Written by Jeff Buckland, 3/22/2006
Played on:
Windows
Some would say that the death of western RPGs has already happened and that no one has actually noticed yet. Development houses like Troika and Black Isle Studios have gone out of business while Asian RPG titles continue to thrive (Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest are still going strong). In the past twenty years, only the very best American games in this genre have had any commercial success, while anything less than stellar has mostly flopped. Yes, some would say that western RPGs are dead, but I think that it's more a case of developers and gamers not connecting like they have in the Asian RPG market. While I can't say that Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion will bridge the gap where many previous great-yet-unsuccessful RPGs have failed, I think that this game can at least prove beyond any doubt that RPGs don't have to come from Japan to be brilliant.
One look at the feature list for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion might make it seem like this game is just too good to be true. We're talking about a living, breathing world that the player interacts with in ways gamers haven't ever seen. The huge, lush forests are the setting for incredible fights where combat is both satisfying and brutal, but these environments can also be serene and peaceful. Cities are filled with characters who don't just stand around waiting for you to talk to them - they have daily routines, jobs, conversations with each other (all acted out by real voice actors), and their lives don't revolve solely around the player's actions. The storyline has you taking arms alongside other warriors and fighting an old evil that's been seen in Bethesda's past games a few times, but they have never gone this far to try and destroy the world of Tamriel. In true Elder Scrolls fashion, there are so many quests built in (which are completely outside of the main storyline) that you could play for months and not see half of this game. Finally, user-made mods will expand the game's scale to unprecedented levels, taking it far beyond the game's already massive amount of things to do. Folks, it's not too good to be true. With Oblivion, Bethesda has taken everything that makes an RPG unique and has tuned and expanded these elements (while fixing many of the stereotypical problems seen in dozens of RPGs) to make it simply one of the best games I've ever seen.
The story unfolds with a cutscene that sets the stage (I'll spare you the spoilers), and in true Elder Scrolls fashion, you'll start up as a nobody who's locked in a prison cell. Now, it just happens to be that the Emperor himself, escaping an assassination attempt with a few guards protecting him, needs to use a secret passage that starts in your cell. Emperor Uriel Septim, voiced by legendary Star Trek actor Patrick Stewart, recognizes your character from one of his dreams and lets you escape on your own through the same passage that the Imperial guards open up. This leads to an introductory dungeon which will teach you the basics of Oblivion in a wonderful way that completely outshines the tutorials in other RPGs.
In the tutorial, the player will be taught how to cast spells, fight, use stealth, pick locks, look through the quest journal, use items, and manage the inventory. Then you'll get to choose your main class from a set of pre-made classes (each with a pre-selected set of 7 major skills out of the game's 21 in total) or a custom one that you build one skill at a time. After a few additional choices, you will get to choose your birthsign which will give you a decent bonus ability or strength, or in some cases, a huge bonus along with a nasty weakness.
There are ten total races in Oblivion, many of whom have a totally different look from each other, and with the gender choices and huge amount of tweaks that can be done to the character's face, it really allows the player to go crazy even before the character's finalized. The choices for race include a few elves, some human variants, Orcs, cat-like Khajiit, and the lizard-like Argonians, and each race has both genders to choose from - this makes a total of twenty body types, but those bodies can't be adjusted or fiddled with at all. Plus, most of the human-type bodies look identical anyway. With the fine detail you can use to fiddle with your character's facial features, a few slider bars for adjusting body shape and size would have made a lot of sense. It's a pretty minor complaint overall, though.
Before you're sent out into the big bad world, you get to redo your whole character if you want. Once you're finished and the game's introductory dungeon has been trudged through, the moment that follows is going to be a very big one for the player - it's time to emerge from the dank dungeon and see the land of Cyrodiil. Oblivion's outdoor scenes are stunningly beautiful in the quality of the art, the uniqueness of the world, the density of the forests, and in the technical quality of the game's special effects and massive open terrain. Visibility can be measured in miles (although those whose computers fall below the "recommended" system specs might have to scale it back), and a wonderful Level of Detail system ensures decent frame rates even as one can see this far out; what it does is it replaces objects like trees in the distance with low-quality versions, and as you get closer to those objects, it adds detail to them. Level of Detail systems have been seen in games before, but the scale and scope of Oblivion makes it that much more grand.
