once you get used to it it’s whatever. Beyond straight up bribery there are four possible methods of NPC persuasion: joke, admire, boast, and coerce. All four must be attempted each round of persuasion and each NPC will respond differently. This can be swayed by charm spells and speechcraft but I still find it a chore, especially since there are some characters that require a high relationship to proceed to their next quest. Y’know, Oblivion is a fascinating example of a game that feels like it has one foot in the future and another firmly in the past, like a college freshman at a bar making a concerted yet clumsy effort to come across as legal age. And considering Oblivion released at the dawn of a new generation in gaming, this only makes sense. The mid 2000s were a transitory time for role-playing games, where expertly-crafted but technically complicated CRPG series of old were being updated with flashier graphics, big name voice acting, and vast open worlds. So some changes were to be expected. Comprehensive NPC voice acting resulted in a decreased number of written lines for each character. An interface tailored for game controllers and lower-res TVs meant less info on-screen at once and increased menu navigation to find what you desired. And the addition of quest markers on your compass and hotlinked points of interest in your journal made navigation a breeze, at the expense of some sense of explorative mystery. While these changes may have bothered some hardcore purists, the fact is it made Oblivion the most broadly accessible Elder Scrolls thus far. It remains one of the most captivating RPGs of its generation and handily outsold its predecessors, so it’s no surprise it got several expansions and re-releases over the years. Though the first re-release wasn’t exactly due to popular demand. In May of 2006, the Entertainment Software Rating Board increased the rating of Oblivion from Teen ages 13+ to Mature ages 17 and up. The reasoning behind this was somewhat similar to the 2005 re-rating of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, where locked assets had been found on the disc that allowed for undisclosed *** content to be accessed in-game. Granted, this could only be done with third-party modding tools on the PC version, but it resulted in unsold inventory being relabeled, marketing being pulled and republished with the new rating, and a reissuing of Oblivion with a Mature rating printed on the packaging. And yes, this included the 360 version too, even though the content wasn’t accessible on that platform. The next re-release was a little more reasonable, being the Game of the Year Edition in 2007. This contained the original game as well the two expansion packs: Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles. The two packs were released individually before this though, as you’d expect for traditional expansions. While these didn’t alter the gameplay very much, they were still substantial in terms of new quests and items. Knights of the Nine presented a storyline filled with shrines, temples, and relics of ancient crusaders and visions of ghostly knights in the sky. And Shivering Isles injected a bit of twisted darkness in the form of the Realm of Madness, with the lands of Dementia and Mania ruled by a daedric prince. They’re both absolutely worth playing if you enjoyed what Oblivion had to offer and want some juicy new storylines. But these weren’t the only additions post-launch. Let’s talk about horse armor. See, in 2006, downloadable content, or DLC, was still a relatively new concept. It’s not that downloadable content itself was new, we’d had that on PC for ages, but the idea of having piecemeal content that was purchasable through an online storefront was fresh. And Oblivion was one of the first to the party with the introduction of the Horse Armor DLC pack on Xbox Live. For just two and a half dollars you could get... armor. For your horse. Yeah. At least horse armor provided an in-game side quest of sorts, as well as a welcome health boost to your noble steed. Still, horse armor remains a symbol of lackluster DLC, and a warning sign of what was to come with the idea of “games as a service” in the future. There were a number of more substantial DLC packs as well, like The Wizard’s Tower and Mehrunes’ Razor, all of which were packed into the Oblivion 5th Anniversary Edition in 2011. This came in a steelbook case and combined all of the officially-released content and updates in one package, a fitting last hurrah for Oblivion hitting shelves just a handful of months before The Elder Scrolls V was set to launch. And then in 2016 came the announcement that Oblivion was receiving a backwards compatibility update for Xbox One users, followed by an enhanced version on Xbox One X that lets you play the game in full 4K resolution, something only possible on PC in the past. Nifty! And that’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, an RPG classic with a bunch of solid gameplay that still holds up and a bunch of caveats that have only gotten more glaring over time. It’s a flawed game to be sure, but a welcome one, and what Elder Scrolls isn’t a little iffy, you know? As many things as there are to enjoy about each entry, there are more than likely just as many things to scrutinize. Yet I keep coming back to them, over and over, for years and decades after they’ve released. There’s something oddly endearing and entirely captivating about the Elder Scrolls and Oblivion is no exception. Stop right there criminal ***! Did you enjoy this retrospective? If you did then check out my others, I’ve done a bunch over the years and there are new videos of all kinds every week right here on this very channel. And as always thank you very much for watching LGR!