The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Review

The guys over at RPG Codex have published a second review for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, once again focusing primarily on where the game falls short. They’ve already pointed out plenty of faults in their last review, but this new article goes into much greater detail.

The character perks gained every time the player reaches a higher rank in any given skill (every 25 points) are another mixed bag. They range from pointlessly baffling, such as the Mercantile skill steps, to the ridiculously empowering, for instance, Armorer, which allows the player to increase the effectiveness of most items by 25% when they attain an Expert rank at 75. There’s also the prohibitive spell casting, where spells are all assigned to restrictive brackets for each level of mastery. Not necessarily a bad thing, but when you effectively have only five tiers of spellcasting, the in between times get fairly repetitive. And just for gags, there’s the Alchemy, which unlocks extra effects for each ingredient. Which is good if you discover a positive effect, but it also unlocks negatives, meaning an Apprentice Alchemist can mix two ingredients to make a healing potion with no side effects, and a Journeyman can mix the same two ingredients to make a healing potion that suddenly has a horrible downside.

All of these little quirks are indicative of a core system that is horribly underdesigned. Of course, when the game attempts to encompass so much, then it’s understandable that there will be more shortcomings than in a game with a simple scope of design. How much can be forgiven is ultimately determined by what sort of experience the player has in and around the core systems, in other words, the quality of the interactions the player has with the game.