I
‘ve been hesitant writing about the game Oblivion (link goes to Wikipedia). The game was passed on to me by Alfons, who complained that (while amazing) the game concept didn’t really appeal to him: too long and dreary. It appears that after the first few hours of playing, I was hooked: Oblivion is literally, the ultimate open-ending RPG game you can play. Beside the main quest, there are hundreds of other quests you can follow and play. Actually, you don’t need to finish or follow the main quest: if you feel like strolling around, you can do so. This is basically what I’ve been doing too: strolling around in the game, going from city to city; so once in a while solving puzzles, advancing levels and ignoring the main quest. There’s too much to discover and too much to see.
But lets take a step back and look at the requirements: obviously you need hardware to get this game to run in high resolutions. Even my latest hardware has troubles running Oblivion in full screen mode, so in my case I still have to run the game in 800×600 mode. When installing the game, I was also surprised to find that (at this stage) only one patch was ever released for the game: While generally stable, the game has booted out a couple of times: from hard resets [blue screens] to lockups. Most of these problematic cases seem to point to the video. On the good side, the game does use ‘autosave’ extensively so after every crash, you magically begin at the point where the game crashed.
Game play is as simple as playing other First Person Shooter games, however, so once in a while, fighting (still) feels like a turn-based game. Take for example the fact that switching and selecting weapons still requires you to go to the a secondary screen: time stops briefly too. Combat can also be quite obnoxious when battling multiple attackers: this is mainly due to how the combat vs. experience system has been implemented. Basically, monsters “level” with you: so in many cases, you may want to clear out areas before actually levelling up.
Additionally, gameplay can be dreary when walking on the roads: I choose that above riding the horse (you can pick up that horse at the priory). Battling enemies and animals on a horse is literally impossible.
But yes, Oblivion is for sure a highlight in the gaming industry: it’s huge, it allows plenty of freedom and the scenery can be totally amazing (as you can tell from the picture above). On my game rating system (aka ‘Frustation level’), this game is definitely ‘Smooth sailing’. As in enjoyable if you like these kind of games.