Articles
By Spud Gun
Published: Mar. 4, 2007 9:46 AM
Your adventures are based in Cyrodiil, a province of Tamriel. Once you enter this world you can do whatever you want. You do have a main quest, which is to save the world and close the various gates of Oblivion, but you are not in any way herded into that role. You can pursue the main quest, or you can join one (or all) of the 4 guilds (specifically Mages, Thieves, Fighters and Dark Brotherhood) and undertake tasks that they assign to you, or you could also take on some other quests that you discover by simply talking to other characters in the game. Perhaps some Gladiatorial combat is more to your liking? You could even ride your horse over the hills and meadows of Cyrodiil looking for adventure like Kane from ‘Kung Fu’. You can be as honest or as deceitful as you like. You can pursue a spiritual path, or a magical one. You can fight honourably or kill and rob people blind. You can even become a vampire and hunt at night. What you do is up to you.
One aspect of the game which is hard to miss is the sheer size of the world you live in. It is vast! Thankfully there are several ways to move around this world, by foot, on horse back, by boat, or by using a new map based travel feature whereby you select the place you wish to travel to on your map and you skip the amount of time that it would have taken you to walk there (or ride there, depending on your means of travel when you invoke it). This is a very useful feature and makes navigating such a massive game far less time consuming than its predecessor. Navigation is also helped by the use of a compass as part of your HUD which has places of interest in your immediate vicinity highlighted, like a city, cave or Daedric ruin (a place well worth raiding should you survive). This makes pursuing side quests and dungeon raids far more accessible and eliminates the need for a futile and frustrating door search. Another idea introduced in Oblivion is the concept of the ‘Active Quest’. If you are offered a side quest by a guild or from some other source, you are presented with the option to make this your active quest. This means that you are postponing the main quest in favour of your new task. Once the side quest is completed, your active quest will automatically return to the main quest. Supporting this concept are the quest markers which appear in red on your compass. These highlight key locations to help complete your active quest. This is hugely beneficial and you only ever have 1 quest target marker on your compass at any time. You can also manually set markers on the map which appear in blue. These can be used to mark places of interest that you may wish to return to at a later date.
Graphically, Oblivion heralds the arrival of next generation gaming like no other. The level of detail that can be seen is impressive to say the least. The forests are lush and varied, and the cities beautifully rendered, with spectacular lighting effects being the norm. In addition to all this, you have a wide range of convincing weather effects. NPC’s have been given a face lift too. Gone is the Morrowind problem of meeting the same handful of faces time and time again. NPC’s have a good level of detail in features and attire. Character animation could have been better implemented, and doesn’t seem to have been hugely improved upon since Morrowind. It’s a hard game to fault graphically, if you are standing still. The nagging draw distance problem of Morrowind has been fixed to a large degree, but there is an annoying jump in of graphical details and objects with long draw distances. This is quite regular and causes a momentary pause in the action. This isn’t subtle and is a distraction. These framerate stutters do impact the atmosphere of the game, as not having them would have meant an incredible immersive streaming environment. Once rendered, spectacular views over of forests, valleys and cities are not a problem. However, one problem that also still persists in this version of Elder Scrolls is area loading. This can get annoying as the framerate takes a serious hit, and can prove very problematic if you happen to be in combat and cross into a different area. Apparently holding ‘A’ upon boot of the game should help as it clears the cache (another nice touch). While on the subject, Oblivion needs to be run at 60Hz as its not compatible in 50Hz.
Combat in Oblivion has been significantly improved on its Xbox counterpart. Gone are the days of random button bashing when an enemy is encountered. It still isn’t quite there, but it’s significantly better than it was in Morrowind. You can block, swing, move around your opponent and cast spells, and you get the strong sense that the timing of each is the key to winning battles. Using the right trigger makes a power attack. The nature of this attack can vary if used with the left thumbstick. The AI does seem to be marginally improved too with some enemies using effective blocking tactics and repositioning themselves for a better attack which added to the need to think in a fight. Enemies now follow you from room to room, so there is no escape. This is a welcome improvement on Morrowind as leaving a room (or cave) meant that the fight was over. That said, you will encounter some questionable AI moments but those are few and far between. A nice addition that eliminates some Morrowind menu trawling is the use of the ‘X’ button while carrying a torch. This automatically switches to your carried weapon. Pressing ‘X’ again will return the torch. It’s a simple idea that eliminates the need to manually equip one in favour of the other.
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