Beyond the whiz-bang special effects, it's the simple things that also make this game much more special. Trees and grass sway in the wind in unison, and heavier winds will make them bend even more. Torches flicker, lighting up cavern walls, and your own magic spells cast their own light as well. The interface looks sufficiently medieval without sacrificing readability, and everything is laid out in a tabbed interface which is very easy to flip though. What it adds up to is a game that focuses on the visuals on both the big and small scales. Let me put it this way: I've thrown around the word "awesome" in plenty of my reviews before, but after going back and looking at the definition of the word and how it applies to graphics in games, I see that my past uses of it were rarely justified. That is not the case with Oblivion. This game looks truly awesome.
Once the player gets to the first town, one of the game's best and most high-profile features is put on full display. The NPCs at first seem like they're following all kinds of scripted encounters, as they'll walk around and have conversations which can be overheard. After a while, though, the player will notice that things are a lot less scripted than originally thought: NPCs will go to sleep at night, find and eat food, and go about their daily lives in ways that some RPGs have touched on, but never to this extent. Every day is a little different for these characters, and some will steal, get caught, and even try and kill others if the situation calls for it. Your interactions with them are what really bring it to life: the unique disposition system for getting NPCs to like or hate you seems so much more natural than in almost any other game out there, and even just screwing around with them in weird ways (like taking away all their food and watching them improvise to find a meal) elicits responses that are clearly not separately hand-coded for all the characters in the game.
This system is called Radiant AI and it controls the behavior of Oblivion's 1500 NPCs, but it's something that doesn't need a name or feels like it stands out once you start playing. It's just there and once you experience it, you might wonder why it's taken so long for someone to come up with a system like this. And that's what makes Radiant AI so wonderful - it just plain works and it makes the game that much better without drawing attention to itself.
Some of the game's NPCs will also turn up later as you grow in power. You might find yourself allied with someone and even get to shape that character's future, and then later in the game see the same person again, changed by whatever decision you helped them make. It's the wonderful little touches like this all over the game that really help me to forgive many of those little annoying or inconsistent things in Oblivion that nag at me as I play.
As you complete the quests either for the main storyline or for one of the many guilds, you'll find that most of these quests are much more involved than we've seen in many single-player or even massive multiplayer RPGs. And if that's not enough, then you can climb the ranks in the Arena in order to get yourself crowned as a champion in combat. Then there are the many hidden items, enemies, NPCs and artifacts out in the world, and after that, there are the dynamically-populated dungeons, and then finally, there are mods. Suffice it to say that this game has more stuff to do - and most of this stuff is of a higher quality than in the average RPG - than any single player game I've ever seen.
The combat in Oblivion, simply put, is some of the best I've encountered in any RPG. Fights will mix together varied weapons, character stats, and action-oriented hacking and slashing. Combat requires the player to time both attacks and defensive moves as well as engage the brain to develop the right tactics in order to win. Pick your poison: Fighter, Mage, or Rogue, and if you want, you can even excel at any combination of these three if you're willing to give up on certain skills. In melee combat you'll need to pick between attacks and block manually in a system that winds up giving the player the choice on how to fight without over-complicating it.
Once you've pulled out your weapon, you can tap or hold your block button to raise your shield. Defend against an attack with the right timing, and you'll stun your opponent for a second. Tap your attack key or button, and a quick attack pops out, and if you mash your attack key, you will get some nice combos as well. But if you hold your attack button instead, a power attack is unleashed. This combination of action game along with the full RPG system behind it carefully ties together the very best aspects of both genres in a way that puts combat in previous "action-RPG" games to shame.
Every skill has a few "perks" that are achieved once you raise it to a certain amount. Some are kind of boring, like the Heavy Armor perk that slows the degradation of your armor as you get hit, because you can always just repair your armor anyway. The spellcasting and attack-oriented abilities are much more interesting, though, and these perks will really motivate the player to get those skills up (far beyond just the promise of more damage, that is). Each of Oblivion's three melee weapon skills (Blade, Blunt, or Hand-to-hand) also has its own set of power attack moves gained through perks. During the course of the game, your power attacks will change and improve, giving the chance to do all kinds of neat effects, like disarm your opponent (and the weapon realistically falls to the ground for your enemy to pick back up, if you give him the chance!) or knock him out on the spot.
