Greeting and salutations, curious reader! For the last march of days I have been on a great adventure in the lands of Cyrodil. It is an adventure that Emperor Uriel Septim himself set me on. And I have quested and fought my way from Cheydinhal in the east to Anvil in the west, and from Bruma in the north to Leyawin in the south. And in all these places I have won renown for my name: Defenestrate.
Where I have been is the world of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for the Xbox 360. As a single-player adventure game it currently has no peer. The world is rich and alive with a large cast of characters, enemies and places to visit that will keep the average gamer entertained for hundreds of hours. It is a game that has frustrations for the impatient, but for the most part it is a wonderful way to spend a big chunk of your gaming life and one of the best gaming values that you can buy.
Your adventure starts with creating the avatar that will represent you. There are 10 races to choose from; they vary from the very human to elves, orcs, reptilian and feline. Each has certain abilities, strengths and weaknesses. After choosing your race, you may personalize the character model through numerous tweaks to everything from overall build to cheekbones, mouth, eyes, nose and more.
The true gameplay opens with your character in the dungeon of the Imperial City. You don’t know why you’re there. You are also given little time to think about it since the Emperor shows up with his bodyguard in a harried stated. Assassins have killed the Emperor’s three sons and are now after him. The Blade, his guards, are attempting to spirit him out of the city through a secret passage that just happens to start in your cell. When he sees you, Emperor Uriel Septim acts as if he has seen you before and tells you that you have a part to play in the grand scheme of things and bids his guards to leave you alone. You follow them through the passage. Here you will get you first weapons and light clothing from characters felled in combat. You’ll be separated from the Emperor’s party for a short time to run through a basic tutorial that will teach you how to use your equipment and the game interface.
Once you’ve completed the basic tutorial, the character you’ve created is ready to be given a classification. There are 21 predefined classes of characters that follow the standard mold of characters in other adventure games. The classic adventure classes of characters were knights, rogues, wizards and thieves. Oblivion’s classes offer fairly pure forms of these basic four as well as others that in some way mix the close-quarters fighting, ranged fighting, magic or stealth attributes of the classic characters. This nice selection of many flavors of the basic characters’ attributes will suit almost any gamer’s play style. There is also a birth sign that further defines your character.
Being very much the get-in-close-and-put-a-mace-in-their-face kind of adventurer, I selected the human Imperial race in the Warrior class under the Warrior birth sign; very good with bladed (swords and knives) and blunt (war hammers and axes) weapons (As Hagar the Horrible said, “Sword for show but axe for dough.”) and skilled with heavy armor. He is a real tank of a fighter.
Should none of the classes suit you, it is possible to build a custom class. In either case you’ll have a character that will have seven major skills that define the selected class and several more minor skills. These are the skills that will be built up as you complete quests and simply use the skills.
When you rejoin the Emperor and his guards, the assassins catch up with and murder him, but before the Emperor dies he tells you that there is another heir to the throne. This heir must be found because he is the only one who can, “Close shut the jaws of Oblivion.” Oblivion is a hell-like dimension inhabited by demons that are seeking to invade the world. (Think Doom 3’s portal to hell and you won’t be far off.) He gives you the Amulet of Kings that he says is the true object of power in the empire and sends you in your initial direction.
It is from here that the game really opens up. There are different ways to tackle the adventure. Being about as subtle as a war hammer, I tried going the straight route: I found the man who knew the identity of the heir, went to the place the heir lived, found the whole city under attack from the Oblivion dimension and attempted to rescue him. I also promptly got my codpiece handed to me. In my low-level and ill-equipped state I had no chance of immediately taking on the big-bads that were keeping me from completing the main quest immediately. It was time to build the character and his equipment.
Oblivion has what seems to be hundreds of side quests to accept and be rewarded for. They range from simple fetch quests to boldly going into goblin dens to rescue people. You’ll become everything from horticulturist to detective as you talk to people and accept their quests for the rewards it will bring you.
