The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion review

Good points

When you first enter the game (in a prison cell) you are asked to choose your race, select your hair colour, give yourself a name and change facial features (among many things).
This alone gives you at least 20 minutes of playing around with all sorts of modifying technology before the game has even began.
After all the talking to people and listening to the tedious instructions, its off out the sewer door and into the open air of Cyrodiil.

The fantastic thing that stays with a player throughout the game is the open-ended way it is set out. You don't HAVE to do any quests, or the main quest, or anything else quest-related. You can spend all your time just exploring, killing things and robbing people. The Cyrodiil province is so big its hard to get bored of all the different places and things to do in them.
Anyone who actually wants to complete quests will find them equally interesting and much more versatile than those in previous games.

Depending on how good your graphics card is, effects such as reflection and ripples on water can be added. If however, you have a rubbish graphics card or an old system, its probably best not to put all effects up to "High".

Another great thing that stays with a player is the choice of EVERYTHING. People of different races speak to you depending on your race.
NPC's move around freely without a looped path.
You don't ever get too tired to swim or run.

Bad points

With every game, there has to be a negative side. Luckily for Oblivion, the good outweighs the bad.

Unfortunately, there are less factions to join in Oblivion. Morrowind boats many factions that allow you to do different quests and gain different skills, but Oblivion is more limited to the main branches of gangs and clubs.

People you talk to have much more limited dialogue this time. It is easy to recognise some repetition in different people when they greet you. And when persuading people to like you, the system is quite confusing to begin with.

It does require quite a bit of processing power. If you only intend to meet the minimum requirements, find a different game. Slow gameplay will be experienced and the whole computer can lock up or crash from time to time. Save files will sometimes be randomly deleted if you're computer is running Oblivion for too long too.

Overall, a fabulous game with some excellent exploration possibilities.
(As long as you have a good computer system).
/ [deleted elfpack]

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