The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

THE GOOD:
Good lastability, very good graphics, good AI system, some good story lines and quest lines. Community supported modules and plug-ins(PC Only), vast styles of combat giving players the option of playing the game how they want.

THE BAD:
Immense requirements for Highest possible graphics, misplaced Meshes and items. Some bugs still exist in the game. Lacks quests and a few abilities/spells from previous games in the series.

SUMMARY:
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the fourth installment of a already quite popular series and carries on the story from the previous games Including The Elder Scrolls III: Marrowind what like Oblivion was also a best selling game as well as receiving the reward of Game of the Year (Oblivion GotY 2006, Marrowind GotY 2002).

It's needless to say people were expecting alot from oblivion and on most points it has met them and in some even exceeded expectations.

The game offers highly diverse gameplay what allows the player to adopt whatever method they want for playing the game, and whilst offering this diversity it still offers a challenge to the player to overcome strengths and weaknesses of their enemy. Also unlike some RPGs Oblivion also has a diverse list of enemies that are more then a few base types just being re-skined over and over. Infact most humanoid enemy can take on about as many different styles of battle as the player. Indeed even enemy of the same type can fight in completely different methods so the player does not get stuck in repeated types of combat over and over.

Whilst enemy offer Diverse methods of combat it's good if the AI system can back this up. And the AI does offer some challenge, it's of no doubt the AI is not as smart as a human player and can easily tricked into situations where it has no chance at all to survive. But such AI would be unfeasible anyway, for current standards the AI is actually quite advanced and does alot better job then the AI in some other games around.

Oblivion also has a vast amount of graphical options for players of the game, This means that the game can be adapted to suit the player given the hardware that the game is run on. To get up to the maximum graphics the game can handle however takes alot of expensive hardware, near top notch DirectX9.0 compatible graphics card are pretty much required for the task, tho a fully DirectX10 compatiable graphics card should easily be able to handle this game.

Oblivion as a free roaming game also has a number of major questlines, 5 in total in the default game. These are the Main Story Line where the player is sent into a series of quests by the Emperor of Tamiral himself Uriel Septim (Voice acted brilliantly by Patrict Stuart), Join the Mages guild where the player has to go around and preform tasks for the mages guild to gain advancement to the higher ranks, joining the fighters guild where the player acts kind of like a mercenary but taking on smaller and more moral tasks then that of any normal mercenary, becoming a thief of the thieves guild where the player steals items for a living and last but not least becoming an assassin of the famed Dark Brotherhood, the nastiest and most deadly assassins to have ever walked on the face of Tamerial(the name of world the player starts in).

Also for the player that has done it all and wants to experience more, there are a vast number of plug-ins that are down-loadable off of multiple sites on the Internet that can add numerous new elements to the game.

There is also the official plug-in collection referred to the main plug-in in the collection, Knights of the Nine and the expansion pack Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles out at the time this reviews has been written. Please note both the plug-in collection and the expansion pack require the installation of Oblivion.

Given there are many great features to this game, it still is not perfect, there still lays bugs in the game and problems that make somethings near impossible, fortunately by use of the oblivion console most things can be fixed but it takes time to look up the right functions to pass to the console to fix the game sometimes. Also every now and then the player may wonder across the odd rock or tree that is floating a meter up in the air and probably the most famous glitch of them all, paintbrushes are not parsed by the Havok Engine so do not have the rule of gravity applied to them.

Another problem is that many people have also been known to suffer problems around the main quest that is used for curing vampirism. There are other ways around this from plug-ins to console commands but most people do not even relise that have suffered vampirism until they are taking damage from sun light or notice the changes to their character. It is a good idea to get all diseases sorted out after fighting a vampire, unless one wants to become a vampire (there are benefits to becoming one).

Also some people are disappointed there are not more quests with in the game itself, not that there is not many, there are hundreds and hundreds of quests in oblivion, however Marrowind has thousands of quests on the other hand and so oblivion whilst being a much bigger location then marrowind leads some to believe it has less content in the default release.

Overall the game is a very good game, and whilst there are some problems in it, they are not on the main part serious at all. Some can be annoying but pretty much all can be sorted out. For the RPGers out there this is a must have game and even for the non-RPGer this is a game that looks good in pretty much any game collection.