Oblivion: Four Years Later

Having only recently fired up The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, one of the editors over at Just Push Start gives us his fresh perspective of Bethesda’s four-year-old RPG.

Role-playing games are meant to be role played, a gameplay experience many players overlook in their haste for the next level or the shiniest gob of armor available. The most upfront manner to accomplish this is character creation. Personally, I can spend upwards of an hour fine-tuning and test driving each of my creations (hell, I spent three hours in The Temple of Elemental Evil tinkering each of my party members to precision), and while Oblivion doesn’t present the normal Dungeons & Dragons screen with stat rolls and attributes, it is anything but rudimentary. Generally, and in my time with Morrowind, I would select either a pure warrior class or a pure magic caster. For my triumphant return here, I planned something slightly more unique. My final product was what I deemed to be a more authentic assassin, far superior to the vanilla character profile provided; I was adept at frontal combat and heavy armor while being a skilled marksman and thief -a true death dealer. The sole caveat of this build was a near-complete lack of magical knowledge. A pithy thing.

The sheer breadth of options available in terms of quest completion remain a feat today, which I was not expecting. As per my previous warrior classes, my limited experience with Oblivion taught me that direct assault was the simplest and most beneficial solution to any task. How much I missed out on! These new options were provided to me by way of the Dark Brotherhood, the assassin’s guild of Oblivion whose primary task is to eliminate individuals for reward. Instead of trite (go here, kill this person, collect reward) quests, these were far more interesting. For example, in one instance I was tasked with attending a Clue-like lock in whereby the guests had been informed the house contained a treasure chest loaded with gold. Sadly, there was no chest -only demise. Each guest had to be picked off out of sight of the others, which led to some highly-entertaining sequences of emergent gameplay. With one guest, I angered him to the point of attacking me. What he didn’t expect was me to lead him directly into another guest, which caused both of them to fight and kill one another.